The Iraq War

Peter Myers, November 21, 2007; update November 23, 2007. Bold emphasis added. My comments are shown {thus}; write to me at contact.html.

You are at http://mailstar.net/iraq-war.html.

(1) Mearsheimer & Walt on the Iraq War - chapter 8 of their book (2) James Petras on the Iraq War - chapters 1 & 2 of his book

(1) Mearsheimer & Walt on the Iraq War - chapter 8 of their book

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2007)

{p. 229} IRAQ AND DREAMS OF TRANSFORMING THE MIDDLE EAST

Why did the United States invade Iraq? In The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, George Packer declares that "it still isn't possible to be sure, and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war." He quotes Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in the State Department during Bush's first term and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, saying that he would "go to his grave not knowing the answer."1

In one sense, their uncertainty is understandable, because the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein even now seems difficult to fathom. He was clearly a brutal tyrant with worrisome ambitions - including desire to obtain WMD - but his own incompetence had put these dangerous objectives out of reach. His army had been routed in the 1991 Gulf War and further weakened by a decade of UN sanctions. As a result, Iraq's military power, never impressive except on paper, was a pushover by 2003. Intrusive UN inspections had eliminated Iraqs nuclear program and eventually led Saddam to destroy his biological and chemical weapons stockpiles as well. There were no convincing links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden (who were in fact hostile to each other), and bin Laden and his associates were in fghanistan or Pakistan, not Iraq. Yet in the aftermath of 9/11, when one vvould have expected the United States to be focusing laserlike on al Qaeda, the Busl administration chose to invade a deteriorating countrv that had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and was already effectively contained. From this perspective, it is a deeply puzzling decision . From another angle, however, the decision is not that hard to understand. The United States was the world's most powerful country, and there

{p. 230} was never any doubt about its ability to oust Saddam if it so chose. The United States had not only won the long Cold War, it had also enjoyed a remarkable run of military successes after 1989: defeating Iraq handily in 1991, halting the Balkan bloodletting in 1995, and beating Serbia in 1999. The rapid ouster of the Taliban in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 reinforced an image of military invincibility and made it harder for skeptics on Iraq to convince others that going to war was unecessary and unwise. Americans were also shocked and alarmed by 9/11, and many of their leaders were convinced that the United States could not allow even remote dangers to grow in an era when terrorists might acquire WMD. Those who favored war believed that toppling Saddam would convince other rogue states that America was simply too powerful to oppose and compel these regimes to conform to U.S. wishes instead. In the period before the war, in short, the United States was simultaneously powerful, confident of its military prowess, and deeply worried about its own security - a dangerous combination.2

These various elements form the strategic context in which the decision ; for war was made and help us understand some of the underlying forces that facilitated that choice. But there was another variable in the equation, and the war would almost certainly not have occurred had it been absent. That element was the Israel lobby, and especially a group of neoconservative policy makers and pundits who had been pushing the United States to attack Iraq since well before 9/11. The prowar faction believed that removing Saddam would improve America's and Israel's strategic position and launch a process of regional transformation that would benefit the United States and Israel alike. Israeli officials and former Israeli leaders supported these efforts, because they were eager to see the United States topple one of their main regional adversaries - and the man who had launched Scud missiles at Israel in 1991.

Pressure from Israel and the lobby was not the only factor behind the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element. Many Americans believe that this was a "war for oil" (or for corporations like Halliburton), but there is little direct evidence to support this claim and considerable evidence that casts doubt on it. Other observer blame political advisers such as the Republican strategist Karl Rove and suggest that the war was part of a Machiavellian scheme to keep the country on a war footing and thus ensure a lengthy period of Republican control. This view has a certain partisan appeal, but it too lacks supporting evidence and cannot explain why so many prominent Democrats supported going to war. Another interpretation views the war as the first step in a bold effort to

{p. 231} transform the Middle East by spreading democracy. This view is correct, but as we will see, this remarkably ambitious scheme was inextricably linked to concerns about Israel's security.

In contrast to these alternative explanations, we argue that the war was motivated at least in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. This was a controversial claim before the war started, but it is even more controversial now that Iraq has turned into a strategic disaster. To be clear, the individuals and groups that pushed for war believed it would benefit both Israel and the United States, and they certainly did not anticipate the debacle that ultimately occurred. Regardless, a proper account of the lobby's role in encouraging the war is ultimately a question of evidence, and there is considerable evidence that Israel and pro-Israel groups - especially the neoconservatives - played important roles in the decision to invade.

Before examining the evidence, however, it is worth noting that a number of knowledgeable and well-respected individuals have said openly that the war was linked with Israel's security. Philip Zelikow, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001-03), executive director of the 9/I 1 Commission, and counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (2005-06), told a University of Virginia audience on September 10, 2002, that Saddam was not a direct threat to the United States. "The real threat," he argued, is "the threat against Israel." He went on to say, "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat ... And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."3

General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander and former presidential candidate, said in August 2002 that "those who favor this attack now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid that at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel."4 In January 2003, a German journalist asked Ruth Wedgwood, a prominent neoconservative academic and a member of the influential Defense Policy Board (chaired by Richard Perle), why the journalist should support the war. I could "be impolite," Wedgwood said, "and remind Germany of its special relationship with Israel. Saddam presents an existential threat to Israel. That Is simply true." Wedgwood did not justify the war by saying that Iraq posed a direct threat to Germany or the United States.5

A few weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, the journalist Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine, "A stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is a part of the argument that dare not

{p. 232} speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neo-conservative faction in the Bush Administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish community."6 Former Senator Ernest Hollings made a similar argument in May 2004. After noting that Iraq was not a direct threat to the United States, he asked why we invaded that country.7 "The answer," which he said "everyone knows," is "because we want to secure our friend Israel." A number of Jewish groups promptly labeled Hollings an anti-Semite, with the ADL calling his comments "reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."8 Hollings adamantly rejected the charge, noting that he had long been a staunch supporter of Israel and that he was simply stating the obvious, not making an untruthful claim. He demanded that his critics "apologize to me for talking about anti-Semitism."9

A handful of other public figures - Patrick Buchanan, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Maureen Dowd, Georgie Anne Geyer, Gary Hart, Ghris Matthews, Congressman James P. Moran (D-VA), Robert Novak, Tim Russert, and General Anthony Zinni - either said or strongly hinted that pro-Israel hardliners in the United States were the principal movers behind the Iraq war.10 In Novak's case, he referred to the war well before it happened as "Sharon's war" and continues to do so today. "I am convinced," he said in April 2007, "that Israel made a large contribution to the decision to embark on this war. I know that on the eve of the war, Sharon said, in a closed conversation with, senators, that if they could succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel's security problems.''11

