Israel, the Iraq War and Iran

This article by Gareth Porter adds an important factor to the history of the Iraq War: Israel Warned US Not to Invade Iraq after 9/11 Inter Press Service 08/28/07. Longtime Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson says that Israeli advice against invading Iraq was "pervasive" and came from a wide variety of official and private sources.

According to Wilkerson's account, Israeli officials of Ariel Sharon's government were telling the Cheney-Bush administration that Iran was the more serious threat in the Middle East and if they were going to take out a government and shift the balance of power, it would be better to focus on Iran. Though they weren't necessarily recommending immediate war with Iran. Porter writes:

Israeli strategists generally believed that taking down the Hussein regime could further upset an Iran-Iraq power balance that had already tilted in favour of Iran after the U.S. defeat of Hussein's army in the 1991 Gulf War. By 1996, however, neoconservatives with ties to the Likud Party were beginning to argue for a more aggressive joint U.S.-Israeli strategy aimed at a "rollback" of all of Israel's enemies in the region, including Iran, but beginning by taking down Hussein and putting a pro-Israeli regime in power there. ...

But most strategists in the Israeli government and the Likud Party - including Sharon himself - did not share that viewpoint. Despite agreement between neoconservatives and Israeli officials on many issues, the dominant Israeli strategic judgment on the issue of invading Iraq diverged from that of U.S. neoconservatives because of differing political-military interests.

Israel was more concerned with the relative military threat posed by Iran and Iraq, whereas neoconservatives in the Bush administration were focused on regime change in Iraq as a low-cost way of leveraging more ambitious changes in the region. From the neoconservative perspective, the very military weakness of Hussein's Iraq made it the logical target for the use of U.S. military power.

Though Israel and its relative power position played a large part in neocon thinking about the Middle East, the neocons were apparently "more Catholic than the Pope" (to use a Christian metaphor) when it came to the notion that Iraq was a deadly threat to Israel. This will muck up the historical picture for those who are determined to see an Israeli plot behind the Iraq War.

Tags: gareth porter, iraq war, iran, israel