Free The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran by David Crist

Middle East. Knowing full well the hawkish Cold War views of the new civilian leaders in Washington, the Israeli government emphasized the Soviet hand in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Just a month after the inauguration, the Israeli foreign minister showed up in a Pentagon conference room to meet with Secretary Weinberger. Yitzhak Shamir repeatedly stressed to Weinberger that the Soviet Union created most of the region’s instability. “The PLO is a terrorist organization that works directly for the Soviet Union,”Shamir said forcefully, if not entirely truthfully, to Weinberger during one of their first meetings. Prime Minister Menachem Begin would repeat this mantra in his first meeting with Reagan in the Oval Office. He saw little difference between Soviet client states in the Middle East and those of the Warsaw Pact in Europe. He offered the use of Israeli air bases and ports, even going so far as to commit the Israeli air force to fly for the U.S. military over the Persian Gulf. In return, he wanted the United States to essentially scrap its recent agreements with Arabs supporting the rapid deployment force. Begin singled out Iraq as the key enemy for Israel, and by inference the United States, due to its large conventional military and budding nuclear program. That Israel’s anxiety over the military might of Iraq had little to do with the Cold War was omitted from the talking points, but the prime minister’s forceful advocacy for Israel as a Cold War asset to Washington affected American officials. 17
     
    Alexander Haig, now secretary of state in the Reagan administration, never needed convincing; he already viewed the Middle East through a Cold War lens and was an ardent supporter of Israel. Both he and Reagan believed that Israel should be included in CENTCOM, an opinion initially shared by Weinberger too.
     
    However, both the Joint Chiefs and the civilians in the Defense Department swayed Weinberger to recommend against it. The Joint Chiefs believed that Israel lay too far from the Persian Gulf and that including Israel would jeopardize the important basing agreements with the Arab nations. 18 The senior civilian responsible for military issues apart from the Soviet Union was a marine Vietnam veteran, Bing West. He warned Weinberger that Reagan was under the undue influence of a pro-Israeli staffer on the National Security Council, or NSC, and that this was why he wanted the Jewish state included in CENTCOM.
     
    This insinuation greatly irritated Weinberger. “He’s the president,” the secretary responded to West. “Whose advice he consulted before making a decision is irrelevant.”
     
    After meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on May 25, 1982, however, Weinberger reversed his position and wrote to Reagan recommending excluding Israel, Lebanon, and Syria from the new Middle East command out of deference to Arab sensibilities. “I do not entirely share this view, but we can always change it if need be,” Weinberger wrote. 19
     

     
    T he replacement for P. X. Kelley and the first commander of CENTCOM was Robert “Barbed-Wire Bob” Kingston. Tall and thin, with a stern demeanor and explosive temper, Kingston was all about the business of war. “He had a gaze that said, ‘Don’t fuck with me,’” remarked Jay Hines, the longtime civilian historian at CENTCOM. He’d earned his moniker when he strung concertina wire around his command post to keep soldiers from walking on the grass. While no great strategic thinker, Kingston was a warrior, gifted with the natural ability to lead men in combat. As a young lieutenant during the Korean War, he’d led a hundred-man force up to the frozen bank of the Yalu River on the Chinese border and had repeatedly distinguished himself during the American army’s chaotic flight south following the Chinese intervention in November 1950.
    Kingston had a long association with the CIA. After his first tour in Korea, he moved over to a joint military-CIA