Israeli Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy
By Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
Moderator
Dale Sprusansky: Our next panel is on “Israel’s Influence on U.S.
Foreign Policy.” We have three great speakers lined up today. I’m
going to keep the intro short, since we’re a little late, but
basically Col. Lawrence Wilkerson will begin by speaking about what
Israel’s influence is on U.S. foreign policy and that impact. Jim
Lobe will be discussing some of the people, particularly the
neocons, who push pro-Israel policy. And finally, Justin Raimondo
has the delight of looking at how our elections and politicians are
impacted by such beliefs.
So, our first speaker will be Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. He’s probably
best known for serving as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of
staff from 2002 to 2005. Before that, he served as associate
director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff under
Ambassador Richard Haass. Before his time with the State Department,
he had 31 years of service in the U.S. Army. During that time, he
was a faculty member at the U.S. Naval War College and deputy
director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College in Quantico, and he
retired in 1997 as a colonel. He’s currently working on a book about
the George W. Bush administration, which he worked in, and he’s also
a distinguished visiting professor of government and public policy
at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Thank you, and thank you all for coming out
today. Since I’m limited in time, I want to get started right away.
Ever since 1948, Israel has been a foreign and security policy
problem. That Israel was a problem—a rather large one as a matter of
fact, in ’47 and ’48 even—was most recently pointed out to me by one
of my truly brilliant students. In fact, in a decade of teaching at
both the George Washington University Honors Program and William &
Mary, and six years at two of the nation’s war colleges, I’ve rarely
had better papers than the one he submitted. At the end of our
semester on fateful decision-making—now, fateful decision-making is
what I teach in this seminar—and as the ancient Greek said, it’s
when old men send young men, and now women, to die for state
purposes—and something we often forget—to kill others for state
purposes. He shall go unnamed, the student paper writer, but not
unheralded by me, at least. I will say, too, that he had the
additional characteristic, if you will, of being a Jewish American,
which recalls to mind for me immediately a most unnerving moment as
I had just begun my new career in 2001 as an erstwhile diplomat. I
just entered the inner sanctum of a man who would prove to be very
powerful at State over the next four years. He had only recently
discovered that I had chosen to work for Richard Haass, in his
capacity as State’s director of policy planning, rather than staying
directly under my old mentor, the new Secretary of State Colin
Powell. “Why,” he asked, “did you like to work for that
self-loathing Jew?” Recovering from mild shock, I looked him
straight in the eye and replied, “I’ll forget I heard that.” I
turned and evacuated his inner sanctum while he harrumphed to my
rear.
I recall this little anecdote because it reveals what many use as a
riposting device against any Jewish American who, through critical
thinking, questions from time to time the policies of the modern
state of Israel and the U.S. relationship with that state. Its
complement, of course, for gentiles like me is anti-Semite. I have
no doubt were someone such as Alan Dershowitz, from whom I have
heard, for example, to read my student’s paper, the response
“self-loathing Jew” would not be far from his lips.
In 1948, I would submit, there’s no explicit such challenge for
Jewish Americans or for any other American for that matter. The
ingrained and highly partisan nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship
and the neoconservative adoption of it in particular—Jim, my hat off
to you, he’ll talk more about that—had not yet come about. What my
student rehearsed in the opening to his paper were the profound
objections of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff of the iconic hero of
World War II—after all, Harry Truman in a moment of apoplexy has
essentially said, he won the war, he won the war; he couldn’t think
of anything more to say about this man George Marshall, who was now
secretary of state—and others who objected to what Harry Truman was
about to do with regard to the State of Israel.
My student summed these objections that the Joint Chiefs had penned
as the vehement Arab opposition to a Jewish state, the threats such
opposition presented to the key oil imports from neighboring Arab
countries, and then my student quoted the Joint Chiefs verbatim:
“The decision to partition Palestine, that the decision were
supported by the United States, would prejudice United States
strategic interests in the Near and Middle East to the point that
United States influence in the area would be”—and here come the
words—“curtailed to that which could be maintained by military
force.” Is that prescience, or is that prescience?
