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Former Defsec under Bush II Republican, and Obama's Democrats, gives us a little sanitized insider view of American administration foreign policy and its actions in the Greater Middle East. Presumably the book was vetted by the Intelligence community, and the serving political parties. In that sense Roberts Gates at the helm of the Pentagon, where $3 trillion is unaccounted for, and trillions $ more wasted on worthless out of date weapons programs......lets his sword basically fall on the two most dangerous nations on earth, and rather pathetically points out their problematic dysfunctional relationship with the USA.
As if that was a revelation.
BUT it is the very USA which funds and props up these problematic and dysfunctional entities....thats the REAL PROBLEM.
The USA is NOT a fly on the wall....that can't help itself being steered into perpetual wars for ERETZ Israel.
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Robert Gates on How Israel & Saudi Arabia Pressure US into Wars of Choice
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By John Glaser at antiwar.com
Robert Gates’s new memoir, which I’ve mentioned I’m making my way through, has a nice example of how dangerous entangling alliances can be.
Not only does Gates write frankly about how U.S. interests are subordinated to those of our weaker allies, but he is unusually candid about the Bush administration’s use of force in the Middle East, describing it as “preventive” (which, of course, is another way of saying “war crime”). (Read Nuremberg laws)
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In 2007, Israel shared intelligence with the U.S. about a nuclear enrichment facility in Syria that had some connection to the North Korean regime (Didn't exist--BUT was an industrial facility in Syria....petro-chemicals?). Israel, according to Gates, explicitly wanted the U.S. to take military action because the reactor represented “an existential threat” to Israel. Israel, along with many members of the Bush administration, did not care a wit about the effect this would have on U.S. interests.(Dick Cheney and neocons----many of whom have business links to the military industrial complex which gives them $100 millions of dollars)
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Just one of the risks, as Gates writes, was that “any overt U.S. preemptive attack will cause a firestorm in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. Efforts to prove our case against Syria and North Korea, based on current available intelligence, will be unsuccessful or regarded with deep skepticism. U.S. military action will be seen as another rash act by a trigger-happy administration and could jeopardize our efforts in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and even with respect to missile defense in Europe. It would be seen as an effort to offset or distract from failures in Iraq.”
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And those were just some of the risks. There were others associated with an Israeli-led strike and Gates advised President Bush to tell Israel not to attack. Instead, several administration officials that Gates describes as “very pro-Israel” advocated giving Israel the green light. According to Gates, “the United States was being held hostage to Israeli decision making.”
.(Robert Gates saves the day)
In September, Israel bombed the reactor in what administration officials nicknamed the “Tojo option – referring to the Japanese prime minister who ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.”
.(Oh pleeez Japan 1941, and Syria now are worlds apart, so need to conflate the two with such ridiculous paranoiac analogies......Japan in 1941 was a highly industrialized power that eventually mobilized 7 million men from a population of 100 million Japanese and Koreans.......and conquered most of Asia, and eventually killed 15 million people.......Syria on the other hand is a weak Third World UN-industrialized regime, with a military of 330,000 trying to hold down 100,000 'al-CIA-duh' cannibals, and run by an extremely handsome President, who happens to be a very nice, reasonable, cosmopolitan, moderate, and SECULAR leader----just listen to his interviews on RT....you don't have to be an intelligence expert to gage his personality, and that he constitutes a zero threat to the USA, and indeed Israel. His only 'crime' is his association with Iran. Now that is because the ruling elite in Syria are Alawites, which is a branch of Shiaism, the state religion of Iran. Hey guess what lets blame the French for their colonial policy of promoting a minority (Alawites) over the majority--Sunnis.
Presumably the Einsteins in the USA government think "al-CIA" cannibals in power in Damascus will do just fine for the USA?....and Israel?.....and the Western Casino loving Saudis)
Aside from Syria, a much bigger worry was the entangling alliances Washington had with Israel and Saudi Arabia that relegated Iran to permanent bogeyman status. “I worried about the influence of the Israelis and the Saudis in the White House, particularly Prime Minister Olmert and King Abdullah, and their shared desire to have problems like Iran ‘taken care of’ while Bush was still president,” Gates writes.
.(If we google Olmert we should find that he has taken a far more pragmatic position vis a vi Iran than before......unlike Netanyahu he is not a dangerous messianic ideologue fixed for eternity in his ways)
Gates then describes a meeting with the Saudi King Abdullah, in which he explicitly demands that the U.S. bomb Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia:
Abdullah, a heavyset man in his eighties with a history of health problems, was very sharp and did not mince words as he smoked one cigarette after another. He wanted a fill-scale military attack on Iranian military targets, not just the nuclear sites.(That would constitute 3000 industrial and infrastructure sites....and 3-5 months of uninterrupted bombing, whilst the Iranians quietly receive the attacks along with Russia and China and Pakistan)
He warned that if we did not attack, the Saudis “must go our own way to protect our interests.”(Saudi Arabia has backed Sunni terrorist groups such as Jundallah operating and conducting terrorism in its SE region-----Iran has captured its leader)
As far as I was concerned he was asking the United States to send its sons and daughters into a war with Iran in order to protect the Saudi position in the Gulf and the region, as if we were mercenaries. He was asking us to shed American blood, but at no time did he suggest that any Saudi blood might be spilled.
He went on and on about how the United States was seen as weak by governments in the region.(The USA is the sole hyper-power, with REAL expenditure on security around $1.5 trillion annually.....and 1000 military bases around the world....and ongoing wars and operations in 130 countries-----it like Sparta is fighting itself into eventual oblivion)
The longer he talked, the angrier I got, and I responded undiplomatically. I told him that absent an Iranian military attack on U.S. forces or our allies, if the president launched another preventive war in the Middle East, he would likely be impeached; that we had our hands full in Iraq; and that the president would use military force only to protect vital American interests.It has been known that the Saudis take this position in private talks with U.S. administrations, as we learned from classified State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, Abdullah “has repeatedly urged the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear program,” at one time even advising the U.S. to “cut the head off the snake,” a comment many considered to be an ill-concealed metaphor for regime change. But what Gates describes is particularly outrageous.
