Iraq War Anniversary: Israel, Palestine Links Absent

by Ramzy Baroud

Global Research, March 31, 2007

"......I spoke exactly of that: it’s the same war, the same occupation; Israel and its neoconservative benefactors are recurring faces in the Middle East’s ongoing chaos. That is a fact that anti-war movements everywhere must keep at the forefront if they want their message to have validity or relevance.

The Israeli connection to the political ‘realignments’ in the region goes back as early as 1992. The draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), which was circulated around the Pentagon for weeks before being ‘leaked’ to the New York Times, envisaged a future in which the US establishes uncontested supremacy in the post cold-war world. Though the guidance didn’t underscore Israel and its role in that new world, those who composed the document were primarily the well known Israel crowd in Washington: then-Defense Department staffers Ewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and America’s man in Iraq a few years later, Zalmay Khalilzad.

Israel’s role in that ‘vision’ didn’t crystallise fully until Richard Pearle, a leading neocon, along with Douglas Feith and others, proposed “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” to Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The policy document envisaged a larger role for Israel in the region that would equate its influence to that of the US, not a mere client state but an equal hegemon. It plotted for the toppling of the Iraqi regime and the re-drawing of the geopolitical map of the entire region. The same recommendations were marketed to the Clinton administration in 1997/98 but failed; Clinton, who conceded much of America’s interests to Israel’s, was, perhaps, not yet ready to accommodate such a grand vision.

That vision, an Israeli one to the core, was often presented as exclusively American, most notably by the Project for the New American Century, established by leading neocons in 1997, the same individuals who vowed allegiance to Israel for many years. PNAC was the key group behind the war in Iraq. The moment terrorists struck the Twin Towers with their deadly airplanes, PNAC campaigners were ready with a map of the Middle East, pointing out the countries they wished to bomb and the regimes that needed to be changed......

The US will leave Iraq; that should hardly be questioned. It cannot possibly bear such financial and material losses indefinitely. The New Statesman reports that caring for the war wounded alone will cost the country $2.5 trillion in the next few decades. But to ensure that such military chaos, such awesome losses of irreplaceable lives on all sides are not repeated, one must not speak of the Iraq war in too general terms: empire, oil and hegemony, and lose sight of most relevant specifics. Israel and its benefactors have played and continue to play a major role in all of this. Ignoring this fact for the sake of not ‘mixing’ the issues would simply mean fighting the right cause with the wrong strategy, to say the least."