Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 10:50:28 -0400
Subject: Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the US-Israel Alliance
From: julian samuel <jjsamuel-AT-vif.com>





Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&s=seale
------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Costly Friendship

by PATRICK SEALE

Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the 
US-Israel Alliance
by Warren Bass


[from the July 21, 2003 issue]

Much of the talk in Europe these days--in newspaper offices, at dinner 
parties, in foreign ministries--is about how the United States and 
Britain were conned into going to war against Iraq, or perhaps how they 
conned the rest of us into believing that they had good reasons for 
doing so. It is now widely suspected that the war was a fraud, but who 
perpetuated the fraud and on whom? Were Bush and Blair fed fabricated 
intelligence, or did they knowingly massage and doctor the intelligence 
to exaggerate the threat from Iraq so as to justify an attack? Everyone 
agrees that Saddam Hussein was a monster, but the military invasion to 
depose him is seen by many, and certainly on this side of the Atlantic, 
as illegitimate and unprovoked, and a blatant violation of the UN 
Charter, setting an unfortunate precedent in international relations. 
Henceforth, in the jungle, only might is right.

Various intelligence and foreign affairs committees of the British 
Parliament and the US Congress have started inquiries into how the 
decision to go to war was taken--when, why and on what basis. But it 
will require a superhuman effort to penetrate the murky thicket of 
competing government bureaucracies, spooks, exiles, defectors and other 
self-serving sources, pro-Israeli lobbyists, magazine editors, 
think-tank gurus and assorted ideologues who, in Washington at least, 
have a massive say in the shaping of foreign policy.

How did it all begin? An important part of the story, though not the 
whole of it, is the special relationship between the United States and 
Israel. Warren Bass's important and timely book Support Any Friend, 
written with candor and firmly rooted in primary sources, takes us back 
to the diplomacy of the 1960s, and to what he argues were the 
beginnings of today's extraordinarily intimate alliance between the two 
countries. It is in effect the story of how Israel and its American 
friends came to exercise a profound influence on American policy toward 
the Arab and Muslim world. Bass believes it all began with JFK. It is 
an interesting thesis and he argues it well, although in my view the 
US-Israeli entente actually began with LBJ, after Kennedy's 
assassination.

The neocons--a powerful group at the heart of the Bush 
Administration--wanted war against Iraq and pressed for it with great 
determination, overriding and intimidating all those who expressed 
doubts, advised caution, urged the need for allies and for UN 
legitimacy, or recommended sticking with the well-tried cold war 
instruments of containment and deterrence. War it had to be, the 
neocons said, to deal with the imminent threat from Saddam's fearsome 
weapons, which, as Tony Blair was rash enough to claim in his 
tragicomic role as Bush's "poodle," could be fired within forty-five 
minutes of a launch order. This flight of blood-curdling rhetoric has 
now come home to haunt him, earning him a headline (in The Economist, 
no less) of "Prime Minister Bliar."

Where did the information for his remarkable statement come from? How 
reliable was the prewar intelligence reaching Bush and Blair? The 
finger is increasingly being pointed at a special Pentagon intelligence 
cell, known as the Office of Special Plans, headed by Abram Shulsky. 
The office was created after 9/11 by two of the most fervent and 
determined neocons, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary, and 
Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, to probe into 
Saddam's WMD programs and his links with Al Qaeda because, it is 
alleged, they did not trust other intelligence agencies of the US 
government to come up with the goods. It has been suggested that this 
special Pentagon intelligence cell relied heavily on the shifty Ahmad 
Chalabi's network of exiled informants. If evidence was indeed 
fabricated, this may well have been where it was done.

One way of looking at the decision-making process in Washington is to 
see it as the convergence of two currents or trends. The first was 
clearly the child of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which 
both traumatized and enraged America, shattering its sense of 
invulnerability but also rousing it to "total war" against its enemies 
in the manner of a Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps because they had more 
experience of wars and terrorist violence, Europeans were slow to 
comprehend the visceral impact of these events on the American psyche. 
Suddenly mighty America was afraid--afraid of mass-casualty terrorism; 
afraid of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; afraid that 
"rogue states" might pass on such weapons to nebulous, elusive, 
fanatical, transnational terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, enabling 
them perhaps to strike again with even more devastating effect.

The aggressive National Security Strategy of September 2002 sprang from 
these fears. It proclaimed that containment and deterrence were now 
stone dead; that the United States had to achieve and maintain total 
military supremacy over all possible challengers; that any "rogue 
states" that might be tempted to acquire WMDs would be treated without 
mercy by means of preventive or pre-emptive war. Under this "Bush 
Doctrine," the United States gave itself the right to project its 
overwhelming power wherever and whenever it pleased, to invade 
countries it disliked, to overthrow their regimes and to transform 
hostile "tyrannies" into friendly--read pro-American--"democracies." It 
was a program for global dominance, driven by the perceived threat to 
America but also by a modern version of imperial ambition.

The second, overlapping trend--overlapping because it involved many of 
the same people--was more narrowly focused on Israel in its conflict 
with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. Right-wing Jewish 
neocons--and most prominent neocons are right-wing Jews--tend to be 
pro-Israel zealots who believe that American and Israeli interests are 
inseparable (much to the alarm of liberal, pro-peace Jews, whether in 
America, Europe or Israel itself). Friends of Ariel Sharon's Likud, 
they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims. For them, the cause of 
"liberating" Iraq had little to do with the well-being of Iraqis, just 
as the cause of "liberating" Iran and ending its nuclear 
program--recently advocated by Shimon Peres in a Wall Street Journal 
editorial--has little to do with the well-being of Iranians. What they 
wished for was an improvement in Israel's military and strategic 
environment.

The Iraq crisis has made their names and organizations familiar to 
every newspaper and magazine reader: Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 and 
3 at the Pentagon; Richard Perle, former chairman and still a member of 
the influential Defense Policy Board, sometimes known as the neocons' 
political godfather and around whom a cloud of financial impropriety 
hangs; Elliott Abrams, senior director of Middle East affairs at the 
National Security Council, with a controversial background in Latin 
America and in the Iran/contra affair; and their many friends, 
relations and kindred spirits in the media, such as William Kristol and 
Robert Kagan of The Weekly Standard, and in the numerous pro-Israel 
think tanks, such as Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, the 
American Enterprise Institute, the Jewish Institute for National 
Security Affairs, the Project for the New American Century, the Center 
for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute, the Washington 
Institute for Near East Policy (born out of AIPAC, the American Israel 
Public Affairs Committee) and many others. As has been observed by 
several commentators, 9/11 provided the neocons with a unique chance to 
harness (some would say hijack) America's Middle East policy--and 
America's military power--in Israel's interest by succeeding in getting 
the United States to apply the doctrine of pre-emptive war to Israel's 
enemies.

This trend rested on a mistaken, indeed willfully tendentious, analysis 
of the attacks that the United States had suffered--not just the body 
blow of 9/11 but also the numerous earlier wake-up calls such as the 
bombing of two US embassies in East Africa and the attack on the USS 
Cole in Aden harbor. The basic neocon argument was that terrorist 
attacks should not in any way be read as the response of angry, 
desperate men to what America and Israel were doing to the Arab and 
Muslim world, and especially to the Palestinians. Quite the contrary; 
America was attacked because the terrorists envied the American way of 
life. America was virtuous, America was "good." The real problem, the 
neocons argued, lay not with American policies but with the "sick" and 
"failed" Islamic societies from which the terrorists sprang, with their 
hate-driven educational system, with their inherently "violent" and 
"fanatical" religion. So, rather than correcting or changing its 
misguided policies, the United States was urged to "reform" and 
"democratize" Arab and Muslim societies--by force if necessary--so as 
to insure its own security and that of its allies. Wars of choice 
became official American policy.

Concerned to insure Israel's continued regional supremacy, and at odds 
with what they saw as distasteful opponents, such as Islamic militancy, 
Arab nationalism and Palestinian radicalism, the neocons argued that 
the aim of US policy in the Middle East should be the thorough 
political and ideological "restructuring" of the region. Exporting 
"democracy" would serve the interests of defending both the United 
States and Israel. A "reformed" Middle East could be made pro-American 
and pro-Israeli. All this seems to have amounted to an 
ambitious--perhaps over-reaching--program for Israeli regional 
dominance, driven by Israel's far right and its way-out American 
friends.

