COMMENTARY
Zionists and the US Joint Intelligence Report
James Petras
The strong Zionist lobby in the United States and Israel supporters in Britain and France continue to talk of hostilities against Iran despite the National Intelligence Estimate report on the non-existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The Zionist-neoconservative combine is bent upon war against Iran to establish Israeli hegemony in west Asia and to control natural resources in the region.
James Petras (jpetras@binghamton.edu), a radical activist and writer, taught sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton, New York.
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, November 29, 2007.
I
Since September 11, 2001 the Israeli state, Zionists inside the US government and the entire leadership of major American Jewish organisations have been entirely devoted to pushing the US into wars on behalf of Israel in west Asia. 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, organised press conferences and presidential agendas, purged critics in the military and intelligence agencies and altered intelligence reports to suit their purposes.
Against ‘Israel-First’
Israeli and the ‘Zion-Con’ success in destroying Iraq however was secured at an enormous cost in the form of military casualties, demoralisation and an expenditure on $ 1 trillion (and counting) for 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.
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As pointed out in an earlier article by this author, the devastating effects of the Iraq war on the US military and intelligence agencies led to widespread opposition within the US state to the Israeli-Zionist push for mounting a new war against Iran. This historic struggle over Iran policy split the top echelons of Washington policymakers. 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 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 west Asia, led by Admiral William Fallon, came out publicly opposing the policy to bomb Iran. The active commanders were meekly backed by the defence 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 NIE was finally released) proclaiming the advent of “World War III” against Iran’s
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nuclear weapons programme and the threat of a nuclear attack (a “holocaust”) by Iran against the people of the US and Israel.
They Knew It All Along!
The White House was privy to the findings in the NIE on Iran at least nine months before they were made public, as witnessed by Dick Cheney’s frequent interventions to alter their content and conclusion and repeated efforts to postpone publication because it undermined the basis for their push to attack Iran. The Israeli government and its “US fifth column”, 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 the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (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 Israeli-US Senator 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 organisation” and thus an automatic target of US military attacks under the doctrine of the “war against terror”. 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 (ZPC), a shift shaped by the enormous
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and unending American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Israeli Intelligence Failure
A key factor in pushing the US intelligence agencies to break with their past subjugation to White House manipulation and Israeli-Zionist fabricated intelligence was the repeated failures of the Israeli intelligence agencies – leading to a loss of their credibility. Israeli intelligence blundered and miscalculated on Hezbollah’s strength and organisation which led to a debacle when Israel invaded Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israeli estimates on Iraqi capacity to resist invasion and foreign occupation (so eagerly accepted and propagated by top Zionist Pentagon officials in the lead up to the invasion) led to the now four years of a US war of attrition in Iraq with no end in sight. Israel’s intelligence totally underestimated Hamas’ electoral strength in the run-up to their electoral victory over the PLO. Israeli intelligence overestimated the PLO’s military capacity to defeat and destroy Hamas in Gaza. Learning from Israeli intelligence agencies’ tendency to feed disinformation to its clients in the US government in order to further Greater Israel’s claims to west Asian hegemony at the expense of Washington’s long term interests, the US national intelligence community asserted its independence and published its report denying each and every Israeli-Zionist-White House assertion concerning Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and, in particular, pointing to the end of research into nuclear weapons as far back as the fall of 2003.
Israel Rejects the US Report
While the international community recognised the rigorous, systematic, comprehensive methods used to compile the data leading to the report declaring that Iran was free of nuclear weapons programmes, Isreal was the only state to object. And in the US only one nationwide configuration of organisations refused to reconcile itself to the absence of any Iranian military threat to Israel (not to speak of the US, a distant secondary consideration) and that was predictably the ZPC, specifically the presidents of the major American Jewish organisations.
Speaking for the Israeli government, defence minister Ehud Barak, dismissed the NIE: “We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth (sic) even from our greatest friend” (The Guardian, December 4, 2007). Though the NIE may weaken the White House drive to war, the fact that Israel rejects the report means that its war preparations will continue and that means that its entire ZPC in the US will continue to pursue Israel’s interest in destroying Iran.
Following Orwellian logic AIPAC twisted the NIE report to fit Israel’s rejectionist lead by arguing that the NIE report bolsters the case for continued confrontation, belligerency and isolation (Jewish Telegraph Agency, December 4, 2007). In fact according to the perverse argument of AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, the absence of any Iranian nuclear weapons threat should result in greater pressure on Iran! ‘All in all, it’s (the NIE) a clarion call for additional and continued (my emphasis) effort to pressure Iran economically and politically to end its illicit nuclear programme’ (Jewish Telegraph Agency, December 4, 2007).
Zionists at Work
In a continuous barrage of articles and television interviews, the entire ZPC buried the NIE report, refocusing attention on themes like ‘Iran’s nuclear programme still a threat’ (Daily Alert, December 7, 2007). The articles disparaged, distorted and dismissed the NIE and continued to push for the “military option” (euphemism for launching a massive attack on Iran) as well as new economic sanctions to destroy the Iranian economy and the livelihood of its 70 million citizens. The ZPC never lost a beat: Israel firster and Zion-Con, the US treasury undersecretary, responsible for terrorism and financial intelligence, Stuart Levey, succeeded in convincing China to tighten trade credit, making trade more difficult and costly for Iran’s private sector (Financial Times, December 6, 2007).
Internationally, the British foreign secretary David Miliband followed the BushIsrael-ZPC line in all but dismissing the NIE report and emphasising the need to “keep the pressure on Iran”. Miliband, on his recent visit to Israel, accused Iran of being a major threat to the international community because it produces what he called “fissile material” and “missiles”. Miliband dismissed out of hand their civilian application and parroted word for word the Israeli line about “hidden programmes” and other such unsubstantiated Zionist propaganda.
