Iraq: Where America’s Israel-Driven Mideast Policies Destroyed a Coalition

by Richard H. Curtiss

“Why does the famous Bush-Baker worldwide “coalition” of nations that so brilliantly fought the Gulf war seem to have fallen apart in the face of these new threats?...We are reaping the harvest of the Clinton administration’s uncritical alliance with the new Israeli anti-Arab rightist administration, plus its inability to forge alliances with allies.”
—Syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, Washington Times, Sept.10, 1996.

When President Bill Clinton assumed office in January 1993, one of the first things he told journalists was that he was “not obsessed with Iraq.” The truth was that he was not remotely interested in the arena where the U.S- and Saudi-led coalition forces had forced Saddam Hussain’s million-man army out of Kuwait with fewer than 300 American deaths in action and in accidents in a ground war that lasted only 100 hours.

In fact, the incoming Clinton administration inherited elaborate on-going CIA-organized efforts in the Middle East to topple the Saddam government and replace it with an administration tough enough to hold Iraq together, but less anti-American and less inclined to invade the territories of its neighbors. The main interest the Clintonites exhibited in the operation concerned its cost. When they found out what it was, they cut the program in half.

Not even the active Israeli-Arab peace process he inherited seemed to interest Clinton initially. He let the Israel lobby make recommendations concerning who should handle Middle East affairs in his administration, and wound up with former AIPAC official Martin Indyk as the White House Middle East adviser. To run Israeli-Arab negotiations at the State Department, he retained Bush administration political appointee Dennis Ross, a former fellow at Martin Indyk’s AIPAC-spinoff think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. An astonishing percentage of the other State Department officers involved in the Middle East peace negotiations also were Jewish, a circumstance that increasingly perplexed the Arab ambassadors who worked with them, and the Arab foreign ministers to whom the ambassadors reported.

A major difference between the Bush and Clinton administrations was that when Ross held the job in the Bush administration, he reported directly to activist Secretary of State James Baker. Baker personally was running U.S. Middle East policy in close consultation with his long-time personal friend, President Bush. By contrast, under a disengaged Clinton and a weak secretary of state who not only tolerated but acted upon interventions in U.S. Middle East policies by the leaders of national Jewish organizations, Ross suddenly was in sole charge of the U.S. role in the Middle East peace process.

Lack of high-level attention to the peace process had immediate repercussions.

The lack of high-level attention to the peace process the U.S. supposedly was brokering had immediate repercussions. Dovish elements in the Israeli Labor government, who seemed more interested in Middle East peace than anyone in the self-selected and self-serving Israel lobby in Washington, went behind the backs of the U.S. and the Russians, co-sponsors of the Middle East peace negotiations.

After a year of intense secret negotiations with emissaries from Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, they produced the Oslo accord, which was signed on Sept. 13, 1993 on the White House lawn, accompanied by the first official handshake between an Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and Arafat.

The photos of a presidential-looking Bill Clinton gently but firmly nudging Rabin to take Arafat’s outstretched hand gave the young president a significant boost in the polls, as did a repeat performance two years later, again on the White House grounds, and now called Oslo II. It was his first quickening of interest in the Middle East, but in fact it had had nothing to do with the efforts of his own new appointees, and he did not understand how intimately continued progress in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was linked to continued progress in U.S. relations with other Middle East countries.

Therefore, while the Clinton administration’s Israel-focused leaders worked closely with the Labor Party governments of Yitzhak Rabin and, after his assassination, with Shimon Peres, U.S. policy in Iraq and the Gulf region drifted. The only innovation was Martin Indyk’s so-called “dual containment” policy. It decreed that henceforth both major powers in the Gulf, Iraq and Iran, were America’s enemies, and initiated a strategy of gradually tightening separate economic embargoes against them. Predictably, the major accomplishment to date of the policy, which has remained in place ever since Indyk left the White House to take up duties as U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv, has been to drive the two mortal enemies the U.S. had dubbed “pariah” governments into some semblance of cooperation — particularly in smuggling Iraqi oil through Iran and into world markets.

