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Trump isn’t the first US president tempted by an Israeli plan to destroy Iran and thereby “remake the Middle East”, as this extract from my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations sets out
In 2008, Pluto Press published my book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to remake the Middle East”. It was an attempt to explain how Israel had persuaded a group of hawkish allies in Washington – known as the neoconservatives (or neocons for short) – to work from within the administration of George W Bush to support a long-standing Israeli ambition to Balkanise the Middle East: that is, to use force to collapse the regimes there, most especially those resistant to Israel’s military domination of the region. The neocons started in earnest with Iraq in 2003, and then planned to move on to Lebanon, Syria and end in Iran.
The benefits for Israel were manifold. First, regime collapse would weaken Muslim majorities, allowing Israel to better manipulate existing tensions between Sunni and Shia communities; to more easily forge alliances with other minorities such as the Druze, Christians and Kurds that would bolster Israel’s strategic position; and to stymie any revival of a unifying Arab nationalism that had been so evident during the 1950s and 1960s.
Second, failed states, riven by permanent civil war, would leave Israel free to dominate the region militarily and secure its privileged alliance with Washington.
Third, at the time, Israel and the neocons were keen to break up Saudi Arabia’s control of the oil cartel Opec and thereby undermine Saudi influence in Washington, as well as its ability to finance Islamic extremism and Palestinian resistance. (These concerns were later superseded as a new broom in Riyadh, in the shape of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, abandoned the Palestinian cause and moved ever close to formal normalisation with Israel under the Abraham Accords.)
Fourth, with the region in chaos, Israel would be free to complete the expulsion of the Palestinian people from what was left of their homeland.
As my book documents, the 2003 Iraq invasion was an unmitigated disaster; Hizbullah gave Israel a bloody nose when it tried to invade south Lebanon in 2006; as a result, the expansion of the war to Syria had to be abandoned, much to the evident annoyance of the neocons in the Bush administration; and the ultimate goal of destroying Iran had to be put on hold.
Eighteen years is a long time in geopolitics. But I am publishing below an extended extract from my book’s second chapter, The Long Campaign Against Iran, because it offers a detailed record of how Israel and its neocon allies in the Bush administration made the same case for attacking Iran as they do now – and came very close to getting their way. They viewed a war on Iran as the second phase of the 2003 attack on Iraq. They believed the two came as a package. Attacking one only would strengthen the other. Which is exactly what happened after Israel and the neocons engineered regime collapse in Iraq but were unable to continue on to Iran.
Twenty years on, most of the coverage of the current US-Israeli war on Iran tends to make two mistaken assumptions. First, that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the main driver, from Israel’s side, of plans to attack Iran. In fact, as this chapter and the previous one on Iraq demonstrates, the idea was widely shared in Israel’s military and political establishments. And second, that Donald Trump was the first US president dumb enough to fall into the trap laid by Israel – or at least by Trump’s pro-Israel donors. Though there is some truth to this, it is also too simplistic. All the evidence suggests that the idea of attacking Iran – sold as “remaking the Middle East” – gained a foothold in the imaginations of US politicians and officials, including in the Pentagon, more than two decades ago.
Former Nato commander General Wesley Clark told us as much, when he recounted in 2007 that during a visit to the Pentagon he had been told of a plan, in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, for the US military to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off in Iran.”
Seen from this perspective, it looks as if the US and Israel have been jointly plotting this course ever since. After the failed first attempt, during Bush’s administration, they rethought their strategy and held off until they believed all the pieces were in place. A genocide in Gaza had Hamas pinned down in the enclave. Hizbullah was largely beaten into submission in Lebanon. And the Syrian state was hollowed out, with the regime of Bashar Assad falling in 2024, after years of relentless scheming – much of it part of Operation Timber Sycamore – from the US, Israel and Britain. The new Syrian president and former al-Qaeda leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, struggling to hold the country together as sectarian grievances surfaced, and deprived of anything resembling a national military following repeated Israeli attacks, is now effectively a US client.
In a prophetic quote from early 2005, Bush’s Vice-President, Dick Cheney, declared: ‘Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.’
The “mess”, of course, now extends far beyond problems of diplomacy.
Chapter Two: The Long Campaign Against Iran
Although the Bush Administration and the neocons had focused their early attention [after 9/11] on the supposed threat posed by Iraq, there are strong grounds for suspecting that, though Israel was pleased to see the Iraqi regime overthrown, Iran was regarded as the more pressing danger. Israel’s obsession with Iran had developed at least a decade earlier as Tehran grew stronger in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War and the effective emasculation of Iraq from the combined effect of Operation Desert Storm, the crippling sanctions regime and the imposition of no-fly zones. Tehran, in contrast, had begun a slow process of economic and military recovery after the exhausting war with Baghdad [in the 1980s]; was nurturing Israel’s main foe in Lebanon, Hizbullah; had an enduring alliance with Syria, Israel’s relatively strong and recalcitrant neighbour; and was suspected of assisting Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel had started a prolonged propaganda campaign against Iran from the early 1990s that strongly echoed the climate being manufactured in the US more than a decade later. Then, as now, Iran was said to be only years or months away from developing nuclear weapons, and determined to destroy not only Israel but the whole world. In reality, Iran was quite open in the early 1990s about trying to find a European partner to help it develop a civilian nuclear energy programme, as it was entitled to do under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, under US pressure, European states refused to cooperate.
These US concerns about a nuclear Iran were shared by Israel, as a review of the media of the time reveals. In early 1993, for example, an article by Yo’av Kaspi, the political correspondent of the newspaper Al-Hamishmar, referring to the crushing sanctions imposed by the West on Baghdad following the Gulf War, reiterated the Israeli government’s view that ‘Iran needs to be treated just as Iraq [has] been’. Kaspi interviewed a retired senior officer in Military Intelligence, Daniel Leshem, who suggested that Tehran should be lured into a trap – possibly encouraged to make a mistake similar to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s of invading Kuwait – thereby justifying massive retaliation. ‘If they [Iran] nevertheless refrain from starting a war,’ he added, it might still be possible to find a pretext. ‘We should take advantage of their involvement in Islamic terrorism which already hurts the entire world.’
In summer 1994, Ha’aretz analyst Aluf Benn explained why dealing with Iran was considered the Israeli army’s top priority: ‘Iran could aspire to regional hegemony and ruin the peace process by virtue of having nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, of building a modern air force and navy, of exporting terrorism and revolution and of subverting Arab secular regimes.’ What this appeared to mean, once the prism of Israel’s security obsessions had been lifted, was that Iran might soon become a genuine military rival and, as a result, Israel’s dictates would not be the only ones shaping the Middle East.
By October 1994, Ha’aretz reported that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his deputy, Shimon Peres, were organising the campaign against Tehran through a new government office under the Orwellian name of the ‘Peace in the Middle East Department’. Its job was to suggest that Iran was ‘a major threat to stability in the Middle East’. This was ascribed not only to ‘its support for terror and sabotage, and its attempts to become nuclearized’ but also to its ‘being an exemplar not only for Islamic fundamentalists but for other resistance movements in Arab countries’.
Rabin and Peres were already reported to be thinking in terms of presenting this as a clash of civilisations. Ha’aretz noted that ‘Israeli hasbara [propaganda] was ordered to depict the rulers of Iran as “a danger to peace in the entire world and a threat to equilibrium between Western civilization and Islam”’. The then Chief of Staff, Ehud Barak, adopted a similar tone, stating that Tehran ‘posed a danger to the very foundations of world order’. Barak reached his conclusion, wrote Aluf Benn, because Iran ‘opposes the flow of oil to the developed world and because it wants to upset the cultural equilibrium between the West and Islam’.
In addition, there were long-standing fears in the Israeli military that a nuclear Iran would pass on its knowledge to Syria, making the two countries a very effective regional counterweight to Israel. In April 1992 General Uri Saguy, head of Israel’s military intelligence, replied to a question about whether Iran would assist Syria with developing a bomb:
When Iran itself becomes nuclearized, I cannot see how it can avoid cooperating [in this matter] with Syria. Such a prospect should worry us … In ten years’ time Iran will certainly become a decisive factor in the entire region, and as such an ever-present threat to its peace. This can hardly be prevented, unless somebody intervenes directly.
It was not surprising, therefore, that, following 9/11, the Israeli prime minister of the time, Ariel Sharon, should have seen a double opportunity to be grasped in Washington’s new aggressive engagement with the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s removal as Iraqi leader was a boon: he had offered symbolic and vocal support to the Palestinians; and his regime, crippled by the Gulf War and the long sanctions regime, was the weak link in the oil cartel OPEC, apparently a prize wanted by the neocons in their designs to smash Saudi influence. But Sharon regarded Iran as the bigger threat to Israel’s regional dominance, both because of its rapid advances in nuclear technology and its links to the Shia militia Hizbullah, which had effectively evicted the occupying Israeli army from south Lebanon in 2000 and become an inspiring example of resistance for the Palestinians.