The connection between Israel and the Iraq war was widely recognized long before the fighting started. When the prospect of an American invasion was beginning to dominate the headlines in the fall of 2002, the journalist Michael Kinsley wrote that "the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel ... is the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one mentions it.12 The reason for this reluctance, he observed, was fear of being labeled an anti-Semite. Two weeks before the war started, Nathan Guttman reported in Ha'aretz that "the voices linking Israel to the war are getting louder and louder. It is claimed the desire to help Israel is the major reason for President George Bush sending American soldiers to a superfluous war in the Gulf. And the voices come from all directions.''13

A few days later, Bill Keller, who is now the executive editor of the New York Times, wrote, "The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think."14 Finally, in May 2005, two years after the war began, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowl-

{p. 233} edged that the belief that Israel and the neoconservatives were responsible for getting the United States to invade Iraq was "pervasive" in the U.S. intel ligence community.15 Some will surely argue that anyone who suggests that concerns about Israels security had a significant influence on the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq is either an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. Such charges are both predictable and false. As we will now show, there is abundant evidence that Israel and the lobby played crucial roles in making that war happen. This is not to assert that either Israel or the lobby "controls" U.S. foreign policy; it is simply to say that they successfully pressed for a particular set of policies and were able, in a particular context, to achieve their objective. Had the circumstances been different, they would not have been able to get the United States to go to war. But without their efforts, America would probably not be in Iraq today.

ISRAEL AND THE IRAQ WAR

Israel has always considered Iraq an enemy, but it became especially concerned about Iraq in the mid-1970s, when France agreed to provide Saddam with a nuclear reactor. For good reason, Israel worried that Iraq might use the reactor as a stepping-stone to building nuclear weapons. Responding to the threat, in 1981, the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor before it became operational.16 Despite this setback, Iraq continued working on its nuclear program in dispersed and secret locations. This situation helps explain IsraelÕs enthusiastic support for the first Gulf War in 1991; its main concern was not to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait but to topple Saddam and especially to make sure that Iraq's nuclear program was dismantled.17 AIthough the United States did not remove Saddam from power, the UN inspections regime imposed on Baghdad after the war reduced - but did not eliminate - Israel's concerns In fact, Ha'aretz reported on February 26, 2001, that "Sharon believes that Iraq poses more of a threat to regional stability than Iran, due to the errant, irresponsible behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime.''18

Sharon's comments notwithstanding, by early 2002, when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Bush administration was thinking seriously about another war against Iraq, some Israeli leaders told U.S. officials that they thought .ran was a greater threat.19 They were not opposed to topppling Saddam, however, and Israel's leaders, who are rarely reticent when it conles to giving their American counterparts advice, never tried to convince

{p. 234} the Bush administration not to go to war against Iraq. Nor did the Israeli government ever try to mobilize its supporters in the United States to lobby against the invasion. On the contrary, Israeli leaders were worried only that the United States might lose sight of the Iranian threat in its pursuit of Saddam. Once they realized that the Bush administration was countenancing a bolder scheme, one that called for winning quickly in Iraq and then dealing with Iran and Syria, they began to push vigorously for an American invasion.

In short, Israel did not initiate the campaign for war against Iraq. As will become clear, it was the neoconservatives in the United States who conceived that idea and were principally responsible for pushing it forward in the wake of September 11. But Israel did join forces with the neoconservatives to help sell the war to the Bush administration and the American people, well before the president had made the final decision to invade. Indeed, Israeli leaders worried constantly in the months before the war that President Bush might decide not to go to war after all, and they did what they could to ensure Bush did not get cold feet.

The Israelis began their efforts ih the spring of 2002, a few months before the Bush administration launched its own campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American public. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington in mid-April and met with U.S. senators and the editors of the Washington Post, among others, to warn them that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons that could be delivered against the American homeland in suitcases or satchels.20 A few weeks later, Ra'anan Gissen, Sharon's spokesman, told a Cleveland reporter that "if Saddam Hussein is . not stopped now, five years from now, six years from now, we will have to deal with an Iraq that is armed with nuclear weapons, with an Traq that has delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction.''21

In mid-May, Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister now serving, as foreign minister, appeared on CNN, where he said that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and the United States "cannot sit and wait" while he builds a nuclear arsenal. Instead, Peres insisted, it was time to topple the Iraqi leader.22 A month later, Ehud Barak, another former Israeli prime minister, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam I lussein. Once he is gone there will be a different Arab world."23

On August 12, 2002, Sharon told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset that Iraq "is the greatest danger facing Israel."24 Then, on August 16, ten days before Vice President Cheney kicked off the cam-

{p. 235} paign for war with a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville Tennessee, several newspapers and television and radio networks (including Haaretz, the Washington Post, CNN, and CBS News) reported that Israel was urging the United States not to delay an attack on Iraq. Sharon told the Bush administration that postponing the operation "will not create a more convenient environment for action in the future." Putting off an attack, RaÕanan Gissen said, would "only give him (Saddam) more of an Opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction." Foreign Minister Peres told CNN that "the problem today is not if, but when." Postponing an attack would be a grave mistake, he said, because Saddam would be better armed down the road. Deputy Defense Minister Weizman Shiry offered a similar view, warning, "If the Americans do not do this now, it will be harder to do it in the future. In a year or two, Saddam Hussein will be further along in developing weapons of mass destruction." Perhaps CBS best captured what was going on in the headline for its story: "Israel to US: Don't Delay Iraq Attack."25

Peres and Sharon both made sure to emphasize that they "did not want to be seen as urging the United States to act and that America should act according to its own judgment."26 Israeli leaders - and many of their supporters in the United States - were well aware that some American commentators, most notably Patrick Buchanan, had argued that the driving force behind the 1991 Gulf War was "the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."27 Denying any responsibility made good political sense, but there is no question - based on their own public comments - that by August 2002 Israel's leaders saw Saddam as a threat to the Jewish state and were encouraging the Bush administration to launch a war to remove him from power.

