[Peace-discuss] Israel urged US to attack Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

[More indication, incidentally, that Israel is just the chief client, 
not the tail wagging the dog -- as, e.g.,  Mearsheimer & Walt would have 
it. --CGE]

	Aug 30, 2007
	Israel urged US to attack Iran - not Iraq
	By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Israeli officials warned the George W Bush administration 
that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilizing to the region and urged 
the United States instead to target Iran as the primary enemy, according 
to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, then a member of the US State Department's policy planning 
staff and later chief of staff for secretary of state Colin Powell, 
recalled in an interview that the Israelis reacted immediately to 
indications that the Bush administration was thinking of war against 
Iraq. After the Israeli government picked up the first signs of that 
intention, said Wilkerson, "The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the 
enemy - Iran is the enemy."

Wilkerson describes the Israeli message to the Bush administration in 
early 2002 as being, "If you are going to destabilize the balance of 
power, do it against the main enemy."

The warning against an invasion of Iraq was "pervasive" in Israeli 
communications with the US administration, Wilkerson recalled. It was 
conveyed to the administration by a wide range of Israeli sources, 
including political figures, intelligence, and private citizens.

Wilkerson noted that the main point of their communications was not that 
the US should immediately attack Iran, but that "it should not be 
distracted by Iraq and Saddam Hussein" from a focus on the threat from Iran.

The Israeli advice against using military force against Iraq was 
apparently triggered by reports reaching Israeli officials in December 
2001 that the Bush administration was beginning serious planning for an 
attack on Iraq. Journalist Bob Woodward revealed in Plan of Attack that 
on December 1, 2001, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered 
the Central Command chief, General Tommy Franks, to come up with the 
first formal briefing on a new war plan for Iraq on December 4. That 
started a period of intense discussions of war planning between Rumsfeld 
and Franks.

Soon after Israeli officials got wind of that planning, Israeli prime 
minister Ariel Sharon asked for a meeting with Bush primarily to discuss 
US intentions to invade Iraq. In the weeks preceding Sharon's meeting 
with Bush on February 7, 2002, a procession of Israeli officials 
conveyed the message to the US administration that Iran represented a 
greater threat, according to a Washington Post report on the eve of the 
meeting.

Israeli defense minister Fouad Ben-Eliezer, who was visiting Washington 
with Sharon, revealed the essence of the strategic differences between 
Jerusalem and Washington over military force. He was quoted by the Post 
as saying, "Today, everybody is busy with Iraq. Iraq is a problem ... 
But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous 
than Iraq."

Sharon, who was incapacitated by a stroke last year, never revealed 
publicly what he said to Bush in the February 7 meeting. But Yossi 
Alpher, a former adviser to prime minister Ehud Barak, wrote in an 
article in The Forward last January that Sharon advised Bush not to 
occupy Iraq, according to a knowledgeable source. Alpher wrote that 
Sharon also assured Bush that Israel would not "push one way or another" 
regarding his plan to take down Saddam.

Alpher noted that Washington did not want public support by Israel and 
in fact requested that Israel refrain from openly supporting the 
invasion in order to avoid an automatic negative reaction from Iraq's 
Arab neighbors.

After that meeting, the Sharon government generally remained silent on 
the issue of an invasion of Iraq. A notable exception, however, was a 
statement on August 16, 2002, by Ranaan Gissin, an aide to Sharon. 
Ranaan declared, "Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage 
will serve no purpose. It will only give [Saddam] more of an opportunity 
to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."

As late as October 2002, however, there were still signs of continuing 
Israeli grumbling about the Bush administration's obsession with taking 
over Iraq. Both the Israel Defense Forces' chief of staff and its chief 
of military intelligence made public statements that month implicitly 
dismissing the Bush administration's position that Saddam's alleged 
quest for nuclear weapons made him the main threat. Both officials 
suggested that Israel's military advantage over Iraq had continued to 
increase over the decade since the Gulf War as Iraq had grown weaker.

The Israeli chief of military intelligence, Major-General Aharon 
Farkash, said Iraq had not deployed any missiles that could strike 
Israel directly and challenged the Bush administration's argument that 
Iraq could obtain nuclear weapons within a relatively short time. He 
gave an interview to Israeli television in which he said army 
intelligence had concluded that Iraq could not have nuclear weapons in 
less than four years. He insisted that Iran was as much of a nuclear 
threat as Iraq.

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

That was the thrust of the 1996 report of a task force led by Richard 
Perle for the right-wing Israeli think-tank the Institute for Advanced 
Strategic and Political Studies, and aimed at the Likud prime minister 
Benjamin Netanyahu.

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

Israel was more concerned with the relative military threat posed by 
Iran and Iraq, whereas neo-conservatives 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 neo-conservative perspective, 
the very military weakness of Saddam's Iraq made it the logical target 
for the use of US military power.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His 
latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War 
in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.

(Inter Press Service)