Aletho News

Goldberg’s next war sure sounds a lot like his last one

By Philip Weiss on January 3, 2011

Four months back, Jeffrey Goldberg published a long piece in the Atlantic called “The Point of No Return,” making the Israeli case for the United States to attack Iran in Never-again terms: Iran is threatening the existence of “the Jewish people,” Israel is bound to act if the U.S. fails to, the U.S. will do a better job. The piece has stirred a lot of discussion. Goldberg has gone on national media and panels at thinktanks to promote these bellicose ideas.

But no one has pointed out that the piece makes the same argument Goldberg marshaled eight years ago for the U.S. to attack Iraq, that time with an article in the New Yorker magazine under the headline, “The Great Terror.”  Iraq too was bent on the destruction of the Jewish people, and was developing a nuclear weapon to do so.

The language in the pieces is eerily similar. The last time the concentration camp Goldberg invoked was Bergen-Belsen. This time around it’s Auschwitz.

Both times the enemy is “three years” away from going nuclear. Last time:

He [August Hanning of German intelligence agency] does not equivocate. “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years,” he said.

This time:

Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so).

The last time round Goldberg was flat wrong.

“The Great Terror” stated that Saddam had links to Al Qaeda, and the article was cited by both Bush and Cheney as proof of the threat posed by Iraq (Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has told me). As it turned out, Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction and didn’t attack Israel and wasn’t making a nuclear warhead or an aflatoxin/chemical/biological one and wasn’t importing canisters of mysterious nerve gases, as Goldberg had affirmed. But meantime, the U.S. was at war with Iraq, in some measure because of the bad ideas that Goldberg proliferated, and we and the Iraqis and its neighbors are still suffering the consequences.

This time around, the question is, Why is anyone listening to Goldberg? Why are prestige news organizations giving him the microphone?

But let’s compare similarities in the casus belli pieces.

In both cases, Goldberg turned Koran scholar to support his views. Last time, Saddam’s rage against the Kurds was based in part on

a chapter in the Koran that allows conquering Muslim armies to seize the spoils of their foes. It reads, in part, ‘Against them’—your enemies—‘make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah…’

Now Iran is the problem, Goldberg writes that “the depth of official Iranian hatred of Israel and Jews” can only be explained by looking to

a line of Shia Muslim thinking that views Jews as ritually contaminated, a view derived in part from the Koran’s portrayal of Jews as treasonous foes of the Prophet Muhammad.

In both cases, Goldberg alarms readers with Holocaust-tinged fears that a Muslim country is planning to wipe Jews out.

[T]he experts say, Saddam’s desire is to expel the Jews from history

That was last time. And this time—

[A] nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people.

The last time Saddam was the first leader since “the Holocaust” to use poison gas to “exterminate” women and children, and Goldberg cited an expert on Iraq with Holocaust fears.

as a child she lived in Germany, near Bergen-Belsen. “It’s tremendously influential in your early years to live near a concentration camp,” she said. In Kurdistan, she heard echoes of the German campaign to destroy the Jews.

This time around it’s the Shoah, and the camp is different, but the lesson of destruction is the same:

Many Israelis think the Iranians are building Auschwitz… “Iran represents a threat like the Shoah,” an Israeli official who spends considerable time with the prime minister told me….

“In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation.“

All the talk of annihilation from Israelis. In fact, Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf has shown here, Goldberg echoed the hysteria of one element of Israeli society to justify the idea of the U.S. going on another Middle East joyride so as to forestall the Israelis from doing so.

The views of Israeli generals and senior officials in the Defense Department on Iran are of great interest, but they should be put in the right context. There are many in Israel who don’t see Iran as an existential threat, or, more precisely, they don’t see it as a different threat than those Israel faced in the past. There are even more who think that the risk in attacking Iran is far greater then the possible benefits. Israeli Generals have a tendency for creating mass hysteria.

The seamless stoking of hysteria is the most obvious impression one gets from reading Goldberg’s two casus belli pieces in sequence: Goldberg’s paranoia exists out of time; the very same themes and lines about the destruction of Jews appear several years apart, shifted from one enemy to the other (much as the State Department 60 years ago was the anti-Semitic enemy in his book Prisoners…).

Why is Goldberg still taken so seriously? The answer has to do with the strength of the Israel lobby inside the American establishment. That is how a former Israeli soldier–Goldberg immigrated to Israel in the 80s then came back a few years later– hops from one prestige magazine to another.

Indeed, Goldberg’s core concern, which also extends seamlessly eight years from the first piece to the second one, from Iraq to Iran– is not the fear of destruction, but of Israel losing hegemonic power in the Middle East. I have held out the two most similar and important phrases in the pieces for last, the phrases that reflect this root concern:

[T]here is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them [nukes] soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East”

Goldberg warned the last time. And this time:

The challenges posed by a nuclear Iran are more subtle than a direct attack, Netanyahu told me….“You’d create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area”.

Does America want to go to war to preserve Israel’s power edge in the Middle East?

January 3, 2011 - Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel