- BEIRUT -- Long before the
American neoconservatives led by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Dick Cheney
and others became the ideological soul of the Bush administration, their
intention was to make Israel unassailable. The cataclysm of Sept. 11, 2001,
allowed them to put that plan into action. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein
and eliminating one of Israel's most implacable foes was a key objective.
Once that was achieved, the new, US-controlled Iraq could be used to help
Israel penetrate the Arab world, if not by diplomatic recognition then
by other means.
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- So it did not come as a surprise last week when the Israeli
media reported that Israel's Sonol fuel company is supplying US forces
in Iraq with 25 million liters of refined fuel a month under a $70 million-$80
million contract. The contract was awarded by Kellogg Brown & Root
(KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, whose dealings in Iraq under the Bush
administration have stirred great controversy, not least because Cheney
is its former CEO.
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- Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves after
Saudi Arabia, but occupation forces have to import refined fuel because
of the constant sabotage of oil installations and pipelines and because
of poor maintenance of refineries over the years, particularly during the
12 years of UN sanctions that ended once Saddam was overthrown.
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- The deal with Sonol, one of Israel's largest oil-product
marketing firms, is the first known commercial link between Israel and
Iraq since US-led forces toppled Saddam in April 2003. But there may well
be others, because Israeli companies have been trying to find a way around
political roadblocks that prevent them from operating in Iraq under US
cover.
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- There is a more far-reaching element involved in Israeli
efforts to build ties with Iraq, which under Saddam was one of its most
vociferous enemies: reaching out to the wider Arab world as it started
to do after the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians. The Sonol deal
has emerged following months of backroom lobbying by Israeli business interests
in Washington with the Bush administration for access to Iraq's multi-billion-dollar
reconstruction program. For political reasons, the administration and the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad have excluded Israeli
firms as main contractors in the vast array of projects under way in Iraq.
The Israelis have accepted that. But they have been pressing hard for subcontractor
deals, and the Sonol contract could be the first.
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- Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, recently
gave an indication that this was the Israelis' way in. There were, he said,
"very few restrictions on subcontractors."
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- The State Department oversees the reconstruction program,
but Boucher added that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World
Bank have their own rules for tenders in Iraq that might involve companies
with Israeli connections. Still, Israel was absent from a December 2003
list of countries eligible to participate in tenders. Israel's exclusion
was to avoid antagonizing the Arab world, which is already hostile to US
policy in the Middle East.
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- Israel's desire to exploit US control of Iraq became
abundantly clear in early 2003, when Israel's finance minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, annulled a long-standing prohibition on Israeli companies trading
with Iraq, opening the door for possible business following Saddam's removal.
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- Dozens of companies began procedures to export to Iraq.
In August 2003, Israel's Export Institute organized a one-day conference
in Tel Aviv on how to do business in Iraq.
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- Since then the Israelis have been looking for loopholes.
One route is to join up with foreign companies that are acceptable to both
the Americans and the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
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- Jordanian and Turkish companies that have experience
doing business with Iraq are favored, but firms from other countries which
supported the US invasion of Iraq, such as Australia, Britain and Spain,
are also being targeted.
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- Israeli companies, particularly in the field of agriculture,
have made significant, albeit discreet, inroads into the Muslim republics
of Central Asia since the Cold War ended in 1991. The corporate structures
they have built there, particularly in relation to Caspian Sea oil, could
also be useful when it comes to getting into Iraq by the back door.
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- Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan in particular are closely
allied with Israeli commercial interests and Israeli military intelligence.
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- Some time before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Jewish lobby
groups in Washington, seeing the possibility of strengthening Israel's
relations with the Arab world, initiated contacts with the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), the umbrella organization for a variety of groups opposed
to Saddam and which was backed by the Pentagon. These contacts were encouraged
by the administration's neocons.
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- Among the key INC people they dealt with were the organization's
leader, Ahmed Chalabi, and the director of the INC's Washington office,
Entifadah Qanbar. They encouraged the Jewish groups to believe that once
Saddam had been eliminated, good relations with Israel were possible. In
that, they were recklessly optimistic.
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- Iraqi hostility toward Israel pre-dated Saddam by several
decades and anyway it became clear once Saddam had been ousted that Chalabi
and his cohorts, most of whom had lived in exile for decades, were not
popular in postwar Iraq and were unlikely to hold high office. Intelligence
they provided to the Americans before, and even after, the invasion proved
to be deeply flawed and often dangerously misleading.
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- In the meantime, Israel is more tightly involved in Iraq
on the security front. A delegation from Israel's foreign intelligence
service, Mossad, reportedly visited Baghdad in August 2003 to coordinate
anti-terrorist efforts with the Americans.
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- US forces have consulted the Israelis on counterinsurgency
strategies and urban warfare, and the results of this have been that US
military operations have begun to look increasingly like Israeli operations
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip hardly likely to encourage Iraqis to deal
with Israel.
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- There have been suggestions in Israel that an old oil
pipeline built during the British Mandate in Palestine, from the Kirkuk
oil fields in northern Iraq to the port of Haifa on the Mediterranean,
could be rebuilt, opening a new export route from Iraq to Western Europe
and the US as well as providing Israel with its fuel requirements. The
pipeline, which ran through Jordan, was closed in 1948 when Israel became
a state. The Jordanian section was sold for scrap years ago.
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- Politically, reviving that oil route seems to be non-starter.
It would antagonize most Iraqis and the Arab world at large. It would also
become a target for saboteurs, just as Iraq's other pipelines are now.
But the idea continues to be kicked around in Washington and Jerusalem.
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- The Middle East Economic Survey, a highly respected Cyprus-based
oil industry newsletter, reported as recently as July 3, 2003, that an
Israeli oil delegation had held secret talks with Kurdish leaders in northern
Iraq to examine the possibility of reactivating the pipeline presumably
if the Kurds establish an independent state that incorporates the Kirkuk
oil fields which the Kurds have long claimed as theirs.
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- In the early 1970s, the Israelis, with CIA backing, supported
Iraq's Kurds in their separatist war against the Baghdad regime, but abandoned
them in 1975 when the Shah of Iran made peace with Iraq and the Kurds became
a political liability. No doubt the Kurds have not forgotten that betrayal,
but in the final analysis, getting a new state off the ground requires
pragmatism rather than passion.
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- - Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute
for Strategic Studies in London, is a Beirut-based journalist who has covered
Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. He is a regular contributor to
The Daily Star
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- Copyright© 1997-2004 The Daily Star (ISSN 1564-0310).
All rights reserved.
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