Don't Blame Israel

The official rationales for the U.S. invasion of Iraq are now widely acknowledged to have been fabricated: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction threatening the national security of the United States and that the Iraqi government had operational ties to al Quaida. As the backup rationalization -- bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq -- loses credibility, increasing attention is being given as to why the U.S. government, with broad bipartisan support, made such a fateful decision.

There are a number of plausible explanations, ranging from control of the country's oil resources to strategic interests to ideological motivations. One explanation that should not be taken seriously, however, is the assertion that the right-wing government of Israel and its American supporters played a major role in leading the United States to invade Iraq.

The government of Israel and its supporters here in the United States deserve blame for many tragic policies in recent years that have led to needless human suffering, increased extremism in the Islamic world, decreased security and rampant violations of the U.N. Charter, international humanitarian law and other international legal principles. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, is not one of them.

Claims of a Major Israeli Role

There are four major arguments made by those who allege a key role by Israel and its American supporters in leading the United States to war in Iraq:

1. Despite propaganda by the Bush administration and its bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill, Iraq was not a military threat to the United States. As a result, the invasion had to have been done to protect Israel from an Iraqi attack.

To begin with, Iraq, during the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule, was no more of a threat to Israel than it was to the United States. Virtually all Iraqi missiles capable of reaching Israel had been accounted for and destroyed by UNSCOM. The International Atomic Energy Agency had determined that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, and virtually all the country's chemical weapons had similarly been accounted for and destroyed, or otherwise rendered inoperable. All this was presumably known to the Israelis, who actively monitored United Nations disarmament efforts in Iraq and had the best military intelligence capabilities in the region.

Though observers were less confident regarding the absence of biological weapons, the Israelis recognized that there was no realistic threat from that source either. Respected Israeli military analyst Meir Stieglitz, writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, stated categorically that "there is no such thing as a long-range Iraqi missile with an effective biological warhead. No one has found an Iraqi biological warhead. The chances of Iraq having succeeded in developing operative warheads without tests are zero." Similarly, it is highly doubtful that Iraq would have been able to attack Israel with biological weapons or by other means. For example, it is hard to imagine that an Iraqi aircraft carrying biological weapons, presumably some kind of subsonic drone, could somehow make the 600-mile trip to Israel without being detected and shot down. Israel -- as well as Iraq's immediate neighbors -- have long had sophisticated anti-aircraft capability.

More fundamentally, if the United States was really concerned with Israel's safety from Iraqi attack, why did the U.S. government provide Iraq with key elements of its WMD programs during the 1980s, including the seed stock for its anthrax and many of the components for its chemical weaponry, when Iraq clearly did have the capability of striking Israel? How could the pro-Israel lobby -- which was no more influential in 2002 than it was 15 years earlier -- have the power to push the United States to invade Iraq while Saddam was no longer a threat to Israel, when the lobby was unable to stop U.S. technology transfers to Iraq at a time that it really could have potentially harmed Israel?