A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (32 page)

A
nd then there is America’s alliance with Israel and the role it plays in our bellicose posture toward Iran. In examining the president’s 2002 decision to include Iran in the axis of evil despite increasing U.S.-Iran cooperation—and to this day to insist that Iran is an enemy of the United States—the role played by Israeli interests (as perceived by its right-wing American supporters) simply cannot be ignored. But when it comes to discussions of Iran in the national media and by national political figures, that topic typically is ignored.

While Iran has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to seek cooperative relations with the United States, relations between Iran and Israel have been genuinely, and mutually, hostile. The depiction of Iran as pure Evil being propagated by Bush-supporting, war-seeking Americans has been echoed by the Israelis with increasing fervor.

As is true for the rhetoric of the president’s supporters and the president himself, 2006 saw a marked escalation in the Israelis’ hostile rhetoric toward Iran. On October 27, 2006, Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert invoked the standard neoconservative “historical analogy” by expressly comparing Iran to Nazi Germany. Referring to Iran, Prime Minister Olmert said: “We hear echoes of those very voices that started to spread across the world in the 1930s.”

Ironically, Olmert, at the start of 2007, found himself the
target
of the same accusation invoking the specter of Neville Chamberlain. As UPI editor Arnaud de Borchgrave reported regarding Israeli debates over Iran: “In a New Year’s Day message, superhawk and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the kind of appeasement that threatened Israel’s very existence.”

Israel’s newest cabinet minister, Avigdor Lieberman, whose duties include strategic affairs with Iran, visited the United States in December 2006 and told the
New York Times:
“Our first task is to convince Western countries to adopt a tough approach to the Iranian problem,” which he called “the biggest threat facing the Jewish people since the Second World War.” Lieberman insisted that American efforts to negotiate with Iran were worthless and should not be attempted: “The dialogue with Iran will be a 100-percent failure, just like it was with North Korea.”

In his 2007 New Year’s speech, Netanyahu made clear that he shares the same goal—convincing the U.S. to consider Iran as an American problem, not just an Israeli one. He said that Israel

must immediately launch an intense, international, public relations front first and foremost on the U.S., the goal being to encourage President Bush to live up to specific pledges he would not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons. We must make clear to the government, the Congress, and the American public that a nuclear Iran is a threat to the U.S. and the entire world, not only Israel.

UPI’s de Borchgrave quoted from an article in
Ynet
by Oded Tira, chairman of the Israeli Manufacturers Association and former chief artillery officer in the IDF, in which he made clear that many Israelis are committed to finding a way to make an American attack on Iran a political necessity (emphasis added):

Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran.
As an American air strike in Iran is essential for our existence,
we must help pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party, which is conducting itself foolishly, and U.S. newspaper editors.

We need to turn the Iranian issue into a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure.
Hillary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party (must) publicly support immediate action by Bush against Iran.

As the prewar “debate” over the invasion of Iraq demonstrated, the key to persuading Americans to support a new war is to convince them that the country targeted for attack is governed by terrorists and those who support international terrorism. Those terms, by design, evoke images of the 9/11 attacks, and the accusation is designed to tie the accused to those attacks even where the so-called terrorist supporters have nothing to do with 9/11.

Indeed, to claim that a country “supports international terrorism” is the most inflammatory accusation that can be made, as it will be understood by many Americans to designate specifically that the accused “participated in the 9/11 attacks,” or more generally that they are close allies of Al Qaeda. Even with Americans’ growing emotional distance from the 2001 attacks, many Americans will reflexively—one could even say understandably—support military action against not just anyone who directly participated in the 9/11 attacks but anyone who seems to have close proximity to those responsible.

Thus, even more than the alarming claims of Saddam’s WMDs, the vague allegation that he supported “international terrorism” is what persuaded Americans of the wisdom and necessity of attacking Iraq. Although the specific allegation that Saddam participated in the 9/11 attacks was never explicitly made, the more general claim that he “supported terrorism” was sufficient to lead almost 70 percent of Americans to believe—even as late as September 2003, six months
after
the United States invaded Iraq—that Saddam personally participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.

This same manipulative tactic—accusing the Iranians of “supporting international terrorism” as a means of implicitly persuading Americans that Iran bears some responsibility for, or at least connection to, the 9/11 attacks, so therefore it, too, must be attacked—is the principal one on which the president and his supporters are relying to justify antagonism toward Iran. And the tactic is no less honest than it was when employed against Iraq. If anything, it is far more dishonest. The evidence that Iran sponsors or in any way abets terrorist attacks on the U.S. is nonexistent.

To document the ongoing threat posed to the United States by international terrorism, the Bush administration’s 2006
National Security Strategy
focuses on Al Qaeda and the type of terrorist attacks that have been directed at Americans or Westerners generally during the last decade—in London, Madrid, Bali, and New York during the first World Trade Center attack and on 9/11. But Iran had nothing to do with any of those. That country does not sponsor Al Qaeda or any groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, nor does it sponsor any other groups devoted to staging terrorist attacks on the United States.

Quite the contrary, Shiite Iran has long-standing animosities with Sunni-dominated Al Qaeda. That was one reason, among others, why Iran stalwartly opposed the Al Qaeda–sheltering Taliban and worked extensively with the U.S. in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in order to bring about an end to their rule.

To the extent that Iran can be said to have an association with “terrorist” groups, those groups are devoted to supporting the Palestinians against Israel as part of the conflict over the West Bank (Hamas) or devoted to supporting the Lebanese against Israel (Hezbollah). Iran is
not
devoted to fighting along with Al Qaeda or any other group devoted to staging terrorist attacks on Americans or against the United States. Iran’s support for what the Bush administration calls “international terrorist groups” is limited to those groups that are hostile to Israel, not those which pose a threat to the U.S.

