America's FALSE "FRIEND":
Israel and Iran Report
James Petras
“The most important thing (sic) that should be said about Bush is that had I told him that I was opposed to this move (Annapolis meeting), he wouldn’t have embarked on it. I could have blocked the move. Had I been unwilling to cooperate with him, Bush wouldn’t have coerced me... I spoke to the president with unparalleled sharpness about these matters (bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities) and my comments were extremely well received — regarding the freedom (to bomb Iran) we are reserving for ourselves and what we will and won’t do.
— Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Haaretz on Nov. 29, 2007.
During and immediately after the Annapolis meetings to discuss peace, Israel abducted the student president of Beir Zeit University for dissent, launched over 50 attacks on Gaza killing and wounding over 50 Palestinian civilians, police and militia, set in motion a vast building project of 250 new apartments in East Jerusalem, projected permanent Israeli military posts in the West Bank, rejected any time limits or specific goals in their negotiations with the PLO and launched a virulent dismissal of the major US intelligence report (National Intelligence Estimate) on the nonexistence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Israel’s presence at Annapolis had absolutely nothing to do with peace or promises to negotiate in good faith: Their purpose was to deflect attention from their meat-grinder style genocidal policies in Gaza and their relentless drive to savagely dispossess all Palestinians of any territory or semblance of autonomy, literally turning off the lights (energy), gas and water to 1.4 million Palestinians residing in Gaza. Since Sept. 11, 2001 the Israeli state, Zionists inside the US government and the entire leadership of the major American Jewish organizations have been entirely devoted to pushing the US into Middle East wars on behalf of Israel. In the run-up to the Iraq war, Zionists in top strategic decision-making positions in the Pentagon, the Vice President’s Office, the White House and the National Security Council designed and executed war policy, fabricated evidence, wrote presidential speeches, organized press conferences and presidential agendas, purged critics in the military and intelligence agencies and altered intelligence reports to suit their purposes.
Israeli and Zion-Con success in destroying Iraq however was secured at an enormous cost in US military casualties, demoralization and one trillion dollars (and counting) in cost to the US taxpayers. As a result, public opinion dramatically shifted against the war, despite the intervention of the Israeli regime in shaping US public opinion via its army of “Israel-First” academic and journalistic scribes and propagandists with broad access to the US mass media.
The devastating effects, which the Israeli-Zion-Con-promoted Iraq war has had on the US military, and intelligence agencies, led to widespread opposition within the US to the Israeli-Zionist push for mounting a new war against Iran. This historic struggle over Iran policy split the top echelons of the Washington policy making. On the one hand, the Israeli Firsters controlled or influenced the White House, the majority of Congress and key congressional committee chairpersons, the financing of both major political parties, the leading presidential candidates and the bulk of the mass media. The opposition was led by senior active and retired military officers, backed by the great majority of middle-level officers and ground troops, especially the reserves. The entire range of top intelligence officials were disgusted by the “Israel Firsters” in the Pentagon because of their distortion of their previous reports and fabrication of “intelligence” via newly invented agencies and their reliance on Israeli disinformation over US intelligence.
This monumental struggle within the government was not merely about US military policy toward Iran (which is crucial) but also about who rules the US, who commands the US military and who formulates intelligence reports that inform policy, and more basically whose interests are being served. The military command in the Middle East, led by Adm. William Fallon, came out publicly opposing the policy to bomb Iran. The active commanders were meekly backed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and surreptitiously (at first) by the top intelligence chiefs.
The Zion-Cons retaliated by launching the White House and Congress in a crusade to escalate economic sanctions and to “keep the military option” on the table. Every major Israel-First academic and propaganda think tank followed up the Israeli war planning with a wave of op-ed articles and interviews throughout the mass media about Iran’s immediate nuclear threat. The president, who does nothing contrary to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (as trumpeted by Olmert himself), pronounced an apocalyptic message to the world in October 2007 (six weeks before the National Intelligence Estimate was finally released) proclaiming the advent of “World War III” against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the threat of a nuclear attack (a “holocaust”) by Iran against the people of the US and Israel.
The White House was privy to the findings in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran at least 9 months before they were made public, as witnessed by President Cheney’s frequent interventions to alter their content and conclusion and repeated efforts to postpone their publication because it undermined the basis for their push to attack Iran. The Israeli government and its US friends, well aware of the forthcoming publication of the findings of 16 top US intelligence agencies, did everything in their power to precipitate a US war with Iran, from issuing hair-raising tales of the “existential threats to Israel’s survival” to encouraging, rousing bellicose speeches by AIPAC, Zionist and Jewish community leaders.
Israel went to war with Iran’s ally (Hezbollah) in Lebanon, bombed Syria which has a mutual security pact with Iran, escalated Israeli-trained Kurdish terrorist attacks across the Iranian border in order to provoke Iranian retaliation — to no avail. AIPAC and its Congressional allies led by Sen. Lieberman pulled all stops to force a conflict, increasing sanctions against bankers and corporations dealing with Iran and even labeling the Iranian military special force, the “Republican Guards” as an illegal “terrorist organization” and thus an automatic target of US military attacks under the doctrine of the “War on Terror”. The hyperactivity, the vicious military attacks, the strident rhetoric against all critics of the military option, and the urgency, with which the Israelis and their US supporters acted, was not due to any imminent Iranian nuclear threat but a desperate effort to precipitate the war before the US NIE became public and undermined their entire war propaganda campaign and military preparations for an attack.
The NIE findings temporarily closed the book on the White House-Israeli-Zionist Big Lie that Iran was engaged in developing weapons to launch a nuclear war.
The NIE report refuted its own previous conclusions of 2005, which were heavily influenced by the White House and its Zionist-Israeli backers. The reversal of conclusions was not based on “new data” or information techniques as is claimed. The change resulted from a dramatic shift in the balance of forces within the US government and in particular the strengthening of the US military elite versus the pro-war Zionist Power Configuration, a shift shaped by the enormous and unending American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. |