In France, president Sarkozy appointed Bernard Kouchner (a fervent supporter of
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humanitarian intervention including the US invasion of Iraq), to head the foreign ministry. Bernie Kouchner and Nicky Sarkozy immediately picked up the Israeli line, dismissing the NIE report and calling for new economic sanctions even as the original justification (Iran’s so-called nuclear weapons programme) was found to be a lie. Sarkozy and Kouchner called for a new UN National Security Council resolution adding further sanctions against Iran (Agence France-Presse, December 7, 2007). The Bush-Miliband-Kouchner-Israeli logic sounds obtuse – the more the intelligence reports demonstrate the absence of a nuclear weapons programme, the greater the nuclear threat; the lesser the present threat, the greater the future threat; the lesser the empirically verifiable threat, the greater the secret threat. The NIE report findings demonstrate that for the war mongers, Iranian nuclear weapons are not the motivating force for their drive to attack Iran. Leaving out the weapons motive, it is abundantly clear that attacking Iran through sanctions and military threats is deeply rooted in the Israeli priority of destroying Iran, the adversary to its assault and territorial dispossession of Palestinians.
Chinese and Russian Reactions
The ZPC, Miliband, Kouchner, Olmert, and the White House’s efforts to push for a third round of UN sanctions is likely to be rejected. On December 4, China’s UN ambassador, Wang Guangya, announced that the NIE report called into question the need for new sanctions, “I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed. I think council members will have to consider that” (Al Jazeera, December 5, 2007). China, with $17 billion dollars in direct trade with Iran and up to $30 billion via Dubai, and with Iran as a major oil supplier and with no Zionist lobby to reinforce Israeli diplomatic pressures, is free to pursue its own national interests. The case can be made that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, will follow China’s lead and object to new sanctions. Nevertheless, the US Congress and in particular its influential committee chairpersons continue to blindly follow Ehud Olmert’s pronouncement post-NIE: “It is vital to pursue efforts to prevent Iran
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from developing a capability like this (sic) in the United States”. Leading Congressional Israeli-American zealot, Thomas Lantos, convened a congressional hearing on the NIE report and invited two top ex-government advisers and ultra-Zion zealots, David Wurmser and Martin Indyk to testify.
Conclusions
There is no question that the anti-(Iran) war groups in the US military and intelligence agencies struck a serious blow to the ongoing war plans of the White House, Israel and their agents in the ZPC. The setback includes a temporary defeat of its massive war propaganda and their fabrication of an “existential threat” to the world community (Israel). Nevertheless the publication of the NIE hit the headlines for only a few days, followed by a barrage of hostile propaganda in all of the US mass media which called into question the peaceful intentions of Iran and even twisted certain probabilistic phrases to contradict the main findings.
From the vantage point of Americans trying to free their government and the public of Israeli and ZPC tyrannical monopoly of opinion, the NIE report struck a blow against the credibility of the White House and Zionist spokespeople in the Congress, the national security council, homeland security and the justice and treasury departments regarding Iran’s socalled nuclear weapons programme. But the quickness, depth and scope of the Israeli response especially magnified by its representatives in the US, the French and British foreign offices, demonstrates that the pro-war Israel firsters are still deeply embedded in positions of political power and willing to defy the US intelligence and military establishment. Without shame or substance, with aggressive outbursts and manipulative semantic skills, the ZPC moves forward toward new sanctions, despite the systematic empirical refutation of its principle argument. Only a blind, irrational tribal-ethnic loyalty to Israel can account for the ready denial of the NIE report and automatic embrace of Israel’s continued fabrications. As in the 1930s when overseas Nazi sympathisers defended Hitler’s’ lies about communists torching the Reichstag and communist fellow travellers defended Stalin’s purges as exemplary judicial processes, our Zionists continue to deny every systematic empirical report (like the NIE) which contradicts Israel’s lies and fabrications about Iran’s nuclear weapons programmes.
There is now the re-emergence of the question of a US-backed Israeli war with Iran. The military option will be buttressed by an Israeli military intelligence propaganda report dismissing the NIE. It will claim secret Iranian nuclear weapons programmes buried somewhere near the center of the earth and therefore undetected by US intelligence informants, satellite photos, UN inspectors, defected (or kidnapped) Iranian generals or any other US source. Only Israel’s “superior intelligence agencies” (which failed in Lebanon, Iraq and the Gaza strip), based on its chosen people can be right – even if they have to once again “cook the data” to make the case to the uninitiated.
The NIE and the US military have struck a blow against the planners of third world war. Will this lift the US Congress off its collective knees to finally address US interests in west Asia? Will it reawaken a currently moribund peace movement, terrified to confront the most virulently organised warmongers? Will it allow Congress and the US public to challenge the ZPC’s stranglehold on USwest Asia policy?
Will the British public and peace movement dare to challenge a Labour Government and foreign office bought and paid for by the “labour friends of Israel”? Will the French public and intellectuals of Paris recover their republican credentials and reject its current Israelfirst regime?
Surprisingly it is not liberal or leftist opinion leaders who have raised the relevant issues pertaining to the questions of war and peace in west Asia and the Israeli-White House threats of starting a third world war. It is the spy agencies in the US and their allies in the US military, the paragons of past wars and present destabilisation campaigns (read – Venezuela) – an irony of history. But just the same, this is the real world in which we live, where Western intellectuals and cultural heroes have abdicated their responsibility to challenge the ZPC operating on behalf of an aspiring west Asian colonial power.
