The Israel lobby is aiming to soften up US public opinion for an attack on Iran. Americans should resist its propaganda
Despite the ballyhoo of the recent
Aipac national policy conference
in Washington, when Israel-US bonds were feted, relations between the
two countries are currently more strained than at any time since 1991.
That was when the elder George Bush, as US president, fiercely lobbied
Yitzchak Shamir to join in the
Madrid peace conference. Relations then reached their nadir when James Baker uttered his infamous
remark about Israel's American-Jewish supporters: "Fuck the Jews, they don't even vote for us."
If
relations continue to deteriorate in coming months, we might have to go
back in time to the Suez crisis of 1956 to find a time when relations
were this fraught.
A case in point is Iran. That bogey-nation was
everywhere at the Aipac conference. Every keynote speech – if they
weren't directly written by that group's staff – seemed unmistakably
scripted and "on message", dedicated to the existential threat that
Iran poses not just to Israel, but the entire world.
A glossy
brochure distributed at the Aipac meeting showed a map (pictured below)
centred on Iran and beyond, with a dark ominous ring around Iran's
neighbours and as far away as India, Russia, Africa and eastern Europe.
The message: these are the countries under imminent threat of Iranian
ballistic missiles.
A map contained in a brochure distributed at an Aipac meeting
The brochure copy even intimates that the next step for Iran is
"building a missile with range to reach US territory". (Never mind that
Iran doesn't yet have any ballistic missile capable of carrying a
nuclear weapon, nor will it have the bomb itself for anywhere from a
year to five years depending on which you source you choose to believe.)
Israel
is in the midst of a massive diplomatic, political and intelligence
campaign, both public and covert, that could lead – if those officials
behind it have their way – towards a military strike on Iran. It is a
war for the hearts and minds of Americans. Or you might call it the war
before the war. In intelligence circles, this Israeli project is known
as perception management and defined by the department of defence as:
Actions
to convey and/or deny information … to foreign audiences to influence
their emotions, motives and objective reasoning as well as to
intelligence systems and leaders … ultimately resulting in foreign
behaviours and official actions favourable to [US] objectives. In
various ways, perception management combines truth projection,
operations security, cover and deception and psychological operations.
The
Israelis are following the template of the Bush administration's run-up
to the Iraq war. First, the US government advocated half-hearted
efforts at diplomatic engagement. Then it ratcheted up pressure through
sanctions and UN resolutions. That is where the Israeli campaign stands
now.
Aipac's members carried a unified message to Capitol Hill during their lobbying of US senators and members of Congress. They demanded that Congress pass the most draconian sanctions
ever proposed against Iran. They demanded that Iran be offered a
limited time in which to respond to an ultimatum insisting it drop its
nuclear programme.
What then? If you review Aipac's literature
and the various commentaries published either by Israeli diplomats or
their supporters in the US media, they don't specify what comes next.
But any sensible person can guess that the final step will be war: "Israeli leaders have … hinted at pre-emptive military strikes if they decide that diplomacy has failed."
The
Israelis surely know that the Obama administration will never go to war
against Iran. In fact, they know that Obama would not approve of Israel
doing so. But I've become convinced, in doing the research and speaking
to knowledgeable sources, that Israel is prepared at some date in the
near future to attack Iran itself, even against the wishes of the US.
This
of course will put Obama in an untenable position: do US forces attack
the Israelis (in effect defending the Iranians) and risk the fallout
that would occur in relations between the Democratic administration and
American Jews? Or does he allow the Israelis to carry on to their
targets and bomb Iran, accepting the bloodletting and mayhem that will
inevitably result? If Israel wishes for the latter outcome, they must
lay the groundwork here in the US for tacit acceptance by the American
people of a third-party attack on Iran.
Indeed, they are already a good deal of the way toward this goal, as the latest polling from Rasmussen Report reveals. According to it, 49% of Americans believe that if Israel attacks Iran then the US should help Israel.
Some
readers may say this is alarmist. Before I learned some of the
information I gathered from sources both public and not, I also would
have labelled this as overly dramatic. But Israel hasn't shrunk, for
example, from drafting opinion columns for US newspapers on the menace
posed by Iran, and telling the editor that a local Jewish community
leader would be attaching his name to it.
Within the US Israel
exploits a willing circle of Likudist advocacy groups and thinktanks –
such as the Washington Institute for Near East Peace, the Israel
Project, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs as well as
Aipac itself – that are closely scripted and co-ordinate their
political message with Israeli diplomats. While some of these groups
deny such a close affiliation, there is proof of scripting and
amplification of the Israeli government's agenda. And of course there
may be cases in which the organisations know the needs of their patron
so well that they need no prompting.
In another example, Israeli
diplomats monitored and encouraged a member of Congress to host an
anti-Iranian conference that would advocate Israel's message of
sanctions (and more).
Israel, along with enablers like Aipac, has
not shrunk from hounding its critics. One peace activist in the US so
angered Israeli authorities that he was driven from a job through a
whispering campaign in the community, which also included a disparaging
article leaked to a willing reporter.
The level of hubris necessary to pull this off is astonishing. Fresh off the dismissal of the Rosen-Weissman spy charges
involving its own employees, Aipac is flexing its political muscle and
reminding the world of its resurgence. It does this through a
combination of manipulation, public lobbying and punishment of its
enemies.
We in the US must be prepared to resist. We must protect
ourselves from Israel's propaganda offensive ginning up war with Iran.
We must encourage President Obama to stay strong in his commitment to
Israeli-Arab peace, whether or not Israel is a willing partner. Keeping
our eyes on the prize of peace is going to be the hardest challenge of
all, because the Netanyahu government is doing everything it can to
divert the world's attention.
by Richard Silverstein
Source > Guardian | May 15