Days before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Ha’aretz noted that the chief concern of Israeli policy makers was that ‘Iran might take advantage of the war [against Iraq] to strengthen its status in the region and accelerate development of nuclear weapons … Israel regards the Iranian atom bomb as the gravest threat to its security, and has been trying to muster international pressure to halt the project, with the United States’ help’. In other words, for Israel the destruction of Iraq and Iran had to come as a package; weakening only one would simply make the other stronger.
Sharon had hoped that a US invasion of Iraq would serve as a model for attacking Iran, just as the neocons had used the US war in Afghanistan as a model for their ‘pre-emptive’ strike on Iraq. Speaking of Iran, Syria and Libya in early 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Sharon noted: ‘These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve.’ (Although Libya was included in the list at this stage, within months its dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had signed up on the US side in the war on terror and abandoned his own, unconvincing attempts at developing nuclear weapons.)
During Sharon’s visit to the White House more than a year before the invasion of Iraq, and only months after 9/11, Ben Eliezer took time out to explain to the international media that the Israeli prime minister was warning President Bush that Tehran posed as much of a threat to peace in the Middle East as Baghdad. ‘I know that today the name of the game is Iraq, which is very relevant, but I would say they are twins, Iran and Iraq.’ In November 2002, Sharon told the London Times about his conversation with the US President:
One of the things I mentioned [to Bush] is that the free world should take all the necessary steps to prevent irresponsible countries from having weapons of mass destruction: Iran, Iraq of course, and Libya is working on a nuclear weapon … Iran is a centre of world terror and Iran makes every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction on the one hand and ballistic missiles. That is a danger to the Middle East, to Israel and a danger to Europe.
Sharon told the newspaper that Iran should come under pressure ‘the day after’ Baghdad was hit.
In February 2003, only a month before the attack on Iraq, Sharon used his meeting with a leading neocon in the Bush administration, John Bolton, then an Under-Secretary of State, to press the case for targeting Iran next. Bolton was reported to have responded that ‘he had no doubt America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea’. Bolton was already referring to the White House’s new ‘axis of evil’ – Syria was to replace Iraq following the latter’s occupation by US forces. Over the coming months, Israel would increasingly focus on a similar axis of evil: Iran, Syria and Hizbullah in Lebanon (with Hamas officially joining later, in early 2006, after its election to lead the Palestinian Authority).
Iran was portrayed as the centre of world terrorism, using as a proxy the Hizbullah militia of its co-religionists, the Shia in Lebanon. Syria, wedged between Lebanon on one side and Iraq and Iran on the other, was accused of assisting Iran in supplying Hizbullah, as well as stoking the Sunni insurgency against the US in post-invasion Iraq. The latter allegation could reasonably be doubted: the secular Syrian regime, dominated by the small Shia sect of the Alawites, had been ruthlessly suppressing Sunni militants inside its own borders and had no interest in helping a similar insurgency in neighbouring Iraq.
Sharon’s keen interest in Iran was well known to the Israeli media. In early 2002 the country’s most celebrated columnist, Nahum Barnea of Yed’iot Aharonot, noted that Israel’s top priority was persuading the US administration that Iran was ‘the real strategic threat’ and that they would have to ‘deal with it diplomatically or militarily, or both. If they don’t, Israel will have to do it alone.’ And hours before the attack on Iraq, Uzi Benziman, one of Ha’aretz’s most informed commentators, amplified the point:
The war on terror and on weapons of mass destruction is the banner under which President Bush is going to war in Iraq. Then why is he passing over Iran when the smoking gun is there for all to see? After the war in Iraq, Israel will try to convince the US to direct its war on terror at Iran, Damascus and Beirut. Senior defense establishment officials say that initial contacts in this direction have already been made in recent months, and that there is a good chance that America will be swayed by the Israeli argument.
Even as the US was preparing to declare victory in Iraq after its rapid push to Baghdad, Sharon’s ‘point man’ in Washington, the lawyer Dov Weisglass, was pressing the Iran line yet again. ‘Israel will suggest that the United States also take care of Iran and Syria because of their support for terror and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction’, reported the Israeli media.
ISRAEL’S FEAR OF A NUCLEAR RIVAL
One veteran Middle East analyst, David Hirst, explained Israel’s view of Iran:
Israel classifies Iran as one of those ‘far’ threats – Iraq being another – that distinguish it from the ‘near’ ones: the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states [Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon] … The closer their [Iraq and Iran’s] weapons of mass destruction programmes come to completion, the more compelling the need for Israel – determined to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the region – to eliminate them.
The core concern for Israel was that should either of these ‘far threats’ manage to rival Israel’s power in the Middle East, they would be able to influence the peace process in ways that might benefit the Palestinians and possibly bring an end to decades of occupation. Israel, therefore, had every reason to exaggerate both the advanced stage Tehran had reached in its nuclear programme and its malicious intentions towards Israel and the world. The US echoed these claims as it blocked dialogue with Tehran at almost every turn.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish National Security Adviser during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, called the US approach ‘clumsy’ and ‘stupid’, effectively forcing the Iranians out of the negotiating process that would have ensured a closer cooperation with the international community. The US had insisted that the Iranians ‘give something up [their right to enrich uranium] as a precondition for a serious dialogue on the subject’, observed Brzezinski. ‘I frankly don’t understand how anyone in his right mind would make that condition if he were serious about negotiations, unless the objective is to prevent negotiations.’
As the US further isolated Tehran over its nuclear energy programme, Iran’s populist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dug in his heels. In 2007 he boasted that his country was making rapid progress on nuclear technology. Tehran was in fact a long way from its stated goal of achieving civilian nuclear energy, let alone nuclear weapons. Exactly 15 years after Israel’s lobbying against Iran had begun, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Muhammad el-Baradei, reported that Iran had only a few hundred centrifuges up and running. Even assuming Ahmadinejad was not exaggerating in claiming that his scientists at the Natanz plant had begun operating 3,000 centrifuges to make enriched uranium, the Guardian newspaper observed that experts ‘doubt whether continuous operation has been achieved – another key part of the calculation. Three thousand centrifuges operating smoothly in tandem would produce enough enriched uranium to produce one bomb in a year’. In assessing the value of an attack on Iran, the Guardian observed:
If, as the Oxford Research Group has claimed, it is the case that bombing Natanz could hasten an Iranian bomb (because you can’t bomb the knowledge that Iranian scientists have gained, and getting a nuclear bomb after an attack would become a national imperative), that leaves only one option: changing Iranian behaviour through cooperation and negotiation.
Furthermore, intimidation was likely only to encourage Tehran to opt out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and thereby end the inspections it was allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to make. The Guardian suggested another way of dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions: ‘One suggestion is an enrichment process [for a civilian programme of nuclear power] that takes place physically on Iranian soil but under multilateral ownership and supervision. There may be other ways of satisfying both Iran’s claim for a nuclear cycle and our desire to stop it getting the bomb.’
The neocons and Israel appeared to have other ideas.
Behind the scenes, the Israel lobby in Washington began its own covert efforts to help Tel Aviv influence Washington policy makers against Tehran. Most controversially, Larry Franklin, a Pentagon staffer working for Douglas Feith, began passing classified information about US defence policy on Iran to two senior staff at Israel’s chief Washington lobby group, AIPAC, and an Israeli diplomat. Franklin was tried and jailed in early 2006. In the subsequent trial of the AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, their lawyer argued that neither had reason to believe he had done anything wrong in receiving classified information from Franklin because senior Bush Administration officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had passed on documents at least as sensitive. Also named as assisting AIPAC were: Stephen Hadley, National Security Adviser to the White House; Elliott Abrams, Hadley’s deputy at the National Security Council; Anthony Zinni and William Burns, two former US envoys to the Middle East; and David Satterfield, Burns’ former deputy and currently the deputy ambassador to Iraq.
By May 2003, according to an article in the American Jewish weekly newspaper the Forward: ‘Neoconservatives advocating regime change in Tehran through diplomatic pressure – and even covert action – appear to be winning the debate within the administration.’ With American Jewish groups pressing for action against Iran, the Forward observed: ‘The emerging coalition is reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq.’
A month later, as US forces were facing the early stages of an insurgency in Baghdad, Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to President Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, wrote in the Washington Post:
We are now engaged in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the terrorists.
