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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33914 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Quite right. The Arab Oil Shock was a direct result of US military aid to Israel. Massive economic damage there. Osama Bin Laden's Islamic extremism was to a significant extent motivated by treatment of Palestinians as he correctly realized that expensive US military aid to Israel was being used against them (and Lebanon + others).

And then there was the Iraq War which is still explained as a kind of mysterious anomaly. Israel was pushing for it the whole time, Sharon and so on. They provided false intelligence about WMDs. There were all kinds of generals and knowledgeable figures who said things like 'Oh of course we know that the US isn't threatened if Iraq acquires nuclear weapons but Israel certainly is'.

Israel was pushing for it the whole time, Sharon and so on.

Hmmm….

In early January 2002, four months after the September 11 attacks, Israeli national security council director Uzi Dayan met in Washington with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice. She told him — to his surprise, he later told me — that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. A month later Dayan’s boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, met with Bush in the White House and offered some advice, based on decades of Israeli intelligence.

Removing Saddam, Sharon said, according to three sources with direct knowledge, will have three main results, all negative. Iraq will implode into warring tribes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. You’ll be stuck in an Iraqi quagmire for a decade. And Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony. Bush didn’t agree.

I recall that Sharon told Putin (who was leading a push for WMD inspectors to verify whether Iraq did have WMDs) that the time for inspections was over, it was too late. His spokesman Ra'anan Gissen certainly went around spruking the WMD story.

Netanyahu was publishing op-eds calling for war. Foreign minister Shimon Peres said on CNN that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and that the United States "cannot sit and wait." A month later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein."

Netanyahu was of course in favor of the war, and promoted to Bush his own fake intelligence in a way that (as the source of the quote I quoted discusses actually) that bypasses both Mossad and Sharon.

Sharon said a lot of things to a lot of people. Perhaps he didn't want to be seen as too strongly endorsing a US invasion of an Arab state. We do know that he was working with zionists in Bush's cabinet to help launder pro-invasion information to the administration:

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

A former IDF brigadier general also criticized Israeli intelligence along similar lines.

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