News stories around the same time also reported that "Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons."28 Peres told CNN that "we think and know that he [Saddam] is on his way to acquiring a nuclear option."29 Ha'aretz reported that Saddam had given an "order ... to Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission last week to speed up its work."30 Israel was feeding these alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programs to Washington at a time When by Sharon's own reckoning, "strategic coordination between Israel and the U.S. has reached unprecedented dimensions.''31 Following the invasion and the revelation that there were no WMD in Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Israeli Knesset released separate reports revealing that much of the intelligence Israel gave to the Bush administration was

{p. 236} false. As one retired Israeli general put it, "Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq's non-conventional capabilities."32

Of course, Israel is hardly the first state to push another country to take a costly or risky action on its behalf. States facing external dangers often try to pass the buck to others, and the United States has a rich tradition of similar behavior itself.33 It backed Saddam Hussein in the 1980s in order to help contain the threat from revolutionary Iran, and it armed and backed the Afghan mujahideen following the Soviet invasion of that country in 1979. The United States did not send its own troops to fight these wars; it merely , did what it could to help others - who had their own reasons for fighting - to do the heavy lifting. .

Given their understandable desire to have the United States eliminate a regional rival, it is not surprising that Israeli leaders were distressed when President Bush decided to seek UN Security Council authorization for war in September 2002, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back into Iraq. These developments troubled Israel's leaders be cause they seemed to reduce the likelihood of war. Foreign Minister Peres told reporters, "The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must. Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors."34 On a visit to Moscow in late . September, Sharon made it clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was leading the charge for new inspections, that it was too late for them to be effective.35 Peres became so frustrated with the UN process in the following months that in mid-February 2003 he lashed out at France by questioning its status as a permanent member of the Security Council.36

Israel's adamant opposition to inspections put it in a lonely and awkward position, as Marc Perelman made clear in an article in the Forward in mid- September 2002: "Saddam Hussein's surprise acceptance of 'unconditional' United Nations weapons inspections put Israel on the hot seat this week, forcing it into the open as the only nation actively supporting the Bush administration's goal of Iraqi regime change."37

Pressing ahead in the face of UN diplomacy, Israelis portrayed Saddam in the dircst terms, often comparing him to Adolf Hitler. If the West did not stand llp to Iraq, they claimed, it would be making the same mistake it made with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Shlomo Avineri, a prominent Israeli scholar, wrote in the LosAngeles Times that "all who condemn the 1930s appeasement of Germany should reflect long and hard on whether a failure to act today against Iraq will one day be viewed the same way."38 The implica-

{p. 237} tion was unmistakable: anyone who opposed invading Iraq - or, as we have seen pushed Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians - was an appeaser, just like Neville Chamberlain, and bound to be regarded as such by future generatiOns. The Jerusalem Post was especially hawkish, frequently running editorials and op-eds favoring the war and rarely running pieces arguing against it.39 Indeed, it went so far as to editorialize that "ousting Saddam is the linchpin of the war on terrorism, without which it is impossible to begin in earnest, let alone win."40

Other Israeli public figures echoed Peres and Sharon's advocacy for war instead of diplomatic wrangling. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed in early September 2002 claiming that "Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program provides the urgent need for his removal." He went on to warn that "the greatest risk now lies in inaction.''41 His predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece a few weeks later in the Wall StreetJournal titled "The Case for Toppling Saddam." Netanyahu declared, "Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do," adding that "I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam's regime," which he claimed was "feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons."42

Netanyahu's influence, of course, extended well beyond writing op-eds and appearing on television. Having gone to high school, college, and graduate school in the United States, he speaks fluent English and is not only familiar with how the American political system works but operates skillfully in it. He has close ties with neoconservatives inside and outside of the Bush administration, and he has extensive contacts on Capitol Hill, where he has either spoken or testified on numerous occasions.43 Barak is also well connected with American policy makers, politicians, security experts, and pundits.

The Israeli government's war fervor did not diminish in the months before the fighting started. Ha'aretz, for example, ran a story on February 17, 2003, titled "Enthusiastic IDF Awaits War in Iraq," which said that Israel's "military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq." Ten days later James Bennet wrote a story in the New York Times with the headline "Israel Says War on Iraq Would Benefit the Region." The Forward published a piece on March 7, 2003, titled "Jerusalem Frets as U.S. Battles Iraq War Delays," which made it clear that Israel's leaders were hoping for war sooner rather than later.44

Given all this activity, it is unsurprising that Bill Clinton recounted in 2006 that "every Israeli politician I knew" believed that Saddam Hussein was so great a threat that he should be removed even if he did not have MD.45 Nor was the desire for war confined to Israel's leaders. Apart from

{p. 238} Kuwait, which Saddam conquered in 1990, Israel was the only country outside of the United States where a majority of politicians and the public enthusiastically favored war. A poll taken in early 2002 found that 58 percen

of Israeli Jews believed that "Israel should encourage the United States to attack Iraq."46 Another poll taken a year later in February 2003 found that 77.5 percent of Israeli Jews wanted the United States to invade Iraq.47 Even in Tony Blair's Britain, a poll taken just before the war revealed that 51 percent of the respondents opposed it, while only 39 percent supported it.48

This rather unusual situation prompted Gideon Levy of Ha aretz to ask, "Why is it that in England 50,000 people have demonstrated against the war in Iraq, whereas in Israel no one has? Why is it that in Israel there is no public debate about whether the war is necessary?" He went on to say, Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedlys and where no alternative opinion is voiced."49

Israel's enthusiasm for war eventually led some of its allies in America to tell Israeli officials to damp down their hawkish rhetoric, lest the war loo like it was being fought for Israel.50 In the fall of 2002, for example, a group of American political consultants known as the Israel Project circulated a six-page memorandum to key Israelis and pro-Israel leaders in the United States. The memo was titled "Talking about Iraq" and was intended as a guide for public statements about the war. "If your goal is regime change, you must be much more careful with your language because of the potential backlash. You do not want Americans to believe that the war on Iraq is being waged to protect Israel rather than to protect America.''51

Reflecting that same concern on the eve of the war, Sharon, according ta several reports, told Israeli diplomats and politicians to keep quiet about a possible war in Iraq and certainly not to say anything that made it appear that Israel was pushing the Bush administration to topple Saddam. The Israeli leader was worried by the growing perception that Israel was advocating a U.S. invasion of Iraq. In fact, Israel was; it just did not want its position to be widely known.52

THE LOBBY AND THE IRAQ WAR

The driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives who had long favored the energetic use of American power to reshape criti- cal areas of the world. They had advocated toppling Saddam since the mid- 1990s and believed this step would benefit the United States and Israel

{p. 239} alike.53 This group included prominent officials in the Bush administration such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the number two and three civilians in the Pentagon; Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey, members of the influential Defense Policy Board; Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and his special assistant, David Wurmser; and Elliott Abrams, who is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council. It also included a handful of well-known journalists like Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and William Safire.

