In 1996, when Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
…they had an intellectual framework to justify their belief that toppling Saddam was an important Israeli strategic objective. But it turns out that they were wrong. If you listen to Richard Perle today, he’ll tell you that he never advised us to occupy Iraq, just to get rid of Saddam and leave. The problem is, we didn’t do that. Yet, there were many prominent Jewish-Americans that were fully supportive of Perle’s plans to invade Iraq and many of them are equally pensive about the outcome. Chief among these early cheerleaders were Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who continues to threaten to leave the Democratic caucus, and the editor of The New Republic, Marty Peretz. Look at what Peretz has to say about the Scooter Libby case:
It was from the beginning a politically motivated case, as Dershowitz argues in this morning’s Post, the appointment of the special prosecutor, the prosecutor’s own obsessions, the case itself with the doubtful and understandably doubtful but diverse memories of many witnesses, including the defendant, the especially harsh sentence pronounced by the judge, the refusal of the appellate court to continue Libby on bail — all of these were politically motivated. And, thus, in and of themselves, unjust.
This analysis is so detached from reality that it has people as disparate as Andrew Sullivan and Steve Benen scratching their heads. But it isn’t all that complicated. Peretz doesn’t see the war in Iraq in terms of Republican vs. Democrat. When he says opposition to Libby is political he means opposition to Perle’s plan is political. The Republican Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, prosecutor, judge, and those Republican appellate judges…they weren’t on board. But Scooter Libby was on board. When the CIA, and the generals, and the State Department were opposing Perle’s plan, it was Cheney and Libby and Rumsfeld and Feith that ignored them and got the job done.
What else can Peretz actually mean? What other interpretation even makes sense?
Let me put it to you this way. The New Republic is a Democratic newsmonthly. Scooter Libby was Dick Cheney’s hatchet man. Why would The New Republic feel a strong affinity for Scooter Libby? Why would they consider opposition to Scooter Libby’s crimes as political opposition to The New Republic? There can only be one answer. The answer is gratitude and, along with gratitude, loyalty. But this loyalty is confused and untenable. Let’s just look at the reasoning of Richard Perle.
RFE/RL: Do you have any regret, remorse, about your advocacy of going into Iraq and what’s happened in the wake of that invasion?
Perle: I have great remorse about some of the things that have followed, but I don’t think the things I regret were inevitable. I believe it was right to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. I wish we had then turned things over to the Iraqis immediately. They can build a country. We can’t. We could remove an obstacle, but we can’t build the structure. So that’s my regret, that we didn’t do that. But if you go back and look at what we knew, what we believed — not everything we believed was true or correct — but if you look at the information we had then, the decision to manage the risk that Saddam could do grievous harm to us was the right decision.
We went into Iraq in the belief that Saddam [Hussein] posed a threat to the United States. We didn’t go into Iraq to bring democracy to the Iraqis. Once we were in Iraq, once Saddam was gone, we had an obligation and a responsibility to try to leave the best possible future for the Iraqis and to encourage the development of democratic institutions. And Iraq happens to be a country with a sizable Shi’ite majority and no great tradition of appreciating minority rights. So it’s difficult. But the motive was certainly not democracy per se.
There is an internal logic error in Perle’s reasoning. How can we simultaneously ‘turn… things over to the Iraqis immediately’ and ‘ha[ve] an obligation and a responsibility to try to leave the best possible future for the Iraqis and to encourage the development of democratic institutions’?
It’s this internal logic error that doomed the Iraq enterprise and also what proves that removing Saddam was not ‘an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.’ Perle makes the point that destroys his rationale.
Iraq happens to be a country with a sizable Shi’ite majority and no great tradition of appreciating minority rights.
Bingo. Israel has struggled to combat Iranian influence in Lebanon and the occupied territories ever since the 1979 revolution. Their relations with their Sunni neighbors (Syria excepted) have been comparatively good. Ironically, the Clean Break report Perle supplied to Netanyahu made this point, and even went further.
King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [ed note: Najaf], Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein.
Who runs Najaf today? Answer: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, born in Mashhad, Iran. So, first, the Americans did not set up a Hashemite [Sunni] to run Iraq. Second, al-Sistani probably has closer relations with Hizballah than even the Iranians. And, third, whatever reverence al-Sistani might have for the King of Jordan’s bloodlines, it isn’t translating into support for Israel or for a Sunni dominated Iraq.
The people that supported the invasion of Iraq because they thought it would accomplish ‘an important Israeli strategic objective’ were basing their analysis on wishful thinking and also without insisting on the minimum conditions that would make their analysis functional. After all, a Shi’a dominated Iraq was not contemplated in the Clean Break strategy. That meant, obviously, that democracy was not contemplated.
And who is ultimately responsible for the strategic decisions that led to a Shi’a majority if not the Office of the Vice-President (OVP)? If anyone screwed up the plan it was the OVP. Even if the decision to democratize Iraq was ultimately a decision made over the objections of Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby (who wanted to impose Ahmed Chalabi), they launched the campaign without assurances that the Shi’a would not be left in control. Even here, Chalabi is a Shi’ite, if not a particularly religious one.
No matter how you slice it, the disaster in Iraq must be laid at the feet of the OVP. And, yet, we see this incredibly misplaced loyalty from so many that fell for Perle’s plan.
This is not a criticism of Israel. It’s a criticism of people that continue to make bad and misguided decisions about what actually serves Israel’s strategic interests.
Their position now seems to be that Israel needs America to stay in place to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control. But this is still a mistake. The weaker America becomes the more the people will begin to question our broader objectives in the Middle East, the worse our relationships will be with our Sunni allies, and the result will be greater insecurity for Israel.
