Britain inquiry into the Iraq war
has been dealt a severe blow by a pro-Israel activist on the inquiry
committee who has given an interview to a Jewish settlers’ radio
accusing his critics of “anti-Semitism”.
The Iraq Inquiry, led by former civil servant John Chilcot, was set up by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in June 2009 in order to “identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict”. It began its deliberations in November.
On 22 November 2009, as the inquiry, was preparing to convene, a former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote an article in the Independent on Sunday
Writing in the Independent newspaper a week later, Richard Ingrams wonderedThe Times, in which the paper described his comments as “disgraceful”, Ingrams said:
newspaper expressing concern at the fact that two out of the five
members of the inquiry’s committee, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence
Freedman, were “strong supporters of Tony Blair and/or the Iraq war”.
He also pointed out that both Gilbert and Freedman were Jewish, and
that “Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism”.
whether the Zionists' links to the Iraq invasion would be brushed
aside. Referring to Oliver Miles’s article and to an extraordinary
attack on Miles by
The ambassador's comments and the attention paid to them by The Times may be helpful in the long run, if only by drawing attention to the Israeli dimension in the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a dimension that hitherto has scarcely been mentioned. Yet it is a fact that the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein was initiated, well before 9/11, by a group of influential American neo-cons, notably Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz (once described byTime magazine as "the godfather of the Iraq war") nearly all of whom were ardent Zionists, in many cases more concerned with preserving the security of Israel than that of the US.
Given that undeniable fact, the pro-Israeli bias of Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman, both of them supporters of the 2003 invasion, is a perfectly respectable point to raise. It is equally legitimate to ask if at any point the panel will investigate or even refer to the US neo-cons and their links to Israel. Call me snide if you like, but I very much doubt they will.
On 28 January 2010, BBC Radio 4’s
“Today” programme reported that Martin Gilbert, whom it described as a
“proud practising Jew and Zionist”, had expressed “deep unease” at the
previous November’s articles by Miles Oliver and Richard Ingrams.
The radio broadcast extracts from an interview given by Gilbert to an internet radio station
run by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank in which he described
Oliver’s and Ingrams’s articles as “really unpleasant”. He referred to
people who questioned the wisdom of including pro-Israel activists in
an inquiry whose purpose was to investigate an Israeli-instigated war
as “these anti-Semites”. And he said that “more leading figures” should
“speak out against” what he described as the “crude anti-Israel
feelings” in Britain.
In the interview with the settlers’ radio station, Martin Gilbert
appeared to be aware of the logic behind concerns regarding the role of
Israel lobbyists and agents of influence in the Anglo-US invasion of
Iraq in 2003. As an eminent scholar, he should therefore understand why
the British public should be worried that an active supporter of Israel
on the Iraq Inquiry might not be impartial or rigorous in scrutinizing
the conduct of those who launched the aggression against Iraq at the
behest of pro-Israel activists like himself. Instead, he chose to
divert attention with the smokescreen of “anti-Semitism”.
This
subterfuge casts serious doubt about the integrity of the Iraq Inquiry.
It means that if Israel lobbyists played a part in pushing Britain to
join the US aggression against Iraq, this would probably be overlooked
by the Israeli activists on the inquiry, who make up 40 per cent of the
panel.
It also means that the Iraq Inquiry has not only been severely compromised, but was in fact doomed before it even started.