To realise his vision, Ledeen promoted in the US media the unfounded story that Iranian agents had smuggled enriched uranium out of Iraq shortly before the US invasion, thereby neatly both explaining the West’s failure to find evidence of a nuclear programme in Iraq and proving a new level of nuclear threat posed by Iran. Ledeen had already established an organisation called the Coalition for Democracy in Iran along with Morris Amitay, a former executive director of AIPAC.
THE US READIES FOR A MILITARY STRIKE
There was no debate in Israel about which country should be targeted after Iraq; it was taken for granted that Iran should be next. The question was simply one of how to isolate Tehran and neutralise its threat to Israel’s regional hegemony, particularly its presumed quest for a nuclear arsenal to rival Israel’s own. Would Europe shrink from the task and insist on negotiations with Tehran, especially as the latter appeared increasingly open to compromise? Would the US find a way to impose effective sanctions on Iran and force it to back down? Or would Israel or the US mount an attack?
Iran, despite the terrifying scenarios created by Israel and the neocons, was no ‘military behemoth’, in the words of analyst Dilip Hiro. Its military industry was smaller than Belgium’s and during its savage eight-year war with Iraq it had purchased only a tenth of the arms bought by its neighbour. Nonetheless, no one in the Israeli or American governments appeared to want a repeat of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As the Economist observed, the military operation being considered was ‘an attack from the air, aimed at disabling or destroying Iran’s nuclear sites’.
In the US, the drumbeat of war grew weaker in late 2003 and early 2004, as the Bush Administration became absorbed with the growing insurgency in Iraq, and as Tehran agreed to tougher inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency. As a consequence, Israel began leaking reports through 2004 that it might go it alone in attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, similar to the strike it launched against Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981. Israeli defence officials were quoted saying: ‘Israel will on no account permit Iranian reactors – especially the one being built in Bushehr with Russian help – to go critical … If the worst comes to the worst and international efforts fail, we are very confident we’ll be able to demolish the ayatollah’s nuclear aspirations in one go.’
The Sunday Times quoted from a classified official Israeli document entitled The Strategic Future of Israel. Drafted by four senior defence officials and presented to Ariel Sharon, it concluded: ‘All enemy targets should be selected with the view that their destruction would promptly force the enemy to cease all nuclear/biological/chemical exchanges with Israel.’ Describing Iran as a ‘suicide nation’, the report called on Israel to develop a multi-layered ballistic missile defence system. An Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, it was noted, could provoke ‘a ferocious response’ that might involve rocket attacks on northern Israel from Iran’s ally in Lebanon, Hizbullah.
By early 2005, with Bush re-elected president, the US quickly shifted its attention back to Iran – in line with Israel’s position. In January, Vice-President Cheney declared: ‘Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.’
Cheney’s suggestion that Israel was facing a tight deadline – supported by endless Israeli statements that Iran was only months away from developing nuclear weapons – contradicted that year’s National Intelligence Estimate, the first updated US intelligence report on Iran since 2001. It found that Iran was at least 10 years away from having the technology to make a nuclear bomb and that, although Tehran was doing clandestine civilian research, there was no evidence it was directly working on developing nuclear weapons. ‘What is clear is that Iran, mostly through its [civilian nuclear] energy program, is acquiring and mastering technologies that could be diverted to bombmaking,’ reported the Washington Post.
Nonetheless, the Bush administration set about creating a legal framework – as it had done previously with Iraq – that might later justify an attack. Paradoxically, in summer 2005, shortly after the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency gave Iran a relatively clean bill of health, the strong US lobbying finally paid off: the Agency’s board of governors, a more politicised body, issued a statement finding Tehran in ‘non-compliance’ and threatening to refer Iran to the UN Security Council if it did not improve its cooperation. Even then the report was carried by the bloc vote of the Nato countries, with, unusually, many voting nations, including Russia and China, abstaining.
Asli U Bali, of Yale Law School, noted that the timing of the board’s statement suggested that behind the vote lay ‘the political objective of persuading Iran to halt enrichment [of uranium], rather than enforcement of treaty obligations’. A subsequent UN resolution, passed in July 2006, demanded that Iran suspend uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities by 31 August 2006 or face sanctions. In December 2006 a harsher resolution, 1737, was adopted, condemning Iran’s nuclear research programme and imposing limited sanctions. Another UN resolution passed in March 2007, applying further sanctions.
In parallel to these legal manoeuvres, the White House was also reported to be preparing for a covert military strike. Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq who had angered Washington by arguing before the US invasion that Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMD in Iraq no longer existed, claimed that the Pentagon had been ordered to be ready for an attack on Tehran from summer 2005 onwards. ‘In October 2004’, Ritter said, ‘the President of the United States ordered the Pentagon to be prepared to launch military strikes against Iran as of June 2005. That means, have all the resources in place so that, if the President orders it, the bombing can begin.’
The timing may not have been arbitrary: two months later Israel was due to withdraw its few thousand settlers from the Gaza Strip in what it called a ‘disengagement’. Israel had publicised fears that Iran, or more likely its Hizbullah allies on the northern border in Lebanon, and Syria, might take advantage of Israel’s vulnerability while its forces were tied up in the country’s south. Israel and the US may have believed that they could use any such move as a pretext to hit Iran.
Ritter’s account was in part corroborated by a series of reports from Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Drawing on an array of sources in the Pentagon and intelligence community, Hersh charted the strategies of the White House – and, to a lesser extent, Israel – in undermining Iran during the key period of 2005 and early 2006. He also revealed that the Administration was facing opposition from senior military staff in the Pentagon and from European states, which wished to pursue a diplomatic policy.
In early 2005, Hersh reported that Defense Department officials under Douglas Feith had been working with Israeli military planners and consultants to pinpoint nuclear and chemical weapons sites and missile targets inside Iran. In addition, US Central Command had been asked to revise its war plans, providing for a ground and air invasion of Iran. By spring 2006, the White House had, according to Hersh,
increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.
Among the military options being considered was using tactical nuclear warheads to hit underground bunkers, such as Natanz, where, officials believed, nuclear weapons research was being conducted. Much of the spying on Iran’s nuclear programme was being carried out by Israeli secret agents, according to Hersh’s informants. It was possible that, in a practice used before by Israel, former Iranian Jews now living in Israel were spying for their country while claiming to be visiting relatives in Iran. (Some 30,000 Jews live in Iran, the Middle East’s largest Jewish population outside Israel. Their relative success in Iran and their repeated refusal to leave, despite financial incentives offered by Israel and Americans Jewish groups for them to emigrate, have proved an enduring embarrassment to those claiming that the Iranian regime is driven by genocidal anti-Semitism.)
By early summer, Hersh reported, Bush was facing stiff opposition from his generals.
Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States. A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities [in Iran]; the war planners are not sure what to hit.
Hersh quoted a Pentagon consultant: ‘There is a war about the war going on inside the building.’ Many military commanders reportedly feared the effect of bombing Iran on the insurgency in neighbouring Iraq – and the consequent loss of US personnel.
By that stage, according to Hersh, tactical nuclear warheads had been taken off the table because of concerns that their use would be politically unacceptable, though there were still debates about whether bunker-busting bombs could be used to similar effect. Bush’s new strategy, argued Patrick Clawson, a fan of the president’s policy and the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was to assuage Europe, as well as Russia and China, for a time when their votes, or abstentions, at the United Nations would be needed if talks broke down and the US decided to seek Security Council sanctions or a UN resolution that allowed the use of military force against Iran. Hersh concluded: ‘Several current and former officials I spoke to expressed doubt that President Bush would settle for a negotiated resolution of the nuclear crisis.’ A former senior Pentagon official claimed that Bush remained ‘confident in his military decisions’.
TURNING THE CLOCK BACK 20 YEARS IN LEBANON
On 24 May 2006, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was invited to address a joint session of Congress. In his widely publicised speech, he claimed that Iran stood ‘on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons’, a development that would pose ‘an existential threat’ to Israel. He added: ‘It is not Israel’s threat alone. It is a threat to all those committed to stability in the Middle East and to the well-being of the world at large.’ Less than two months later, on 12 July 2006, Israel launched a war against the Lebanese Shia militia Hizbullah, publicly – if simplistically – identified by Israel and the US as a proxy for Iran. After a month’s futile fighting, 119 soldiers and 43 civilians had been killed in Israel, and at least 1,000 civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters had died in Lebanon.
