Israel : A Costly Friendship to the US ?

Patrick Seale wrote an article entitled Costly Friendship in The Nation, and posed the question:

It is now widely suspected that the (Iraq) war was a fraud, but who perpetuated the fraud and on whom ?

He answered his own question:

An important part of the story is the special relationship between the United States and Israel. The US-Israel alliance is officially and routinely celebrated in both countries, but its legacy is troubling.

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."

Read HERE the full article by Patrick Seale.

Excerpt from Patrick Seale's article:

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?

An important part of the story is the special relationship between the United States and Israel.

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.

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.

Friends of Ariel Sharon's Likud, they (right-wing Jewish neocons) tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims. 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.

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.

Concerned to insure Israel's continued regional supremacy, the neocons argued that the aim of US policy in the Middle East should be the thorough political and ideological "restructuring" of the region.

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. It would tilt the balance of power decisively in Israel's favor, allowing it to impose on the hapless Palestinians the harsh terms of its choice.

But what made the attack possible 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.

President Kennedy was totally opposed to Israel's getting the (nuclear) bomb and was prepared to disregard the views of the American Jewish community on the matter. 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.

President Lyndon Johnson was the true father of the US-Israel alliance. It was he 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."

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.

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.

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 (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) -- "the purring, powerful lobbying machine of the 1980s and 1990s"/

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), 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 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.

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