Harry Truman, on the other hand, as my student pointed out, summed
up the case for, if you will, thusly. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” the
president said, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who
are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of
thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”
Marshall, in a tale that is not apocryphal, when Truman did decide
that he was going to essentially recognize the state that had stood
up, Israel, threatened not to vote for the president if he did.
Coming from a man like Marshall, who as a military professional
never voted in his life, this was almost stunning for Truman to
hear. Of course, he went ahead, and so we began our relationship.
There were to be sure more counterarguments in the president’s
re-elections, as my student also pointed out in his excellent paper:
the horrors of Holocaust, the plight of hundreds of thousands of
Jewish refugees, and the need to make up for the wrongs committed
against the Jewish people, all spoke for recognition by Truman. My
student continued, also in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the
British promised the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine. And in
the eyes of many Americans after World War II, it was up to the U.S.
to give that home to them, and Harry S. Truman did just that.
Today, we can look back on a line of post-World War II presidents
who tried to deal with the challenges and more that the Joint Chiefs
of Staff had so presciently laid out. And to be honest, and as many
of you in this audience probably are well aware of, the Joint Chiefs
were not breaking new ground. Ever since World War I and Louis
Brandeis’ influence on Woodrow Wilson and his foremost adviser,
Edward House, the U.S. State Department’s position on the potential
for a Jewish state in Palestine had been quite clear. It opposed the
Zionist movement because it was a minority group interfering in
United States foreign affairs. Again, talk about prescience and
there we have it—prescience par excellence.
Even so, could State at that time have envisioned the power of AIPAC
today, particularly after Bill Clinton decided in 1995, as I recall,
to make presidential appearances there de rigueur? I love that
French phrase. I looked it up in Merriam Webster to see what English
definitions were given to it. The second one was this: “necessary if
you want to be popular.” Oh, Bill, the things you did for
popularity’s sake.
But despite these heavily adverse conditions, most U.S. presidents
managed a rather precarious balance, whether it’s in the
beginning—it was Eisenhower in ’56, as we’ve heard before, telling
the Israelis, British and French to get their invading military
forces out of the Suez Canal area. Or it was Ronald Reagan in mid-
to late 1980s, selling AWACS aircraft to the Saudis. Or George H.W.
Bush insisting on real and serious work on the Middle East peace
process following the first Gulf war in 1991, in which the U.S. had
gained quite a bit of new leverage applicable to that process of
survival and potential success. And you all know probably, too,
there are some critics who’ve written quite eloquently in my view
that George H.W. Bush lost the election in ’92 because of his
vehement opposition to Israeli settlements. And then came George W.
Bush, Dick Cheney and a presidency captured by the neoconservatives
of which I was a part.
In a flash, Israel became publicly a strategic ally. Its Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, in every Arab eye dripping blood all over
Oval Office carpet, blood from Israel’s invasion and occupation of
Lebanon in 1982 and ’83. I might add, an invasion we had to haul
their asses out of, and ultimately at the cost of the greatest
single-day casualty of Marines since Tarawa in World War II. This
man, Ariel Sharon, became, in President Bush’s own words, “a man of
peace.”
And all the fears of the 1948 Joint Chiefs of Staff loomed so
largely in the rearview mirror of history that some of us in the
U.S. government sucked in our collective breaths and found it hard
to exhale thereafter. But, of course, we did, and ever since people
just like us have been trying—clearly to little avail, with some
brilliant exceptions, of which the Iran nuclear agreement is the
most exceptional and recent—to restore that precarious balance
maintained since World War II by all of the presidents.
And so, today, where are we in this relationship so fraught with
danger—and, as has been pointed out, danger to both parties, to
Israel and the United States? Today, how does U.S. policy toward
Israel impact our overall foreign and security policy in adverse or
positive ways?
