 Yearning for World War
The irony of Israel's position between Iraq and the United States, is that the more Israel wants the US to attack Iraq, the quieter Israel will have to stay about it and the lower the profile it will have to keep. The paradox was most clear right after the September 11 attacks when Sharon was the first to volunteer to join the "war on terrorism," only to find himself coldly rebuffed by the Bush administration. Israel soon learned that sometimes discretion is the better than an open alliance, and by working on the US administration behind the scenes, Israel's lobby was able to convince the Americans that it would be hypocritical to condemn Israel's "war on terrorism" while conducting its own.
Much of the storm of criticism that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has faced for reimposing a siege on Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah has come from Israelis who would dearly like to see a U.S. war against Iraq, as Sharon certainly ion ought to be more sanguine about the prospect of yet another war front opening up. But over the past years, Israeli military assessments have consistently concluded that Iraq represents no real military threat to Israel at the present time, and certainly Iraq would not launch an unprovoked aggression against it.
Still, there is always the chance that if the United States invades Iraq, that country might try to lob a few of its remaining missiles at Israel, as it did in 1991. Citing foreign sources, the Israeli press this week reported that Israeli special forces are already operating in Iraq, searching for Scud launchers which are believed to exist in small numbers, and probably in poor shape.
Overall, therefore, it seems Israel views any possible threat from Iraq as a manageable risk, easily outweighed by the benefits of a US attack on that country. Indeed, it is one of the few things for which many Israelis are prepared to tolerate a temporary pause in the "complicating" persecution of the "The Growing Clamor for Ethnic Cleansing, Electronic Intifada, 28 August 2002). This gives rise to the legitimate fear that some in Israel's military leadership and government might see a war with Iraq, especially if it produces an Iraqi attack on Israel, as a golden opportunity to push a few hundred thousand Palestinians into neighboring countries.
For some of Israel's supporters both within the US administration and the think tanks that feed it ideas, catastrophic developments even short of ethnic cleansing and the instability, chaos and violence that would ensue fit into a broader plan to completely remake an unruly Middle East with Israel as the dominant local power, under overall US hegemony.
The most comprehensive vision is that of neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, who writes in the September 2002 issue of his journal Commentary that "changes in regime are the sine qua non throughout the region." The regimes "that richly deserve to be ove
"are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as "friends" of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen."
Podhoretz makes it clear that it is the United States that should do the overthrowing and replacing.
Not content with merely changing nearly every government in the region by force, Podhoretz also hopes to bring about through this scheme "the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam." In other words, what Podhoretz wants is truly a war of civilizations. For Islam to be purged of the elements to which neoconservatives like him object, the increased hatred and fanaticism and possibly September-11-style terror that the Iraq war might provoke some to commit are not undesirable side effects but the necessary pretext for aggressive American intervention which
"Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave a number of issues--support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general--into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core." For this group, Vest states, "total war," and "'regime change' by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative." (The Men From JINSA and CSP, The Nation, 2 September 2002)
Among the prominent former advisors and board members of JINSA are current Bush Administration officials Vice President Dick Cheney, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton and Douglas Feith, currently the third-highest ranking official in the Pentagon. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board is according to Vest currently a JINSA/CSP advisor.
The Guardian's Brian Whitaker recently shed lstate is Jordan.
Eldar points out how the document's writers proposed that Netanyahu press for cooperation with the United States on anti-ballistic missile defense, because "it would broaden Israel's base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense." (Perles of wisdom for the Feithful, Ha�aretz, 1 October 2002)
This was perhaps the beginning of what has become a fruitful alliance between those, like the JINSA crowd whose main motivation is fanatical support for an expansionist Israel, and those, of whom Cheney and Rumsfeld are the embodiment, who have no emotional or ideological attachment to Israel, but who see Israel as a useful example or tool to achieve their aim of forcefully extending and asserting US power and sovereignty in pursuit of a narrowly and unilaterally defined national interest. By working to seamlessly merge Israeli interests with those of American power, the pro-Israeli neoconservatives.
|
2002-11-06, 22:51