An Appeal for Help

This was the situation in the spring of 1996 when, allegedly, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani approached the U.S. for help against his rival for leadership of the Iraqi Kurds, Jalal Talabani. The two had been fighting against each other within the U.S.- protected area of northern Iraq since May 1994. This newest Kurdish civil war was touched off by Barzani’s sudden refusal to share revenues raised by taxing Turkish trucks that passed through Kurdistan. The Turkish trucks were defying the U.S.-instigated United Nations embargo on Iraq by bringing some consumer goods into Iraq from Turkey, and then returning to Turkey carrying large quantities of Iraqi gasoline stored in specially installed hidden tanks in the trucks. The U.S. looked the other way because Turkey was the biggest foreign sufferer, economically, from the U.N. embargo which the U.S. had insisted be maintained on Iraq so long as Saddam Hussain remained in power there.

Barzani complained to the U.S. that Talabani had brought in Iranian arms and ammunition, and even Iranian revolutionary guards, to help him capture a portion of the main road leading from Iraq into Turkey. The U.S. allegedly ignored Barzani’s pleas for help, so on Aug. 20 Barzani turned to the Iraqi dictator.

Saddam sent an estimated 30,000 Iraqi troops, tanks and artillery into the U.S.-patrolled northern no-fly zone to back a lightning thrust by Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) troops into Irbil, the major Kurdish city in that zone. Barzani’s troops took over the headquarters of Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and Iraqi security police allegedly seized the opportunity to enter and ransack the offices of the CIA-backed Iraqi National Congress, an organization formed to unite 24 different Iraqi opposition elements, including the Kurdish leaders, into a unified effort to overthrow Saddam. After occupying Irbil, Barzani’s forces went on to occupy Suleimaniya and other Kurdish population centers, but without Iraqi help.

The U.S. retaliated by extending the southern no-fly zone north from the 32nd to the 33rd parallel (bringing it within 30 miles of Baghdad), and launching 44 cruise missiles at 15 Iraqi air defense sites in the south in two separate attacks from U.S. naval ships and submarines in the Gulf and from B-52 bombers flown halfway around the world from Louisiana to Guam to the Gulf for that purpose. Each missile costs $1.2 million, considerably more than some of the savings realized by closures and curtailments of U.S. operations with Iraqi resistance groups.

Seeking some diplomatic cover for its action, the Israel-focused Clinton administration seemed to discover for the first time how thoroughly its Middle East alliances had collapsed, and how frayed its European alliances had become as a result of its “dual containment” policy, and its benign neglect of actions by the newly elected government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to shut down the land-for-peace process with the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon.

No Arab country could support airstrikes from its bases against Arab Iraq as retaliation for what all saw as a legitimate intervention, at the invitation of one of the Kurdish parties, by Saddam’s forces in a Kurdish civil war raging within Iraq’s sovereign boundaries. Nor at the U.N. was there support for a resolution condemning Saddam’s intervention because he had not violated the previous U.N. resolution passed at the end of the Gulf war.

That resolution called upon Saddam not to harass his own people, and not to use military aircraft against them. The U.S., Britain and France had designated the no-fly zones to keep Saddam from using military aircraft against Shi’i Arabs in the south and Kurds in the north. However, there was nothing in the previous resolution prohibiting use of Iraqi ground forces anywhere in the country, and no indication that Saddam had used those forces except to provide brief support for Barzani’s thrust into Irbil.

The result was that the U.S. moved unilaterally. It had the support of Britain, which has forces in the area, and some lip service support from Germany and Japan, which do not. Other countries of the former Gulf coalition in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East itself were conspicuously silent. France, which joined Russia in openly criticizing the unilateral U.S. action, refused to allow its military aircraft, which together with those of the U.S. and Britain have been flying 120 to 140 sorties daily over the two no-fly zones, to patrol north of the original 32nd parallel boundary of the southern no-fly zone. Patrols beyond that point must be made solely by U.S. and British aircraft.

