The upsurge in anti-semitism in the West since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 has been accompanied by a deluge of lies and distortions, one of which is that Israel manipulated the U.S. into attacking Iraq in 2003. Journalist Nadav Eyal published an article on the subject today, including an off-the-record discussion he had with Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the fall of 2002.
Before getting to that, I wanted to review my own experience on the subject. In the early 2000s I was reading online the right-wing Jerusalem Post and left-wing Haaretz (1). One thing I discovered was that while Israel's military and intelligence services were fanatic and effective about maintaining operational security, internal government strategic discussions often played out in the press and what I consistently read in 2002 was while Saddam Hussein was definitely a bad actor, Israel felt Iraq was in a box and the much greater threat to Israel was Iran. If the U.S. was to go over anyone in the War on Terror, Israel's preference was Iran.
Later in the 2000s, I learned that Prime Minister Sharon had conveyed this both directly and indirectly to the Bush Administration and was told in no uncertain terms that Iraq was next after Afghanistan. Sharon's instructions to his cabinet was, given Israel's dependence on the U.S., it would publicly support whatever decision the Bush Administration made. In other words, causation ran precisely in the opposite direction from what Mearsheimer and others maintain; it is Israel's reliance on the U.S., not American reliance on Israel, that was the driving force in what happened.
It's actually an example refuting the linkage made between neoconservatives and Israel. In this case, American neocons urged the Iraq invasion while Israel cautioned against it. Another division occurred in 2011, when neocons wanted the U.S, to support the Arab Spring uprisings while Israel was much more cautious.
My initial take was reinforced as more information became available about the American decision to invade Iraq. Perhaps the best summary can be found in Mark Mazarr's 2019 book, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy. Mazarr's book benefits from his access to participants and documents which, with the passage of time, became more available. The Iraq decision was driven by George Bush and Dick Cheney and was made even as the early stages of the Afghanistan action were underway in late 2001. The degree of dysfunction in the Bush foreign policy team, including Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice is appalling, with a lot of passive-aggressive behavior involved on everyone's part. I didn't think much of Bush when he was elected but felt reassured that steady hands like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell would help steer things the right way on foreign policy. What a mistake! Nowhere in Mazarr's account does Israel play a role in the decision making.
More recently, I've seen a lot being made of Benjamin Netanyahu's Congressional testimony in 2002, urging an attack on Iraq. That did occur, but those using the testimony fail to note (no doubt deliberately) the point Eyal makes:
In 2002 he was a private citizen plotting a political comeback. Sharon had taken control of Likud and sidelined Netanyahu decisively. The two camps detested each other. Netanyahu had no contact with Sharon when he testified and did not speak on behalf of the Israeli government.
Eyal's article pulls together in one place, the various threads I've come across over the years on this subject and is well worth reading. Some excerpts:
I remember his message [during the off the record conversation with Sharon on the flight back from America in 2002] with unusual clarity. Israel, Sharon said, was not lobbying for this war. He told us that he had made Israel’s position explicit in Washington: this was the wrong war. Iraq was not the central threat to the region. Iran was. His concern, as he framed it, was that an American fixation on Iraq would come at the expense of confronting Iran’s growing regional ambitions.
By “wrong war,” he was not advocating the occupation of Iran or a campaign of regime change. At the time, Iran’s nuclear program was still in its early stages — and relatively unknown to the West and Israel. The Israeli preference was for crippling sanctions that would halt it before it matured.
They added that Sharon understood Israel had to stay out of the invasion debate altogether, given how contentious the issue already was in American politics. Sharon — unlike Netanyahu — was meticulous about preserving bipartisan support in Washington. He believed Israel’s strategic relationship with the United States depended on it. For him, even if he had supported the war, lobbying for it would have amounted to a stupid mistake. So he didn’t.
You do not have to take my word for it. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, later recalled that senior Israeli officials warned Washington against focusing on Iraq. “The Israelis were telling us,” Wilkerson said, “Iraq is not the enemy — Iran is the enemy.”
Eyal goes on to argue that one of the consequences of the Iraq invasion eventually led to the Hamas takeover of Gaza.
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(1) Today I read the Times of Israel and several Israeli writers on X and Substack, though I still have a difficult time understanding the factions and parties in Israeli politics which often doesn't make much sense to me. I rarely look at the Jerusalem Post and never at Haaretz which is today published for the benefit of those hostile to Israel since its internal very left-wing audience dramatically shrunk in the aftermath of the Second Intifada. More recently Haaretz has been entangled in scandal as it was revealed that one of its prominent journalists was receiving payments from the Hamas supporting government of Qatar.
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