What friends are really for

The United States went to war in Iraq because President George W. Bush, backed by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice – all non-Jews, all far more pro-Saudi than pro-Israel – wanted to. The Israeli intelligence input to the war concerning Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was no more flawed than that of the United Kingdom or even France. Pro-Israel Jews are no more influential in the current U.S. administration than they were in previous ones. There was no Israeli plot at work in the Iraq war. Israel’s influence, for better or for worse, was minor.

But that doesn’t wholly exonerate Israel of harboring cost-benefit calculations of its own regarding the war and its aftermath, and acting accordingly in its relationship

with the United States.

Nor was any sort of an Israeli role necessarily a bad thing. On the positive side, Israel plainly recognized that it as well as others in the region would benefit strategically from U.S. post-9-11 policies, and it has. The destruction of Iraq’s regime and armed forces means that, for the first time in 56 years, Israel does not face any threat of conventional war by a hostile Arab coalition. It also releases Iraq’s immediate neighbors from

a hostile military threat.

American post-war pressures on states caught developing or proliferating nuclear capabilities – Iran, Libya, and Pakistan – have benefited not only Israel but the entire region. The same can be said for the U.S. war against radical Islamic terrorism. Israel has no reason to apologize for supporting this U.S. effort or for aiding it through intelligence and operational know-how.

But there is also a negative side. One of the ideological underpinnings for the war was advocated by Rumsfeld’s neo-conservative advisers, many of whom are Jewish and are known for their pro-Israel views. This approach holds that America’s most pressing problem in the Middle East is that much of the Arab and Muslim worlds is dysfunctional and exports Muslim extremism that targets the United States; that dealing with this threat is far more important than trying to solve the Arab-Israel conflict; and that after the occupation of Iraq, America can remake the entire Middle East in a democratic mode that will encourage peace and human rights and, by-the-by, benefit Israel. This point of view has been shared and advocated for a number of years by prominent Israeli hawks like Binyamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky. (It is not shared by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, if only because he apparently does not believe in the possibility of peace with Arabs at all, under any circumstances.)

This approach was not the main reason the United States went to war in Iraq. But it was there, and its advocates did not hide their belief that an Arab world democratized by the United States would be easier for Israel to make peace with, and that this was an American interest. Many Israeli strategic thinkers on the left and the right knew from bitter experience prior to the war in Iraq that foreign occupation of an Arab country is counterproductive to the occupier’s interests. So obvious is this lesson from our occupations in Lebanon and Palestine that Israeli contingency war plans today aspire to avoid prolonged occupation of enemy territory.

Many Israeli Middle East and security experts, this writer among them, warned the administration publicly that the Iraq war was ill conceived; that it would be easy to go into Iraq but hard to get out; and that post-war Iraq would not behave like post-World

War II Germany and Japan. (Indeed, half of Israel’s public opposed the war altogether.) In other words, we sought to disassociate Israel from the misbegotten pro-Israel neo-con camp in the administration – but, in retrospect, we did not warn firmly enough.

And our government did not warn the United States at all. Caught between Arab and European opposition to the war on the one hand and, on the other, the American request that we assist here and there but avoid displays of overt support for the war lest we further alienate Arab opinion, our government remained largely silent in public, too supportive in private. It preferred the instant benefits the war would provide, alongside Washington’s seeming benevolent neglect of Israel’s settlement policies and war-fighting tactics against the Palestinians, to any attempt to calculate and share with the United States just where the occupation of Iraq would leave Israel’s ally and what this could mean for Israel in the long term.

America’s mistake was not that it fought back against Arab terrorists, murderous dictators and WMD proliferators. The mistake was occupying and trying to reform Iraq. Israel is not to blame for this, but it knew better. It should have said so more loudly. That’s what real friends are for.

Yossi Alpher is coeditor of bitterlemons.org and bitterlemons-international.org, where this commentary was first published. He is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He will be a speaker at the 2005 Camden Conference, to be held Feb. 25-27 at the Camden Opera House.