It was not the first time the U.S. has bid the Kurds sayonara.

Although the initial Iraqi action on the ground and U.S. reactions in the air were militarily meaningless, the events have had major political consequences. They mark the end of the Iraqi National Congress effort to overthrow Saddam. An unnamed official of the organization told New York Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar in Amman: “It is very hard to hold a coalition of such diverse groups together. I mean we had Communists and Islamic organizations in the same group, we had former Baath Party members and Kurds, an Assyrian Christian party and members of the Turkmen minority group.” At this writing members of the group in Kurdistan are awaiting evacuation, but a newer group, the Iraqi National Accord, also funded by the CIA and possibly Saudi Arabia, remains in existence in Amman, although it, too, has suffered defections among its largely Iraqi Arab members.

Further, the September events mark the unofficial end of Operation Provide Comfort, the almost accidental U.S. involvement in Iraqi Kurdistan. It arose when, after an abortive effort by Iraq’s Shi’i in the south and the Kurds in the north to overthrow Saddam, Kurds began fleeing by the hundreds of thousands into Iran and the high mountains of Turkey to escape Saddam’s retaliation. The Turks, who have a major Kurdish problem of their own, refused to admit the Iraqi refugees, who were dying in large numbers of dysentery and exposure in the snow-covered mountains that separate the two countries.

To persuade the Kurds to return to Iraq, the U.S. offered to protect many of their major towns, and thus the involvement began. However, during the current debacle, Clinton administration spokesmen were quick to seize the opportunity to wash their hands of the Kurds.

The Kurds’ “Failure”

Said State Department spokesman Nicolas Burns on Sept. 10: “We gave the Kurds every opportunity for five years. We gave them political protection; we gave them economic and humanitarian assistance; we gave them a security zone in the north where they could run their own affairs in a highly autonomous way. And the Kurds failed to meet that great historic opportunity for the Kurdish people.”

It was not the first time that the U.S. has bid the Kurds sayonara. In the early 1960s Israel and Iran provided logistical support for a Kurdish insurrection against Iraq by Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Massoud Barzani’s late father. The U.S. was not directly involved that time, but there is no record that it told its then Iranian and Israeli allies to stop.

In 1972, the U.S., under its Machiavellian Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, sent $16 million in weapons for a renewed Iranian-supported Kurdish insurrection in Iraq. Under pressure, Saddam then agreed to a border settlement which gave Iran unprecedented rights in the Shatt al Arab, the waterway which forms part of the southern boundary between the two countries, but which also is Iraq’s only major outlet to the sea.

Having obtained this major concession, the Shah of Iran abruptly withdrew his support for the Kurds, Saddam launched his army against them, and thousands died. Kissinger later defended his role in this treachery against the ever-warlike, ever-gullible Kurds by telling a congressional panel in 1976: “Clandestine operations should not be confused with missionary work.”

(That 1975 settlement imposed by the U.S.-Iranian pressure on Saddam Hussain lead directly to his attack on Iran in the fall of 1980, when he erroneously concluded that Iran had been so weakened by its revolution that it could not repel an Iraqi incursion into the contested Khusistan/Arabistan area of Iran. The result was the eight-year Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988. That was followed by a genocidal action in which Saddam allegedly massacred 70,000 Kurds in 1988, and then by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Now, along with an unfavorable border settlement with Kuwait imposed on Iraq in 1991, Saddam’s unfavorable 1975 Shatt al-Arab settlement with Iran remains unrectified—two potential catalysts for future wars in the area.)