There were obvious reasons why Israel and the US might have regarded the destruction of Hizbullah as the necessary gambit before an attack on Iran. Were Tehran to be targeted first, Israel would be vulnerable to retaliation not only from long-range Iranian missiles but also, as Israel’s defence officials had suggested two years earlier, from Hizbullah’s short-range Katyusha rockets across the northern border. And if Israel launched a combined attack on Iran and Hizbullah, almost inevitably drawing in Syria too, Israel would face military reprisals on three fronts at once. Instead, dealing with Hizbullah’s rockets first – and at the very least intimidating the Syrian army – would isolate Tehran militarily and free Israel and the US to attack Iran at a time of their choosing. That was the assessment of the White House, according to Seymour Hersh’s conversations with officials at the time.
The July 2006 hostilities began with a relatively minor incident by regional standards: Hizbullah launched a raid on an Israeli military post on the border with Lebanon, during which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured. A brief Hizbullah rocket strike on sites close to the northern border left no one seriously hurt and was described at the time by the Israeli army as a ‘diversionary attack’. Five more soldiers died shortly afterwards when their tank crossed over into Lebanon in hot pursuit of the captured Israelis and hit a landmine. This was the latest in a long-running round of tit-for-tat strikes by Israel and Hizbullah since Israel’s withdrawal from its military occupation of south Lebanon in May 2000. A few weeks before Hizbullah captured the two soldiers, for example, Mossad had been strongly suspected in the assassination of two Islamic Jihad militants in a car bombing in the port city of Sidon in south Lebanon.
Israel was well aware of the reasons for the Hizbullah attack. The Shia militia had several outstanding points of friction with Israel since the latter had withdrawn from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in May 2000. First, as recorded by United Nations peacekeepers stationed in south Lebanon, Israeli war planes had been flying almost daily over Lebanon to carry out spying operations in violation of the country’s sovereignty, and to wage intermittent psychological warfare by creating sonic booms to terrify the local civilian population. Second, since Israel’s withdrawal, its army had continued occupying a small corridor of land known as the Shebaa Farms. Israel, backed by the United Nations after Tel Aviv had exerted much pressure on the international body, claimed that the Farms area was Syrian – part of the Golan – and that it could only be returned in negotiations with Damascus; Lebanon and Syria, meanwhile, argued that the land was Lebanese and should have been handed back when Israel withdrew.
But third and most important in explaining the July 2006 border raid was a bitter dispute between Hizbullah and Israel over prisoners. Israel had refused after its withdrawal in 2000 to hand over a handful of Lebanese prisoners of war (the exact figure was difficult to establish as Israel had opened a secret prison, called Facility 1391, into which many Lebanese captives disappeared during the occupation of south Lebanon). Regarding this issue as a point of honour, Hizbullah had vowed to capture Israeli soldiers so that they could be exchanged for the remaining Lebanese prisoners. It had seized three soldiers in October 2000, six months after the Israeli withdrawal, without incurring major reprisals. Although on that occasion the soldiers had died during their capture, Israel later agreed an exchange of 23 Lebanese, 12 other Arab nationals and 400 Palestinians it was holding for the return of the soldiers’ bodies and a captured Israeli businessman. According to reports in the Israeli media, there had subsequently been three unsuccessful attempts by Hizbullah to capture soldiers to ensure the return of the last two or three remaining Lebanese prisoners, and especially Samir Kuntar, who had been held by Israel since 1979. The day after the eruption of the July 2006 hostilities, a Ha’aretz editorial noted:
The major blow Israel suffered yesterday, the circumstances of which will certainly demand explanations, is particularly harsh primarily because this did not come as a surprise. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned in April that he planned to get back Samir Kuntar, even by force … Freeing Kuntar along with the other Lebanese prisoners and captives may have prevented yesterday’s kidnapping.
As expected, following the border raid, Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, offered a prisoner swap for the two soldiers.
Israel, however, was in no mood to compromise or negotiate. Calling the seizure of the soldiers an ‘act of war’, Israel began bombing Lebanon from the air the same day and launched a limited ground invasion. (Notably, a senior Israeli army commander later admitted that the point of destroying Lebanon was not the return of the two Israeli soldiers but to weaken Hizbullah.) The next day Israeli war planes destroyed airports, roads and bridges, factories, power stations and oil refineries – part of Israel’s campaign to ‘turn back the clock in Lebanon 20 years’, as the Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, phrased it. Was Halutz referring, even if unconsciously, to better times for Israel, before Hizbullah’s establishment in the early 1980s? The civilian death toll in Lebanon rose rapidly. Hizbullah responded, cautiously at first, by firing its primitive rockets at areas near the northern border, including the towns of Kiryat Shmona and Nahariya, that were well prepared for such strikes. The Shia militia waited four days before extending its reach and hitting Haifa with a volley of rockets that killed eight railway workers. By then more than 100 Lebanese civilians were dead from the Israeli bombing.
When Israel failed over the course of four weeks to significantly dent Hizbullah’s military capabilities – the rocket attacks continued and expanded, and the army’s attempts at invading south Lebanon were repeatedly repulsed – Israel and the US were forced to go down diplomatic channels, seeking a United Nations resolution, 1701, that they hoped would limit Hizbullah’s ability in the future to resist Israel. The two demanded disarmament of the militia by the Lebanese army and enforcement by UN peacekeepers. However, given the weakness of Lebanon’s army and the reluctance of the international community to commit troops, the chances of defanging Hizbullah looked remote. Israel, therefore, spent the last three days before the ceasefire was due to come into effect dropping some 1.2 million US-made cluster bombs over south Lebanon. The use of these old stocks of US munitions, which were reported to have a failure rate as high as 50 per cent, meant that hundreds of thousands of bomblets – effectively small land mines – were left littering south Lebanon after the fighting finished. The intention seemed clear: to make the country’s south as uninhabitable as possible, at least in the short term, and the job of isolating Hizbullah fighters that much easier should Israel try another attack.
There were three early indications that Israel might be seeking to widen the war to Iran and Syria. First, within hours of the attack, the deputy director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Gideon Meir, was trying to implicate Iran in Hizbullah’s capture of the two soldiers, and by extension Syria too: ‘We have concrete evidence that Hezbollah plans to transfer the kidnapped soldiers to Iran. As a result, Israel views Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran as the main players in the axis of terror and hate that endangers not only Israel, but the entire world.’ The ‘concrete evidence’ never emerged from the dark corridors of the Mossad.
Second, Israel claimed that Hizbullah’s arsenal of some 12,000 rockets hidden across south Lebanon – from which it managed to fire as many as 200 a day into northern Israel – had been supplied by Iran and Syria. This may have been true but applied a double standard typical of Israel’s relations with its neighbours: Israel was supplied by the US with the latest weaponry, including cluster bombs. Arriving at the Haifa railway depot where the workers had been killed, Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s Transport Minister and a former Chief of Staff, said the fatal rocket contained Syrian ammunition. At the same time, Israeli military commanders held a press conference at which they claimed that they had destroyed a Syrian convoy trying to re-supply Hizbullah. ‘These are rockets that belong to the Syrian army. You can’t find them in the Damascus market, and the Syrian government is responsible for this smuggling’, said the army’s head of operations, Gadi Eisenkott. Both Iran and Syria had good reasons to want Hizbullah strong: Israel’s difficulties invading Lebanon might deter it from attacking them; and Israel’s problems with Hizbullah on the northern border were one of the few leverage points Syria and Iran possessed in international negotiations.
And third, Israel’s leaders took advantage of the Western media’s instant and convenient amnesia about the chronology of Hizbullah’s rocket strikes. Israel argued that its army’s massive bombardment of Lebanon, far from being an act of barely concealed aggression, was a necessary defensive response to Hizbullah’s rockets. The attacks were popularly referred to by Israeli officials and commentators as Hizbullah’s attempt to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ – a clear echo of a phrase closely (though wrongly, as we shall see later) associated with Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In fact, the Hizbullah rockets had been fired in retaliation for the Israeli aerial onslaught, and Nasrallah had repeatedly used his TV appearances to call for a ceasefire.
When at one point the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, won Israel’s agreement to a 48-hour suspension of air strikes on south Lebanon, Israel broke its promise within hours while Hizbullah largely honoured the pause in hostilities, even though it was not party to it. Nasrallah appeared keen to show that his militia was disciplined and that it had a specific aim: namely, a prisoner swap. The Western media, however, concentrated on Israeli arguments that Hizbullah was seeking the Jewish state’s destruction – with the implication that Iran was really behind the plan.
