ZGram - 7/2/2003 - "A Costly Friendship"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever

July 2, 2003

Below an absolutely remarkable article/Book Review in The Nation:

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A Costly Friendship

by PATRICK SEALE

Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the 
US-Israel Alliance
by Warren Bass


[from the July 21, 2003 issue]

Much of the talk in Europe these days--in newspaper offices, at 
dinner parties, in foreign ministries--is about how the United States 
and Britain were conned into going to war against Iraq, or perhaps 
how they conned the rest of us into believing that they had good 
reasons for doing so. It is now widely suspected that the war was a 
fraud, but who perpetuated the fraud and on whom? Were Bush and Blair 
fed fabricated intelligence, or did they knowingly massage and doctor 
the intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq so as to justify 
an attack? Everyone agrees that Saddam Hussein was amonster, but the 
military invasion to depose him is seen by many, and certainly on 
this side of the Atlantic, as illegitimate and unprovoked, and a 
blatant violation of the UN Charter, setting an unfortunate precedent 
in international relations. Henceforth, in the jungle, only might is 
right.

Various intelligence and foreign affairs committees of the British 
Parliament and the US Congress have started inquiries into how the 
decision to go to war was taken--when, why and on what basis. But it 
will require a superhuman effort to penetrate the murky thicket of 
competing government bureaucracies, spooks, exiles, defectors and 
other self-serving sources, pro-Israeli lobbyists, magazine editors, 
think-tank gurus and assorted ideologues who, in Washington at least, 
have a massive say in the shaping of foreign policy.

How did it all begin? An important part of the story, though not the 
whole of it, is the special relationship between the United States 
and Israel. Warren Bass's important and timely book Support Any 
Friend, written with candor and firmly rooted in primary sources, 
takes us back to the diplomacy of the 1960s, and to what he argues 
were the beginnings of today's extraordinarily intimate alliance 
between the two countries. It is in effect the story of how Israel 
and its American friends came to exercise a profound influence on 
American policy toward the Arab and Muslim world. Bass believes it 
all began with JFK. It is an interesting thesis and he argues it 
well, although in my view the US-Israeli entente actually began with 
LBJ, after Kennedy's assassination.

The neocons--a powerful group at the heart of the Bush 
Administration--wanted war against Iraq and pressed for it with great 
determination, overriding and intimidating all those who expressed 
doubts, advised caution, urged the need for allies and for UN 
legitimacy, or recommended sticking with the well-tried cold war 
instruments of containment and deterrence. War it had to be, the 
neocons said, to deal with the imminent threat from Saddam's fearsome 
weapons, which, as Tony Blair was rash enough to claim in his 
tragicomic role as Bush's "poodle," could be fired within forty-five 
minutes of a launch order. This flight of blood-curdling rhetoric has 
now come home to haunt him, earning him a headline (in The Economist, 
no less) of "Prime Minister Bliar."

Where did the information for his remarkable statement come from? How 
reliable was the prewar intelligence reaching Bush and Blair? The 
finger is increasingly being pointed at a special Pentagon 
intelligence cell, known as the Office of Special Plans, headed by 
Abram Shulsky. The office was created after 9/11 by two of the most 
fervent and determined neocons, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense 
Secretary, and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, 
to probe into Saddam's WMD programs and his links with Al Qaeda 
because, it is alleged, they did not trust other intelligence 
agencies of the US government to come up with the goods. It has been 
suggested that this special Pentagon intelligence cell relied heavily 
on the shifty Ahmad Chalabi's network of exiled informants. If 
evidence was indeed fabricated, this may well have been where it was 
done.

One way of looking at the decision-making process in Washington is to 
see it as the convergence of two currents or trends. The first was 
clearly the child of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, 
which both traumatized and enraged America, shattering its sense of 
invulnerability but also rousing it to "total war" against its 
enemies in the manner of a Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps because 
they had more experience of wars and terrorist violence, Europeans 
were slow to comprehend the visceral impact of these events on the 
American psyche. Suddenly mighty America was afraid--afraid of 
mass-casualty terrorism; afraid of the proliferation of weapons of 
mass destruction; afraid that "rogue states" might pass on such 
weapons to nebulous, elusive, fanatical, transnational terrorist 
groups such as Al Qaeda, enabling them perhaps to strike again with 
even more devastating effect.

