Bush administration official publicly admitted attack on Iraq was to 'defend' Israel
by WILLIAM BLUM, counterpunch.org Tuesday April 06, 2004 at 09:20 PM


A pro-Israeli Bush administration official publicly admitted in 2002 that the up coming attack on Iraq was solely to "defend" Israel. He said that the administration could not state this "because it is not a popular sell." The media, of course, suppressed this.

The Anti-Empire Report
By WILLIAM BLUM

Philip Zelikow is of the type of whom it is customarily said: "He has impeccable establishment credentials". He is currently executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Between 2001 and 2003 he served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president. Before his appointment to PFIAB he was part of the Bush transition team in January 2001. And in 1995 he co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice.

It's recently been revealed that in 2002 he publicly stated that a prime motive for the upcoming invasion of Iraq was to eliminate a threat to Israel.

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?" he asked a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002. "I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."

And this seems to be the story that dare not speak its name. The story was revealed on March 29 by Inter Press Service, a major international news agency that is mainly published outside the United States. An extensive search of the Lexis-Nexis database revealed that only one English-language news source in the world picked up the story: another news agency, United Press International, on March 30. There thus appears to be no mainstream newspaper or broadcast medium that used it.

I'll bet you never thought of that

On March 25, L. Paul Bremer, the American head of the occupation authority in Iraq, issued an executive order specifying that "All trained elements of the Iraqi armed forces shall at all times be under the operational control of the [American] commander of coalition forces for the purpose of conducting combined operations." The order was not referring simply to the present state of affairs; it was a command for the future, after the alleged return of sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30.

In regard to the rather obvious and rather sensitive question of whether the Iraqis would stand for this continued American control, a US official in Baghdad had it all figured out: He declared that the Iraqis could hardly claim that Iraq's sovereignty was compromised by having its troops under American command when nations like Britain and Poland had placed military contingents in Iraq under an American general. "There's no sovereignty issue for them," he said.

-New York Times, March 26, 2004

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