September 11, 2007
Column: America’s self-inflicted war wounds
The symbolism of getting General David Petraeus to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the anniversary of 9/11 appealed to the White House. It should not have. It is crass. General Petraeus’s struggle to salvage the Iraq war merely underlines the fact that invading Iraq was a crazy way to respond to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
Six years after 9/11, the US needs to re-think. It is now clear that Iraq was the biggest blunder of the Bush years. It is also becoming evident that counter-terrorism should no longer be the centrepiece of American foreign policy. As the official 9/11 commission demonstrated, Saddam Hussein played no role in the terrorist attacks. He also had no nuclear weapons and no significant relationship with al-Qaeda.
But the Iraq invasion was not simply the wrong response to 9/11. It has actually made the terrorism problem worse in five significant ways.
The remainder of this week’s column can be read here (FT.com subscribers only). Comments can be made below.
Sir: Your article is little more than the same, tired criticism we see on both sides of the Pond.
Rather than second-guessing, please explain what you believe to be the “sane way to respond.”
Posted by: Brian McDaniel | September 11th, 2007 at 12:29 pm | Report this commentTutt Tutt Gideon,
Don’t you remember that you are either with Dubya or you are a terrorist?!
Seems as if you have blown it now and next time you land in the US you will be taken to Gitmo and will have to try on an orange suit…
That is unless you retract and repent now. Repeat after me:
- The invasion of Iraq was justified, moral, legal and humanitarian.
- The Jewish lobby had nothing to do with it.
- The oil interests had nothing to do with it.
- Overthrowing Saddam was worth the lives of the 1 million Iraqis who have perished since and the two million Iraqis who have become refugees.
- The Iranians are to blamed for all the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have sneakily bordered their country on places that the Americans wished to invade in order to cause trouble!
Amen,
Pacifist
Posted by: Pacifist | September 11th, 2007 at 2:53 pm | Report this commentPS Great Article!!
The “Jewish” Lobby? Do you mean to imply that a lobby composed out of members of the Jewish race and lobbying for the Jewish people has urged a US attack on Iraq? Certainly you meant “Zionist” or “Likudnik”? Pacifist, the idea that the Jews are collectively responsible for anything or collectively pursuing a certain policy or objective is a very alarming idea because of the almost total destruction of Jewish life on the European continent this very same suspicion has caused. Feel free to blame Aipac, Zionists, Likudnik, Neocons all you like but try to leave people’s race out of it, because it has absolutely nothing to do with it. You have to ask yourself how you would feel if every day you were confronted with people blaming the Persians or a Persian lobby for certain ills when only 65 years previously 6 million Persians had been murdered in the fashion of the holocaust by people who believed in exactly such racial conspiracy theories.
If you did mean the Pro-Israel lobby by that, far from endorsing an attack on Iraq, Israel strongly argued against it in feb 2002 when such US intentions became manifest and sought to focus the attention of the US on the Iranian buildup in Lebanon instead. Quote “The warning against an invasion of Iraq was “pervasive” in Israeli communications with the US administration, Wilkerson recalled.” (Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH30Ak04.html
A much more authoritative source is this; On Feb 7, 2002, the Washington Post wrote:
“When [Ariel Sharon] meets with [Bush] and other U.S. officials today, he plans to sound the alarm about Tehran’s ambitions in Lebanon, according to Israeli officials. Israel has accused Iran of dispatching Iranian Revolutionary Guards to foment anti-Israel activity in Lebanon and of providing thousands of missiles to Hezbollah. Iranian and Lebanese leaders had denied these charges.
He said Israeli officials were raising these concerns with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others in the administration, discussing what steps could be taken to ensure Israeli security in case of a U.S. military thrust against Iraq. Some Middle East analysts have said the United States might have to dispatch troops to western Iraq to hunt down scud missiles, like those Baghdad fired at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War.”
Source:
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/105787489.html?dids=105787489:105787489&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT
If a Zionist organization in Washington was pro-invasion then so much for the united stance of the “Israeli lobby”.
Posted by: Felix Drost | September 11th, 2007 at 4:48 pm | Report this commentDear Felix,
“The Lobby” as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt called it, refers to itself as the Jewish Lobby but is in fact Likudnik-Zionist.
Thanks for pointing out.
P
Posted by: Pacifist | September 11th, 2007 at 5:44 pm | Report this commentDear Felix (part 2),
We could toss articles at each other till kingdom come but, as I mentioned Mearsheimer and Walt, I would like to post this extract from their LRB article in answer to your pleading innocence of behalf of the Neocon-Likudnik-Zionist axis:
Quote
Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’
On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’
At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’
As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.
Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’
Unquote
However, in defence of Jews, the article goes on to say:
Quote
Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.
Unquote
All the best,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | September 11th, 2007 at 5:54 pm | Report this commentI would find the following far more compelling than what Mr Rachman has offered.
First. Is Afghanistan or Iraq a better environment to fight el Qaeda? Surely it is Iraq. Rachman may prefer to journey about the wilderness of Afghanistan chasing the ethereal Mr. Bin Laden, but a tactical approach to a strategic issue is amateurish. Iraq is a preferred killing zone and offers the opportunity of strategic victory.
Second. Iraq is a failed state today, but will not be in the future. Was it not under Saddam? How does one define failed state? Mr Rachman would have preferred that we live with this ongoing irritant? Eventually, it will be Iraqi troops that destroy El Qaeda completely in Iraq. Humble El Qaeda in its native environment, the Arab world, and you will destroy the organziation. Osama can continue to reside in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistian, but his strategic effectiveness will expire with Iraq.
Third: A new and virulent El Qaeda? Fusing a Nationalist insurgency with a global terrorist movement? Has Mr. Rachman been reading the papers the last 6 months? The Sunnis in Iraq are finsihing off El Qaeda. How much more virulaent could El Qaeda be from its pre-Iraq version. This is tautological nonsense of the first degree. A sophist’s argument for armchair generals.
Fourth. Oh, so El Qaeda had NO appeal to the disaffected Muslim youth until the US invaded Iraq. BOLLOCKS. Pure balderdash. One shrinks the pool of potential recruits by destroying and humiliating the organziation. Iraq is a better opportunity to do this than Afghanistan.
Fifth. Undermined support among tradiitonal allies? These traditional allies, with the exception of stalwarts such as the UK, Australia and Canada, have barely been able to contribute a fighting man to Afghanistan. My discussions with Europeans in my travels the past two weeks indicated a growing fear of Muslims in Europe, legitimate if what I saw in my train travels was any glimpse of the future, and the hope that the Americans humiliate El Qaeda and the Islamists in Iraq. Naturally, the European media will choose to ignore the public that does not adhere to its view of the situation.
Invading Iraq has resulted in the militants gathering in a single place convenient for us to kill them. One cannot negotiate with these people. One must kill them. Iraq takes these monsters off our planes, out of our cities, off our buses and away from our schools and our infrastructure. Eventually, it will be the Iraq army that exterminates what is left of El Qaeda and then positions itself on the Iranian border as a compelling message to the Iranian people and its misbegotten leadership.
I will stand by this version of the strategic objectives. In 3 years we shall see whether Rachman had it right or I did.
Posted by: Christopher M Veith | September 11th, 2007 at 6:28 pm | Report this commentWell said, Felix. The anti-semitic undertones in some of the Pacifist postings are disturbing (I suspect more than one writer using that pseudonym: the level of English tends to vary).
Posted by: BH | September 11th, 2007 at 6:58 pm | Report this commentDear BH and Felix,
I apologise if my level of English does not meet your approval. I shall try harder in future.
Meanwhile, in order to confuse the simple people like me, perhaps you should write to an organisation like Jinsa and request them not to implicate all the Jewish people in their peculiar, ideological campaigns and perhaps change their name to “Zinsa”.
Meanhile, please do read the extracts from Mearsheimer and Walt about how various Israeli leaders and their supporters in the US pushed the US towards war against Iraq.
Today, they are doing the same to cause a war against Iran. Hence the necessity for pointing this out.
Shalom / Pax / Salam,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | September 12th, 2007 at 11:35 am | Report this commentNB For a little relevant perspective on JINSA, you may wish to have a look at the following article in “The Nation”:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest
Quote
On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war–not just with Iraq, but “total war,” as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, “regime change” by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents–be it Colin Powell’s State Department, the CIA or career military officers–is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East–a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.
Unquote
Best wishes,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | September 12th, 2007 at 11:53 am | Report this commentI join BH in thanking you Felix. Well put and very welcome indeed…
Posted by: ppp | September 12th, 2007 at 6:33 pm | Report this commentTo Felix:
You keep talking about the Jewish Race.
Jews are a religion, not a race. It is possible to convert to Judaism. Here’s a long list of some of the notable converts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_converts_to_Judaism
but it is not possible to convert to being an Afro-Black (or show me your list!!).
You see, one is a race, the other is a religion.
This simple fact is also very apparent if you look at my acquaintance in North London (from the very small Finnish Jewish community) who is a natural platinum blond and compare her to the average Sephardi Jew.
Even the average blue-eyed, light skinned Ashkenazi looks clearly a different race to the average swarthy Sephardi and then there are the Falasha (Ethiopian Jews) who are black.
Just compare these 3 (v. attractive)faces:
Falasha:
http://www.atlantajewish.com/graphics/subpages/content/032006/estimamo-inside.jpg
Ashkenazi:
http://www.keshertalk.com/images/blogpix/ellen_barkin_sized.jpg
and Sephardi:
http://www.answers.com/topic/bahar-soomekh
You get the point???
