Historical amnesia often distorts Western perceptions of the Middle East. In a manner comparable to that taken in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, Western policymakers attempting to develop an effective strategy for dealing with Iran are experiencing troubling lapses of historical memory regarding the colonial and post-colonial past. Such analytical failures could make the world pay the dreadful price of a new regional conflagration that would result from a US or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. Seasoned analysts such as Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker have already published forecasts of such an attack.

I arrived in Beirut in 1965 as the Christian Science Monitor’s Middle East correspondent after covering North Africa’s colonial and post-colonial wars. Our small community of correspondents was covering the Ba’ath party’s 1963 seizure of power in Syria as well as its efforts to gain similar control in Iraq with the support of a ruthlessly ambitious and CIA-assisted politician known as Saddam Hussein.

Four decades later, the administration of US President George W. Bush was able to convince the US public and Congress that the same Saddam Hussein’s largely nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program posed a clear and imminent threat to US security. A cabal of Bush’s neoconservative advisers, influenced and informed by Israel, had convinced many US citizens of this alleged threat. They drew the United States into a costly conflict that has drained US manpower and has helped to push the budget deficit close to its statutory red line of US$11.8 trillion. Now in 2006, history and more authentic intelligence point to regional dangers from a possibly nuclear Iran. But in order to develop an effective understanding of what ought to be done regarding this situation in Iran, it is necessary to understand first how historical amnesia contributed to the US decision to engage in a costly and destabilizing military invasion of Iraq.

Iraq and Israel: An Ancient Enmity

One of the most commonly overlooked dimensions of the US occupation of Iraq is the historical relationship between Iraq and Israel. The United States’ failure to factor this rivalry into its calculations in the run-up to the war in Iraq may have contributed to a bias toward Israel that warped its perception of the security threat posed by Iraq.

The millenia-long rivalry between the Jews and the Mesopotamians has its roots in the biblical Babylonian captivity of the Israelites. These tensions were later manifested in the enmity between Israel and Iraq. By 1948 the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had become the central point of contention between Iraq and Israel. Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, and his fledgling intelligence apparatus oversaw the covert and overt evacuation of about 300,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel between the late 1940s and 1951. Iraq’s Hashemite monarchy and its wily senior minister, Nuri al-Said, managed to remain allies with Britain, the United States, and Turkey while simultaneously opposing the rise of Israel beginning with the 1948 to 1949 Arab-Israeli War.

The traumatic 1947 to 1951 exodus of Iraqi Jews, including many prosperous and highly educated professionals, reinforced the enmity. It was further exacerbated by Israel’s alliance with Iraq’s Kurds, an alliance that was temporarily strengthened in the 1970s with help from the Shah of Iran and the Nixon-Kissinger leadership in the United States. As a result, Iraq, unlike Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, is the only Arab belligerent never to have signed a peace treaty, temporary armistice, or cease-fire with Israel. Until now, this history has remained a persistent backdrop for Iraq’s role in Arab-Israeli confrontations over Palestine.

Complicating this relationship was the Desert Storm military expedition to expel Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in 1991, which eradicated the preexisting US support for Saddam Hussein and his opposition to revolutionary Iran. This alienation between the United States and Iraq was accompanied by a solidification of the informal military alliance that had already existed between the United States and Israel. This development would prove to be crucial one decade later when the United States collaborated with Israel in order to gain intelligence regarding Hussein’s WMD program. Former Israeli intelligence officers and think-tank gurus ruefully admitted to me in 2004 that such collaboration had occurred and that the same false intelligence used by the United States to justify its intervention had been supplied to Israel by a variety of non-objective sources, including Iranian émigrés and exiles. Israeli military and political analysts initially cheered the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, both for removing the short- and long-term strategic threat to Israel and for terminating Hussein’s control of Iraq’s vast oil resources. Recently, however, these same analysts have deplored repeated US tactical mistakes and the chaos that is accompanying the US-led coalition’s desperate attempts to transform the fissiparous Iraqi nation into a democratic state. They warned that an inevitable US military withdrawal, perhaps in 2007 or 2008, would expose Israel to “great strategic peril,” as Iraqi military historian Ze’ev Schiff wrote in Haaretz.

As we know from the leaked British cabinet memorandum of summer 2002, Bush’s fixation on invading Iraq and forcibly removing Hussein’s dictatorship did not depend solely on false intelligence. Several former Bush advisers confirm that Israel’s historically aggressive actions against Iraq pleased many of Bush’s strategists. They were also encouraged by previous Israeli intelligence cooperation and assessments of Arab intentions, which bred trust between the Israeli and US intelligence services. Such predispositions and the failure to account for the historical rivalry between Iraq and Israel only reinforced the determination of Bush’s neoconservative counselors to discard the advice of seasoned experts on Iraq in the State Department and in academia and follow the advice of Israeli analysts.

Iran’s Historical Nuclear Aspirations

Just as historical amnesia contributed to the United States’ biased approach to Iraq, so has it also played a role in the West’s ineffective initiatives to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons program. In order to reach a mutually beneficial compromise in the future, the West must consider the old Iranian relationships with both its Middle-Eastern neighbors, including Israel, and distant powers such as the United States. It must also take into account how these relationships will influence Iran’s growing ambition to become a regional nuclear power, especially in light of Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal.