COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : The U.S. Tilt to Iraq Was Never a Secret : The timing of ‘Iraqgate’ neatly distracted America from negative stories about Israel.

One of the more preposterous political soap operas now in progress is the uproar over “Iraqgate.” We are being treated to histrionic bellows of amazed outrage--from Democrats in Congress and from columnists such as the neoconservative William Safire--at the “disclosure” that the Reagan and Bush administrations were friendly to Iraq and supplied it with arms, advanced technology and intelligence throughout the 1980s and indeed up to the moment of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

This is not news. The analogy to “Iran-gate” is entirely bogus, for the simple reason that whereas assistance to Iran was entirely covert and ran counter to declared policy, the U.S. tilt to Iraq was public, even though some of the specific transfers were shrouded in secrecy.

Between 1980 and 1988, the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran and indeed gave Iraq the green light to commence hostilities. American assistance to Iraq in the area of intelligence was an open secret; U.S. credits to Iraq were also part of the effort to bolster that country in the long war of attrition against Iran. The United States was so forthright in its assistance that it openly provided naval protection for Iraqi tankers during the later stages of the war. In the course of this exercise the U.S. cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger jet. The war ended soon after, with Iran believing that the United States had become an active co-belligerent.

When the war was over, cordial relations continued, again with a clear public tilt buttressed by a steady and profitable trade in agricultural and technological commodities. These credits, it should be emphasized, were in no way secret.

The fresh-minted outrage at this dog-eared saga focuses in part upon the duplicitous nature of the tilt toward Iraq, given that that country is Israel’s mortal foe. An irony here is that from 1986 onward there was a keen debate among Israeli elites on the advisability of a tilt toward Iraq. Many on Israel’s military general staff held strongly to the opinion that such a tilt was called for, given Iraq’s hostility to Syria, which bulked far larger in Israeli minds as a threat.

Gen. Avraham Tamir, formerly director-general of the prime minister’s office and later director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry, confirmed in Jerusalem Report, an English-language mainstream periodical, that he had met on numerous occasions with high-ranking Iraqis such as Tarik Aziz. In early 1991, he defended the policy, known in elite circles in Israel as the Iraq Concept, as being worthwhile.

Another irony is that the U.S. tilt began with a Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, and was endorsed by Democrats in Congress. The aim, of course, was to punish Iran for overthrowing the Shah and taking U.S. hostages.

The reasons for this disingenuous pre-election clamor over “Iraqgate” are not hard to fathom. Three months ago, the ominous possibility of a major public outcry against U.S. aid to Israel came with the disclosure, notably by Ed Pound of the Wall Street Journal, that Israel was busy making money by diverting U.S. proprietary technology to countries such as China. There were also charges that Israel had sold Patriot missile technology to the Chinese.

“Iraqgate” was a swift and efficient way of changing the subject.

Nor does the story stop there. Bill Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, is drawing admiring paragraphs from unlikely sources, such as the above-mentioned Safire, a former Nixon speech-writer who is usually unforgiving toward Democratic candidates, particularly ones who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War.

Such new-found affection for Clinton is not particularly mysterious in light of the fact that those professing it are usually zealous proponents of the Israeli interest as it bears upon U.S. policy.

George Bush has had the temerity to challenge Israel’s right to dispose of U.S. economic assistance as it pleases. He also demonstrated last year that his rebuke to the Israel lobby over the famous $10 billion in loan guarantees commanded immense popular support in the United States. Clinton, by contrast, has given no sign in any of his public pronouncements that he would be anything other than this lobby’s compliant partner.

As Samuel Gompers once said, “Reward our friends, punish our enemies.” The lobby would heartily agree.