To start, we have the unguarded words of Gen. David Petraeus to
illuminate our inquiries, before he was himself subjected to the
ritual of head-bashing that accompany such remarks. In a hearing
before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March of 2010,
Petraeus said quite straightforwardly that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict foments anti-American sentiment in the region due to a
perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel, and it makes military
operations that much more difficult. These remarks came amidst a
U.S.-Israeli dispute over housing units, 1,600 of them, in
Jerusalem—illegal under international law, in defiance of U.N.
Security Council resolutions, and destabilizing to the max. I can
tell you that in the military councils, of which I’ve been part over
three decades plus, this sentiment was often voiced, and at times in
far more dramatic terms.
When my old mentor and boss, Colin Powell, and I used to talk about
the issues here, we rarely if ever complimented Israel on its
additions to U.S. security posture in the region—quite the opposite,
as a matter of fact. Although today I suspect he would deny such
conversations, and frankly I wouldn’t blame him, it would prove my
point.
But there’s more, there’s concrete evidence of Israel detracting
from U.S. security and of being a strategic liability rather than an
asset. Where is, after all, U.S. hard power in southwest Asia, in
Africa, and the Persian Gulf today? First, it isn’t in Israel—nor
could it be, unless the world was at war and all bets were off. I’ll
come to that scenario in a minute.
Under any other conceivable scenario, the U.S. will never land
meaningful military forces on the unsinkable Middle East aircraft
carrier of Israel. That’s a phrase used by some of my
neoconservative colleagues. Every instance of the use of force by
the U.S. in the region to date has proven that reality beyond a
shadow of a doubt.
So where, exactly, is the hard power? It’s in Qatar, it’s in
Bahrain, it’s in Saudi Arabia, it’s in Kuwait, Oman, Egypt, Djibouti
and a host of other lesser places. The largest U.S. Air Force
complex on earth, for example, by some measures, is in Qatar. The
most powerful fleet headquarters in the U.S. arsenal, The Fifth, is
in Bahrain. The land-based aircraft carrier, if there is one, is
Kuwait, not Israel, as both Gulf wars have proven. As a matter of
fact, my comment during the first Gulf war, when we landed over half
a million U.S. soldiers and all the supplies that went with them,
was, “My God, another Marine, another soldier, we’ll sink Kuwait.”
In fact, in all my years in the military and beyond, I’ve never
heard a serious suggestion of using Israel to help defend U.S.
interests in the region. Instead, what I have heard many times is
advice and decision-making to stay totally away from such use.
Moreover, each one of those genuine hard-power interests that I just
enumerated is threatened, as General Petraeus pointed out
indirectly, by the U.S. unbalanced role as Israel’s lawyer and
unquestioning great power supporter. In fact, examining the single
strategic scenario in which use of Israel might be a viable option
is so grim as to be self-defeating in conception as well as
execution. God forbid.
Imagine, if you will, a general war in southwest Asia, with Turks
fighting Russians, allied with Greeks; Iranians and Hezbollah,
fighting Saudi proxies; Iraqis plunged into sectarian warfare, while
the Kurds try desperately to survive; ISIS spread from Kabul through
Aleppo, through Tripoli, and perhaps beyond; and the U.S. deciding
to do more than provide special operating forces and air power.
Imagine, in other words, the beginnings of a region-wide and then
possibly global conflict.
Imagine, too, the only ally the U.S. will have in this is Israel—an
Israel about to be overwhelmed itself, in all likelihood. People
would be choosing sides. Jordan and Egypt would choose sides, as
will 350 million to 400 million others. So, the U.S. lands major
military forces on the unsinkable aircraft carrier Israel. This is,
of course, after we mobilized fully, conscript at a minimum two
million men and women, spend a year training them, and then enter
the fray—inconceivable? I hope so.
Another major and overwhelming negative influence that I saw up
close and personal, besides these hard power facts, was every time
Rich Armitage, the deputy secretary of state at the time, took us
through the budget drill. It’s been highlighted here earlier, but I
want to highlight it for you in even more graphic terms. We would go
into the room with all the assistant secretaries, undersecretaries,
office heads, directors and so forth, assembled to battle the
budget. And mind you, it’s really kind of an anemic battle, because
the Defense Department was getting around $600 billion and we were
getting around $30 billion. Donald Rumsfeld said he lost more money
in a year than we got. He was right.
