The best
thing about this political moment in the U.S. (if not for the good people of
Iraq) is that the rise of ISIS and the Republican candidates’ embrace of the
Iraq war is posing that deep and permanent question to the American public, Why
did we invade Iraq?
Last night
Chris Matthews asked that question again
and David Corn said it was about the neoconservative desire to protect Israel.
Both men deserve kudos for courage. Here’s part of the exchange:
Matthews: Why were the people in the administration
like [Paul] Wolfowitz and the others talking about going into Iraq from the
very beginning, when they got into the white house long before there was a 911
long before there was WMD. It seemed like there was a deeper reason. I don’t
get it. It seemed like WMD was a cover story.
Corn: I can
explain that. For years. Paul Wolfowitz and other members of the neocon
movement had talked about getting rid of Iraq and there would be democracy
throughout the region that would help Israel and they came to believe actually
a very bizarre conspiracy theory that al Qaeda didn’t matter, that Saddam
Hussein was behind all the acts of violence…
Matthews: The reason I go back to that is there’s a
consistent pattern: the people who wanted that war in the worst ways, neocons
so called, Wolfowitz, certainly Cheney.. it’s the same crowd of people that
want us to overthrow Bashar Assad, .. it’s the same group of people that don’t
want to negotiate at all with the Iranians, don’t want any kind of
rapprochement with the Iranians, they want to fight that war. They’re willing
to go in there and bomb. They have a consistent impulsive desire to make war on
Arab and Islamic states in a neverending campaign, almost like an Orwellian
campaign they will never outlive, that’s why I have a problem with that
thinking. … we’ve got to get to the bottom of it. Why did they take us to Iraq,
because that’s the same reason they want to take us into Damascus and why they
want to have permanent war with Iran.
What a great
exchange. And it shows up Paul Krugman, who mystifies this very issue in the
New York Times. (“Errors and Lies,”
which poses the same question that Matthews does but concludes that Bush and
Cheney “wanted a war,” which is just a lie masquerading as a tautology.)
Here are my
two cents. We invaded Iraq because a powerful group of pro-Israel ideologues —
the neoconservatives — who had mustered forces in Washington over the previous
two decades and at last had come into the White House were able to sell a
vision of transforming the Middle East that was pure wishful hokum but that
they believed: that if Arab countries were converted by force into democracies,
the people would embrace the change and would also accept Israel as a great
neighbor. It’s a variation on a neocolonialist theory that pro-Israel
ideologues have believed going back to the 1940s: that Palestinians would
accept a Jewish state if you got rid of their corrupt leadership and allowed
the people to share in Israel’s modern economic miracle.
The evidence
for this causation is at every hand.
It is in the
Clean Break plan written for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996 by leading
neocons Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser — all of whom would
go into the Bush administration — calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein
and the export of the Palestinian political problem to Jordan.
It is in the
Project for a New American Century letters written to Clinton in 1998 telling him that
Saddam’s WMD were a threat to Israel. (A letter surely regretted by
Francis Fukuyama, who later accused the
neocons of seeing everything through a pro-Israel lens.)
It is in the
PNAC letter written to George W. Bush early in 2002 urging
him to “accelerate plans for removign Saddam Hussein from power” for
the sake of Israel.
the United States and Israel share a common enemy. We are both targets
of what you have correctly called an “Axis of Evil.” Israel is targeted in part
because it is our friend, and in part because it is an island of liberal,
democratic principles — American principles — in a sea of tyranny, intolerance,
and hatred.
It is in Netanyahu
testifying to Congress in
2002 that he promised there would be “enormous positive
reverberations” throughout the region if we only removed Saddam.
It is in
Wolfowitz saying that the
road to peace in the Middle East runs through Baghdad. (Possibly the
stupidest thing anyone has ever said in the history of the world, including
Douglas Feith.)
It is in all
the neocon tracts, from Perle and Frum’s An End to Evil, to Kristol and
Kaplan’s The War Over Saddam, to Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, saying that
Saddam’s support for suicide bombers in Israel was a reason for the U.S. to
topple him.
It is in
war-supporter Tom Friedman saying that we
needed to invade Iraq because of suicide bombers in Tel Aviv–
and the importance of conveying to Arabs they couldn’t get away with that.
It is in the
head of the 9/11 Commission, former Bush aide Philip
Zelikow, saying Israel was the reason to take on Iraq back in 2002
even though Iraq was no threat to us:
“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll
tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 –
it’s the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of
Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002. “And this is the threat that dare not speak its
name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell
you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it
rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”
It’s the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It’s the war
the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September
11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that
the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give
you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block
radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year
and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
For many in the current US administration, a major strategic
consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East
in a manner thought favorable to Israel.
Yes, it would be ridiculous, and anti-semitic, to cast the Iraq war as a
conspiracy monocausally driven by a cabal of Jewish neocons and the Israeli
government. But it’s entirely accurate to count neoconservative policy analyses
as among the important causes of the war, to point out that the pro-Israeli
sympathies of Jewish neoconservatives played a role in these analyses, and to
note the support of the Israeli government and public for the invasion. In fact
any analysis of the war’s causes that didn’t take these into account would be
deficient.
Many writers,
including Joe Klein,
Jacob Heilbrunn, and Alan Dershowitz,
have said the obvious, that neoconservatism came out of the Jewish community.
And I have long written that the Jewish community needs to come to terms with
the degree to which it has harbored warmongering neoconservatives, for our own
sake.
But America needs
to come to terms with the extent to which it allowed rightwing Zionists to
dominate discussions of going to war. This matter is now at the heart of the
Republican embrace of the war on Iran. There is simply no other constituency in
our country for that war besides rightwing Zionists. They should be called out
for this role, so that we don’t make that terrible mistake again. And yes: this
issue is going to play out frankly in the 2016 campaign, thanks in good measure
to Matthews.
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