Reckless Incitement to War

Israel's Reckless Incitement of War
by Patrick Seale


Israel’s campaign of propaganda and intimidation against Iran and its nuclear programme has reached dangerous proportions. It risks building an unstoppable momentum for war with catastrophic consequences for the region, the wider world -- and for Israel itself.


It bears a marked resemblance to the campaign of disinformation that Israel and its neo-conservative allies -- inside and outside the Bush administration -- waged against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 war.


Israel is widely thought to be urging President George W. Bush to strike Iran before he leaves office next January. This was the message Prime Minister Ehud Olmert carried to the White House on his latest visit to the U.S. in early June.


Israel’s persistent war-mongering has drawn a cry of alarm from Muhammad al-Baradei, director-general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. Nothing that he saw in Iran posed “a current, grave and urgent danger,” he declared in an interview with Al Arabiya TV last Friday. On the other hand, a military strike against Iran would, he said, turn the region into a ‘fireball’ and drive Iran to build nuclear weapons.


He might have added that a U.S./Israel attack on Iran would have a disastrous impact on the economies and societies of the Arab Gulf, which would inevitably find itself in the line of fire.


Three recent developments have served to raise fears of a confrontation.


• Earlier this month, Israel conducted a major air exercise over the Eastern Mediterranean involving over 100 F-16 and F-15 warplanes. Pentagon officials said its apparent aim was to practice flight tactics and aerial refueling for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.


•In a major front-page interview on 20 June with the French daily Le Monde, Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak categorically dismissed as false America’s recent National Intelligence Estimate, which had concluded that Iran halted its military nuclear programme in 2003.


Instead, Barak repeated the familiar Israeli mantra that Iran was “a challenge to the whole world” and that “no options should be taken off the table.” If the world allowed Iran to become a nuclear power, nuclear devices would, he predicted, fall into the hands of terrorists within a decade, and could be sent by container to a major port on America’s East Coast, to Europe or to Israel.


Israel, he said, had to be a “lion” in a “rough environment.” It faced threats from “radical Islamic terrorism, the proliferation of military nuclear technology and rogue states.” In confronting these threats, he mentioned former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s destruction of Iraq’s French-built nuclear reactor in 1991, as if to say that this was a precedent to be followed.


Barak failed, however, to mention Israel’s own substantial contribution to Middle East violence, lawlessness and chaos.


• A recent 30-page study by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, entitled The Last Resort, argues not just for a one-off strike against Iran -- using, if necessary, nuclear earth-penetrating munitions -- but for a more ambitious policy of “successive military strikes against a number of targets, in tandem with a variety of nonmilitary measures, carried out over an extended period [of] time.” Iran, it seemed to be advocating, should be hit hard and kept down for the foreseeable future!


The Washington Institute is one of Israel’s main instruments for influencing American opinion. It directs its efforts at shaping the Administration’s Middle East policy, in much the same way as AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, shapes opinion in the U.S. Congress.


Just as it pressed for the destruction of Iraq by the United States, so Israel is now pressing for the destruction of Iran. It evidently persists in seeing its ultimate long-term security in terms of military domination over a weakened and shattered region, rather than in comprehensive peace with its neighbours.


But this is almost certainly a strategic blunder of the first importance. It has not won Israel security and could prove self-destructive. The time has surely come for Israel to rethink the security doctrine it has pursued since the creation of the state in 1948.




Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.


Copyright © 2008 Patrick