I haven’t been able to bring myself to blog on the Iraq inquiry since last Friday, when we were all transfixed by Tony Blair’s defiant and unrepentant testimony. Sir John Chilcot and his team of long-winded, deferential establishment worthies did a stunningly inept and incomplete job, allowing our former premier — as is his nature — to duck, weave, dodge, distort and evade.
I felt like throwing my remote control at the television.
Here’s Bob Marshall-Andrews, Labour MP and Queen’s Counsel, writing in the Guardian:
Answer after answer descended into self-serving waffle of total irrelevance. His love of America, his closeness to President Clinton, his admiration for the armed forces, the indescribable nastiness of Saddam, “the calculus of risk” (what?), his experience as a junior barrister, even his silly asides to Fern Britton expanded endlessly to suffocate meaning. No one demanded a straight answer. No one deplored the obvious strategy of delay.
In the morass, essential questions surfaced briefly, were avoided and remained, amazingly, ignored. Question: “Had President Chirac phoned to say that his position was being misrepresented out of context?” Answer: “I remember speaking to Chirac on a number of occasions.” Yes? And? What is the answer? We will never know, as the examination drifted gently on to another topic, and obscurity remained.
The most unforgivable, outrageous and bizarre moment of the day occurred when Blair, for some inexplicable reason, volunteered the following revelation about his all-important meeting with George W Bush in Crawford, Texas, back in April 2002:
As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.
Blair and Bush had “conversations” with “Israelis” while they were alone in Crawford, having a behind-closed-doors, private meeting about Iraq? Which Israelis? Were they present, or on the phone? Did the Israelis express a view about Saddam Hussein, WMDs or “regime change”? How many other Iraq-related meetings or discussions were the Israelis involved in?
The answer to all these questions is: DUNNO! The committee members didn’t ask him. There were no follow-ups. They simply . . . moved on.
And so, too, did the media. I haven’t yet seen the “Israelis at Crawford” story reported in any national newspaper. Apart from a brief reference by Seumas Milne on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, there has been no coverage of this story in the mainstream media.
So were the Israelis agitating for war against Iraq, and was Israel a factor in the Bush administration’s decision to unilaterally and illegally invade Iraq in 2003? Opinion has always been split on the anti-war side. But Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their much-discussed London Review of Books essay “The Israel Lobby”, back in 2006, made a persuasive case for the argument that Israel, and the pro-Israeli lobby, were key players on the road to war:
Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the “real threat” from Iraq was not a threat to the United States.
The “unstated threat” was the “threat against Israel”, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. “The American government,” he added, “doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”
On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that “Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein”. By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached “unprecedented dimensions”, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes.
As one retired Israeli general later put it, “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.”
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. “The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,” Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. “Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.”
At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that “the greatest risk now lies in inaction”. His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: “The Case for Toppling Saddam”. “Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,” he declared. “I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.” Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, “the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq”.
Content from our partners
Related
