Handcuffed by Iraq | The Jerusalem Post

Syria’s brutal civil war and Iran’s renegade nuclear program pose serious threats to countries across the Middle East and beyond. Yet Israel is the only nation truly stepping forward to confront these challenges, as the West still seems to be shell-shocked by the fallout of the 2003 Iraq war.

The US intelligence community in particular has been perilously slow at deciphering the obvious – that Iran is on the threshold of nuclear weapons capabilities and the Syrian regime has used chemical agents against its own citizens. This has given the Obama administration cover for its very hesitant approach to these impending threats.

Ten years ago, the US-led invasion of Iraq was driven by concerns over Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction and its involvement in sponsoring global terror, including a suspected role in the September 11 terror attacks. For instance, there were reports of mobile gas labs and Saddam Hussein’s attempts to acquire uranium ore in central Africa. Meanwhile, the lead 9/11 hijacker supposedly met with Iraqi agents in Prague and a mothballed jetliner outside Baghdad had been used to practice commandeering passenger planes with box-cutter knives.

Much of this intelligence was questioned at the time as being cooked up by hawkish and “Zionist” elements in Washington, particularly in the Pentagon. But then CIA chief George Tenet suggested the information gathered on Iraq’s WMDs was a “slam dunk” case and then-secretary of state Colin Powell held up that five-pound bag of sugar at the UN Security Council to underline the seriousness of the anthrax threat.

And so the invasion of Iraq ensued. Yet significant stockpiles of WMDs were never located and the death toll began to mount. Although Saddam was swiftly toppled, both al-Qaida and Iran prolonged the bloodshed by deliberately turning Iraq into the main battlefield against the Crusader West.

Now no one today pines away for Saddam’s return and most of his chemical and biological arsenals likely wound up in Syria. But the war fatigue from Iraq and the intelligence failures associated with that conflict are still impacting us, as the West seems handicapped in dealing with the growing Syrian and Iranian threats.

In the case of Iran, there has been a persistent gap between US and Israeli estimates on Tehran’s progress towards developing atomic weapons. The Americans and Europeans have had less confidence in their intelligence and thus have preferred diplomacy. That intelligence gap is now closing simply because Iran has drawn so close to the nuclear threshold. Thus, US President Barack Obama recently acknowledged that Tehran is one year or less away from being able to construct a nuclear bomb.

At the opening session of the UN General Assembly in September, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu famously set a red line for stopping Iran’s atomic quest, insisting the Ayatollahs must not be allowed to accumulate 250 kg. of uranium enriched to 20% purity – the amount needed to make one bomb. It is widely assumed that Iran has basically reached that point, although it has diverted some for use in fuel rods and needs a little more time now to build back up to Netanyahu’s red line.

In any event, we have reached the moment of truth on whether the US administration will keep its promise to confront Iran militarily, if necessary, or opt for containment. Vice President Joe Biden insists Obama “does not bluff,” but what if Biden is bluffing?

Meantime, the bloodbath in Syria has claimed more than 80,000 lives in the past two years, but the NATO countries have been loath to get involved, perhaps because Syria lacks oil reserves like Libya. Moreover, two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have soured the West on such interventions.

Obama did draw a red line in Syria, warning that the US would act if Syrian President Bashar Assad used his deadly arsenal of chemical weapons in his fight to stay in power. Yet in the face of credible reports that Assad loyalists indeed have used chemical agents on rebel forces, the White House now wants to establish a “chain of custody” back to the Assad regime.

As with Iran, this is a decision borne of a lack of Western political will to confront the rising dangers in Syria, and an intelligence community that is still gun-shy from the failures in Iraq a decade ago.

Israel, on the other hand, has trusted its intelligence and acted decisively to reinforce its own red lines in Syria. Jerusalem does not want to get entangled in the civil war between Assad and the Sunni majority, in part because the rebel forces are teeming with jihadists who hate Israel as well. But Netanyahu has warned that any attempt to funnel advanced weapons or WMDs to Hezbollah or al-Qaida militias would be thwarted.

The IDF has now backed up that warning with precision air strikes on at least three occasions in recent months. This includes twice targeting missile convoys headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as destroying a military research factory near Damascus.

These bold actions carried great risks, but they also sent a strong message to Iran that Israel means business when it comes to weapons of mass annihilation.

So far Syria has not retaliated for the Israeli attacks, most likely due to the Assad regime’s current preoccupation with survival. But it also failed to directly respond to the IAF’s reported strikes on the secret al-Kibar nuclear reactor in September 2006.

At that time, Israel had ample proof it was a nuclear plant based on a North Korean model and shared its hard evidence with the Bush administration. This included soil samples and photos of the reactor coil taken inside the plant by Israeli commandoes operating deep inside Syria. Yet the Bush team was still smarting from Iraq.

Recent accounts indicate vice president Dick Cheney stood alone in urging president George W. Bush to take military action. But secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged the matter be handed over to the UN. They relied on intelligence briefings which conceded the Syrian plant was a nuclear reactor, but questioned whether it was part of an atomic weapons program.

This reflected the fact that, after Iraq, America’s intelligence branches changed their entire system for grading the certainty and uncertainty of their data and conclusions, and consistently came down on the cautious side on nearly every security challenge analyzed.

In other words, the spooks got spooked by Iraq and have never recovered.

But not Israel! The Olmert government trusted its intelligence and courageously ordered air strikes on al- Kibar, which succeeded without drawing any Syrian military response.

No doubt Syria and its allies Iran and Hezbollah will now try to retaliate for the latest air strikes near Damascus through terror attacks on Israeli and Jewish “soft targets” abroad.

But Israel is starting to feel that it alone has the pluck to face the mounting threats from Syria and Iran, while the West remains handcuffed by the mistakes of yesteryear.

The problem is that Iran was and remains a much bigger threat to the region and the world than Iraq was 10 years ago. In fact, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon paid two separate visits to Washington in the lead-up to the Iraq war specifically to warn Bush that Iran was the greater threat.

So how did we wind up in this difficult place, where the West is so wearied of war and hamstrung by lingering doubts that it cannot deal with the real threat posed by Iran and its proxies? I believe all this negative fallout is because the US was seduced into Iraq.

Now Saddam is thankfully gone and our intelligence was not that far off. But something lured us into a fight in Iraq that dragged on way too long and handcuffed the West in dealing with the more serious menace in Tehran. I believe that something was what the Bible describes as seducing or deceiving spirits, which we are told will operate on a global scale in the “last days” (2 Thessalonians 2; 2 Timothy 3:13).

The West must defend our freedoms, but I believe we are being slowly seduced into an endless war with Islam. It is a spirit that wants to destroy Israel but will never succeed. Yet it will seek to drain our resolve and stir up excuses for demonizing Israel and the West. It also seeks to provoke us into a massive military response that would result in the deaths of multitudes of Muslims. And that perhaps is what the devil wants most of all.

David Parsons is media director for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem; www.icej.org