Recent confirmations of an Israeli presence in Iraq should inspire action to safeguard Iraq's unity and cohesion, writes Ibrahim Nafie New evidence has come to light of Israeli involvement in Iraq. The sources that revealed this evidence are not Arab but American, and their claims are backed by documentation of the network of relations Israeli security agencies have woven and used to infiltrate Iraq. This time, at least, it cannot be said that the Israeli presence in Iraq is a figment of Arab conspiracy theorising, as some like to brand our methods of political analysis. Although many Arab and international studies on the role Israel played in escalating the Iraqi-US crisis before the fall of Saddam Hussein have noted that this drive was part of Israel's greater strategy to fragment multinational Arab political entities, they refrained from more intensive probing until more facts became available. These facts have now surfaced as the result of two recent developments. The first is a BBC interview with US Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, former military commander of Abu Ghraib prison. The second is the appointment of Salem Chalabi as head of the Iraqi Special Tribunal formed to prosecute former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and other members of his regime. In an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Karpinski said that in the course of her work in Iraq she had met a man with Middle Eastern features who spoke Arabic and who claimed to be involved in the interrogation of some Iraqi detainees. She said he told her, "I speak Arabic but I'm not an Arab; I'm from Israel." Although Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom emphatically denied Karpinski's claim, Seymour Hirsch, the American journalist who detonated the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, had another opinion. On the same programme he said that the information he had confirmed the presence of Israeli intelligence experts in Iraq, adding, "One of the Israelis' aims was to get to the prisoners who had been members of Iraqi intelligence and specialised in Israeli affairs." In addition Yossi Melman, intelligence analyst for Ha'aretz, was of the opinion that his government's denial was weak. General Karpinski's statements must be regarded as the testimony of an American military officer who harbours no animosity towards Israel, he wrote. Melman also alluded to the similarities between the methods of torture used in Iraqi detention centres and those Israeli intelligence use in their interrogations of Palestinian activists. Following his appointment as head of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, Salem Chalabi came under the scrutiny of some members of the western press. British journalists, in particular, were quick to expose his extensive American and Israeli connections. Salem is the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, president of the Iraqi National Congress. He is also the partner of an Israeli businessman in a law firm catering to US companies in Iraq. Their company, the Iraq International Law Group, promotes itself to its clients as "Your specialized gateway to the new Iraq." His partner, Mark Zell, is a member of the radical Israeli settler movement Gush Emunim. He is also a partner in a law firm with Undersecretary of Defence and long- time neo-conservative Iraqi War hawk Douglas Feith. An ardent Likud supporter, Feith was among those who tried to persuade former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wriggle out of the Oslo accords on the grounds that they were detrimental to the security of Israel. Subsequently he vehemently criticized Netanyahu for having signed the Wye River agreement in 1998. Now that the Israeli presence in Iraq is established fact, by the admission of important non-Arab figures and substantiated by other western news sources, we must take it very seriously. After all, the welfare of the Iraqi people and the future of a free, united and Arab Iraq are at stake, since there is little doubt that Israel aims to undermine the stability and geographical integrity of Iraq and its relations with the rest of the Arab world. The perils of Israeli involvement in the "new" Iraq cannot be overstated. It is already grave enough that the Sharon government and its allies and supporters in Washington worked so intensively to propel the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq, a drive that accelerated in the wake of 11 September with the feverish attempt to unearth any connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Clearly, Israel perceived that the invasion and occupation of Iraq served its long-range ambitions. This is not to exonerate the deposed Iraqi president from the major responsibility he had in bringing Iraq to its current pass. There is no question that he and his officials stubbornly courted the invasion that led to the occupation, or that the crimes his regime perpetuated against its neighbours and its own people were the prime cause of the regional and international isolation that fed the collision course with the US. Given Israel's efforts to promote the war and occupation there was every reason to expect it to persist in its efforts to fragment that sister Arab nation along ethnic, linguistic and sectarian lines. The recent corroboration of an Israeli presence in Iraq confirms this expectation, which, in turn, should compel the Iraqis and the Arabs in general to act quickly to end that infiltration in order to safeguard Iraq's territorial and demographic unity. Still, one cannot help but to wonder, here, what prompted the current US administration to allow an Israeli involvement in Iraq. Certainly, it must have realised the magnitude of the long-standing bad blood between Iraq and Israel, due to the complex history of political and military tensions between them and, consequently, the extent to which an Israeli presence in that country would create severe problems for US policy and for the US as a great power. Or is it possible that Washington let Israel into Iraq precisely because it knew the repercussions this would have? In my opinion the scandals that have so tarnished the reputation of the US military in Iraq were the product of Israeli planning. What General Karpinski was saying between the lines was that the torture and inhumane practices perpetrated against Iraqi prisoners were inspired by Israeli advice or were practical applications of Israel's interrogation expertise actively sought out by US intelligence authorities. Yossi Melman suggests as much in his observation that the torture methods used in Iraq were similar to those used by Israeli intelligence in their interrogations of Palestinian activists. Although I had formerly written that Israel's "Prison 1391" was a clone of Abu Ghraib the reverse now seems to be the case, which helps explain why the Abu Ghraib scandal is what triggered the heated debate in Israel over "Prison 1391." At the same time we must bear in mind the nature of the current US administration. A clique of radical ultra-conservatives, it has consistently given precedence to US relations with Israel over all other bilateral relations, and frequently placed Israeli interests above America's own interests. There is a vast difference between the current administration and that of Bush Senior. The latter, during the war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, kept the then Israeli Prime Minister Shamir in check, refusing to let Israel play any part in that war so as to safeguard the coalition which included many Arab countries. The Bush Senior administration then exerted enormous pressure on the rightwing Israeli government to take part in the Madrid peace conference, after which it campaigned intensively to topple the Shamir government in favour of a Labour government under Rabin. As for the current administration, instead of exerting pressure on Israel, it has let the current Likud government impose its agenda on the American agenda and to tarnish the reputation of the US and the American army. The brutal torture and degradation suffered by Iraqi prisoners can be attributed in large measure to the services of Israeli intelligence agencies, to which testify statements issued by American officials and Israeli press sources. This alone should make it imperative to end the Israeli presence in Iraq as part of the effort to eliminate the rancor over all the injustices visited upon the Iraqi people. Indeed, for the same reason, the current Iraqi interim government must handle the prosecution of Saddam Hussein with the greatest delicacy and wisdom. The first step towards this is to ensure that the judges selected are above all suspicion. Again I stress that no one sympathises with Saddam Hussein. The crimes he perpetrated against his neighbours and the even more heinous crimes he perpetrated against his own people are unpardonable. Under his regime, a country that was once wealthy in natural and human resources degenerated into an impoverished and indebted nation that was all the more vulnerable to invasion and occupation. In short, the interim government must summon the utmost objectivity and foresight in dealing with the trial and other crucial issues in order to pave the way for a truly new era for a peaceful, safe and vibrant united Iraq.