The 2003 Congressional Research Service Report documented that “U.S. concerns about Iran’s support for terrorism center on its assistance to
groups opposed to the Arab-Israeli peace process,
primarily Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command” (emphasis added). The agendas of those groups are confined to anti-Israeli positions, and none stages attacks on the U.S.

Deliberately vague claims that Iran “supports international terrorism” are virtually always predicated on its support for anti-
Israeli
, not anti-U.S., groups. When Michael Gerson issued his call to war against Iran in the pages of
Newsweek
in August 2006, for instance, he accused Iran of supporting “terrorist groups like Hizbullah and Hamas.” In Joe Lieberman’s December 2006 op-ed in the
Washington Post,
which essentially declared the U.S. at war with Iran, he warned Americans of what he called “Iran’s terrorist agents,” whom he then identified as “Hezbollah and Hamas.”

It is true that Hezbollah, a group created to defend Lebanon against military invasions from Israel, was responsible for the attack on U.S. troops in 1983 when American troops were inside that nation. Ronald Reagan then withdrew American troops from that country, and ever since, over the next twenty-four years, Hezbollah has staged no attacks of any kind on the United States.

Hezbollah was also quite possibly responsible for two bombings in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the early 1990s—a 1992 car bomb attack at the Israeli embassy in Argentina and a similar 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. But even assuming that those attacks were engineered by Hezbollah with Iranian backing—a precarious assumption for which, particularly with regard to Iranian involvement, there is no confirmation—the target of Hezbollah is plainly Israel, not the United States.

There are countless groups around the world engaged in what could be called terrorism, and the vast majority have nothing to do with attacks on the U.S. Some have domestic agendas and some have regional agendas. Only a tiny fraction have anything to do with Al Qaeda or are devoted in any way toward attacking America.

The groups that Iran supports—Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad—are certainly hostile to Israel, and certainly include anti-American rhetoric as part of their speeches, but they pose no threat to the U.S. As Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has himself pointed out repeatedly, “Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing.” Thus, claims that Iran “supports international terrorism”—even if true—do not translate into support for Al Qaeda or any group that poses a threat to the U.S., though the intent of the president and his war-seeking supporters is plainly to leave that false impression.

There may (or may not) be a compelling argument to make that the U.S. should view terrorist attacks on Israel as attacks on the U.S. There may (or may not) be a compelling argument to make that because Israel is an ally of the United States, America should be willing to wage war against countries that sponsor terrorist attacks on Israel, or that American commitment to spreading democracy requires the United States to come to the defense of Israel.

Or perhaps there is (or is not) a good case to be made that U.S. interests are so inextricably linked with Israel’s that America cannot, or should not, attempt to distinguish between terrorist attacks directed at Israel and those directed at the U.S. If there are valid arguments for deeming Israel’s enemies to be enemies of the U.S., then they should be made explicitly and clearly, without the type of misleading obfuscation that President Bush and his supporters clearly intend to create by implying that Iran supports anti-U.S. terrorist groups.

It may be true that Iran—as the Bush administration’s
National Security Strategy
alleges—is involved in the state sponsorship of international terrorism, but, for Iran, that terrorism is directed against Israel, not against the U.S. That may or may not be a distinction that ultimately matters, but the factual lines should not be allowed to be blurred this way, because that is exactly what allows war advocates to mislead Americans into viewing Iran as an enemy of the U.S.

From its inception, the campaign to depict and treat Iran as pure, unadulterated Evil has been driven by this manipulative and dishonest attempt to conflate Iran’s posture toward Israel with its posture toward the U.S. Whether the president himself was a victim of that manipulation or a knowing propagator of it is something one can debate, and the truth likely lies somewhere in between. But what is beyond dispute is the centrality of Israel and its right-wing American supporters in shaping the president’s moralistic and absolutist view of Iran.

Indisputably, the Israelis perceive Iran as far and away their most formidable and serious enemy. And there is a strong argument to make that, from the Israeli perspective, this perception is justified. Iran provides critical support for anti-Israel groups based in two of Israeli’s neighbors—Palestine and Lebanon—and Iran itself, like many Muslim countries around the world, formally opposes Israel’s right to exist in the Middle East.

But it should go without saying that a country’s opposition to Israel does not render it an enemy of the U.S., certainly not one on which
Americans
must wage war. Yet the president’s view of Iran as Evil, and the collision course he has embarked upon with regard to Iran, critically depends upon the conflating of Israeli interests with American interests, as though the two are, by definition and in every instance, the same.

In the weeks before the president’s 2002 State of the Union speech, relations between the U.S. and Iran were improving dramatically. But as a result of the January 2002 discovery by Israel that Iran was shipping relatively sophisticated weapons to the Palestinians, the Israelis were blaming Iran for what the Israelis perceived was an extremely significant threat to their security—specifically their ability to dominate the Palestinians militarily. These two visions of Iran—the American view of a country that was becoming increasingly cooperative, and the Israeli view of a country that was becoming increasingly threatening and hostile—were in direct and irreconcilable conflict.

President Bush—in a speech shaped by neoconservative speechwriter David Frum—resolved that conflict in favor of the Israeli view by pronouncing on January 30, 2002, that Iran was a member of the “axis of evil” and directing the most threatening language possible toward that country. In light of the actual state of U.S.-Iranian relations, the president’s inclusion of Iran as an “axis of evil” member was both sudden and mystifying. The BBC in February 2002 drew the only rational conclusion: