Dore Gold is the latest to address the problem of blaming ‘Jewish insiders’ for the Bush administration’s decision to go to war on Iraq. Excerpt:
* An insidious but steady drumbeat can be discerned over the last several weeks charging that the primary interest of the Bush administration in going to war against Saddam Hussein was to defend Israeli security interests. This newest wave is often more subtle but also far more mainstream than what was voiced in this regard just last year.
* Yet from Israel’s perspective, by 2003 the Iraqi Army had been severely degraded in both military manpower and equipment. Continuing UN sanctions had made Iraqi re-armament difficult and Iraq was clearly not Israel’s primary concern. Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens concluded in August 2002 that in the immediate future, “the [missile] threat that Israel most likely will have to contend with” is that of Syria. He described the Iraqi capability as “relatively limited.” During the same month, Israel’s current chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, declared in Jerusalem that the threat posed by Iraq “doesn’t make me lose sleep.”
* In other words, the American war against Iraq may have had an unintended side-effect of removing a secondary or tertiary threat to Israel, but not a primary threat.
See also our earlier post on this topic.
