by Dore Gold
A dramatic front-page
New York Times story on Jan. 8, 2013 gave readers a rare glimpse into
the level of intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and Israel.
According to the article, written by two of the newspaper's leading
reporters David Sanger and Eric Schmitt, several months earlier senior
IDF officers had received satellite intelligence that showed Syrian
forces mixing chemical weapons at two sites and filling 227 kilogram
bombs. The chemical munitions were loaded onto vehicles near Syrian air
bases and, according to assessments, could be deployed within two hours
of an order by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Israel reportedly
handed the intelligence it had in its possession over to the Pentagon.
After U.S. President Barack Obama was informed, he worked to assemble an
international coalition to prevent Assad from employing his chemical
weapons against rebel forces in the Syrian civil war. The U.S. reached
out to Russia, China, Turkey and even to several Arab states that were
undoubtedly concerned with Assad's behavior on the basis of the
intelligence originally received from Israel.
Beyond the details
outlined in The New York Times report about the dangers emanating from
Syria's continuing uprising, the article also demonstrated how important
U.S.-Israel intelligence sharing had become. On the eve of Obama's
upcoming visit to Israel it is useful to take stock of the nature of the
security ties between the U.S. and Israel that have come to light in
open sources, like The New York Times report from January.
This report was
certainly not the first time that the extent of the security
relationship between the U.S. and Israel came to light. During the Cold
War, Israel provided the U.S. with data on the performance of captured
Soviet weapons systems that had been in Syrian and Egyptian arsenals. As
early as 1966, Israel provided the U.S. with a MiG-21 fighter jet that
the Mossad had flown out of Iraq; the MiG-21 was to become the workhorse
of the North Vietnamese Air Force.
In the years that
followed, Israel supplied Washington with whole Soviet radar systems. In
a famous remark, former head of U.S. Air Force Intelligence Maj. Gen.
George Keegan Jr. expressed his appreciation for Israel's contribution
to U.S. security by stating that the U.S. could not have received the
same kind of intelligence "with five CIAs."
Not everyone shares
this kind of enthusiastic view of the U.S.-Israel relationship. There is
a small but vocal school of thought led by Prof. John Mearsheimer of
the University of Chicago and Prof. Stephen Walt of Harvard University
who argue that even if Israel was a "valuable ally during the Cold War,"
this aspect of the relationship ended when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Since that time, in their judgment, Israel is not a strategic asset but
rather it is a strategic liability and the bilateral relationship is
only sustained by pro-Israel lobbying in Washington. Despite its flaws,
their 2007 book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" still
influences the discourse on Israel within the U.S.
Yet since the terror
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the security relationship between the U.S.
and Israel appears actually to be closer than ever. The two countries
are collaborating closely in the area of missile defense, as exemplified
by the recent testing of the Arrow-3 anti-missile system (tested on
Feb. 25). But the new threat of global terrorism has also transformed
the defense ties between the two countries. The key to winning the war
on terrorism was obtaining accurate intelligence about the organizations
and their leaders, who are waging this new war. It has required a scale
of intelligence cooperation that many states had been unwilling to
undertake in the past, including Israel.
After he left his
position as head of the research division of Israeli Military
Intelligence, Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser wrote a paper for the Saban
Center at the Brookings Institution in 2007 on how Israel was
implementing intelligence reforms. One critical area of reform was
intelligence cooperation, which had been restricted in the past. In
fact, according to Kuperwasser, Israeli military intelligence was not
only focusing on Israel's intelligence needs; it also was collecting and
analyzing intelligence "whose main beneficiary is the U.S."
In any event, it
appears that the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship remains vital in
multiple areas for both countries in the 21st century, just as it was
during the Cold War. The scale of joint military exercises has also
increased, reaching record numbers. Delegations from the U.S. Army's
Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) regularly study Israel's lessons
from its recent operations in the West Bank, Southern Lebanon and in the
Gaza Strip.
While the Pentagon has
not made public pronouncements on the application of these lessons to
U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would not be
surprising if one day it is disclosed that some of the tactics used in
the 2004 battle of Fallujah in Iraq could be traced back to the battle
of Jenin in 2002.
Signaling the
importance of defense ties between the two countries, visits by chairmen
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Israel and the Israeli chief of Staff
to the U.S. have become far more frequent in recent years. In 2007, the
commander of EUCOM, General Bantz Craddock called Israel the U.S.'s
"closest ally" in the Middle East in testimony before the House Armed
Services Committee. In a speech at the Washington Institute in April
2010, Obama's first National Security Adviser General James Jones
remarked: "I can say from long experience that our security relationship
with Israel is important for America."
Despite these
statements, Israel's critics have a built-in advantage when they debate
the value of the U.S.-Israeli defense ties to America. The substance of
much of U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation is classified. This is
particularly true of the area of intelligence cooperation. So if
academics like Mearsheimer and Walt question the value of the defense
relationship, what can Israel do? Clearly, it is not worth leaking
sensitive information that is classified as "secret" by both countries
in order to win a public relations battle. The degree that a strategic
partner is perceived as a reliable ally is affected by the extent to
which he can be trusted to protect secrets.
American military
experts voiced their concern in the past that if aspects of U.S.-Israeli
military cooperation were to become public, it would alienate the Arab
leaders from Washington. But at present, given the preoccupation of the
Sunni Arab states with the threat of Iran, they are not about to refuse
the visit of an American warship because it docked several weeks earlier
in Haifa.
In fact, U.S.
diplomatic cables reporting the visits of senior U.S. officers to Arab
capitals, that were published by Wikileaks, show that the leaders of the
Gulf states do not spend their time talking about Israel but rather
about what the U.S. should do to stop Iran. In many of the new conflicts
now erupting, Israel and the Arab states are actually on the same side.
Those writing commentary about the Middle East must take into account
this new reality and not present outdated stereotypes about the Arab
world that were probably never accurate to begin with.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3569
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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