There was one sense, however, in which Hizbullah’s rockets may have been fired for Tehran’s benefit – though few seemed to understand the significance. Most critics, including international human rights organisations, regarded the rocket fire from south Lebanon either as ‘indiscriminate’ or as targeted at Israeli civilians. But while Hizbullah’s projectiles were not precise enough to hit specific or small targets, they were often accurate enough to suggest the intended target. Though not reported by the local and international media, some observers on the ground, including myself, saw that a significant proportion of the rockets landed close by – and in some cases hit – military sites in northern Israel, including weapons factories, army bases, airfields, communication towers and power stations.
Israel was able to conceal this fact through its military censorship laws, which ensured that reporters were unable to explain what had been hit, or what military targets might exist, at the site of Hizbullah strikes. Nazareth, for example, was repeatedly mentioned as a target of rocket attacks, with the implication that the Shia militia was trying to hit a ‘Christian’ city (most observers appeared not to appreciate that the city has a Muslim majority), without journalists noting that military facilities were located close by Nazareth. I can reveal this information now only because a subsequent Ha’aretz article noted in another context the existence of an armaments factory in Nazareth.
The same conclusion – that Hizbullah had been trying, at least on some occasions, to target military sites in Israel – was subsequently reached by the Arab Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth. Its researchers found a close correlation between the existence of a military base or bases close by Arab communities in the north and the high number of Hizbullah strikes officially recorded against the same communities. After the war, the Israeli media admitted a few successful strikes on military sites, including a hit on an oil refinery in Haifa. Hizbullah’s ability to direct its fire towards such targets, if less often hit them, was possible because on several earlier occasions pilotless Hizbullah drones, supplied by Iran, photographed much of northern Israel, mimicking on a small scale Israel’s own spying operations.
Another direct hit was reported by Robert Fisk, a British journalist based in Beirut who was not subject to the censor. Fisk revealed that the army’s most important military planning centre in the Lebanon war, an underground bunker in the hillside of Mount Miron close to the border, had been repeatedly struck by rockets – a fact later confirmed by Israel’s leading military correspondent Ze’ev Schiff.
Hizbullah’s futile targeting of these well-protected military sites with their Katyusha rockets served a purpose, however. It suggested to Israel not only that Hizbullah knew where Israel’s military infrastructure was located but that Iran knew too. Why reveal this to Israel? Because, we can surmise, Tehran may have hoped that, by showing just how exposed Israel was militarily to Iran’s more powerful, long-range missiles, Israel’s leaders might think twice before attacking Iran after Hizbullah.
EVIDENCE THAT THE WAR WAS PLANNED
Iran and Hizbullah had good reason to fear that the assault on Lebanon – and whatever was supposed to follow it – had been planned well in advance. Nasrallah’s deputy, Sheikh Naim Qassem, certainly thought so. He told the An-Nahar daily that two days into the summer war on Lebanon Hizbullah learnt that Israel and the United States had actually been planning an attack on Lebanon in September or October. ‘Israel was not ready. In fact it wanted to prepare for two or three months more, but American pressure on one side and the Israeli desire to achieve a success on the other … were factors which made them rush into battle.’ Are there any grounds for Qassem’s belief that Israel was working to a prepared, if secret, script with the Americans rather than, as the official version suggests, improvising after the two soldiers’ capture? There are several strong indications that it was.
First, in an interview and separate article published shortly after the ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah was agreed, respected American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his officials, led by neocon advisers Elliott Abrams and David Wurmser, had been closely involved in the war. US government sources told him that earlier the same summer several Israeli officials had visited Washington ‘to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear. Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.’ After that, ‘persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board’. With these agreements in place between Washington and Tel Aviv, a war of reprisal could be launched the moment a Hizbullah violation of the border took place. A hawkish former head of intelligence at Mossad, Uzi Arad, expressed it this way: ‘For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily. We usually go through long analyses.’
The main concern in Tel Aviv and Washington, Hersh pointed out, was with Hizbullah’s rockets. ‘You cannot attack Iran without taking them [the rockets] out, because obviously that’s the deterrent. You hit Iran, Hezbollah then bombs Tel Aviv and Haifa. So that’s something you have to clean out first.’ But the neocons had other reasons for supporting an Israeli attack on Hizbullah, according to Hersh. First, they wanted the Lebanese government of Fuad Siniora, seen as loyal to Washington, to be able to challenge a weakened Hizbullah and assert the Lebanese army’s control over south Lebanon. And second, the US air force was hoping that their Israeli counterparts would be able to field-test US bunker-busting bombs against Hizbullah before they were turned on Iranian sites. From the spring, he added, the US and Israeli military worked closely together. ‘It was clear this summer, the next time Hezbollah made a move … the Israeli Air Force was going to bomb, the plan was going to go in effect … I think the best guess people had is it could have been as late as fall, September or October, that they would go. They went quickly.’ Hersh noted that a US government consultant had confided in him: ‘The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits.’
Second, a report by Matthew Kalman in the San Francisco Chronicle published a week into the war, supported Hersh’s account:
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified. In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah’s heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded.
And third, there is the self-serving, though nonetheless revealing, evidence about the build-up to war from Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, to the Winograd Commission. He said that he spoke to the Israeli General Staff in January 2006, as he became acting prime minister after Ariel Sharon was felled by a brain haemorrhage, about preparing a contingency plan for attacking Lebanon should a soldier be captured by Hizbullah, an event Israel was expecting but seemed to have done little to prevent. Olmert says he then held further talks with the military in March about drawing up more definite plans. He claims that he was the one directing the army to ready itself for war. There is good reason to believe that Olmert’s testimony is right in respect of there existing by July 2006 a military plan for attacking Lebanon, but wrong about when the plan was drawn up and about his role in its preparation.
In fact, after Olmert’s testimony was leaked to the media, members of the General Staff criticised him for having kept them out of the loop: if Olmert was planning a war against Lebanon, they argued, he should not have left them so unprepared. That claim can quickly be discounted as smoke and mirrors. Apart from the improbability of Olmert being able to organise a war without the senior command’s knowledge, references can be found in the Israeli media from the time of the war acknowledging the fact that the army was already readying for a confrontation with Lebanon, just as Olmert claimed. On the first day of fighting, for example, the Jerusalem Post reported of the planned ground invasion: ‘Only weeks ago, an entire reserve division was drafted in order to train for an operation such as the one the IDF is planning in response to Wednesday morning’s Hizbullah attacks on IDF forces along the northern border.’
But even more importantly, there is every reason to doubt that in Israel’s highly militarised system of government – where prime ministers are almost always generals too – Olmert, a military novice, would have been allowed to take a significant role in the army’s plans for how to deal with a regional enemy. The General Staff would have had their own plans for such an eventuality, regularly revised according to changing circumstances and coordinated in part with Washington. Olmert would at best have been able to choose from the plans on offer. That was certainly the view of General Amos Malka, a former head of military intelligence, when he testified to the Winograd Commission. He told the panel that politicians came to the army to discuss a military operation ‘as if coming for a visit’, and added: The politician
does not come with anything of his own, he has no [military] staff, no one prepared papers for him, he has not held a preliminary discussion, he comes to a talk more or less run by the army. The army tells him what its assessment is, what the intelligence assessment is, what the possibilities are, option A, option B and option C.
Malka also dismissed Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’s claim that he was following the orders of a politician in prosecuting the war against Lebanon. Such a relationship, he said, ‘does not exist in Israeli decision making. The army is part of the political echelon.’ Giving the commission members a brief history lesson, Malka concluded: ‘David Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] was both defense minister and prime minister, and the army was his executive branch, for education and establishing settlements as well. Since then, we’ve placed strategy in the hands of the army, but we forgot to take it back when the reasons for doing so ceased to exist.’ Malka’s view was supported by Binyamin Ben Eliezer, the infrastructures minister and a member of the war cabinet, who told the Winograd Commission that Olmert had been ‘misled, to put it mildly’ by the army. ‘Olmert said to me: “I am not a company, platoon or brigade commander, nor am I a general, as opposed to my predecessor [Ariel] Sharon. All of the generals I met with did not present any plans”.’
Experienced military analysts also inferred the same conclusions from the Winograd Commission’s heavily censored interim report, published in May 2007. While endlessly castigating the Israeli leadership over its ‘failures’ in prosecuting the war against Lebanon, the report revealed almost nothing on the most important questions: what had happened at the start of the war and why had Israel’s leaders taken the decisions they did? The reporter Ze’ev Schiff of Ha’aretz observed:
The main conclusion emerging from the testimony given to the Winograd Committee by the three most important players – Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and former chief of staff Dan Halutz – is that the army dominates in its relationship with the government … The conclusion is that the Israel Defense Forces has too big an impact on decision making.
That may in part explain the Commission members’ failure to understand the process by which Olmert reached his decision to go to war.
