Compared With Israel Chicken Little Was Optimistic

Israel is a sovereign state. The Government of Israel (GOI) pursues the self-defined strategic and national interests of the state. No surprises. That's all business as usual.

GOI as well as its advocates and apologists in the United States do all in their collective power to convince the government and people of the US to support without qualification the strategic and national interests of Israel--regardless of American national interests. No surprises. That's all business as usual.

GOI in a manner identical to countries such as the United Kingdom has employed any and all means necessary to gain American support and assistance. GOI, again in a manner identical with that used by, say, the UK during World War I and the opening years of World War II, has employed deceptive intelligence, exaggerated threats and repeated warnings of dire consequences to influence the American public and its government. Influence the government to take actions which it would otherwise not take as being against long term American national and strategic interests.

The difficulty for us comes when our politicians and our public opinion molders accept without question GOI policy positions. It comes when our political leaders and opinion molders act upon the bogus intelligence, the exaggerated threats and the mournful predictions of catastrophe.

The process of co-opting the US through the use of bogus intelligence started before there was a state of Israel. During World War II James Jesus Angleton then at the London Controlling Section of the OSS established contacts with the intelligence office of Haganah.

After the war Angleton combined his functions as head of CIA's counterintelligence shop with that of privately running liaison with the Mossad. During the 1950s Angleton was fed--and accepted uncritically--a combination of chickenfeed and falsity from his Israeli interlocutors. The Mossad derived disinformation emphasized the rapid growth of Soviet aerospace technology and nuclear capacities.

Not until the U2 overflights was the Mossad exposed as a papermill and the usefulness of the liaison called into question. The doubts about Israeli military and political intelligence continued even though on occasion, such as the "Secret Speech" exposing Stalin's excesses, the Israeli catch proved bang-on accurate.

The purpose of the "intelligence" sharing was twofold. Show how useful GOI and its components were to the US and thus drop markers for later collection. Establish a basis of reliability so that Israeli warnings of immediate threat would be believed by Washington.

While the Israeli military intelligence product has proven both accurate and of limited utility, the political and strategic products were far less so. In the run-up to the Six Day War all hands from CIA, the Pentagon, State and even the Executive Office Building didn't know whether to laugh or cry over the grossly exaggerated threat intel streaming out of the Mossad.

Israel played the we-are-doomed-we-are-going-to-die tune so long and hard and with such little real world basis that contempt dripped (privately) throughout the US national security community. (Recall that CIA, the Pentagon and State predicted up to a year before the outbreak of war that the Israeli military would need not more than seven days to obliterate the enemy forces.)

LBJ and his administration had no options given the political context of 1967. They had to applaud the war, ignore the unjustifiable attack on the USNS Liberty, and overlook the intransigence of GOI regarding the occupied territories. Similar constraints operated on LBJ when it came to the matter of GOI's nuclear weapons program.

We had known (or suspected) that Israel was hot after the bomb since Ike putted on the West Lawn. Various attempts to "inspect" the Israeli facilities were turned aside by GOI. By the time LBJ was pulling the ears of his beagles and getting our feet stuck in the muck of Vietnam, the denizen of the Oval Office made it clear that he didn't want to know about any yarmulke wearing atom bombs.

The Israeli bomb coupled with exaggerations of threat combined to convince the Nixon Administration to provide real-time intelligence (which allowed redeployment of IDF and IAF assets to blunt the nearly successful Syrian attack) and airlifted resupply (which provoked the first OPEC oil embargo.) It should be noted that the Egyptian Army had no intention of going deep into the Sinai let alone chug on to Israel proper.

With this historical background it should have come as no surprise that GOI provided false and misleading "intelligence" regarding Saddam and the Iraqi WMD. This set of Israeli fabrications came as biblical manna to the neocon ninnies who litter the landscape of the current US administration. Had George W. Bush possessed the mental horsepower necessary to parse between responsible realpolitikers such as James Baker and Robert Gates and the posse of neocons led by Dick (Nobody Has A Need To Know Anything) Cheney and Donald (Shock And Awe 'Em Into Democracy and Shopping Malls) Rumsfeld, the output of the Mossad papermill would have been pulped without a second thought.

Of course the neocon ninnies lapped it up and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now history threatens to repeat itself.

Even eight and more years ago GOI and Company wanted the US to abate the Iranian nuisance. Indeed, in the months preceding the invasion of Iraq there was great fear within GOI that we would lose sight of the Iranian peril while pursuing the lesser menace of Saddam's Iraq.

Five years into what is arguably the greatest foreign policy debacle in US history, GOI and Company is leaning hard on the button marked "War." The neocons of the Bush regime are doing the same.

As posted yesterday, the potential "Mahdi bomb" represents no clear and present danger to the US. It constitutes, at worst, an irritation that the US can learn to live with given that deterrence works and the American nuclear umbrella has historically sheltered many allied or other states important to the US national and strategic interests.

True, the Mahdi bomb is much more of a threat to GOI and the Israeli public. But, Israel has a substantial nuclear arsenal of more than two hundred devices. These include not only the old standby of pure fission but, almost certainly, boosted fission weapons and quite probably genuine two stage fission-fusion gadgets as well.

In short, Israel has the capacity to green glass the totality of Iran. The mullahs know this. They also know that the US nuclear threat stands behind Israel. And, as previously mentioned, it matters not if the Twelfth Imam returns and you are a loose assembly of radioactive fly ash in the stratosphere.

So why can't We the People emulate the "What? Me Worry?" attitude of yesterday's Mad Magazine? Why can't we say to the mullahocracy, "Go ahead, make your bomb and pray for peace?"

Because we are deep in an election campaign.

On the one hand is the Nice Young Man From Chicago, Senator Obama. He is an empty suit and a teleprompter mouth who hails from a machine politics background. His party has its own neocon ninnies. His party has a long and rich history of conflating Israeli national interests with American. With respect to US-Israel relations his definition of "change" is more than likely to be "more of the same."

Then there is John McCain. He used to be a realpolitiker. Under the whip of the campaign he is morphing into a neocon. (See, http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/2008092220080922bootdanzig.html.)

The history of the past few years shows what that means.

Lord help us.