The appointment of a number of neoconservatives to top policy positions was seen by Israelis and their American allies as a very positive development. When Wolfowitz was selected to be deputy defense secretary in January 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported that "the Jewish and pro-Israel communities are jumping with joy."54 In the spring of 2002, the Forward pointed out that Wolfowitz is "known as the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration," and it selected him later in 2002 as the first among fifty notables who "have consciously pursued Jewish activism."55 At about the same time, JINSA gave him its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States, and theJerusalem Post, describing Wolfowitz as "devoutly pro-Israel," named him its "Man of the Year" in 2003.56

Feith's role in shaping the case for war should also be understood in the context of his long-standing commitment to Israel and his prior association with hard-line groups there. Feith has close ties with key organizations in the lobby like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Zionist Organization of America. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories 57 More important, as we noted in Chapter 4, Feith was a coauthor, along with Perle and Wurmser, of the famous "Clean Break" report in June 1996.58 Written under the auspices of a right-wing Israeli think tank for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the report recommended, among other things, that Netanyahu "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its on right." It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East Netanyahu did not implement their advice, but Feith, Perle, and Wurmser were soon advocating that the Bush administration pursue those same goals. This situation prompted the Ha'aretz columnist Akiva Eldar to warn that Feith and Perle "are walking a fine line between their loyalty to merican governments ... and Israeli interests."59 As George Packer notes

{p. 240} in The Assassins' Gate, "For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover" behind their support for the war.60

John Bolton and Scooter Libby were staunch supporters of Israel as well. As America's ambassador to the UN, Bolton consistently and enthusiastically defended Israel's interests. So much so, in fact, that in May 2006, the Israeli ambassador to the UN jokingly described Bolton as "a secret member of Israel's own team at the United Nations." He went on to say that "the secret is out. We really are not just five diplomats. We are at least six including John Bolton.''6l When Bolton's controversial reappointment to that position became an issue later in 2006, pro-Israel groups weighed in on Bolton's side.62 Regarding Libby, the Forward reported when he left the White House in the fall of 2005 that "Israeli officials liked Libby. They described him as an important contact who was accessible, genuinely interested in Israel- related issues and very sympathetic to their cause."63

Neoconservatives outside the Bush administration are every bit as devoted to Israel as are their compatriots in the government. Consider the comments that the columnist Charles Krauthammer made in Jerusalem on June 10, 2002, after receiving the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University.64 The theme of his talk was characterizing Israel's participation in the Oslo peace process as an example of misguided Jewish messianism. In his remarks, Krauthammer explicitly identified himself with Israel - indeed, as Israeli. At one point he observed that "thirty-five years ago today the Six-Day war ended. It seemed like a new era ... Jerusalem had been renited, the Temple Mount was ours, Israel." He went on to say, "My thesis tonight is that many of our troubles today, as a people and as a Jewish state, are rooted precisely in this new Messianic enthusiasm." Krauthammer, like virtually all other neoconservative pundits, was a relentless advocate for war right up until the invasion.

Although many of the prominent neoconservatives were Jewish Americans with strong attachments to Israel, some of the leading members of the pro-War party were not. In addition to John Bolton, the signatories of the open letters to Presidents Bush and Clinton sponsored by the Project for the New American Century included gentiles such as former CIA director James Woolsey and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Woolsey was particularly obsessed with proving that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, and he devoted considerable effort trying to confirm an early report that Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. The story was implalsible and is widely believed to be false, but Woolsey and Vice President Dick Cheney both invoked it to bolster the case for war.65

{p. 241} The neoconservatives were not the only part of the lobby pushing for war with Iraq. Key leaders of the major pro-Israel organizations lent their voices to the campaign for war. Of course, many of the neoconservatives themselves had close ties to these organizations. In mid-September 2002, when the selling of the war was just getting under way, Michelle Goldberg wrote in Salon that "mainstream Jewish groups and leaders are now among the strongest supporters of an American invasion of Baghdad."66 This same point was made in a Foru-ard editorial written well after the fall of Baghdad: "As President Bush attempted to sell the ... war in Iraq, America's most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Some groups went even further, arguing that the removal of the Iraqi leader would represent a significant step toward bringing peace to the Middle East and winning America's war on terrorism." The editorial goes on to say that "concern for Israel's safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups."67

Although there was hardly any opposition to the war among the major Jewish organizations, there was disagreement about how vocal they should be in backing it. The main concern was the fear that too open support for an invasion would make it look like the war was being fought for Israel's sake.68 Nonetheless, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Conference of Presidents of MajorAmerican Jewish Organizations voted to support the use of force against Iraq ("as a.last resort") in the fall of 2002, and some prominent figures in the lobby went further.69 Among the most outspoken propo- nents of the invasion was Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents, who made frequent public statements promoting the war. In late August 2002, he wrote in U.S. News World Report, where he is editor in chief, "Those who predict dire results if we try to unseat Saddam simply refuse to understand - as President Bush manifestly does - that if we opt to live with a nightmare, it will only get worse. Much worse. The best medicine here, in other words, is preventive medicine."70

Jack Rosen, the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Rabbi David Saperstein, the head of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, were also enthusiastic war hawks. Saperstein, who is known for his liberal political views and whom the Washington Post called "the quintessential religious lobbyist on Capitol Hill," said in September 2002 that "the Jewish Community would want to see a forceful resolution to the threat that Saddam Hussein poses."71 Jewish Week, an influential newspaper in the greater New York area, backed the war as well. Gary Rosenblatt, its editor and pub-

{p. 242} lisher, wrote an editorial in mid-December 2002 in which he emphasized that "Washington's imminent war on Saddam Hussein is not only an opportunity to rid the world of a dangerous tyrant who presents a particularly horrific threat to Israel." He went on to say that "when a despot announces his evil intentions, believe him. That's one of the lessons we should have learned from Hitler and the Holocaust. What's more, the Torah instructs that when your enemy seeks to kill you, kill him first. Self-defense is not permitted; it is commanded."72 Organizations like AIPAC and the ADL also supported the war, but they did so with minimum fanfare.

Now that the war has turned into a disaster, supporters of Israel sometimes argue that AIPAC, which is the most visible group in the lobby, did not g back the invasion.73 But this claim fails the common sense test, as AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United : States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting on AIPAC's annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: "AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital."74 AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr's statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged that "'quietly' lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq" was one of "AIPAC's successes over the past year."75 And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC's . policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that "AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war."76 ?