Our impression is that the prime minister came to the fateful discussions in those days with his decision already substantially shaped and formulated. We have no documented basis from which it is possible to obtain hints as to his process of deliberation, as to what alternatives he considered, nor as to the timeline of the decisions that he made and their context.
This passage echoed the conclusions of Aluf Benn of Ha’aretz two days into the war: ‘The brief time that passed between the abduction [of the two soldiers] and Olmert’s announcement of a painful response indicates that his decision to undertake a broad military operation in Lebanon was made with record speed. That he had no doubts or hesitations.’ Unusually, the Commission could find no evidence of the conversations between Olmert and Halutz that preceded the war, and therefore concluded that this was because the prime minister made the decision ‘in haste’ and ‘informally’ – in other words, that Olmert did not consult with anyone. A more convincing explanation is that Olmert and the Israeli military concealed the true circumstances surrounding the launching of the war because the decision had been taken in advance.
Both the General Staff and Olmert probably had additional reasons for wanting to muddy the waters on the issue of responsibility for the war. After the army’s dismal performance in Lebanon, commanders were keen to restore a little of their dignity and the army’s deterrence power by claiming that the politicians had interfered in ways that damaged their ability to defeat Hizbullah. Olmert, on the other hand, was facing some of the lowest popularity ratings ever for a serving prime minister, almost universally regarded as a leader without the military experience needed to cope with the new climate of confrontation in the Middle East. Admitting that he had simply rubber-stamped the General Staff’s plans would have damaged him even further, underlining to Israelis that he was not a warrior like Ariel Sharon they could trust in difficult times. It would also have set him on course for a clash with the army, a fight he would have inevitably lost against one of the institutions most respected by Israeli society.
A far more probable scenario was that from the moment Olmert took up the reins of power, he was slowly brought into the army’s confidence, first tentatively in January and then more fully after his election in March. He was allowed to know of the senior command’s secret plans for war – plans, we can assume, his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, a former general, had been deeply involved in advancing and that had been approved by Washington. Olmert was brought into the picture relatively late. If the observations of Hersh and the Hizbullah leadership are to be believed, the hasty and chaotic nature of Israel’s prosecution of the war – and the resulting dismal military failures – reflected, at least in part, the fact that the Israeli army was pushed into war too early, before it had fully prepared, by Hizbullah’s capture of the soldiers. Comments from an anonymous senior officer to Ha’aretz suggested that the army had intended an extensive ground invasion of Lebanon in addition to the aerial campaign, but that Olmert and possibly the Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, shied away from putting it into effect after the unexpected failure of the aerial bombardment in defeating Hizbullah. ‘I don’t know if he [Olmert] was familiar with the details of the plan, but everyone knew that the IDF had a ground operation ready for implementation.’
SYRIA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE NEXT
Had Hizbullah been beaten, what would this plan have required next? The answer, it seems, is an attack on Syria, with Israeli air strikes forcing Damascus into submission. According to reports in the Arab media during the early stages of the war against Lebanon, that was the fear in Syria and Iran. The newspaper al-Watan reported a phone conversation in which President Bashar Assad of Syria was supposedly told by the Iranian leader Ahmadinejad: ‘The Zionist-American threat on Damascus has reached a dangerous level, and there is no choice but to respond with a strong message so the aggressors will reconsider whether to launch a preventive attack against Syria.’
The evidence for a planned attack on Damascus comes from an impeccable source. After the summer’s war, Meyrav Wurmser, the Israeli wife of David Wurmser, Dick Cheney’s adviser on the Middle East, gave an interview to the website of Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yed’iot Aharonot. Meyrav Wurmser is a leading neocon in her own right, a director of an American rightwing think-tank, and one of the authors of the document A Clean Break. She revealed that the neocons in the Bush Administration, including presumably her husband, had delayed the imposition of a ceasefire for as long as possible so that Israel would have more time to expand its attack to Syria. Only Hizbullah’s unrelenting rocket strikes on northern Israel, she implied, had prevented the plan from being put into effect.
The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians. The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space. They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its [Iran’s] strategic and important ally [Syria] should be hit … It is difficult for Iran to export its Shiite revolution without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab country. If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and [changed] the strategic map in the Middle East.
These were doubtless the expected ‘birth pangs’ that Condoleezza Rice referred to a week into the fighting with Hizbullah. Wurmser’s view certainly makes sense of reports in the Israeli media that Washington wanted Syria targeted next. On 30 July, the Jerusalem Post reported: ‘[Israeli] Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.’ That followed an unguarded moment during the G8 summit in Russia on 17 July when President Bush was caught on a live microphone telling British prime minister Tony Blair: ‘What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.’ A few days later, on 21 July, the White House issued a press release claiming that Bush’s foreign policy was succeeding. Strangely, it ended with a link to an article by a leading neocon military historian and newspaper columnist, Max Boot, entitled ‘It’s time to let the Israelis take off the gloves’. In his piece, Boot argued: ‘Syria is weak and next door. To secure its borders, Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard. If it does, it will be doing Washington’s dirty work.’
Wurmser’s account is partly confirmed by another leading neocon, John Bolton, at the time of the attack on Hizbullah the US ambassador to the United Nations and the key American official responsible for negotiating the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. He told the BBC in an interview several months after the fighting that the Bush Administration had resisted calls for a ceasefire to give Israel more time to defeat Hizbullah. Stating that he was ‘damned proud’ of the US role in blocking a ceasefire, he added that the US had also been ‘deeply disappointed’ at Israel’s failure to remove the threat of Hizbullah and the subsequent lack of any attempt to disarm its forces.
Wurmser’s account is further corroborated by the evidence of an Israeli government minister, Ophir Pines Paz, to the Winograd Commission. He told the panel that many members of the cabinet had been led to expect that the international community would stop the war within a few days. ‘The leading diplomatic sources … gave us [a] working premise that we didn’t have much time to work with, and that we needed to act until we would be stopped – but then no one stopped us. This is what happened. Not only did no one stop us, they encouraged us, and we let this go to our heads.’
The disappointment of Wurmser and Bolton could be explained, at least to a degree, by the neocons’ conviction that the Shia coalition of Hizbullah and Iran needed to be split asunder by force, and that this could not achieved without transforming Syria from an ally of this Shia confederation into an obstacle. Iran could not easily supply and support Hizbullah if Damascus refused to turn a blind eye to such activities.
Following the August 2006 ceasefire, all signs were that another round of fighting against Lebanon and Syria would be launched again soon – this time, Israel presumably hoped, more successfully. That has certainly been the widely held view of the Israeli public, government officials and the army. It also explained the army’s obsession with protecting an Achilles’ heel exposed in the war against Lebanon: the home front. For the first time in one of its conflicts, Israel faced a military threat – in the form of rockets – on its own soil that quickly sapped the public’s morale. Since the Lebanon war, Israel has concentrated on finding a solution to its domestic vulnerability, from installing Arrow and Patriot anti-ballistic missiles and a home-grown defence system known as Iron Dome to developing a laser-based system known as Skyguard and what the Israeli media termed a ‘missile-trapping’ steel net designed to shield buildings from attack.
Typifying this manufactured consensus for ‘more war’ were the views of Martin van Creveld, a professor at Hebrew University in Jersualem and one of the country’s most respected military historians with intimate knowledge of the army’s inner workings and its collective ethos. He wrote a commentary in the American Jewish weekly the Forward in March 2007 arguing that Syria was planning an attack against Israel, possibly using chemical weapons, no later than October 2008. He predicted that Syria would create a pretext for a military confrontation: ‘Some incident will be generated and used as an excuse for opening rocket fire on the Golan Heights and the Galilee [in Israel].’ In the professor’s view, Syria hoped to ‘inflict casualties’ and ensure Jerusalem ‘throws in the towel’. The evidence, said Van Creveld, was that the Syrian military had been on an armaments shopping spree in Russia and studying the lessons of the Lebanon war. He did not interpret this as evidence that Damascus feared, given the hostile rhetoric from Israel and the US, that an attack was imminent and that therefore it should be ready to defend itself.
The implication of Van Creveld’s article was that Israel was entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike to foil Damascus’ plans.
Strangely, Van Creveld’s gloomy forecast contradicted another article he had written just a few weeks earlier for the same publication, in which he argued that Israel should negotiate with Syria as a way to weaken Israel’s Shia enemies, notably Iran and Hizbullah. ‘Syria forms the critical link between Hezbollah and Iran. The airport in Damascus is the gateway through which Iranian weapons and Iranian military advisers have been reaching Lebanon for some two decades. Close the gateway, and the flow of aid will be much diminished, if not eliminated.’ As the leader of a relatively poor and small country, argued Van Creveld, ‘Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like.’ Exploiting this vulnerability, Israel and the US could wrestle Syria away from the ‘Shia arc of extremism’, concluded the professor.
