West Asia At War by Talmiz Ahmad

Author:Talmiz Ahmad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2022-04-17T17:00:00+00:00

8

Iran and Israel: US Policies Over Two Decades (2001–2021)

IN OCTOBER 2003, THEN SENATOR JOE BIDEN SPOKE OF THE BUSH JR administration as the ‘most ideological administration in US history, led by neoconservatives who believe that the only asset that counts is our military might’. A few years later, in 2007, Ron Paul, then the Republican presidential candidate, noted that it was not the American people who had wanted war in Iraq; it was ‘a small number of people called the neoconservative [who] hijacked our foreign policy’.1 Commentator Michael Hirsh, writing in Newsweek in June 2003, said that the neocon vision had ‘become the hard core’ of American foreign policy. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said in January 2005, ‘The amazing thing is we have been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government.’2

The neocons, briefly noted earlier, were influential players in the Bush Jr administration and, working closely with the president and his senior officials – Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – shaped and steered US policy in West Asia, impacting, crucially, on its approach to Iraq, Iran and Israel, through the two terms of the Bush presidency.

The Neocon Agenda

The central commitment of the neocons was to Israel’s interests; they successfully projected the view that the interests of the US and Israel were identical. They worked closely with Israel’s politicians and policymakers to define the US position on West Asian issues. As the British writer Patrick Seale has said:

Rightwing Jewish neocons … tend to be pro-Israel zealots who believe that American and Israeli interests are inseparable. … Friends of Ariel Sharon’s Likud, they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims. For them, the cause of liberating Iraq had little to do with the well-being of Iraqis. … What they wished for was an improvement in Israel’s military and strategic environment.3

After the 9/11 attacks, the neocons grew in stature. They propounded the idea of an extremist Islamic attack on the US that would, according to neocon intellectual Michael Ledeen, bring together ‘Baathists, radical Wahhabi Sunnis, radical Iranian Shia, and the PLO’. Ledeen claimed that, while these groups might have differences between themselves, ‘they can always put aside their differences whenever there is a common enemy’; they were united in their hatred of the US because it was the enemy of tyranny which they all represented.4 Ledeen offered no evidence to support these far-fetched assertions, nor did he try to explain how the US, with close ties to authoritarian regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, could be viewed as the ‘enemy of tyranny’.

Affirming this monolithic neocon view of the region, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, as early as October 2001, predicted that ‘Afghanistan will prove but an opening battle. … [This war on terrorism] is going to spread and engulf a number of countries in conflicts of varying intensity. … It is going to resemble the clash of civilisations that everyone has hoped to avoid.’ Influential neocons within the administration, such as

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