Iraq was the first candidate for a "democratic" cure, but the need for 
this doubtful medicine could just as well justify an assault on Iran, 
Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or wherever a "threat" is detected or 
America's reforming zeal directed. Immediately after 9/11, Wolfowitz 
clamored for the destruction of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This was a cause 
he had advocated unsuccessfully throughout much of the 1990s. But the 
accession of the neocons to positions of power, the fear of more 
terrorist attacks and the President's combative instincts now made what 
had been a Dr. Strangelove scenario appear quite doable. No scrap of 
evidence, however, could be found linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin 
Laden. Nor did Iraq pose an imminent threat to anyone, least of all to 
the United States or Britain. Exhausted by two wars, it had been 
starved by a dozen years of the most punitive sanctions in modern 
history. Hans Blix's UN arms inspectors had roamed all over the country 
and acquired a good grasp of its entire industrial capability. They had 
found no evidence that Saddam had rebuilt his WMD programs. They would 
have certainly liked more time to look further and make quite sure. 
This was the view of most European experts. Meanwhile, Arab leaders had 
buried the hatchet with Iraq at the Arab summit in Beirut in March 
2002. All Iraq's neighbors wanted to trade with it, not make war on it. 
In the atmosphere of reconciliation that then prevailed, even Kuwait 
did not think it seemly to admit that it still longed for revenge for 
Saddam's 1990 invasion.

There were, however, plenty of reasons why Israel and its friends in 
Washington wanted Iraq "restructured." Saddam had dared fire Scuds at 
Israel during the 1991 war and, more recently, he had been bold enough 
to send money to the bereaved families of Palestinian suicide bombers, 
whose homes had been flattened by Israeli reprisals. These "crimes" had 
gone unpunished. Moreover, in spite of its evident weakness, Saddam's 
Iraq was the only Arab country that might in the long run pose a 
strategic challenge to Israel. Egypt's government had been neutralized 
and corrupted by American subsidies and by its peace treaty with 
Israel, while Syria was enfeebled by internal security squabbles, a 
faltering economy and a fossilized political system. The Iraqi leader 
had to be brought down. His fall, the neocons calculated, would change 
the political dynamics of the entire region. It would intimidate 
Teheran and Damascus, even Riyadh and Cairo, and tilt the balance of 
power decisively in Israel's favor, allowing it to impose on the 
hapless Palestinians the harsh terms of its choice. Some neocons were 
already envisioning an Israel-Iraq peace treaty as a bonus byproduct of 
the war.

These concerns, in addition to control of Iraq's oil resources, rather 
than Saddam's alleged WMDs, were the real aims of the war against Iraq. 
They were embraced by the United States to assuage its own fears and 
restore its sense of absolute power. But what made the attack 
possible--the motor behind it--was one overriding fact of American 
political life: the US-Israel alliance, as close a relationship between 
two states as any in the world today. The Iraq war was in fact the 
high-water mark of that alliance.

Warren Bass seeks to establish that the foundations of the US-Israel 
alliance were laid by the Kennedy Administration. He even gives a 
precise date--August 19, 1962--for the start of the military 
relationship as we know it. On that day in Tel Aviv, Mike Feldman, the 
deputy White House counsel and Kennedy's indefatigable contact man with 
Israel and American Jews, met secretly with David Ben-Gurion and Golda 
Meir and told them that "the President had determined that the Hawk 
missile should be made available to Israel." The Israelis were 
ecstatic. The Kennedy decision destroyed the Eisenhower embargo on the 
sale of major weapons systems to Israel. "What began with the Hawk in 
1962," Bass writes, "has become one of the most expensive and extensive 
military relationships of the postwar era, with a price tag in the 
billions of dollars and diplomatic consequences to match."

