Israeli
Think Tank: Don’t Destroy ISIS - It’s a “Useful
Tool” Against Iran, Hezbollah, Syria
Head of a right-wing think tank says the
existence of ISIS serves a "strategic purpose"
in the West's interests
By Ben Norton
August 24,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Salon"
- According to a think tank that does contract
work for NATO and the Israeli government, the
West should not destroy ISIS, the fascist
Islamist extremist group that is committing
genocide and ethnically cleansing minority
groups in Syria and Iraq.
Why? The
so-called Islamic State “can be a useful tool in
undermining” Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and Russia,
argues the think tank’s director.
“The
continuing existence of IS serves a strategic
purpose,” wrote Efraim Inbar in “The Destruction of
Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake,” a
paper published on Aug. 2.
By
cooperating with Russia to fight the genocidal
extremist group, the United States is committing a
“strategic folly” that will “enhance the power of
the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus axis,” Inbar argued,
implying that Russia, Iran and Syria are forming a
strategic alliance to dominate the Middle East.
“The West
should seek the further weakening of Islamic State,
but not its destruction,” he added. “A weak IS is,
counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS.”
Inbar, an
influential Israeli scholar, is the director of the
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a think
tank that says its
mission is to advance “a realist, conservative,
and Zionist agenda in the search for security and
peace for Israel.”
The think
tank, known by its acronym BESA, is affiliated with
Israel’s Bar Ilan University and has been
supported by the Israeli government, the NATO
Mediterranean Initiative, the U.S. embassy in Israel
and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International
Affairs.
BESA also
says it “conducts specialized research on contract
to the Israeli foreign affairs and defense
establishment, and for NATO.”
In his
paper, Inbar suggested that it would be a good idea
to prolong the war in Syria, which has destroyed the
country, killing hundreds of thousands of people and
displacing more than half the population.
As for the
argument that defeating ISIS would make the Middle
East more stable, Inbar maintained: “Stability is
not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only
if it serves our interests.”
“Instability and crises sometimes contain portents
of positive change,” he added.
Inbar
stressed that the West’s “main enemy” is not the
self-declared Islamic State; it is Iran. He accused
the Obama administration of “inflat[ing] the threat
from IS in order to legitimize Iran as a
‘responsible’ actor that will, supposedly, fight IS
in the Middle East.”
Despite
Inbar’s claims, Iran is a mortal enemy of ISIS,
particularly because the Iranian government is
founded on Shia Islam, a branch that the Sunni
extremists of ISIS consider a form of apostasy. ISIS
and its affiliates have massacred and ethnically
cleansed Shia Muslims in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.
Inbar noted
that ISIS threatens the regime of Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad. If the Syrian government survives,
Inbar argued, “Many radical Islamists in the
opposition forces, i.e., Al Nusra and its offshoots,
might find other arenas in which to operate closer
to Paris and Berlin.” Jabhat al-Nusra is Syria’s
al-Qaida affiliate, and one of the most powerful
rebel groups in the country. (It recently changed
its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.)
Hezbollah,
the Lebanese-based militia that receives weapons and
support from Iran, is also “being seriously taxed by
the fight against IS, a state of affairs that suits
Western interests,” Inbar wrote.
“Allowing
bad guys to kill bad guys sounds very cynical, but
it is useful and even moral to do so if it keeps the
bad guys busy and less able to harm the good guys,”
Inbar explained.
Several
days after Inbar’s paper was published, David M.
Weinberg, director of public affairs at the BESA
Center, wrote a similarly-themed
op-ed titled “Should ISIS be wiped out?” in
Israel Hayom, a free and widely read right-wing
newspaper funded by conservative billionaire Sheldon
Adelson that
strongly favors the agenda of Israel’s
right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
In the
piece, Weinberg defended his colleague’s argument
and referred to ISIS as a “useful idiot.” He called
the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran “rotten” and argued
that Iran and Russia pose a “far greater threat than
the terrorist nuisance of Islamic State.”
Weinberg
also described the BESA Center as “a place of
intellectual ferment and policy creativity,” without
disclosing that he is that think tank’s director of
public affairs.
After
citing responses from two other associates of his
think tank who disagree with their colleague,
Weinberg concluded by writing: “The only certain
thing is that Ayatollah Khamenei is watching this
quintessentially Western open debate with
amusement.”
On his
website, Weinberg includes BESA in a list of
resources for “hasbara,”
or pro-Israel propaganda. It is joined by the
ostensible civil rights organization the
Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel think
tanks, such as the Middle East Media Research
Institute (MEMRI) and the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy (WINEP).
Weinberg
has
worked extensively with the Israeli government
and served as a spokesman for Bar Ilan University.
He also identifies himself on his website as a
“columnist and lobbyist who is a sharp critic of
Israel’s detractors and of post-Zionist trends in
Israel.”
Inbar
boasts an array of accolades. He was a member of the
political strategic committee for Israel’s National
Planning Council, a member of the academic committee
of the Israeli military’s history department and the
chair of the committee for the national security
curriculum at the Ministry of Education.
He
also has a prestigious academic record,
having taught at Johns Hopkins and
Georgetown and lectured at Harvard, MIT,
Columbia, Oxford and Yale. Inbar served as a
scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars and was appointed as a
Manfred Wörner NATO fellow.
The
strategy Inbar and Weinberg have proposed,
that of indirectly allowing a fascist
Islamist group to continue fighting Western
enemies, is not necessarily a new one in
American and Israeli foreign policy circles.
It is reminiscent of the U.S. Cold War
policy of supporting far-right Islamist
extremists in order to fight communists and
left-wing nationalists.
In
the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA
and U.S. allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia
armed, trained and funded Islamic
fundamentalists in their fight against
the Soviet Union and Afghanistan’s
Soviet-backed socialist government. These
U.S.-backed rebels, known as the mujahideen,
were the predecessors of al-Qaida and the
Taliban.
In
the 1980s, Israel adopted a similar policy.
It supported right-wing Islamist groups like
Hamas in order to undermine the Palestine
Liberation Organization, or PLO, a coalition
of various left-wing nationalist and
communist political parties.
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s
creation,” Avner Cohen, a retired Israeli
official who worked in Gaza for more than 20
years,
told The Wall Street Journal.
As
far back as 1957, President Dwight
Eisenhower
insisted to the CIA that, in order to
fight leftist movements in the Middle East,
“We should do everything possible to stress
the ‘holy war’ aspect.”
Ben Norton is a politics reporter and staff
writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter
at
@BenjaminNorton.
|