The Hands Of Israel In Iraq
By Ibrahim Nafie
Jihad Unspun
7-11-4
New evidence has come to light of Israeli involvement in Iraq. The
sources that revealed this evidence are not Arab but American, and
their claims are backed by documentation of the network of relations
Israeli security agencies have woven and used to infiltrate Iraq. This
time, at least, it cannot be said that the Israeli presence in Iraq is
a figment of Arab conspiracy theorising, as some like to brand our
methods of political analysis.
Although many Arab and international studies on the role Israel played
in escalating the Iraqi-US crisis before the fall of Saddam Hussein
have noted that this drive was part of Israel's greater strategy to
fragment multinational Arab political entities, they refrained from
more intensive probing until more facts became available. These facts
have now surfaced as the result of two recent developments. The first
is a BBC interview with US Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, former
military commander of Abu Ghraib prison. The second is the appointment
of Salem Chalabi as head of the Iraqi Special Tribunal formed to
prosecute former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and other members of
his regime.
In an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Karpinski
said that in the course of her work in Iraq she had met a man with
Middle Eastern features who spoke Arabic and who claimed to be
involved in the interrogation of some Iraqi detainees. She said he
told her, "I speak Arabic but I'm not an Arab; I'm from Israel."
Although Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Foreign Minister
Silvan Shalom emphatically denied Karpinski's claim, Seymour Hirsch,
the American journalist who detonated the Abu Ghraib prison scandal,
had another opinion. On the same programme he said that the
information he had confirmed the presence of Israeli intelligence
experts in Iraq, adding, "One of the Israelis' aims was to get to the
prisoners who had been members of Iraqi intelligence and specialised
in Israeli affairs." In addition Yossi Melman, intelligence analyst
for Ha'aretz, was of the opinion that his government's denial was
weak. General Karpinski's statements must be regarded as the testimony
of an American military officer who harbours no animosity towards
Israel, he wrote. Melman also alluded to the similarities between the
methods of torture used in Iraqi detention centres and those Israeli
intelligence use in their interrogations of Palestinian activists.
Following his appointment as head of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, Salem
Chalabi came under the scrutiny of some members of the western press.
British journalists, in particular, were quick to expose his extensive
American and Israeli connections. Salem is the nephew of Ahmed
Chalabi, president of the Iraqi National Congress. He is also the
partner of an Israeli businessman in a law firm catering to US
companies in Iraq. Their company, the Iraq International Law Group,
promotes itself to its clients as "Your specialized gateway to the new
Iraq." His partner, Mark Zell, is a member of the radical Israeli
settler movement Gush Emunim. He is also a partner in a law firm with
Undersecretary of Defence and long- time neo-conservative Iraqi War
hawk Douglas Feith. An ardent Likud supporter, Feith was among those
who tried to persuade former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
to wriggle out of the Oslo accords on the grounds that they were
detrimental to the security of Israel. Subsequently he vehemently
criticized Netanyahu for having signed the Wye River agreement in
1998.
Now that the Israeli presence in Iraq is established fact, by the
admission of important non-Arab figures and substantiated by other
western news sources, we must take it very seriously. After all, the
welfare of the Iraqi people and the future of a free, united and Arab
Iraq are at stake, since there is little doubt that Israel aims to
undermine the stability and geographical integrity of Iraq and its
relations with the rest of the Arab world.
The perils of Israeli involvement in the "new" Iraq cannot be
overstated. It is already grave enough that the Sharon government and
its allies and supporters in Washington worked so intensively to
propel the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq, a drive that
accelerated in the wake of 11 September with the feverish attempt to
unearth any connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Clearly,
Israel perceived that the invasion and occupation of Iraq served its
long-range ambitions.
This is not to exonerate the deposed Iraqi president from the major
responsibility he had in bringing Iraq to its current pass. There is
no question that he and his officials stubbornly courted the invasion
that led to the occupation, or that the crimes his regime perpetuated
against its neighbours and its own people were the prime cause of the
regional and international isolation that fed the collision course
with the US.
Given Israel's efforts to promote the war and occupation there was
every reason to expect it to persist in its efforts to fragment that
sister Arab nation along ethnic, linguistic and sectarian lines. The
recent corroboration of an Israeli presence in Iraq confirms this
expectation, which, in turn, should compel the Iraqis and the Arabs in
general to act quickly to end that infiltration in order to safeguard
Iraq's territorial and demographic unity.
Still, one cannot help but to wonder, here, what prompted the current
US administration to allow an Israeli involvement in Iraq. Certainly,
it must have realised the magnitude of the long-standing bad blood
between Iraq and Israel, due to the complex history of political and
military tensions between them and, consequently, the extent to which
an Israeli presence in that country would create severe problems for
US policy and for the US as a great power. Or is it possible that
Washington let Israel into Iraq precisely because it knew the
repercussions this would have?
In my opinion the scandals that have so tarnished the reputation of
the US military in Iraq were the product of Israeli planning. What
General Karpinski was saying between the lines was that the torture
and inhumane practices perpetrated against Iraqi prisoners were
inspired by Israeli advice or were practical applications of Israel's
interrogation expertise actively sought out by US intelligence
authorities. Yossi Melman suggests as much in his observation that the
torture methods used in Iraq were similar to those used by Israeli
intelligence in their interrogations of Palestinian activists.
Although I had formerly written that Israel's "Prison 1391" was a
clone of Abu Ghraib the reverse now seems to be the case, which helps
explain why the Abu Ghraib scandal is what triggered the heated debate
in Israel over "Prison 1391."
At the same time we must bear in mind the nature of the current US
administration. A clique of radical ultra-conservatives, it has
consistently given precedence to US relations with Israel over all
other bilateral relations, and frequently placed Israeli interests
above America's own interests. There is a vast difference between the
current administration and that of Bush Senior. The latter, during the
war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, kept the then Israeli Prime Minister
Shamir in check, refusing to let Israel play any part in that war so
as to safeguard the coalition which included many Arab countries. The
Bush Senior administration then exerted enormous pressure on the
rightwing Israeli government to take part in the Madrid peace
conference, after which it campaigned intensively to topple the Shamir
government in favour of a Labour government under Rabin. As for the
current administration, instead of exerting pressure on Israel, it has
let the current Likud government impose its agenda on the American
agenda and to tarnish the reputation of the US and the American army.
The brutal torture and degradation suffered by Iraqi prisoners can be
attributed in large measure to the services of Israeli intelligence
agencies, to which testify statements issued by American officials and
Israeli press sources. This alone should make it imperative to end the
Israeli presence in Iraq as part of the effort to eliminate the rancor
over all the injustices visited upon the Iraqi people.
Indeed, for the same reason, the current Iraqi interim government must
handle the prosecution of Saddam Hussein with the greatest delicacy
and wisdom. The first step towards this is to ensure that the judges
selected are above all suspicion. Again I stress that no one
sympathises with Saddam Hussein. The crimes he perpetrated against his
neighbours and the even more heinous crimes he perpetrated against his
own people are unpardonable. Under his regime, a country that was once
wealthy in natural and human resources degenerated into an
impoverished and indebted nation that was all the more vulnerable to
invasion and occupation. In short, the interim government must summon
the utmost objectivity and foresight in dealing with the trial and
other crucial issues in order to pave the way for a truly new era for
a peaceful, safe and vibrant united Iraq.
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