The Hawk sale is therefore the first pillar of Bass's case for saying 
that Kennedy was the father of the US-Israel alliance. The second is 
what he describes as Kennedy's "fudge" over America's inspections of 
Israel's secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev. Although 
ingeniously and entertainingly argued with a wealth of detail, the 
thesis is not conclusively proven. As a matter of fact, the Kennedy 
team, with the exception of Feldman and his friends, did not want a 
special military relationship with Israel, fearing that it would 
trigger a regional arms race. Kennedy was not taken in by Ben-Gurion's 
histrionic description of Nasser, the Egyptian leader, as a cruel 
aggressor bent on Hitlerian genocide. He knew Israel was strong enough 
to deal with any Arab threat. He didn't believe it needed the advanced 
weapons and the formal American security guarantee Ben-Gurion 
requested. He told Ben-Gurion firmly that he did not want to be the US 
President who brought the Middle East into the missile age. Kennedy was 
in fact attempting to reach out to Nasser, whom he recognized as a 
nationalist, not a Communist. He feared that giving Israel preferential 
treatment might push the Arabs into the arms of the Soviets. In turn, 
the State Department's Middle East experts saw no good reason for the 
United States to change its arms policy toward Israel. As an internal 
memo put it, "To undertake, in effect, a military alliance with Israel 
would destroy the delicate balance we seek to maintain in our Near East 
relations."

Nevertheless, Kennedy finally approved the Hawk sale, which Eisenhower 
had rejected two years earlier. But he seems to have done so against 
his better judgment. He was eventually worn down by Israel's persistent 
and systematic exaggeration of the Egyptian menace, and more 
particularly by Shimon Peres's ability, based on chillingly detailed 
knowledge of internal Administration debates, to play off the Pentagon 
and the NSC against the State Department.

Bass's case is also arguable regarding Dimona. Far from turning a blind 
eye to what was evidently going on there, JFK was totally opposed to 
Israel's getting the bomb and was prepared to disregard the views of 
the American Jewish community on the matter. In the spring of 1963 he 
warned Ben-Gurion that (in Bass's words) "an Israeli refusal to permit 
real Dimona inspections would have the gravest consequences for the 
budding US-Israel friendship." He wrote Ben-Gurion two scorching 
letters, on May 18 and June 15, threatening that "this Government's 
commitment to and support of Israel would be seriously jeopardized" if 
Israel did not permit thorough inspections to all areas of the Dimona 
site. Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, lied through their 
teeth to Kennedy about Dimona but, as Bass writes, Kennedy was 
preparing to force a showdown. Had he not been assassinated on November 
22, 1963, he was on course for a confrontation with Israel.

The fudge came later, with Lyndon Johnson, who was far less concerned 
than Kennedy with nuclear proliferation. Skirting the issue of Israel's 
nuclear ambitions, Johnson approved the sale to Israel of large numbers 
of American tanks and warplanes even before the 1967 war, which 
propelled the Jewish state to stardom, pumping a large segment of the 
American Jewish community full of confidence, ambition and even 
arrogance. Johnson was the true father of the US-Israel alliance. It 
was he, rather than Kennedy, who "set the precedent that ultimately 
created the US-Israel strategic relationship: a multimillion-dollar 
annual business in cutting-edge weaponry, supplemented by extensive 
military-to-military dialogues, security consultations, extensive joint 
training exercises, and cooperative research-and-development ventures."

Bass raises the intriguing possibility that the Hawks were never really 
intended, as Ben-Gurion pleaded, to defend Israel's air bases from a 
knockout blow by Nasser's MIGs, but rather as a perimeter defense to 
protect the Dimona nuclear weapons plant. Some indirect corroboration 
of this thesis was later to emerge. In delivering its own knockout blow 
to Egypt's air force on the first day of the 1967 war, Israel lost 
eight jets in the first wave of attack. One wounded plane came limping 
back to base in radio silence. It wandered into Dimona's air space, and 
was promptly shot down by an Israeli Hawk missile.

