”If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Mr. Netanyahu said then. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

In the same testimony, the American-educated Israeli leader, who had already served a term as prime minister and would become foreign minister later that year, suggested that Iran was so ripe for revolt that just seeing American television shows could do the trick — even if he had some trouble recalling the name of one of the programs he proposed using as a weapon. Mr. Netanyahu recalled that he had once advised senior officials at the Central Intelligence Agency “that if you want to advance regime change in Iran, you don’t have to go through the C.I.A. cloak-and-dagger stuff — what you want to do is take very large, very strong transponders and just beam ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Beverly Hills 2050’ and all that into Tehran and into Iran, because that is subversive stuff. They watch it — the young kids watch it, the young people. They want to have the same nice clothes and the same houses and swimming pools and so on.”

At another point, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that the war in Afghanistan had already discredited predictions that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “produce a counterreaction in the Arab world,” and inspire tens of thousands of zealots “outraged by America’s action” to stream into the country and take up arms.

Video of the testimony also shows that Mr. Netanyahu’s longtime adviser, Ron Dermer, sat directly behind him that day. Mr. Dermer, a former Republican political operative now serving as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, is blamed by some Democrats for injecting partisanship into the relations between the two countries by orchestrating the prime minister’s address to Congress without consulting either the White House or the State Department.