Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2002, page 12

Special Report

 

Opposing Advice to Bush: Take out Iraq vs. Take on Israeli-Palestinian Peace

 

By Richard H. Curtiss

Let’s start with three basic facts. President Saddam Hussain, Iraq’s dictator for life, is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to the Middle East. The second fact is that Russia has a huge special interest in getting back some of the billions of dollars that Moscow lent Iraq. Third, the Israel lobby is desperate to find another distraction so that Israel will not have to agree to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

From that point on there are many surprises, both in the United States and, of course, in the other Middle Eastern countries. The new diversion to distract Washington from insisting that Israel seek a just solution to the Palestine problem began with the open offensive against postponing the problem one more time and “finishing the job in Iraq.” This, of course, goes all the way back to the question of whether, as the Gulf war was ending, the U.S. should have completed the destruction of Iraq’s military capability.

George Bush Sr. had to face up to the fact that most of America’s allies in the coalition he had forged would not readily have agreed to the continuation of the war. Certainly, those Arab countries who had worked so hard to put the Saudis and the United States into the joint command that made the war possible would have quickly abandoned the coalition.

Bush père made the choice at that time not to unleash a lot of political complications. Some Middle East experts realized that, if the war were to continue, there was a serious danger that Iraq might have broken into three parts: a Sunni center, a Kurdish northern third and a southern Shi’i sector.

It was clear way back in 1991 that the Israelis were brokenhearted. They felt sure they were losing what might be their only opportunity to break up Iraq once and for all as a viable country. The remaining remnants could have been used to permanently divide and conquer this vital but unstable major power, which now has a combination of over 23 million people.

Meanwhile, most Middle East experts assumed that the political evolution of the country would continue, with the Iraqis working out a way to get rid of Saddam Hussain but retain a central government. The Iraqi leader’s clever manipulations, however, thwarted any attempt at U.S. support of the Iraqi people, virtually all of whom would be deeply concerned if the country were fragmented into thirds.

Let us now fast-forward to the present. The Afghanistan war and its Taliban aberration have come and nearly gone. It happened even more rapidly than anyone might have predicted. Almost desperately, the Israel lobby has begun to forestall a peace agreement with the Palestinians, as it lays the groundwork for a new diversion.

The Israel lobby has begun to forestall a peace agreement as it lays the groundwork for a new diversion.

Israel-firsters quickly launched their offensive in two arenas. Firing the first shots was Richard Perle, a long-time lobbyist for Israel. He had hoped to get a more substantive position in George W. Bush’s administration. That was not to be, but Perle took what he could get—chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon and is charged with overseeing military preparedness and engaging in defense policy.

The 18-member board includes Harold Brown, President Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary; former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; R. James Woolsey, director of the CIA in the Carter administration; Adm. David E. Jeremiah, a former deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Vice President Dan Quayle; and James R. Schlesinger, a former defense and energy secretary.

Perhaps under Perle’s auspices, a tight-knit group of Pentagon officials and defense experts outside the government is working to mobilize for a military operation to oust President Saddam Hussain as the next phase of the war against terrorism.

This group, derisively known as the “Wolfowitz cabal,” after Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, is laying the groundwork for a strategy based on the use of air support, the occupation of southern Iraq and deployment of ground troops to install the London-based Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress.

According to one senior official, this plan calls for seizing the oil fields around Basra in southeastern Iraq and using the oil revenues to finance the Iraqi opposition in the south and the Kurds in the north. New York Times correspondents Elaine Sciolino and Patrick E. Tyler report that the group is making its case despite President Bush’s declaration that the war against Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden’s terrorists must be waged and won first.

The Wolfowitz cabal largely has been excluded from the State Department, however, where Secretary Powell has argued that such an attack on Iraq would destroy all of the international coalition that President Bush assembled. It is important to note that Secretary Powell has said that there is no evidence linking Iraq to the attacks of Sept. 11.

On Sept. 19 and 20, however, Perle’s Defense Policy Board met for 19 hours to discuss the ramifications of the Sept. 11 attacks. The board agreed on the need to focus on Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war against Bin Laden is completed. People familiar with the meetings said both Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz took part in both sessions.

