A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies

By James Bamford. Doubleday, 2004, 420 pp. List: $26.95; AET: $18.

Reviewed by Mitch Kaidy

The most remarkable aspects of this book are its candor and revelations. Also remarkable is the fact that it was published by a leading New York publishing house—and twice quoted in Time magazine and twice reviewed in The New York Times! (The Sunday reviewer angrily rejected one of the book’s central theses, while the weekday reviewer accorded it a more nuanced hearing.)

Since author James Bamford’s central theses are “controversial”—i.e., he largely blames Israel for igniting terrorism, and presents evidence that top-level pro-Israel hard-liners in the Bush administration conceived the Iraq war to benefit Israel—his book provides some confirmation to those who for decades have criticized and opposed unbalanced American support of Israel, as well as the war on Iraq.

Those theses won’t be novel to Washington Report readers, but they are earthshaking to the overwhelming number of Americans who rely on the mainstream media for their Middle East information.

Few American books about the excruciating events of 9/11 are forthright and honest enough to link them to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—especially since such observations immediately draw angry charges of anti-Semitism.

But Bamford lifts the lid for those Americans who read books. According to the investigative journalist—author of Body of Secrets and Puzzle Palace, two well-received books on national security issues—the evidence linking Osama bin Laden and the events of Sept. 11 to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was prefigured in a note signed by the “Liberation Army” and passed to The New York Daily News after the initial attempt to bring down the World Trade Center Towers in February 1993.

Demanding an end to military and diplomatic aid to Israel, as well as an assurance that the U.S. “not…interfere with any of the Middle East countries’ interior affairs,” the note justified the attempted World Trade Center operation by stating that American “civilians who got killed are not better than those who are getting killed by American weapons.” That first attempt, of course, only partly successful, soon was forgotten.

Bamford documents that, two years later, Philippine police alerted the FBI in Manila that Middle Easterners were training for suicide missions “inside and outside the United States.” “It was clear,” writes the author, “that the United States had become a target and would be at great risk in the future. It was equally clear that the reason for the attacks was the country’s support for Israel and its occupation and treatment of the Palestinians.”

According to Bamford, Osama bin Laden’s interest in the Palestinian diaspora first was awakened in the late 1970s by a displaced Palestinian teacher, who motivated his well-to-do student to establish a training school for mujahadeen recruits. Indirectly refuting revisionists who dismiss Bin Laden’s Palestinian motivation, Bamford reveals that, before being turned toward the Palestinians’ plight, Bin Laden wanted to fight Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Kuwait.

Other bloody events intruded, however. Israel, apparently fixed on seizing Lebanese land—and on the eve of Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ bid for re-election—launched a savage 10-day aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon, culminating in its missile attack on the U.N. base at Qana, killing and wounding scores of civilians who had sought shelter there. Israeli authorities later claimed it was all a mistake, but both the United Nations and Amnesty International, terming it “a massacre,” condemned the attack as deliberate. Israel has rejected the U.N. demand that it pay $1.7 million in damages.

“While largely ignored in the American press, the massacre at Qana was front-page news in London, much of Europe and throughout the Middle East,” writes Bamford. “Already burning with hatred for America and Israel, the pictures…were likely the final shove, pushing Bin Laden over the edge….”

In one of the New York Times reviews, Fred Kaplan predictably rejected Bamford’s thesis that the Qana attack had everything to do with Bin Laden’s World Trade Center responses. Bin Laden’s anger, Kaplan asserted, stemmed exclusively from the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Unaccountably, Bamford neglects to mention the earlier hideous massacre at Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which claimed over 1,200 Palestinian children, women and men, and which most Middle Easterners—including Israel’s Kahane commission, which investigated the massacre—blamed on then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.

Had reviewer Kaplan translated from the Arabic Bin Laden’s several television statements, he wouldn’t have been so cocksure about motivation. Prominent in virtually all his statements, Bin Laden has expressed sympathy for the Palestinians’ plight at the hands of Israel. Bamford even provides a translation of one of Bin Laden’s pronouncements that confirms this.

In convincing and depressing detail, Bamford then goes on to illuminate the role of pro-Israel operatives in shaping President Bush’s violent blueprint for the Middle East, for which we now lamentably pay in American lives in Iraq. That policy, Bamford asserts, “had actually been drawn up secretly five years earlier by three of Bush’s top national security advisors expressly to benefit Israel and magnify its power over its neighbors.”

“A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (i.e., Israel) was written in 1996 for Israel’s incoming prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. When three of its authors—Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser—surfaced in the Bush administration, Under Secretary of Defense Feith created a quasi-independent Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon that, Bamford writes, “forged close ties to a parallel ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel”—incredibly circumventing their own country’s intelligence organization, the CIA, as well as the Mossad.

According to Bamford, that secret operation was intended to strengthen Israel and allow it to operate with impunity in dominating its Middle East neighbors. One of “A Clean Break’s” central tenets was that Middle East stability could come only if Saddam Hussain was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy.

Since this tiny insider group circumvented their own government and sparked the earthshaking war on Iraq in the service of a foreign country, the book’s revelations and consequences alone make it worth reading, pondering, and communicating to the world.