Finally, I think the fallacy of the Jews being a race whereas others being a religion is being exploited in countries (like the UK) where there are anti-racism laws but religions are not protected.
Any talk against Israel is immediately equated with race-hatred whereas many racists attack the generally Asiatic, dark-skinned Muslims in Europe and get away with it because Muslims are not a race.
Best,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | September 13th, 2007 at 1:08 pm | Report this commentHello
I’m an interactive editor at the FT and am moderating this thread, which is going rapidly off-topic.
Pacifist - you have replied 5 times now, and you have made your point, as have the others.
So let’s just leave it there please and get back on-topic.
Thanks
Damian
Posted by: Damian Carrington | September 13th, 2007 at 2:04 pm | Report this commentChris Veith, I want to try to help you understand this situation, since it sounds like you are a basically intelligent person who is getting a lot of bad information about AQ, the Sunni insurgency, Iraq, market forces, and how human beings in general tend to operate. Therefore, you are coming to some patently unreasonable conclusions. This is understandable, since a number of groups are working to deliberately mislead you on this matter.
1) AQ SIMPLY DOESN’T HAVE THE MANPOWER OR RESOURCES TO ACCOUNT FOR ANYTHING MORE THAN A VERY, VERY SMALL FRACTION OF THE VIOLENCE WE SEE IN IRAQ.
The insurgency in Iraq is a native, home-grown insurgency being carried out primarily by Iraqi civilians angry over the military occupation of their country. Not AQ. (It isn’t being funded in any significant way by the Iranian Syrian, or Saudi governments either. We’d be fleeing that country with our tail between our legs if there were a state-sponsor for the insurgency in Iraq.
“One shrinks the pool of potential recruits by destroying and humiliating the organziation. ”
AQ at their height was maybe 25k fighters, I’ll spot you another 10k to give you 35k AQ fighters. Those are very generous numbers for you, btw. Our forces have already killed many times that number of insurgents in Iraq. Yet here you are still talking about AQI as a significant presence in Iraq!
“Eventually, it will be the Iraq army that exterminates what is left of El Qaeda and then positions itself on the Iranian border as a compelling message to the Iranian people and its misbegotten leadership.”
The Sunni insurgency in Iraq is right now more focused on killing American soldiers than the few scattered AQI groups in Iraq. Assuming that what marginal presence AQ has in that country is completely eradicated, they will probably focus even more of their attention on blowing up American soldiers. What they aren’t going to do is line up to go die fighting your enemies for you.
“I will stand by this version of the strategic objectives. ”
No you won’t. You will continue to change your strategic objectives as facts on the ground prove your previous objectives to be completely fictional.
“In 3 years we shall see whether Rachman had it right or I did.”
I have a 5-year old and I know what you are trying to pull. We’ve already given you far more than the time you said you needed to accomplish the goals you wanted to accomplish. I did give you the benefit of the doubt. You failed remarkably on pretty much every single point. You don’t get any more do-overs with my money!
Posted by: Chris | September 13th, 2007 at 8:04 pm | Report this commentThe reason why the Falashas and the ones the world knows as Jews looks totally different, is because they are from two different races, AND two different beliefs. One that (be the Jews) that makes their nationality their religion, and the Falashas know that they’re Israel from the tribe of Dan that follows certain beliefs. Just like an American man that follows the Christian faith. Jew (Judah) is a tribe not a religion. So why is it being called a religion? By the way, Jacob had eleven other sons, so how is everybody going under the banner of Jew! We should pay attention to the Falashas and certain guys in America whom say they are Israelites who might look different then the Jews of today, but maybe they know what they are talking about.
Posted by: Leon | February 6th, 2008 at 2:55 am | Report this commentCome on. We all know the U.S. has gone to Irak for oil and Israel. That´s clear for everybody.
The U.S. will not leave Iraq volunteerly now that they are IN and have their hands in the treasure.
As happens in Germany and Japan Sovereignty is curtailed as the main expresion of Sovereignty, Defense, is under foreign (US) control.
After all, neither Al-Qaeda nor the Iraqi nationalist militias have any possibility to move the U.S. military bases on Iraqi soil.
A majority of Iraqis want U.S. troops OUT of Iraq and consider U.S. troops Occupation - COLONIAL - troops…
Americans have built a puppet Army and a puppet Government, even if (it is true) so much infiltrated by Iran and the Shia majority that the only way to guarantee the necessary estability for pumping oil is with a good relationship with IRAN, hahaha.
Independence for Iraq!
Posted by: Enrique Costas Mira | February 6th, 2008 at 4:48 am | Report this commentFreedom for Iraq!