There is little evidence that the Clinton administration even understands, at the political level, the extent of its current Middle East problems. Career foreign service officers doggedly pursue the policy that whoever replaces Saddam must be strong enough and well-connected enough to rule the country from its Sunni Arab center and to keep it from disintegrating into three squabbling entities: A tiny Kurdistan with half the country’s oil and perpetually at war with its Iranian, Turkish and Syrian neighbors; a tiny Shi’i Arab enclave in the south with the other half of the country’s oil and strong religious ties to Iran; and a Sunni Arab enclave from Baghdad north and west to Iraq’s border with Syria, in tune with its Sunni Arab neighbors to the south but stripped of its petroleum fields.

Traditional U.S. policy, supported by all the Arab countries, has eschewed that recipe for disaster. It now is increasingly clear to America’s Arab allies, however, that Netanyahu and the hard-line Jewish nationalists running Israel find the vision of a permanently dismantled Iraq attractive—and a collection of squabbling ministates in the area a fertile field for Israeli intervention along the lines the Israelis pursued in the 1960s.

The “so what if Iraq disintegrates” line therefore already has surfaced among members of Israel’s journalistic fifth column within the American media. It may soon find its echoes among Israel-centered political appointees in a Clinton second term administration.

Beneficiaries of the Collapse

So who else benefits from the collapse on Clinton’s watch of the Gulf coalition, the Iraqi National Congress—and, probably, international patience with U.S. schemes to undermine Saddam—along with the collapse of Operation Provide Comfort, and the potential weakening of close U.S.-Turkish cooperation in the Middle East?

Oddly enough, the answer is that Bill Clinton has benefited in the short run. Television footage of him standing tall in the face of machinations by arch-villain Saddam Hussain crowded out images of his challenger, Sen. Bob Dole, who desperately needed the exposure for his campaign. The poll numbers, which had been shifting toward Dole, veered decisively back toward Clinton.

Nor, it seems, are Dole and his staff sufficiently informed or astute to capitalize on the alarming evidence of the complete unraveling of U.S. relations not only with Middle Eastern allies, but with European allies and Japan over manifest U.S. incompetence in the area. Instead of concentrating on the need for the U.S. to repair and rebuild the alliances eroded by sheer neglect in the Israel-centered Clinton administration, clueless Republicans seem to be calling on the one hand for far tougher retaliatory strikes, and on the other for a trip back to the drawing board to rebuild the coalition. Their criticisms might have more credibility if they suggested revisiting the Bush strategy: first build the coalition, then make the war.

In fact, the U.S. needs to moderate its domestic politics-driven obsession with Israeli "security” and pay some attention to the advice and concerns of its many well-wishers in a belt of Islamic countries extending a third of the way around the globe from Morocco to Indonesia. Virtually all of these Muslim countries demonstrated their readiness, during the Rabin-Peres era, to make peace with Israel if it first would make peace with the Palestinians. If the U.S. would address some of the concerns of its other Middle East allies, it might find any more such wars, alarms and excursions in the Middle East both irrelevant and unnecessary.

Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, critics of Israel, the Handbook said, “promoted the myth of an ‘oppressive, imperialistic’ Israel seeking to expand her borders ‘from the Jordan to the Euphrates.’”

Again, the Handbook, while claiming that the descriptive terms are “myth,” gave no evidence that refuted an “aggressive,” “imperialistic” Israel—one that was dramatically and successfully executing a plan to expand her borders. Rather than being a “myth,” it was, especially for the victims, a tragic reality.

“In the wake of the Camp David accords,” the preface continued, champions of Palestinian rights began calling attention to issues “they claimed had been overlooked by the 1979 peace treaty signed between Egypt and Israel. Charging the Jewish state with gross human rights violations—including torture, educational and economic repression of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, the propagandists stepped up their campaign aimed at discrediting Israel in the eyes of the American public.”

Here again, rather than deal with the accusations—that Israel engages in “gross human rights violations—including torture, and educational and economic repression of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza” the Handbook attacked not what might be at fault, worthy of ADL’s own investigation, but rather those who expose the wrongs.

By branding those who say Israel engages in “gross human rights violations” as suspect characters, the ADL hopes that others will see the charges as a “myth,” coming from persons not so pure as the rest of society.