The aggressive National Security Strategy of September 2002 sprang 
from these fears. It proclaimed that containment and deterrence were 
now stone dead; that the United States had to achieve and maintain 
total military supremacy over all possible challengers; that any 
"rogue states" that might be tempted to acquire WMDs would be treated 
without mercy by means of preventive or pre-emptive war. Under this 
"Bush Doctrine," the United States gave itself the right to project 
its overwhelming power wherever and whenever it pleased, to invade 
countries it disliked, to overthrow their regimes and to transform 
hostile "tyrannies" into friendly--read pro-American--"democracies." 
It was a program for global dominance, driven by the perceived threat 
to America but also by a modern version of imperial ambition.

The second, overlapping trend--overlapping because it involved many 
of the same people--was more narrowly focused on Israel in its 
conflict with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. Right-wing 
Jewish neocons--and most prominent neocons are right-wing Jews--tend 
to be pro-Israel zealots who believe that American and Israeli 
interests are inseparable (much to the alarm of liberal, pro-peace 
Jews, whether in America, Europe or Israel itself). Friends of Ariel 
Sharon's Likud, they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims. For them, the 
cause of "liberating" Iraq had little to do with the well-being of 
Iraqis, just as the cause of "liberating" Iran and ending its nuclear 
program--recently advocated by Shimon Peres in a Wall Street Journal 
editorial--has little to do with the well-being of Iranians. What 
they wished for was an improvement in Israel's military and strategic 
environment.

The Iraq crisis has made their names and organizations familiar to 
every newspaper and magazine reader: Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 
and 3 at the Pentagon; Richard Perle, former chairman and still a 
member of the influential Defense Policy Board, sometimes known as 
the neocons' political godfather and around whom a cloud of financial 
impropriety hangs; Elliott Abrams, senior director of Middle East 
affairs at the National Security Council, with a controversial 
background in Latin America and in the Iran/contra affair; and their 
many friends, relations and kindred spirits in the media, such as 
William Kristol and Robert Kagan of The Weekly Standard, and in the 
numerous pro-Israel think tanks, such as Frank Gaffney's Center for 
Security Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, the Jewish 
Institute for National Security Affairs, the Project for the New 
American Century, the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson 
Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (born out of 
AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and many others. 
As has been observed by several commentators, 9/11 provided the 
neocons with a unique chance to harness (some would say hijack) 
America's Middle East policy--and America's military power--in 
Israel's interest by succeeding in getting the United States to apply 
the doctrine of pre-emptive war to Israel's enemies.

This trend rested on a mistaken, indeed willfully tendentious, 
analysis of the attacks that the United States had suffered--not just 
the body blow of 9/11 but also the numerous earlier wake-up calls 
such as the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa and the attack 
on the USS Cole in Aden harbor. The basic neocon argument was that 
terrorist attacks should not in any way be read as the response of 
angry, desperate men to what America and Israel were doing to the 
Arab and Muslim world, and especially to the Palestinians. Quite the 
contrary; America was attacked because the terrorists envied the 
American way of life. America was virtuous, America was "good." The 
real problem, the neocons argued, lay not with American policies but 
with the "sick" and "failed" Islamic societies from which the 
terrorists sprang, with their hate-driven educational system, with 
their inherently "violent" and "fanatical" religion. So, rather than 
correcting or changing its misguided policies, the United States was 
urged to "reform" and "democratize" Arab and Muslim societies--by 
force if necessary--so as to insure its own security and that of its 
allies. Wars of choice became official American policy.

Concerned to insure Israel's continued regional supremacy, and at 
odds with what they saw as distasteful opponents, such as Islamic 
militancy, Arab nationalism and Palestinian radicalism, the neocons 
argued that the aim of US policy in the Middle East should be the 
thorough political and ideological "restructuring" of the region. 
Exporting "democracy" would serve the interests of defending both the 
United States and Israel. A "reformed" Middle East could be made 
pro-American and pro-Israeli. All this seems to have amounted to an 
ambitious--perhaps over-reaching--program for Israeli regional 
dominance, driven by Israel's far right and its way-out American 
friends.

Iraq was the first candidate for a "democratic" cure, but the need 
for this doubtful medicine could just as well justify an assault on 
Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or wherever a "threat" is detected 
or America's reforming zeal directed. Immediately after 9/11, 
Wolfowitz clamored for the destruction of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This 
was a cause he had advocated unsuccessfully throughout much of the 
1990s. But the accession of the neocons to positions of power, the 
fear of more terrorist attacks and the President's combative 
instincts now made what had been a Dr. Strangelove scenario appear 
quite doable. No scrap of evidence, however, could be found linking 
Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. Nor did Iraq pose an imminent 
threat to anyone, least of all to the United States or Britain. 
Exhausted by two wars, it had been starved by a dozen years of the 
most punitive sanctions in modern history. Hans Blix's UN arms 
inspectors had roamed all over the country and acquired a good grasp 
of its entire industrial capability. They had found no evidence that 
Saddam had rebuilt his WMD programs. They would have certainly liked 
more time to look further and make quite sure. This was the view of 
most European experts. Meanwhile, Arab leaders had buried the hatchet 
with Iraq at the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002. All Iraq's 
neighbors wanted to trade with it, not make war on it. In the 
atmosphere of reconciliation that then prevailed, even Kuwait did not 
think it seemly to admit that it still longed for revenge for 
Saddam's 1990 invasion.

There were, however, plenty of reasons why Israel and its friends in 
Washington wanted Iraq "restructured." Saddam had dared fire Scuds at 
Israel during the 1991 war and, more recently, he had been bold 
enough to send money to the bereaved families of Palestinian suicide 
bombers, whose homes had been flattened by Israeli reprisals. These 
"crimes" had gone unpunished. Moreover, in spite of its evident 
weakness, Saddam's Iraq was the only Arab country that might in the 
long run pose a strategic challenge to Israel. Egypt's government had 
been neutralized and corrupted by American subsidies and by its peace 
treaty with Israel, while Syria was enfeebled by internal security 
squabbles, a faltering economy and a fossilized political system. The 
Iraqi leader had to be brought down. His fall, the neocons 
calculated, would change the political dynamics of the entire region. 
It would intimidate Teheran and Damascus, even Riyadh and Cairo, and 
tilt the balance of power decisively in Israel's favor, allowing it 
to impose on the hapless Palestinians the harsh terms of its choice. 
Some neocons were already envisioning an Israel-Iraq peace treaty as 
a bonus byproduct of the war.

These concerns, in addition to control of Iraq's oil resources, 
rather than Saddam's alleged WMDs, were the real aims of the war 
against Iraq. They were embraced by the United States to assuage its 
own fears and restore its sense of absolute power. But what made the 
attack possible--the motor behind it--was one overriding fact of 
American political life: the US-Israel alliance, as close a 
relationship between two states as any in the world today. The Iraq 
war was in fact the high-water mark of that alliance.

Warren Bass seeks to establish that the foundations of the US-Israel 
alliance were laid by the Kennedy Administration. He even gives a 
precise date--August 19, 1962--for the start of the military 
relationship as we know it. On that day in Tel Aviv, Mike Feldman, 
the deputy White House counsel and Kennedy's indefatigable contact 
man with Israel and American Jews, met secretly with David Ben-Gurion 
and Golda Meir and told them that "the President had determined that 
the Hawk missile should be made available to Israel." The Israelis 
were ecstatic. The Kennedy decision destroyed the Eisenhower embargo 
on the sale of major weapons systems to Israel. "What began with the 
Hawk in 1962," Bass writes, "has become one of the most expensive and 
extensive military relationships of the postwar era, with a price tag 
in the billions of dollars and diplomatic consequences to match."

The Hawk sale is therefore the first pillar of Bass's case for saying 
that Kennedy was the father of the US-Israel alliance. The second is 
what he describes as Kennedy's "fudge" over America's inspections of 
Israel's secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev. 
Although ingeniously and entertainingly argued with a wealth of 
detail, the thesis is not conclusively proven. As a matter of fact, 
the Kennedy team, with the exception of Feldman and his friends, did 
not want a special military relationship with Israel, fearing that it 
would trigger a regional arms race. Kennedy was not taken in by 
Ben-Gurion's histrionic description of Nasser, the Egyptian leader, 
as a cruel aggressor bent on Hitlerian genocide. He knew Israel was 
strong enough to deal with any Arab threat. He didn't believe it 
needed the advanced weapons and the formal American security 
guarantee Ben-Gurion requested. He told Ben-Gurion firmly that he did 
not want to be the US President who brought the Middle East into the 
missile age. Kennedy was in fact attempting to reach out to Nasser, 
whom he recognized as a nationalist, not a Communist. He feared that 
giving Israel preferential treatment might push the Arabs into the 
arms of the Soviets. In turn, the State Department's Middle East 
experts saw no good reason for the United States to change its arms 
policy toward Israel. As an internal memo put it, "To undertake, in 
effect, a military alliance with Israel would destroy the delicate 
balance we seek to maintain in our Near East relations."

Nevertheless, Kennedy finally approved the Hawk sale, which 
Eisenhower had rejected two years earlier. But he seems to have done 
so against his better judgment. He was eventually worn down by 
Israel's persistent and systematic exaggeration of the Egyptian 
menace, and more particularly by Shimon Peres's ability, based on 
chillingly detailed knowledge of internal Administration debates, to 
play off the Pentagon and the NSC against the State Department.

Bass's case is also arguable regarding Dimona. Far from turning a 
blind eye to what was evidently going on there, JFK was totally 
opposed to Israel's getting the bomb and was prepared to disregard 
the views of the American Jewish community on the matter. In the 
spring of 1963 he warned Ben-Gurion that (in Bass's words) "an 
Israeli refusal to permit real Dimona inspections would have the 
gravest consequences for the budding US-Israel friendship." He wrote 
Ben-Gurion two scorching letters, on May 18 and June 15, threatening 
that "this Government's commitment to and support of Israel would be 
seriously jeopardized" if Israel did not permit thorough inspections 
to all areas of the Dimona site. Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi 
Eshkol, lied through their teeth to Kennedy about Dimona but, as Bass 
writes, Kennedy was preparing to force a showdown. Had he not been 
assassinated on November 22, 1963, he was on course for a 
confrontation with Israel.

The fudge came later, with Lyndon Johnson, who was far less concerned 
than Kennedy with nuclear proliferation. Skirting the issue of 
Israel's nuclear ambitions, Johnson approved the sale to Israel of 
large numbers of American tanks and warplanes even before the 1967 
war, which propelled the Jewish state to stardom, pumping a large 
segment of the American Jewish community full of confidence, ambition 
and even arrogance. Johnson was the true father of the US-Israel 
alliance. It was he, rather than Kennedy, who "set the precedent that 
ultimately created the US-Israel strategic relationship: a 
multimillion-dollar annual business in cutting-edge weaponry, 
supplemented by extensive military-to-military dialogues, security 
consultations, extensive joint training exercises, and cooperative 
research-and-development ventures."

Bass raises the intriguing possibility that the Hawks were never 
really intended, as Ben-Gurion pleaded, to defend Israel's air bases 
from a knockout blow by Nasser's MIGs, but rather as a perimeter 
defense to protect the Dimona nuclear weapons plant. Some indirect 
corroboration of this thesis was later to emerge. In delivering its 
own knockout blow to Egypt's air force on the first day of the 1967 
war, Israel lost eight jets in the first wave of attack. One wounded 
plane came limping back to base in radio silence. It wandered into 
Dimona's air space, and was promptly shot down by an Israeli Hawk 
missile.