The basis for his optimism was a growing number of credible reports in the Israeli media that Assad had been seeking for two years to negotiate with Israel a deal on the Golan Heights. Not only that, but he had used a back channel, mediated by the Swiss, to offer Israel the best terms it could possibly expect for the Golan’s return: its demilitarisation and transformation into a peace park open to Israelis. In addition, Assad had gone a long way to meeting Israel’s concerns about its continuing access to the area’s water supplies. The Israeli government appeared convinced of Assad’s sincerity: assessments by the National Security Council and the Foreign Ministry concluded that the offer of talks on the Golan was genuine. Other reports, however, indicated that both the Israeli prime minister and US Vice-President Dick Cheney, although aware of the talks, had decided not to pursue the offer from Damascus. In fact, if Meyrav Wurmser was right, they had not only rebuffed Syria but had also planned to attack it at a time when Assad was desperately trying to make peace.
The Israeli and American leaderships stuck to their position of no talks with Damascus through early 2007, even as a group of Israeli intellectuals and former officials pushed for the talks to be renewed, and as senior US politicians, including Nancy Pelosi, the new Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, visited Syria. President Bush accused Pelosi of sending ‘mixed signals’ to Damascus. She, on the other hand, saw Syria as the key to ameliorating the disastrous situation of American forces in Iraq. The Israeli dissidents, meanwhile, believed a deal with Syria on the Golan would ensure that the Shebaa Farms were returned to Lebanon and that a major justification for Hizbullah’s continuing hostilities with Israel would be removed.
As summer 2007 approached, there were at least hints that the US and Israel might begin engaging Damascus, possibly in an attempt to isolate Iran further, though no substantive progress was made on this front. Their good faith was at least put in question by comments from Elliott Abrams, one of the most resilient of the State Department’s senior neocon officials, in May 2007. Referring to the mooted possibility of a renewal of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, but implicitly also alluding to Israel’s wider relations with its neighbours, Abrams reassured a group of powerful American Jews that such talk was designed to dissipate criticism of the US from the Arab world and the European Union for its failure to initiate a peace process. Talks, he said, were sometimes nothing more than ‘process for the sake of process’.
Given this context, what did Van Creveld’s rapid change of tune about talking to Syria signify? After his initial guarded optimism, why did he claim in his later article that peace talks with Damascus were futile and that a military confrontation was all but inevitable. His reasoning was to be found in the following argument:
Obviously, much will depend on what happens in Iraq and Iran. A short, successful American offensive in Iran may persuade Assad that the Israelis, much of whose hardware is either American or American-derived, cannot be countered, especially in the air. Conversely, an American withdrawal from Iraq, combined with an American-Iranian stalemate in the Persian Gulf, will go a long way toward untying Assad’s hands.
In other words, Van Creveld was now arguing, against all the evidence but presumably in line with Israeli official policy, that the waverers in Washington and Tel Aviv were wrong to contemplate withdrawal from Iraq or risk ‘appeasement’ with Iran or Syria, that Israel faced a dire threat from this axis of evil, and that a US attack on Iran was the key to Israel’s regional survival. It looked suspiciously as if the professor, after writing his original conciliatory piece, had been persuaded to return to the fold.
A POWER STRUGGLE IN WASHINGTON
Israel’s failure in Lebanon, and the dismal performance of Bush’s Republican party in the mid-term Congressional elections in November 2006, put in doubt the ascendancy of the neocons for the first time. With the Democrats taking decisive control of the House of Representatives, tensions in the Bush Administration started to surface and a change of direction in the Middle East seemed possible – if not yet certain. One of the major points of friction was over the recommendations of a report by a Congressional panel called the Iraq Study Group published in late 2006. Led by James Baker, a former Republican Secretary of State and a close ally of the oil industry, and Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, the panel argued that US forces should be gradually withdrawn from Iraq and that Washington should engage its main neighbours, Iran and Syria, to help in the task of stabilising what was clearly now a failed state.
The Iraq Study Group’s proposals were a direct reversal of neocon policy. Bush’s key advisers continued to argue that the US ‘stay the course’ in Iraq – or as one leading neocon ideologue, Daniel Pipes, suggested:
My solution splits the difference, ‘Stay the course – but change the course.’ I suggest pulling coalition forces out of the inhabited areas of Iraq and redeploying them to the desert. This way, the troops remain indefinitely in Iraq, but remote from the urban carnage. It permits the American-led troops to carry out essential tasks (protecting borders, keeping the oil and gas flowing, ensuring that no Saddam-like monster takes power).
The neocons therefore focused on a different claim, one that required deeper US involvement in the region rather than an exit. They argued that Tehran was trying to undermine American determination to stay in Iraq by interfering in its neighbour’s internal politics. Iran was widely blamed both for stirring up Iraq’s majority Shia community against US forces and for helping arm the Sunni-led insurrection. Although Tehran undoubtedly had an interest in American forces becoming bogged down in Iraq, not least because it might prevent the White House from trying to extend its Middle East wars to Iran, there was an improbability to claims that Iraq’s mainly Sunni insurgents were cooperating closely with Shia Iran – in fact, these claims echoed earlier fanciful US accusations that Iraq was giving sanctuary to al-Qaeda.
In line with the White House’s position, a US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, accused Iran of ‘using surrogates to conduct terrorist operations in Iraq, both against us and against the Iraqi people’. However, other Pentagon generals broke ranks to present Iran’s involvement in a different light. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, observed that, although individual Iranians were assisting the insurgency, Tehran was not obviously implicated. ‘It is clear that Iranians are involved and it is clear that materials from Iran are involved, but I would not say, based on what I know, that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit.’
Later, in April 2007, as the White House sought to widen the case against Iran, it claimed the Shia regime was supplying weapons to the Sunni fundamentalists of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the other Middle East quagmire in which US forces were sinking. By late May 2007, an anonymous Washington official was quoted in the Guardian newspaper stating that Tehran was behind many of the attacks on US soldiers in Iraq and was secretly forging ties with al-Qaeda and Sunni militias in Iraq to launch an offensive against the occupation forces to oust them from the country. Implying that responsibility for these developments lay directly with the Iranian leadership, the official claimed: ‘The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of Iran’s government]’. He added that Syria was a ‘co-conspirator’ that was allowing jihadis to infiltrate across the border.
Despite much speculation following the publication of the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq that the neocons’ influence was waning, Bush ignored the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations for a gradual withdrawal and announced a ‘surge’ of 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. Most analysts assumed that these forces were being sent to try to restore order, even if it is was widely recognised that their presence would be little more than a drop in the ocean. However, another possibility was suggested by dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, who argued that the surge troops might move into Khuzestan, an Arab area of Iran and the location of its main oilfields, during an attack on Tehran. The attack could then concentrate on destroying Iran’s nuclear installations without interrupting the flow of oil. ‘If you could carry that off, you could just bomb the rest of the country to dust,’ Chomsky observed. Shortly afterwards, in April 2007, during a standoff with the West over the capture of 15 British sailors found in or near Iranian waters, reporter Robert Fisk noted: ‘The Iranian security services are convinced that the British security services are trying to provoke the Arabs of Iran’s Khuzestan province to rise up against the Islamic Republic. Bombs have exploded there, one of them killing a truck-load of Revolutionary Guards, and Tehran blamed MI5.’
By late 2006, it was difficult to decipher whether the diplomatic or military option was preferred. The White House had put concerted pressure on other nations to isolate Tehran in the United Nations through a regime of economic, travel and arms sanctions, and it had also sent an armada of US aircraft carriers to the Gulf. Claims from the Bush Administration that Iran was meddling in Iraq and helping the insurgency against US forces were growing louder by the day. The question was: were the signals from Washington reflecting high-level disagreements or were they designed to provide cover for America’s real intentions? Was this a war of words and brinkmanship, or was Washington manoeuvring the international community to justify an attack on Iran, just as it had previously done in the case of Iraq?
AHMADINEJAD: THE NEW HITLER
With Washington apparently wavering, Olmert took the chance in his closing speech to international delegates at Israel’s Herzliya security conference in late January 2007 to focus on the threat from Iran. He ramped up the rhetoric.
