By David K. Shipler
History is a
fickle thing, and given Israel’s intransigence toward Iran today, and toward
the nuclear deal just negotiated, it’s worth remembering how differently the
two countries’ interests lined up thirty-five years ago, even after Iran’s
Islamic revolution of 1979.
In the early 1980s, during the
Iran-Iraq war, Israel’s then Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, invited me down to
his ranch for a chat. He had a specific purpose, which emerged during our long
conversation on a range of subjects. The point he pressed most urgently was the
need for the United States to repair its relations with Iran. The country was a
major player in the region, he argued, not to be ignored by Washington in the
aftermath of the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He believed the Americans
should be reaching out to Tehran, cultivating a restoration of ties.
His view
was self-serving, in that Iran was the chief counterweight to Iraq, Israel’s
archenemy at the time. Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel, Jordan had
a weak military. Syria and Israel were technically still at war but were
observing a de facto peace along their common border on the Golan Heights.
But Iraq was a formidable military
power in the region, and a threat. It had never endorsed the Arab-Israeli
armistice of 1948, was helping finance the Palestine Liberation Organization,
and had tried to go nuclear—an effort halted by Israel’s bombing in June 1981
of its nuclear reactor.
So Israeli officials quietly
celebrated the grinding Iran-Iraq war as it went on year after year, reasoning
that Iran would handicap and preoccupy Iraq and, in the longer term, serve as a
balance against aggressive impulses in Baghdad. The enemy of Iraq was, well, if
not a friend, at least a convenience. Indeed, Sharon publicly accused the US of
arming Iraq with heavy weapons during the war.