 From 1967 onward there was no stopping the extravagant blossoming of 
the US-Israel relationship. If Johnson had been the father of the 
alliance, Henry Kissinger was to be its sugar daddy. In 1970, he 
invited Israel to intervene in Jordan when a beleaguered King Hussein 
asked for US protection. Syrian troops had entered the country in 
support of militant Palestinians then engaged in a trial of strength 
with the little King. Israel was only too happy to comply with this 
most irregular request. It made some much-publicized military 
deployments in the direction of Jordan. Emboldened by this support, 
Hussein's own forces then engaged the Syrians, who quickly withdrew. 
Hussein's army was thus left free to slaughter the Palestinians.

Rather than seeing Black September as the local tiff that it actually 
was, Kissinger blew it up into an "East-West" contest in which Israel 
had successfully faced down not just the Syrians but the Russians as 
well. This was the real launch of the US-Israel "strategic 
relationship," in which Israel was entrusted with "keeping the peace" 
in the Middle East on America's behalf--and was lavishly rewarded 
with arms, aid and a cupboard-full of secret commitments directed 
against Arab interests.

Kissinger adopted as America's own the main theses of Israeli policy: 
that Israel had to be stronger than any possible combination of Arab 
states; that the Arabs' aspiration to recover territories lost in 
1967 was "unrealistic"; that the PLO should never be considered a 
peace partner. His step-by-step machinations after the October war of 
1973 were directed at removing Egypt from the Arab lineup, exposing 
Palestinians and other Arabs to the full brunt of Israeli military 
power. Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982--in which some 
17,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed, triggering the birth of 
the Hezbollah resistance movement--was a direct consequence of 
Kissinger's scheming. In 1970 Israel received $30 million in US aid; 
in 1971, after the Jordan crisis, the aid rose to $545 million. 
During the October war Kissinger called for a $3 billion aid bill, 
and it has remained in the several billions ever since.

In due course Congress was captured by AIPAC--in Bass's phrase, "the 
purring, powerful lobbying machine of the 1980s and 1990s"--while the 
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, founded in 1985 by Martin 
Indyk, an Australian-born lobbyist for Israel, set about carefully 
shaping opinion and placing its men inside the Administration. Dennis 
Ross, Indyk's colleague at WINEP and a high-level negotiator for Bush 
I, became Clinton's long-serving coordinator of the Arab-Israeli 
peace process; he rarely failed to defer to Israel's interests, which 
is one reason the peace process got nowhere. He has now returned to 
WINEP as its director and continued advocate.

But nothing in the history of the US-Israel alliance has equaled the 
accession by "friends of Israel" to key posts in the current Bush 
Administration, and their determined and successful struggle to shape 
America's foreign policy, especially in the Middle East--including 
the destruction of Iraq.

The nagging question remains as to what the special friendship has 
achieved. Have the wars, security intrigues and political showdowns 
of the past decades really served Israel's interest? A student of the 
region cannot but ponder these questions: What if the dovish Moshe 
Sharett had prevailed over the hawkish Ben-Gurion in the 1950s? 
Sharett sought coexistence with the Arabs, whereas Ben-Gurion's 
policy was to dominate them by naked military force, with the aid of 
a great-power patron--ideas that have shaped Israeli thinking ever 
since. What if the occupied territories had truly been traded for 
peace after 1967 (as Ben-Gurion himself advised, with rare 
prescience), or after 1973, or after the Madrid conference of 1991, 
or even after the Oslo Accords of 1993? Would it not have spared 
Israelis and Palestinians the pain of the intifada, with its 
miserable legacy of hatred and broken lives? Has the triumphalist 
dream of a "Greater Israel" (which James Baker, for one, warned 
Israel against) proved anything other than a hideous nightmare, 
infecting Israeli society with a poisonous dose of fascism? The 
US-Israel alliance is officially and routinely celebrated in both 
countries, but its legacy is troubling. Without it, Israel might not 
have succumbed to the madness of invading Lebanon and staying there 
twenty-two years; or to the senseless brutality of its treatment of 
the Palestinians; or to the shortsighted folly of settling 400,000 
Jews in Jerusalem and the West Bank, who are now able to hold 
successive Israeli governments to ransom.

An inescapable conclusion is that the intimate alliance, and the 
policies that flowed from it, have caused America and Israel to be 
reviled and detested in a large part of the world--and to be exposed 
as never before to terrorist attack.

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