 From 1967 onward there was no stopping the extravagant blossoming of 
the US-Israel relationship. If Johnson had been the father of the 
alliance, Henry Kissinger was to be its sugar daddy. In 1970, he 
invited Israel to intervene in Jordan when a beleaguered King Hussein 
asked for US protection. Syrian troops had entered the country in 
support of militant Palestinians then engaged in a trial of strength 
with the little King. Israel was only too happy to comply with this 
most irregular request. It made some much-publicized military 
deployments in the direction of Jordan. Emboldened by this support, 
Hussein's own forces then engaged the Syrians, who quickly withdrew. 
Hussein's army was thus left free to slaughter the Palestinians.

Rather than seeing Black September as the local tiff that it actually 
was, Kissinger blew it up into an "East-West" contest in which Israel 
had successfully faced down not just the Syrians but the Russians as 
well. This was the real launch of the US-Israel "strategic 
relationship," in which Israel was entrusted with "keeping the peace" 
in the Middle East on America's behalf--and was lavishly rewarded with 
arms, aid and a cupboard-full of secret commitments directed against 
Arab interests.

Kissinger adopted as America's own the main theses of Israeli policy: 
that Israel had to be stronger than any possible combination of Arab 
states; that the Arabs' aspiration to recover territories lost in 1967 
was "unrealistic"; that the PLO should never be considered a peace 
partner. His step-by-step machinations after the October war of 1973 
were directed at removing Egypt from the Arab lineup, exposing 
Palestinians and other Arabs to the full brunt of Israeli military 
power. Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982--in which some 17,000 
Palestinians and Lebanese were killed, triggering the birth of the 
Hezbollah resistance movement--was a direct consequence of Kissinger's 
scheming. In 1970 Israel received $30 million in US aid; in 1971, after 
the Jordan crisis, the aid rose to $545 million. During the October war 
Kissinger called for a $3 billion aid bill, and it has remained in the 
several billions ever since.

In due course Congress was captured by AIPAC--in Bass's phrase, "the 
purring, powerful lobbying machine of the 1980s and 1990s"--while the 
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, founded in 1985 by Martin 
Indyk, an Australian-born lobbyist for Israel, set about carefully 
shaping opinion and placing its men inside the Administration. Dennis 
Ross, Indyk's colleague at WINEP and a high-level negotiator for Bush 
I, became Clinton's long-serving coordinator of the Arab-Israeli peace 
process; he rarely failed to defer to Israel's interests, which is one 
reason the peace process got nowhere. He has now returned to WINEP as 
its director and continued advocate.

But nothing in the history of the US-Israel alliance has equaled the 
accession by "friends of Israel" to key posts in the current Bush 
Administration, and their determined and successful struggle to shape 
America's foreign policy, especially in the Middle East--including the 
destruction of Iraq.

The nagging question remains as to what the special friendship has 
achieved. Have the wars, security intrigues and political showdowns of 
the past decades really served Israel's interest? A student of the 
region cannot but ponder these questions: What if the dovish Moshe 
Sharett had prevailed over the hawkish Ben-Gurion in the 1950s? Sharett 
sought coexistence with the Arabs, whereas Ben-Gurion's policy was to 
dominate them by naked military force, with the aid of a great-power 
patron--ideas that have shaped Israeli thinking ever since. What if the 
occupied territories had truly been traded for peace after 1967 (as 
Ben-Gurion himself advised, with rare prescience), or after 1973, or 
after the Madrid conference of 1991, or even after the Oslo Accords of 
1993? Would it not have spared Israelis and Palestinians the pain of 
the intifada, with its miserable legacy of hatred and broken lives? Has 
the triumphalist dream of a "Greater Israel" (which James Baker, for 
one, warned Israel against) proved anything other than a hideous 
nightmare, infecting Israeli society with a poisonous dose of fascism? 
The US-Israel alliance is officially and routinely celebrated in both 
countries, but its legacy is troubling. Without it, Israel might not 
have succumbed to the madness of invading Lebanon and staying there 
twenty-two years; or to the senseless brutality of its treatment of the 
Palestinians; or to the shortsighted folly of settling 400,000 Jews in 
Jerusalem and the West Bank, who are now able to hold successive 
Israeli governments to ransom.

An inescapable conclusion is that the intimate alliance, and the 
policies that flowed from it, have caused America and Israel to be 
reviled and detested in a large part of the world--and to be exposed as 
never before to terrorist attack.



     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---