or General of the US Defence Department, in a declassified report, released on April 5 at the request of Carl M. Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Together with his boss, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defence secretary, Douglas Feith was part of an influential group of pro-Israeli neo-conservatives in the Bush administration who exploited the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the US to campaign and plot the overthrow of Saddam Hussain.

According to the Inspector General’s report, Feith produced intelligence assessments which claimed that there was a ‘mature, symbiotic relationship [between Iraq and Al Qaida]’ in no fewer than ten specific areas, including training, financing and logistics.

To bolster his case, Feith made much of an alleged meeting in Prague in April 2001 between Mohammad Atta, one of the Al Qaida hijackers and an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad Al Ani.

Leaked

Feith leaked his fraudulent conclusions to the Weekly Standard, the neo-con magazine which, under its editor William Kristol, had been stridently calling for ‘regime change’ in Iraq since the late 1990s.

After a thorough examination of the evidence, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) both concluded that Feith was wrong. They found ‘no conclusive signs’ of a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaida and no evidence of ‘direct cooperation.’

But Feith was not deterred. Instead, he did his best to discredit the CIA and DIA findings and he presented his phoney evidence as fact to another prominent neo-con, I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and to Deputy National Security Director Steven Hadley.

In due course, Feith’s dubious material was passed up to President Bush and Cheney who used it in speeches preparing the public for war in March 2003. The intrigue was successful.

Senator Carl Levin said in a written statement last week that the Defence Department’s report fully demonstrated why the Inspector General had concluded that Douglas Feith had ‘inappropriately’ written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between Iraq and Al Qaida.

As is now plain for everyone to see, the war has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States, for Iraq and for the whole Middle East. But it is only now that an official report has clearly pointed the finger at the men largely responsible.

Feith and his neo-con associates were primarily concerned about enhancing Israel’s security by smashing a major Arab state, thereby removing any potential threat to Israel from the east. Overthrowing Saddam was to be only the first step in a thorough transformation of the region.

In the event, the United States has suffered a devastating blow to its political influence and moral authority, as well as to its finances and to the fighting ability of its armed services, while Israel, confronted by a resurgent Iran, is itself less secure than before the war.

The reckless enterprise of Feith and his fellow neo-cons would probably have had little chance of success had they not managed to team up with men like Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Bush himself bought their agenda - a decision he must now bitterly regret, as he and his advisers seek desperately to find a way out of the Iraqi quagmire.

In retrospect, the campaign by Israel and its American friends to push the US into war with Iraq must be judged one of the most audacious sabotage operations of the Arab world ever mounted.

Destabilisation

Israel has a long history of seeking to destabilise its neighbours in the belief that a weak and divided Arab world is to its advantage.

But for sheer daring, the intrigue which carried the US into war against Iraq can best be compared to the Iran-Contra Scandal of the mid-1980s when Israel started sending American weapons secretly to Iran from the start of the Iraq-Iran war in 1980, even while American hostages were held captive in Tehran and in infringement of the arms embargoes imposed by both the Carter and Reagan administrations.

Israel’s interest was to fuel the war so as to rule out any possibility that Iraq might turn westwards and combine its military power with that of Syria. Selling arms to Iran, which was then fighting for its survival, was a way to weaken two potential enemies - Iran and Iraq.

Can Israel now be persuaded to seek its long-term security by means of good neighbourly relations with the Arabs rather than by spreading mayhem among them?

The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, re-launched at the recent Arab Summit in Riyadh, could perhaps be seen as an invitation to Israel to play a constructive rather than a destructive role in the region.

The Arab message to Israel seems to be this: “Stop being the bad boy on the block. Let’s put war behind us and cooperate for a better future.”

But Israel’s interventionist instincts are so deeply ingrained that it would take something of a revolution in its military and security thinking for it to seize the opportunity now being presented to it.

Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs