from Juan Cole:
Campbell: Israeli PM Sharon Threatened Bush with Nuking Iraq
(Mearsheimber & Walt vindicated)
Posted on 06/21/2012 by Juan
Alastair Campbell’s serialized memoirs contain a bombshell that is
largely being ignored in the Western press, the revelation that in
conversations with President George W. Bush in late 2002, then Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon threatened to nuke Baghdad if Saddam
Hussein hit Israel with rockets again. (Campbell was then British
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications director).
It is an astonishing threat. The Iraqi SCUDs that hit Israel during
the Gulf War of 1991 were primitive and hardly the sort of threat to
Israel that would trigger a nuclear response among sane people.
It is also clear that the threat was intended to force George W. Bush
to act aggressively against Saddam:
“Campbell also relays another nuclear threat a year later when
George Bush told Blair he feared that Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli
prime minister, was planning to launch a nuclear attack against Iraq.
In an account of a conversation with Bush at a Nato summit in Prague
in November 2002, as diplomatic pressure intensified on Saddam
Hussein, Campbell writes: “[George Bush] felt that if we got rid of
Saddam, we could make progress on the Middle East. He reported on some
of his discussions with [Ariel] Sharon, and said he had been pretty
tough with him. Sharon had said that if Iraq hit Israel, their
response would ‘escalate’ which he took to mean go nuclear. Bush said
he said to him ‘You will not, you will not do that, it would be
crazy.’ He said he would keep them under control, adding ‘A nuke on
Baghdad, that could be pretty tricky.’”
That the threat was made so cavalierly can only provoke some
speculation as to whether current Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu is behind the scenes once again playing this bargaining chip
with regard to Iran. I have long wondered why Western leaders pay so
much attention to Netanyahu, the leader of a small country of 7.5
million with a gross domestic product only a little bigger than that
of Portugal. Is it because, behind closed doors, they still talk the
way Sharon did? Does Israel regularly use its nuclear warheads to
blackmail the US and the West more generally?
In their pathbreaking book, The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and
Stephen M. Walt argued that among the more important impetuses for
George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the Israel lobby.
Important evidence for this allegation was the central role played in
propagandizing for the war by Neoconservative figures such as Richard
Perle (chair of the Defense Advisory Committee), Paul Wolfowitz
(deputy Secretary of Defense), Douglas Feith (undersecretary of
Defense for planning, and himself more or less a militant West Bank
settler); along with other officials such as Irv Lewis “Scooter” Libby
(convicted of perjury), David Wurmser and John Hannah– all
high-ranking members of Israel lobbies at one time or another.
The response to Mearsheimer and Walt’s closely reasoned book was an
unseemly food fight. They were denounced as anti-Semites (mostly by
bigots who themselves hold racist views of Arabs) on the one hand and
accused of presenting insufficient evidence on the other. A chorus of
important political figures went so far as to deny that there even is
an Israel lobby. (Just as NYT poobah David Brooks had denied that
there were any Neoconservatives, provoking Michael Lind and others to
some amusement).
Given that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee vigorously
pushed Sharon’s policies in the US Congress, it is impossible that
Sharon’s alarm about Iraq did not animate their lobbying efforts in
fall of 2002, when US politicians were inveigled into giving Bush
carte blanche to attack Iraq.
Campbell’s revelation is not only support for the Mearsheimer/Walt
thesis, but it actually goes much beyond their analysis. They probably
hadn’t dreamed that Sharon was wielding nuclear blackmail to get Bush
to go after Iraq!
I myself think that the Iraq War was overdetermined, i.e. that there
were multiple motivations for it, and I include oil. [Right! -- JD]
But that the Israel lobbies were central to it seems an inescapable
conclusion.
At a time when a US war on Iran is building, under the pressure of the
same Israel lobbies and the Likud Party in Israel, the American people
deserve to know from President Obama whether Netanyahu has threatened
to nuke Iran. We have been bamboozled into too many ruinous wars, and
the health of our society, values and economy won’t survive another
such catastrophe.
--
Jim Devine / "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they
are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to
reality." -- Albert Einstein
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