But we would go in there, and we would look at the money for U.S.
foreign affairs. Yes, U.S. foreign affairs. We would take out
immediately $3-plus billion for Israel and $3-plus billion for Egypt
to bribe them to keep the peace treaty with Israel, and then we
would look at the rest. We’d then factor out international military
education and training, and those other things that are just more or
less fixed, and we’d say, wow, we’ve got less than a billion dollars
left for the entire foreign policy of the United States of America.
Now do you understand a little bit why diplomacy is not really an
instrument we reach for very often?
And I’m not refraining either from pointing out possibly more
insidious factors that demonstrate to me rather conclusively that
Israel is an untenable ally, or that when Israel—you’ve got Israeli
arms merchants often selling arms to our most likely enemies, UAVs
to Russia here lately, when the UAVs were a problem for
Russia—they’re no longer a problem—or that when Israel breaks U.S.
law and does things that we don’t do anything but démarche them
from.
These are other aspects of a relationship that I’ve been very close
to that have been disturbing, but mostly have enlightened me as to
what it means to have this ally.
Now, let me conclude with the recognition of reality. First,
President Obama, as I earlier intimated, with the JCPOA has regained
a little ground, but at considerable cost—not least of which is an
even more robust military-to-military relationship, intelligence
relationship and, as has been highlighted here, an increase in
funding maybe to $5 billion. If Israel went away tomorrow, if all
the previous military-diplomatic advice had been followed and if
we’d not assisted Perfidious Albion in setting up an experiment that
would result in ethnic cleansing akin to our own Indian Wars in the
heart of Palestine—even if we had not then managed to unbalance
majorly our own approach to the precarious dance required to manage
such a concoction, even if all had gone swimmingly since 1948 with
regard to Israel, the region in question, southwest Asia—or the
Middle East, call it what you will—would still be a boiling cauldron
of instability, chaos and wreckage.
In short, were there no state of Israel at all, the region will
still be a mess, or settle the Israeli-Palestinian challenge
tomorrow with a decent two-state solution that worked and the same
would adhere—the region would remain in turmoil. But the United
States would not be painted with the broad brush of favoritism and
prejudiced policy that it is every day, 24/7, impacting its security
and foreign policy. Now, it must be acknowledged as well that part
of this reality of a volatile region is our fault, too, because we
have coddled, supported, funded, advised and used tyrant after
tyrant to fulfill our wishes, whether it was the Shah of Iran for 26
years, the king in Riyadh, the emir in Qatar or whomever—how many
dictators have we accommodated, or worse?
The region’s calamities have many causes—a majority religion that
has seen no reformation to haul it kicking and screaming into
modernity, tyrants who have sucked its people’s blood dry, and, as I
said, the distinct lack of entrepreneurial talent or desire
nourished by dependency on black gold—interestingly, one of the most
entrepreneurial people in the region are the Palestinians—a surfeit
of strategic water ways and the adjacent land masses begging to be
contested, tribal instincts of the very worse sort, not to mention
the legacy of English missteps, misdemeanors, crimes, artificial
border drawings and double dealings that all by themselves would
damn any people to purgatory at best, and to hell at worse.
But that is no reason for the United States of America to so tie its
foreign and security policy to a tiny enclave in the midst of chaos
that, when the enclave goes, the master might be sucked into the
morass that results, and for no positive purpose of power
whatsoever.
Does the unbiased policy of the U.S. toward this enclave jeopardize
U.S. national security interest? You bet it does, big time. All we
should ask, all I’m asking, all I asked for four years in the State
Department, is that the American people be told the unvarnished
truth and then decide if they’re willing to do it. Do they want
their foreign and security policy based on sound principles of power
management, or do they want it based on passions, ideology and
unbridled favoritism? Now, I’m not quite certain what their answer
is going to be, but I’m dead certain we need to give them the
essential facts and then ask the question. Thank you. [Applause]
