Letters

What Carol Brightman (Letters, 11 May) has to say about the military bases that the Americans have been building up in Iraq is both sinister and surprising. What’s sinister is how very large they appear to be, what’s surprising is that, given that scale, we haven’t hitherto heard much or even anything about them. Four ‘fortresses’, as she calls them, situated one in each of the four quarters of the country, are all too obviously strategic, not tactical, covering as they do by implication the entire territory. Are Western journalists allowed access to these extremely nasty examples of suburban sprawl, if only to down a burger and play a few holes of miniature golf? If they are, why haven’t any journalists gone there, and written about them? Pampered oases of security, filled exclusively by outsiders, in a desert of deprivation, they represent a gross and inflammatory insult to the Iraqi population facing the – to us – unimaginable daily risk of being slaughtered on the way to work. Brightman is right: remarks such as the one she quotes, by Condoleezza Rice, to the effect that the catastrophic US adventure in Iraq is ‘right on “strategy"’ get disregarded, because they’re taken to be the Bush people’s unforgivably lame excuse or apology for all that’s gone wrong since the invasion, to be one more attempt to take our minds off it. It’s valuable to be made for once to see things the other way round: to see all that’s gone wrong as the distraction which, whether by design or not, stops us from dwelling on the long-term strategic goal of that invasion, a long-term goal which this country or any other member of the so-called Coalition had absolutely no business sharing in.

One is bound to wonder whether this realisation proved too much in the end for our newly sacked foreign secretary, who having cosied photogenically up to Condoleezza Rice, first in downtown Blackburn and then, a few hours later and hardly by popular request, in the Baghdad Green Zone, decided that he would – if three years too late – break ranks with the Great Helmsman and dismiss as ‘nuts’ the idea of dealing with a nuclear Iran militarily. As Jack Straw leaves the war zone and subsides speechlessly into the role of leader of the House of Commons, we can perhaps feel a faint relief that his old job has been handed to the seemingly pacific Margaret Beckett and not to Hazel Blears, the thought of whom being let loose in the chancelleries of Europe or the rose garden of the White House chills the blood.

In their essay ‘The Israel Lobby’, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt invoke comments made by me as evidence for a controversial assertion of their own concerning the motives for the US invasion of Iraq (LRB, 23 March):

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical … The war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

Readers may find it interesting to know what I actually said and how Mearsheimer and Walt appear to have misused my comments.

My talk was on 10 September 2002 at a 9/11 anniversary symposium. I argued that possession of nuclear (or biological) weapons by Saddam Hussein would be very dangerous. Reflecting on my White House work during the Gulf War in 1990-91, I did point out that I believed then, and later, that the most likely direct target of an Iraqi WMD attack would be Israel, but that policymakers had no wish to emphasise this. That said, any US or European government, in 1991 or later, would rightly have regarded an Iraqi nuclear attack on Israel – or on any other country – as a horrific prospect they would do much to prevent.

Neither of these conclusions – that Saddam’s possession of nuclear weapons would be dangerous, or that Israel might be most directly threatened by such weapons – was especially remarkable. These things were understood in 1991. Iraq tried very hard to pull Israel into that war and its politics, ultimately even bombarding Israel with ballistic missiles. The coalition laboured successfully to thwart Saddam and keep Israel out of that war.

None of this, though, bore on the question of what to do about a possible Iraqi WMD programme in 2002. On that issue – whether or when the US ought to go to war with Iraq – I expressed no view in my September 2002 talk, or on any other public occasion during those years.

Nor did I try to explain why the Bush administration went to war, either in 2002 or after the invasion in 2003 or 2004. And in those years I had little special knowledge of those motives. My work on the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (from which I resigned in February 2003) had not involved Iraq.

So how did my views wind up in Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay as evidence that Bush went to war in part for Israel? In 2004, local reports of my September 2002 comments were discovered by the Inter Press Service. To put it mildly, that body has a strong political point of view. It circulated on the web an article headlined ‘War Launched to Protect Israel – Bush Adviser’. Without any evidence other than the old September 2002 quotes, the article’s lead was: ‘Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.’ The claim has bounced around the internet ever since. Mearsheimer and Walt cite this article, which they found in Asia Times Online, as their source for my comments.

The original slur did not deserve a response, but the situation is different when it is repeated by two accredited scholars, and endorsed by publication in the LRB. The claim still has three holes. First, like most of the world, I did think that, if Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, this would endanger the interests of America and the world in several ways, including the direct threat of a possible strike on Israel. Second, I did not state an opinion about whether this should be a cause for war in 2002-03. Third, I did not state an opinion – or even have any special knowledge – about the motives of the Bush administration in going to war in 2003.

I hope that readers will contrast these points with what Mearsheimer and Walt wrote in the passage quoted above. Readers will also notice that the passage leads with a reference to the ‘Lobby’, of which I am clearly presumed to be a part. There is no evidence for that either.

Anthony Pagden refers to Antoine Polier as ‘marginalised’ and ‘of relatively humble background’ (LRB, 11 May). On the contrary, Polier was what one might call a gentleman of no independent means, a class that since feudal times has produced its fair share of wasters, chancers and social parasites, but also, out of sheer necessity, its fair and perhaps more than fair share of energetic and enterprising individuals attracted to the possibilities offered by overseas adventure. Polier, known to his relatives as ‘l’Indien’, came from an armigerous family of French origin established in Lausanne since 1575. The uncle whom he went to India to join was one of 16 children of a local landowner, which is explanation enough of his need to seek an honourable way of making a living.