Israel is the only country since the end of the first Gulf War that has been systematically targeted by Saddam. His payment of between $10,000 and $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers was an attempt to incite violence against the Jewish state. No country in the last decade, not even the U.S., can claim to have lost more lives to Iraqi-backed terrorism than has Israel.

For years, Israel has been a principal source of intelligence for the U.S., providing Washington with copious amounts of information on virtually every aspect of the Iraqi regime. When the U.S. found it lacked the human assets necessary to understand developments in Iraq, the CIA and others turned to Israel and its community of 300,000 expatriate Iraqis for guidance.

U.S. intelligence agencies have relied heavily on Israel for information on Iraq's clandestine nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. In the months leading up to the war, there were reports that Israeli commandos were scouring the hills and deserts of western Iraq alongside their American, British, and Australian counterparts identifying hidden military targets and killing Scud missile launchers.

With Coalition forces now bogged down in an ugly guerrilla war throughout much of Iraq, Washington has once again called upon Israeli expertise. For months, reports have been rife in the international press that members of Israel's elite counter-terrorist units have been on the ground in Iraq, training U.S. forces in how to fight an urban guerrilla war. Israeli Special Forces may be in Syria as wel,l looking for evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and eliminating anti-Western mercenaries crossing the border into Iraq.

Many of the tactics and technologies now employed by American forces in the Sunni Triangle derive from Israel's experience in dealing with Palestinian Arab insurgents. These include the use of drones in aerial surveillance, the encirclement of Iraqi towns with barbed wire fences and the deployment of hunter-killer teams against so-called "ticking bombs," terrorist cells active in planning attacks on coalition forces.

Israel also has shared its methods for employing specialized bomb-detection equipment, its strategies for identifying and interdicting suicide bombers, its approach to the manning of checkpoints, its procedures for conducting interrogations of suspects in compliance with human-rights norms, and its knowledge of how to fuse real-time intelligence with field operations.

The Pentagon acknowledges that Israel's 40-month terrorist war has given its military unparalleled tactical experience and an acute understanding of how to cope with a pervasive terrorist threat.

In December, reports surfaced that the U.S. Special Operations Command had invited Israeli experts to Fort Bragg to share their know-how in conducting counter-insurgency operations. Force 121, one of the elite American units responsible for capturing Saddam Hussein, is believed to have benefited significantly from these exchanges. In line with current Israeli practice, the U.S. is now taking a stronger, more pro-active approach to hunting down and neutralizing the Iraqi resistance.

In recent weeks, representatives from the Army's Training and Doctrine Command flew to Tel Aviv for a firsthand look at Israeli units and to receive briefings by senior military commanders on what the country is doing to meet the growing sophistication of the terrorist threat. Still, say Israeli officials, they would like to do more to assist the coalition in stabilizing Iraq.

Treating Israel as a pariah in the Iraqi reconstruction process is at best insulting and at worst a repudiation of a close and loyal American ally. It is a decision that can only hurt Washington's case for regional economic integration and the promotion of shared democratic and free market values.

Moreover, the U.S. action reinforces the worst instincts of the Arab world, instincts that see non-Arabs as unworthy of respect and fair dealing. Barring Israeli companies from overseeing Iraqi contracts sends a political message that Washington's alliance with Israel, though beneficial to both countries, is somehow second rate when compared to those in the Arab world.

Perhaps it is time for U.S. taxpayers to question why countries that are so viscerally anti-American like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are rewarded with contracts, while a pro-American country like Israel is swept aside.

For the good of Iraq and America's war on terrorism, this needs to change. It is about time that policymakers in Washington grew up and acknowledged what always has been the case -- that the U.S. has no more consistent or more reliable ally in the Middle East than Israel.  

Dr. Fishbein is president of Fishbein Associates Inc., a public-policy consulting firm based in Potomac, MD. He is a former professional staff member (majority) of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and a former special assistant for national security affairs to Sen. Daniel K. Inouye. This article appeared on WorldNetDaily.com on January 13, 2004.

Outpost               - 8 -               February 2004