TO THE MODERATORS: I have NOT reassigned the item to a different category. I have merely parsed the text correctly and added tags so as to facilitate ease of reading.
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The modern history of U.S.-Israeli-Iranian relations dates back 35 years to a time of political intrigue when Israel's Likud leaders and the Reagan administration's neocons secretly worked to arm Iran's radical regime, an inconvenient truth given today's anti-Iran hysteria, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
After the July 14 agreement between six world powers and Iran to tightly constrain its nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the U.S. Congress to overturn the deal and ratchet up the confrontation with Iran, which he calls an "existential threat" to Israel.
As part of Israel's campaign to derail the agreement, Iran is portrayed as a reckless "rogue" regime with the madness dating back to 1979 when the Iranian revolution ousted the Shah of Iran and the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun with scores of diplomatic personnel taken hostage and 52 of them held for 444 days.
But the lost history from that era included the fact that Israel's Likud government of Menachem Begin moved quickly to reestablish secret ties with the "rogue" regime of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini and became an important source for covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980.
It was not until the early 1990s - after the eight-year war with Iran-Iraq War was over and Iran's budget for weapons purchases was depleted - when Israel began transforming Iran into its principal regional enemy. Similarly, American neoconservatives inside the Reagan administration sought to put U.S. policy in sync with Israel's pro-Iranian tilt in 1981, but the neocons shifted - along with Israel - to transform Iran into a psychotic enemy during the 1990s.
I discovered documents at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California, revealing that on July 21, 1981, just six months after Iran freed 52 Americans hostages at the same moment as President Reagan was being sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981, senior Reagan administration officials secretly endorsed third-party weapons sales to Iran.By that point, the Israeli arms pipeline to Iran already was functioning. Three days earlier, on July 18, an Argentine plane strayed off course and crashed (or was shot down) inside the Soviet Union exposing Israel's secret arms shipments to Iran, which apparently had been going on for months.
On July 13, 1981, with the Israel-to-Iran shipments in full swing but still five days before the Argentine plane crashed, this State Department neocon group pushed a formal plan for allowing third-country weapons shipment to Iran. But the idea encountered strong resistance from an Interdepartmental Group (IG), according to a memo from L. Paul Bremer III, who was then the State Department's executive secretary and considered one of the neocons.
Though many Americans were still livid toward Iran for the 444-day hostage crisis, Bremer's memo described a secret tilt toward Iran by the Reagan administration, a strategy which included confirming "to American businessmen that it is in the U.S. interest to take advantage of commercial opportunities in Iran." But the memo noted an inter-agency disagreement over whether the United States should oppose third-country shipments of non-U.S. weapons to Iran."The Arab perspective tends to automatically link Israeli actions and US policy. The Iraqi Government recently informed the Chief of the US Interest Section in Baghdad that Iraq considers the United States ultimately responsible for arms already transferred to Iran by Israel since, in Iraq's view, those transfers were possible only because US arms supplies to Israel are more than actually needed for Israel's defense."If Israeli deliveries of arms to Iran increase after a change of US policy, the Iraqi argument may find a sympathetic audience among moderate Arab states. This would add to the momentum of growing discontent with US-to-Israel arms policy, which surfaced within some moderate Arab states after the Israeli air attacks in Iraq and Lebanon.
This, in turn, would jeopardize US efforts to secure facility access and host-nation support in Arab states vital to US Southwest Asia strategy. "The JCS also disputed Iran's need for more weapons, saying: "Implicit in the argument for arms transfers to Iran is the idea that Iran needs arms to resist further Iraqi incursions. The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe, however, that the military capability of Iran is sufficient to meet the current Iraqi threat. "Iraq has long called for negotiations to end the war and on several occasions has announced its willingness to accept a ceasefire. Given this politico-military climate, deliberate US action to encourage an increase in arms supply to Iran is unwarranted at this time. Rather than adding to the prospects for peace, increased supplies of arms may encourage Iran to intensify its military actions and continue to reject the negotiated-settlement option."
Through the latter half of 1981, Iraqi officials complained bitterly about what they viewed as U.S. complicity in Israel's arms shipments to Iran and about Iran's resulting capability to sustain its war effort. State Department officials responded to these complaints by dancing around what they knew to be true, i.e., that Israel had shipped U.S.-origin and third-country weapons to Iran with U.S. knowledge and, to some degree, U.S. approval.
In one cable to British authorities, Secretary of State Haig described U.S. policy disingenuously as "hands off" toward the Iran-Iraq War. The cable said, "We have been assured repeatedly by Israeli officials at the highest level that arms subject to U.S. controls would not be provided Iran. We have no concrete evidence to believe that Israel has violated its assurances."
In 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told The Washington Post that U.S. officials had approved the Iranian arms transfers. "We said that notwithstanding the tyranny of Khomeini, which we all hate, we have to leave a small window open to this country, a tiny small bridge to this country," Sharon said, although other evidence suggested that the bridge was more like an eight-lane highway.
Source: Consortium News
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