AIPAC has remained a firm supporter of the U.S. presence in Iraq. In the fall of 2003, when the Bush administration was having difficulty convincing Senate Democrats to allocate more money for the war, Senate Republicans asked AIPAC to lobby their Democratic colleagues to support the funding request. AIPAC representatives talked to some Democratic senators and the money was approved.77 When Bush gave a speech at AIPAC in May 2004 in which he defended his Iraq policy, he received twen.ty-three standing ovations.78 At AIPAC's 2007 conference, by which time American public opinion on the war had soured, Vice President Cheney made the case for staying the . course in Iraq. According to David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post, he received "considerable applause."79 And John Boehner, the House minority leader, received a standing ovation when he said, "Who does not believe that failure in Iraq is not a direct threat to the state of Israel? The consequences of failure in Iraq are so ominous for the United States that you can't even begin to think

{p. 243} about it." By contrast, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi criticized the Bush administration's "surge" strategy, many in the audience booed.80

AIPAC is not the only major group in the lobby to stick with Bush on Iraq, or at least not come out against the war. As the Forward reported in March 2007, "Most Jewish organizations have refused to speak out against the war, and at times they displayed support for the administration."81 This behavior is especially striking given the attitudes of most American Jews toward the war itself. According to a 2007 Gallup Organization study based on the results of thirteen polls taken since 2005, American Jews are significantly more opposed to the Iraq war (77 percent) than the general American public (52 percent).82 With respect to Iraq, the larger and wealthier pro-Israel organizations are clearly out of step with the broader population of American Jews. A few Jewish organizations, such as the Tikkun Community and Jewish Voice for Peace, opposed the war before it started and continue to do so today. But as noted in Chapter 4, these groups are neither as well funded nor as influential as organizations like AIPAC.

This gap between the political positions taken by key groups in the lobby and the public attitudes of American Jews underscores an essential point that deserves special emphasis. Although prominent Israeli leaders, the neoconservatives, and many of the lobby's leaders were eager for the United States to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not.83 In fact, Samuel Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University, reported just after the war started that "a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%."84 It would therefore be a cardinal error to attribute the war in Iraq to "Jewish influence," or to "blame the Jews" for the war. Rather, the war was due in large part to the lohys influence, and especially its neoconservative wing. And the lobby, as we have emphasized before, is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak.

SELLING THE WAR TO A SKEPTICAL AMERICA

The neoconservatives began their campaign to use military force to topple Saddam well before Bush became president. They caused a stir in early 1998 by organizjng two letters to President Clinton calling for Saddam's removal from power. The first letter (January 26, 1998) was written under the

{p. 244} auspices of the Project for the New American Century and was signed by Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. The second letter (February 19, 1998) was written under the auspices of the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, the organization set up in 1990 by Perle, Ann Lewis (the former political director of the Democratic National Committee), and former Congressman Stephen J. Solarz (D-NY), to lobby for the first Gulf War. It was signed by the individuals mentioned above who signed the first letter as well as Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis, Martin Peretz, and David Wurmser, just to name a few.85

ln addition to these two high-profile letters, the neoconservatives and their allies in the lobby worked assiduously in 1998 to get Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, which mandated that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime." The neoconservatives were especially enthusiastic about this legislation not only because it sanctioned regime change in Iraq, but also because it provided $97 million to fund groups committed to overthrowing Saddam.86 The main group they had in mind was the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was headed by their close associate, Ahmed Chalabi. Perle, Wolfowitz, and Woolsey all lobbied hard on behalf of the legislation, as did JINSA.87 The act passed in the House by a vote of 360-38 and by unanimous consent in the Senate. President Clinton then signed it on October 31, 1998.

Clinton had little use for the Iraq Liberation Act, but he could not afford to veto it because he was facing midterm elections and impeachment.88 Both he and his key advisers held Chalabi in low regard, and they did little to implement the law. In fact, by the time Clinton left office, he had spent hardly any of the allotted money for opposition groups like the INC. The president did pay lip service to the goal of ousting Saddam but did little to make it happen, and he was certainly not considering using the U.S. military to drive the Iraqi dictator from power.89 In short, the neoconservatives were unable to sell the idea of war against Iraq during the Clinton years, although they did succeed in making regime change in Baghdad an official goal of the U.S. government.

Nor were they able to generate much enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration, even though a number of prominent neoconservatives held important positions in the new government and had lost none of their enthusiasm for the enterprise. Richard Perle later said that

{p. 245} the advocates for toppling Saddam were losing the arguments inside the administration during this early period.90 In fact, in March 2001, the New York Times reported that "some Republicans" were complaining that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "are failing to live up to their pre-election advocacy of stepping up efforts to overthrow President Hussein." At the same time, the Washington Times ran an editorial titled "Have Hawks Become Doves?" The text of that editorial was the January 26, 1998, PNAC letter to President Clinton.91

Given the publicity and the controversy surrounding two books published in 2004 - Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty - one might think Bush and Cheney were bent on invading Iraq from the moment they assumed office in late January 2001.92 This interpretation, however, is wrong. They were certainly interested in toppling Saddam, but there is no evidence in the public record showing that Bush and Cheney were seriously contemplating war against Iraq before 9/11. Bush did not advocate using force against Saddam during the 2000 campaign, and he made it clear to Bob Woodward that he was not thinking about going to war against Saddam before 9/11.93 Interestingly, his main foreign policy adviser in the campaign, Condoleezza Rice, wrote a prominent article in Foreign Affairs in early 2000 saying that the United States could live with a nuclear-armed Iraq. Rice declared that Saddam's "conventional military power" had been "severely weakened" and said "there need be no sense of panic" about his regime.94

Vice President Cheney maintained throughout the 1990s that conquer- ing Iraq would be a major strategic blunder and he did not sign either of the letters calling for military action against Saddam that the neoconservatives sent to President Clinton in early 1998.95 In the closing stages of the 2000 campaign, he defended the 1991 decision not to go to Baghdad - in which he played a major role as secretary of defense - and said that "we want to maintain our current posture vis-a-vis Iraq."96 There is no evidence to suggest that either his thinking or that of the president had changed significantly by early 2001.97 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had signed both of the 1998 letters to President Clinton, appears to have been the only toptier Bush administration official who may have favored war with Iraq upon taking office. None of the other groups that are sometimes blamed for the war - such as oil companies, weapons manufacturers, Christian Zionists, or defense contractors like Kellogg Brown & Root - were making noise about invading Iraq at this time. In the beginning, the neoconservatives were largely alone.