Other members of the group, however, expressed concern that they might be pawns in a bureaucratic battle. “Both the Pentagon and State are using us to support their arguments,” said one DPB member.

At the State Department, officials who worked on Iraq policy were not briefed at all on the meeting and had to learn about it second-hand.

 

Signs of Disarray

There were other signs of bureaucratic disarray as well. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made a hard-line attempt, reminiscent of Cold War days, to change an agreed plan worked out between NATO countries and Russian President Vladimer Putin. The controversy, apparently, had to be adjudicated by President Bush. The debate clearly pitted conservatives in the Pentagon against Powell’s more collective approach of working out compromises with allies. The secretary of state sees great virtue in Russia’s inclusion in the alliance to combat extremism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Powell later said he would not discuss Rumsfeld’s role in the episode. Apparently the secretary of state, and probably Vice President Cheney, had to rein in Rumsfeld’s Cold War habits.

Meanwhile, it was taking a bit longer for the usual Israel lobby cheerleaders to get going. But fairly soon they, too, got into the act. William Kristol, now editor of the Weekly Standard, which covers many topics objectively but has the obvious agenda of broadcasting the Israel line, began pushing the Iraq war. In the absence of any clear restraint by the Bush administration, it almost looked as if the Israel lobby was going to take over American foreign policy.

Now, however, clearer heads with less ideological baggage have come forth on both sides of the issue. Some of those who have sought to halt the rush to a new war against Saddam Hussain will surprise readers.

Madeleine Albright, for example, who was Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations in the first Clinton administration and secretary of state in the second, counsels restraint. Clearly the complications in American foreign policy which would ensue from the Wolfowitz cabal’s scenario could turn out to be a disruptive fiasco.

Even more astonishing is Leon Fuerth, currently a visiting professor of international relations at George Washington University. Most people would have counted on Fuerth, who was widely expected to be national security adviser in a Gore administration, always to support the Israel lobby. In this case, however, he does not. Says Mr. Fuerth bluntly, “Saddam Hussain is not America’s most serious problem and attacking Saddam would be at the expense of higher priorities.”

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned the United States on Dec. 9 against expanding its war on terrorism into Iraq. “Any attempt or any decision to attack Iraq today,” he said, “will be unwise and could lead to a major escalation in the region.”

Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit warned that his government would not allow Turkish soil to be used for an attack on Iraq.

Nevertheless, the lobby war drums go on. Patrick Clawson, a director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), wrote on Jan. 12 that it was U.S. policy to see Saddam replaced because of the threats of biological weapons and Baghdad’s refusal to allow United Nations inspectors into Iraq.

Predictably, syndicated columnist William Safire used his New York Times column to keep the momentum going. Indeed, the list of media cheerleaders goes on and on.

Fortunately, despite the clamoring of Israel firsters at all levels, Secretary of State Powell has remained unperturbable. He is adamant that the administration should take one problem at a time. If wiser heads continue to prevail, the Israel lobby will be reduced to trying to dream up a war in Somalia, a failed state; or Sudan, which probably would be just as eager as the United States to clean out any residual terrorists it could find; or Yemen, which certainly can be called upon to cooperate in pacifying some of its unruly elements in order to continue an orderly national development program.

None of this, of course, would require a new war—just simple common sense and a little neighborly help.

What is essential is for the United States to turn to its next problem, which is solving the Israel-Arab dispute based on the nearly completed work that has gone before. This remains America’s—and, in fact, the world’s—gravest problem. It is imperative that Washington intervene to halt the slaughter of civilians by Ariel Sharon and his band of thugs.

Sept. 11 and its aftermath have called forth a broad international effort to tone down the Israel lobby, which seems so desperately afraid of the Bush administration. This is nothing new. Former President Bill Clinton tried to restrain the Israel lobby, but he never had the courage to finish the job.

Now the time has come for George W. Bush to act. Postponing the problem will only create new temptations to procrastinate. The rest of the world is becoming increasingly impatient for a just solution.

The lobby knows that if Bush can be distracted for a little while longer the Bush 2004 campaign will decide to defer the entire matter until after the next election. And Americans can count on the fact that, once again, there will be a major attempt to change administrations, just as has happened in every major U.S. election when the incumbent administration was preparing to solve the Arab-Israeli problem.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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