The Jewish people, on whom the scars of the Holocaust are deeply etched, cannot allow itself to again face a threat against its very existence. In the past, the world remained silent and the results are known. Our role is to prevent the world from repeating this mistake. This is a moral question of the highest degree … When the leader of a country announces, officially and publicly, his country’s intention to wipe off the map another country, and creates those tools which will allow them to realize their stated threat, no nation has the right to weigh its position on the matter. This is an obligation of the highest order, to act with all force against this plot.
Olmert also accused Iran of being the hidden hand behind all of Israel’s enemies in the region:
Iranian support of Palestinian terror – through financial support, provision of weapons and knowledge, both directly and through Syria – Iranian assistance of terror in Iraq, the exposure of the capabilities which reached the Hizbullah from Iran during the fighting in Lebanon [in 2006] and the assistance which they offered just recently to Hamas, have demonstrated to many the seriousness of the Iranian threat.
There were still a few voices inside the Israeli security establishment prepared quietly to point out that, even assuming Tehran had the desire to destroy Israel, it did not have the capability, especially given’s Israel’s own formidable nuclear arsenal. In late 2006, for example, Ephraim Halevy, a former head of the Mossad, told a convention in Budapest that Iran’s development of a nuclear programme posed no threat to Israel. Yiftah Shapir, an expert on missile warfare at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies, believed Iran wanted Israel’s destruction but assessed the chances of it ever launching a first strike of nuclear weapons – if it possessed them – as ‘low’. He argued that Tehran would want a ‘dialogue’ with its enemies. ‘Strategic logic is stronger than any ideology,’ he observed. And Yitzhak Ravid, once the head of military studies at Israel’s Rafael Armaments Development Authority, pointed out that Iran was not only far off developing a nuclear warhead but had not even mastered the technology of the missiles that would be needed to deliver them. Quoting Uzi Rubin, head of ballistic missile research for the Ministry of Defense, he said: ‘The Iranians are almost frantic in volunteering information about their weapons capabilities, sometimes to the point of incredulity … they [their missiles] are meant to impress before they are meant to be used in anger.’
Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector who had overseen the inspection programme in Iraq before the American invasion and was also a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, highlighted the West’s double standards. He noted that, unlike North Korea, which the West was engaging in negotiations over its known nuclear arsenal, Tehran was instead being isolated and threatened with ‘humiliating’ punishments over mere suspicions that it planned to manufacture weapons. Faced with what he called a ‘neocolonial attitude’, Blix observed: ‘The Iranians have resisted all the time saying, no, we are willing to talk, we are willing to talk about the suspension of enrichment, but we are not for suspension before the talks. I would be surprised if a poker player would toss away his trump card before he sits down at the table. Who does that?’
But the messages of Halevy, Ravid and Blix were being drowned out, both in Israel and the United States. After months of bellicose talk from Israeli leaders, there was a wide consensus among the country’s Jewish public – just as there had been before for an attack on Iraq. According to Ha’aretz in March 2007, as the world waited in trepidation to see what would unfold next in the Middle East, Israelis were in no mood for compromise: ‘The Israeli Jewish public sees eye to eye with the government’s position’, reported Ha’aretz. ‘Eighty-two percent of people believe [Iran’s] nuclear armament constitutes an existential danger to Israel. And a majority – albeit smaller at 48.5 percent – say Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and destroy them even if it has to do so on its own.’
At Herzliya in January 2007, Olmert, head of the centrist Kadima party founded by Sharon, used his speech to neatly merge two themes that were the stock-in-trade of his chief political rival, Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, and his coalition ally, Shimon Peres, a veteran of the Labor party. For many months Netanyahu, in particular, had been accusing Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, both of being a ‘new Hitler’, who like his predecessor was consumed with a visceral hatred of Jews, and of planning to carry out a new Holocaust by exterminating the Jews with a nuclear attack. Where once the Nazis herded Jews into concentration camps before sending them to the gas chambers, argued Netanyahu, now Iran was treating Israel as a readymade death camp which could be ‘wiped out’ with a nuclear bomb. In late 2006, Netanyahu told American Jewish leaders: ‘It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs. Believe him [Ahmadinejad] and stop him … He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state.’ On another occasion, Netanyahu told Israel’s Army Radio that, after an Iranian attack on Israel, an apocalypse would engulf the rest of the world:
Israel would certainly be the first stop on Iran’s tour of destruction, but at the planned production rate of 25 nuclear bombs a year … [the arsenal] will be directed against ‘the big Satan’, the US, and the ‘moderate Satan’, Europe … Iran is developing ballistic missiles that would reach America, and now they prepare missiles with an adequate range to cover the whole of Europe.
Netanyahu’s campaign reached its climax in London at about the same time as the Herzliya conference, when he told members of the British parliament that Ahmadinejad should be brought before the World Court for his ‘messianic apocalyptic view of the world’ and for inciting genocide against the Jewish people.
It should be pointed out that none of these genocidal positions could be convincingly attributed to Ahmadinejad, let alone the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, who, it is rarely mentioned in Western coverage, is in charge of foreign policy. The quote endlessly attributed to Ahmadinejad that he wanted to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ – a reimagining of a familiar Zionist fear that the Arabs want to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ – was a straightforward mistranslation of one of his speeches, an error that quickly gained a life of its own after the mistake was originally made by the overworked translators of an Iranian news agency. Accurate translations were quickly offered by Farsi experts, including Juan Cole, a professor of the Modern Middle East at the University of Michigan and former editor of The International Journal of Middle East Studies. On his website, he noted that Ahmadinejad was actually quoting from the late Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who was himself comparing Israel’s survival as an ethnic state with the illegitimate regime of the former Western-backed Shah of Iran.
The phrase [Ahmadinejad] then used as I read it is ‘The Imam [Khomeini] said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).’ Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope – that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.
Arash Narouzi, an Iranian intellectual who was no friend of the regime in Tehran, made much the same point:
What exactly did he [Ahmadinejad] want ‘wiped from the map’? The answer is: nothing. That’s because the word ‘map’ was never used. The Persian word for map, ‘nagsheh’ is not contained anywhere in his original Farsi quote, or, for that matter, anywhere in his entire speech. Nor was the western phrase ‘wipe out’ ever said. Yet we are led to believe that Iran’s president threatened to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ despite never having uttered the words ‘map’, ‘wipe out’ or even ‘Israel.’
Nonetheless, world leaders cited and condemned this unuttered ‘quote’ almost daily as proof of Iran’s malevolent intentions towards Israel. Much mileage was also made by the US and Israel of Ahmadinejad’s decision to call what was widely referred to as a ‘Holocaust denial’ conference in Tehran in December 2006. In fact, the aim of the conference was not to deny that the Holocaust had happened; rather it was officially billed as questioning the Western historical record of the Nazi death camps and the number of Jews killed in them. Offensive as Ahmadinejad’s stunt undoubtedly was (and was designed to be) to Western sensitivities, it was also clear from what Iranian officials and Ahmadinejad himself had to say about the event that two transparent goals lay behind it.
First, the conference was supposed to illustrate Western hypocrisy in denying Muslims the legitimacy of their sensitivities in the recent ‘Danish cartoons’ affair, in which a Danish newspaper, followed by several other European publications, printed denigrating representations of the Prophet Mohammed, including one of him as a suicide bomber. By staging the conference, Ahmadinejad was questioning how Muslims’ sensitivities on this subject were different from the West’s own sensitivities about the Holocaust. If Islam’s most precious beliefs were public property, ripe for exploitation and abuse, reasoned Ahmadinejad, why not also the West’s most taboo issue, the Holocaust?
And second, the conference was meant to expose Israel’s exploitation of the Holocaust to justify its decades-long occupation of the Palestinians and the violation of their right to statehood and justice. Why did a crime committed by Europe against the Jews subsequently indemnify Israel against all criticism of its own crimes against the Palestinians? Or as Manouchehr Mohammadi, a research and education officer at the Iranian foreign ministry, observed: ‘Our policy doesn’t mean we want to defend the crimes of Hitler … This issue [of the Holocaust] has a crucial role regarding the west’s policies towards the countries of the Middle East, especially the Palestinians.’ As preparations for the conference were announced in January 2006, Ahmadinejad made a similar argument: ‘If you [the West] started this killing of the Jews, you have to make amends yourself. This is very clear. It’s based on laws and legal considerations. If you committed a mistake or a crime, why should others pay for it?’
It was a question Israel desperately did not want anyone, let alone its chief rival in the Middle East, asking. The issue now was whether the US would help Israel silence Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime for good.
Jonathan Cook a British corporate media journalist with The Guardian and The Observer, and recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, now working independently for more than two decades. His reporting—shaped especially by years covering Israel-Palestine—focuses on media, politics, corporate power, and international affairs, with occasional work on culture, science, health, and philosophy.
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