West Asia At War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games

by Talmiz Ahmad

Israel was a fervent believer in regime change in Iraq, and used the WMD argument effectively in Washington to obtain the sanctions regime and the intrusive inspections, which were ostensibly under the UN, but were effectively controlled by the US. Despite the failure of the inspectors to discover any evidence of development of WMD by Iraq, in February 2001, an Israeli newspaper said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon believed that ‘Iraq poses more of a threat to regional stability than Iran, due to the errant, irresponsible behaviour of Saddam Hussein’s regime’.55 Israel itself and its lobby in the US worked hard to ensure that, after the Cold War, US–Iran relations did not improve. The principal instrument deployed for this purpose was the ‘dual containment’ policy that required the US to deploy substantial troops in the Gulf to ‘contain’ these two regional adversaries. Commentators have noted that the policy document first prepared by Martin Indyk was ‘a copy of an Israeli proposal’.