Yet as important as the neoconservatives were as the chief architects of

{p. 246} the war, they had been unable to persuade either Clinton or Bush to support an invasion. They needed help to achieve their aim, and that help arrived on 9/11. Specifically, the events of that tragic day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war to topple Saddam. Robert Kagan put the point well in an interview with George Packer: "September 11 is the turning point. Not anything else. This is not what Bush was on September 10." The neoconservatives - most notably Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis played a critical role in persuading the president and vice president to favor war. For them, 9/11 was the new context to sell their old view of American foreign policy. Possibly their greatest advantage was that they had, in Kagan's words, "a ready-made approach to the world" at a time when both the president and the vice president were trying to make sense of an unprecedented disaster that seemed to call for radically new ways of thinking about international politics.98

Wolfowitz's behavior is especially revealing. At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on September 15, 2001, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the United States and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan.99 Wolfowitz was so insistent on conquering Iraq that five days later Cheney had to tell him to "stop agitating for targeting Saddam.''100 According to one Republican lawmaker, he "was like a parrot bringing [Iraq] up all the time. It was getting on the President's nerves.''101 Bush rejected Wolfowitz's advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and the president tasked U.S. military planners on November 2 1, 2001, with developing concrete plans for an invasion.102

Other neoconservatives were also hard at work within the corridors of power. Although we do not have the full story yet, there is considerable evidence that scholars like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University played an important role in convincing Vice President Cheney to favor war against Iraq.l03 Indeed, Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, describes Lcwis as "perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq.104 Cheney's views were also heavily influenced by neoconservatives on his staff like Eric Edelman and John llannah. But surely the most important influence on the vice president was his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who was one of the most powerful individuals in the ad- ministration and whose views on Iraq were similar to those of his close friend and longtime mentor, Paul Wolfowitz.105 Shortly after 9/11, the New

{p. 247} York Times reported that "some senior administration of ficials, led by Paul D. Wolfowitz ... and I. Lewis Libby ... are pressing for the earliest and broadest military campaign against not only the Osama bin Laden network in Afghanistan, but also against other suspected terrorist bases in Iraq and in Lebanon's Bekka region.106 Of course, the vice president's position helped convince President Bush by early 2002 that the United States would probably have to take Saddam out.107

Two other considerations show how profoundly important the neoconservatives inside the administration were for making the Iraq war happen. First, it is no exaggeration to say that they were not just determined; they were obsessed with removing Saddam from power. As one senior administration figure put it in January 2003, "I do believe certain people have grown theological about this. It's almost a religion - that it will be the end of our society if we don't take action now." A Washington Post journalist described Colin Powell returning from White House meetings during the run-up to the Iraq war, "rolling his eyes" and saying, "Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq. Bob Woodward reports that Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Board, "said he had worried to death as time went on and support seemed to wane that there would be no war.''108

Second, there was little enthusiasm for going to war against Iraq inside the State Department, the intelligence community, or the uniformed military. Although Secretary of State Powell ultimately supported the president's decision for war, he believed that it was a bad idea. The rank and file in his department shared his skepticism. There were two key outliers in the State Department, however - John Bolton and David Wurmser, both prominent neoconservatives who had close ties to the White House. George Tenet, the head of the CIA, also supported the White House on Iraq, but he was not a forceful advocate for war. Indeed, few individuals within the intelligence community found the case for war convincing, which is why, as discussed below, the neoconservatives established their own intelligence units. The military, especially the army, was filled with Iraq skeptics. General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, was severely criticized by Wolfowitz (who dismissed Shinseki's estimate of the necessary troop levels required for the occupation as "wildly off the mark") and later Rumsfeld for expressing doubts about the war plan. 109 The war hawks within the administration were mainly high-level civilians in the White House and the Pentagon, almost all of whom were neoconservatives.

They lost no time making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were partly aimed at keeping pressure

{p. 248} on Bush and partly intended to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside of the government. On September 13, 2001, JINSA put out a press release titled "This Goes Beyond Bin Laden," which maintained that "a long investigation to prove Osama Bin Laden's guilt with prosecutorial certainty is entirely unnecessary. He is guilty in word and deed. His history is the source of his culpability. The same holds true for Saddam Hussein. Our actions in the past certainly were not forceful enough, and now we must seize the opportunity to alter this pattern of passivity.110 One week later, on September 20, a group of prominent neoconservatives and their allies published an open letter to Bush, telling him that "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.111 The letter also reminded Bush that "Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism."

Little more than a week later, on September 28, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after we were done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq. "The war on terrorism," he argued, "will conclude in Baghdad," when we finish off "the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world." Shortly thereafter, in the October 1 issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq immediately after the Taliban was defeated.112 Other pundits, like Michael Barone in U.S. News World Report, were arguing even before the dust had settled at the World Trade Center that "evidence is accumulating that Iraq aided or perhaps planned the attack.''113

Over the next eighteen months, the neoconservatives waged an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq. On April 3, 2002, they released yet another open letter to Bush, which clearly linked Israel's security with a war to topple Saddam.114 The letter starts by commending the president for his "strong stance in support of the Israeli govern ment as it engages in the present campaign to fight terrorism." It then argues that "the United States and Israel share a common enemy" and are "fighting the same war." It urges Bush "to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power," because otherwise "the damage our Israeli friends and we have suffered until now may someday appear but a prelude to much greater horrors." The letter concludes with the following message: "Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel's victory is an important part of our victory. For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism."

The basic aim of the letter was to portray Arafat, bin Laden, and Saddam

{p. 249} as critical parts of a looming menace that threatened both Israel and the United States. Not only did this depiction of a shared and growing danger justify close relations between America and Israel, it also justified the United States treating these three individuals as mortal enemies and backing Israel's hard-line response to the Second Intifada. As noted in the previ ous chapter, relations between the Bush administration and the Sharon government were especially contentious in early April 2002, when the letter was written. The signatories included Kenneth Adelman, William Bennett, Linda Chavez, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Frank Gaffney, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Joshua Muravchik, Martin Peretz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, and James Woolsey, among others.

Other pro-Israel pundits, who are not normally thought of as neoconservatives, offered a steady drumbeat of prowar advocacy as well. The case for war got a major boost with the publication in 2002 of Kenneth Pollack's ominously titled The Threatening Storm, which argued that Saddam was too risk acceptant and irrational to be deterred and concluded that preventive war was the only realistic option. Because Pollack was a former Clinton administration official who had previously called ousting Saddam the "rollback fantasy," his conversion to a prowar position seemed especially telling despite the book's tendentious treatment of evidence.115 Pollack moved from the Council on Foreign Relations to Brookings's Saban Center for Middle East Policy during this period, where he and Saban Center director Martin Indyk produced a number of op-eds and commentary in the months before the war, warning that Saddam was undeterrable, that UN inspections were no solution, and that however regrettable, force would almost certainly be necessary.116

The neoconservatives and their allies deployed the same arguments and almost the same language that the Israelis used to promote the war. The neoconservatives made frequent reference to the 1930s and Munich, comparing Saddam with Hitler and opponents of the war (like Brent Scowcroft and Senator Chuck Hagel) with appeasers like Neville Chamberlain.117 Israel and the United States, they maintained, were facing a nebulous common enemy, "international terrorism," and Iraq, to quote the New York Times columnist William Safire, was "the center of world terror.''118 The war hawks portrayed Saddam as an especially aggressive and reckless leader who would not only use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and Is rael but would also pass them on to terrorists.119 Identifying diplomacy and multilateralism with weakness, neoconservative commentators had nothing but contempt for the UN and its inspectors in Iraq, not to mention

{p. 250} France.120 Indeed, they repeated the old Israeli adage that force has great utility in the Middle East, because it is a region where, to quote Krauthammer, "power, above all, commands respect.121

One might argue that this analysis exaggerates the impact that open letters to presidents, newspaper columns, books, and op-eds can have on the policy-making process. After all, relatively few people actually read the various open letters and there were plenty of other articles, editorials, and op-eds written in U.S. newspapers that had nothing to do with Iraq. This perspective would be wrong, however. The signatories of the various letters written to Presidents Bush and Clinton are powerful individuals who have connections and influence with important policy makers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, some of whom they had worked closely with in the course of their careers. In fact, a number of the individuals who signed the earlier letters to Clinton - including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith - became key policy makers in the Bush administration. Thus, the signatories of the letters written to Bush in the period between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were not shouting into a void. The same was true for journalists like Charles Krauthammer and William Safire, who wrote frequently about Iraq for two of the country's leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively. Their views were taken seriously by influential people inside and outside of the U.S. government, as were the articles that appeared in neoconservative magazines like the Weekly Standard. Indeed, these writings by outsiders worked to reinforce the arguments made by Bush administration insiders, who shared their views on the need to invade Iraq. The underlying purpose of all these efforts was to define the terms of debate in a way that would facilitate an affirmative decision for war. By making war seem both necessary and beneficial, by portraying potential opponents as "soft" on terror, and by linking America's fate to Israel's through the repetition of familiar moral and strategic arguments, these efforts helped stifle serious discussion about the pros and cons of an invasion and were an important part of the broader campaign for war.122

FIXING THE INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ

A key part of the public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq was the manipulation of intelligence information in order to make Saddam look like an imminent threat. Scooter Libby was an important player in this endeavor, visiting the CIA several times to pressure analysts to find evidence

{p. 251} that would make the case for war. He also helped prepare a detailed briefing on the Iraq threat in early 2003 that was pushed on Colin Powell, who was then preparing his infamous presentation to the UN Security Council.123 According to Bob Woodward, Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, "was appalled at what he considered overreaching and hyperbole. Libby was drawing only the worst conclusions from fragments and silky threads.124 AIthough Powell discarded Libby's most outlandish claims, his UN representation was still riddled with errors, as Powell now acknowledges.125

The effort to manipulate intelligence, which was then leaked to an alarmist prowar press, also involved two organizations that were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.126 The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was tasked to find links between al Qaeda and Iraq that the intelligence community supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese American who had close ties with Richard Perle. The New York Times reporter James Risen writes that "Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn't trust the CIA," and this dissatisfaction helped cause him to rely on Ahmed Chalabi for intelligence and to create the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group.127

The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was directed to find evidence that could be used to sell the war against Iraq. It was headed byAbram Shulsky, a neoconservative long associated with Wolfowitz, and its ranks included several recruits from pro-Israel think tanks like Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute, David Schenker from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Michael Makovsky, who had worked for then Prime Minister Shimon Peres after graduating from college.128 OSP relied heavily on information from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles and it had close connections to various Israeli sources. Indeed, the Guardian reported that it "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorize.129 The Pentagon's inspector general released a report in February 2007 that was critical of OSP for disseminating "alternative intelligence assessments" that "were, in our opinion, inappropriate given that the intelligence assessments were intelligence products and did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community."130

The neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the White House not only relied heavily on Chalabi and his fellow exiles for intelligence about Iraq, they also championed him as Iraq's future leader after Saddam was gone. The

{p. 252} CIA and the State Department, on the other hand, considered Chalabi dishonest and unreliable and kept him at arm's length. That severe judgment has now been vindicated, as we know that Chalabi and the INC fed the United States false information, and his relations with the U.S. occupation forces soon deteriorated, with Chalabi later being accused of providing classified information to Iran (a charge that he has denied). The neoconservatives' hopes that he would be the "George Washington of Iraq" fared no better than their other prewar forecasts.131

So why did neoconservatives embrace Chalabi? The INC leader had gone to considerable lengths to establish close ties with individuals and groups in the lobby, and he had especially close links with JINSA, where he had been "a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997"132 He also cultivated close ties with pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, AEI, the Hudson Institute, and WINEP. Max Singer, who helped found the Hudson Institute, described Chalabi as a "rare find. He's deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West.133 When an embattled Chalabi returned to give his eighth address to the AEI in early November 2005, that think tank's president introduced him as a "very great and very brave Iraqi patriot, liberal and liberator.134 Another big supporter of Chalabi was Bernard Lewis, who argued that the INC leader should be put in charge of Iraq after Baghdad fell.135

In return for the lobby's support, Chalabi pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. According to Feith's former law partner, L. Marc Zell, Chalabi also promised to rebuild the pipeline that once ran from Haifa in Israel to Mosul in Iraq.136 This was precisely what pro-srael proponents of regime change wanted to hear, so they backed Chalabi in return. The journalist Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: "The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein's regime."l37 Not surprisingly, Nathan Guttman reports that "the American Jewish community and the Iraqi opposition" had for years "taken pains to conceal" the links between them. 138

I he neoconservatives and their allies did not operate in a vacuum, of course, alld they did not lead the United States to war by themselves. As emphasized earlier, the war would probably not have occurred absent the September 11 attacks, which forced President Bush and Vice President Cheney to consider adopting a radically new foreign policy. Neoconservatives like

{p. 253} Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been urging regime change in Iraq since early 1998, were quick to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11 - even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved - and to portray his overthrow as critical to winning the war on terror. The lobby's actions were a necessary but not sufficient condition for war.

Indeed, Richard Perle made precisely this point to George Packer in a discussion about the role that the neoconservatives played in making the Iraq war happen. "If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker," Perle noted, "which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into it the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it.139 The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman offered a similar appraisal in May 2003, telling Ari Shavit of Ha'aretz that Iraq was "the war the neoconservatives wanted ... the war the neoconservatives marketed ... I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington, D.C.]), who, if you exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened." We agree completely with Perle's and Friedman's observations, while recognizing that it was a combination of individuals, ideas, and circumstances that came together to produce the ultimate decision for war.140

WAS IRAQ A WAR FOR OIL?

Some readers might concede that the Israel lobby had some influence over the decision to invade Iraq but argue that its overall weight in the decision-making process was minimal. Instead, many American and foreign observers appear to think that oil - not Israel - was the real motivation behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In one variant of this story, the Bush administration was determined to control the vast reserves of oil in the Middle East, because that would give the United States enormous geopolitical leverage over potential adversaries. Conquering Iraq, according to this scenario, was seen by the administration as a giant step toward achieving that goal. An alternative version sees the oil-producing states and especially the oil companies as the real culprits behind the Iraq war, driven primarily by a desire for higher prices and greater profits. Even scholars who are often critical of Israel and of the lobby, such as Noam Chomsky, apparently subscribe to this idea, which was popularized in filmmaker Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.141

{p. 254} The claim that the conquest of Iraq was mainly about oil has a certain prima facie plausibility, given the importance of oil to the world economy.142 But this explanation faces both logical and empirical difficulties. As emphasized in Chapter 2, U.S. policy makers have long been concerned about who controls Persian Gulf oil; they have been especially concerned about the danger that one state might control all of it. The United States has been involved with various oil-producing countries in the Gulf, but no American government, including the Bush administration, has seriously considered . conquering the major oil-producing countries in that region to gain coercive leverage over other countries around the world. The United States might consider invading a major oil-producing state if a revolution or an embargo caused its oil to stop flowing into world markets. But that was not the case with Iraq; Saddam was eager to sell his oil to any customer willing to pay for it. Moreover, if the United States wanted to conquer another country in order to gain control of its oil, Saudi Arabia - with larger reserves and a smaller population - would have been a much more attractive target. Plus, bin Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who struck the United States on September 11 were Saudis (none were from Iraq). If control of oil were Bush's real objective, 9/11 would have been an ideal pretext to act. Occupying Saudi Arabia would not have been a simple task, but it would almost certainly have been easier than trying to pacify the large, restive, and well-armed population of Iraq.

There is also hardly any evidence that oil interests were actively pushing the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2002-03. In 1990-91, by contrast, Saudi Arabia's leaders clearly pressed the first Bush administration to use force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. They feared, like many American policy makers at the time, that Saddam might next invade Saudi Arabia, which would place much of the region's oil under his control. Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, worked closely with pro-Israel groups here to build support for ousting Saddam from Kuwait.143 But the story was very different in the run-up to the second Gulf War: this time Saudi Arabia publicly opposed using American force against Iraq.144 Saudi leaders feared that a war would lead to the breakup of Iraq and destabilize . the Middle East. And even if Iraq remained intact, the Shia were likely to ascend to power, which worried the Sunnis who ran Saudi Arabia not only for religious reasons but also because it would increase Iran's influence in the region. In addition, the Saudis faced growing anti-Americanism at home, which was likely to get worse if the United States launched a preventive war against Iraq.

{p. 255} Nor were the oil companies, which generally seek to curry favor with big oil producers like Saddam's Iraq or the Islamic Republic of Iran, major players in the decision to conquer Iraq. They did not lobby for the 2003 war, which most of them thought was a foolish idea. As Peter Beinart noted in the New Repu1lic in September 2002, "It isn't war that the American oil industry has been lobbying for all these years; it's the end of sanctions.145 The oil companies, as is almost always the case, wanted to make money, not war.

DREAMS OF REGIONAL TRANSFORMATION

The Iraq war was not supposed to be a costly quagmire. Rather, it was intended as the first step in a larger plan to reorder the Middle East in ways that would benefit long-term American and Israeli interests. Specifically, the United States was not just going to remove Saddam Hussein from power and go home; the invasion and occupation would, in this dream, quickly turn Iraq into a democracy, which would then serve as an attractive model for people living in the various authoritarian states in the region. The results from Iraq would trigger a cascade of democratic dominoes, although it still might be necessary to use the sword to spread democracy to some countries in the Middle East besides Iraq. But once democracy took hold across the region, regimes friendly to Israel and the United States would be the norm, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would, in the words of the "Clean Break" study, be "transcended," other regional rivalries would be muted, and the twin problems of terrorism and nuclear proliferation would largely disappear.

Vice President Cheney laid out this ambitious rationale for regional transformation in the speech to the VFW convention on August 26, 2002, opening the administration's campaign to sell the Iraq war. "When the gravest of threats are eliminated," he said, "the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace ... Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced."146 Cheney would repeat these arguments on several occasions over the next six months .

President Bush spoke with similar enthusiasm about regional transformation as he made the case for war against Iraq. On February 26, 2003, he told an audience at AEI that the United States aims to "cultivate liberty and

{p. 256} peace in the Middle East." He emphasized that "the world has a clear inter- est in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East." Furthermore, he claimed, "Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian peace.147

This ambitious strategy, grounded in an almost theological belief in the transformative power of freedom, was a dramatic departure from previous U.S. policy, and there was certainly no indication before 9/11 that either Bush or Cheney would embrace it. Indeed, both men - as well as National Security Adviser Rice - were on record as being opposed to the ambitious kind of nation building that was at the heart of regional transformation, and Bush had sharply criticized the Clinton administration for its emphasis on : nation building during the 2000 campaign. So what had produced this shift? According to a March 2003 story in the Wall StreetJournal, the critical driving forces behind this major change in U.S. Middle East policy were Israel and the neoconservatives in the lobby. The headline says it all: "President's Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-U.S., Democratic Area Is a Goal That Has Israeli and Neoconservative Roots.148

Charles Krauthammer says this grand scheme to spread democracy across the Middle East was the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician whose writings are said to have impressed President Bush.149 But Sharansky was hardly a lone voice in Israel. In fact, Israelis across the political spectrum maintained that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel's advantage. Writing in the New York Times in early September 2002 former Prime Minister Ehud Barak argued that "putting an end to Saddam Hussein's regime will change the geopolitical landscape of the Arab world." He claimed that "an Arab world without Saddam Hussein would enable many from this generation [leaders about to come into power] to embrace the gradual democratic opening that some of the Persian Gulf states and Jordan have begun to .. enjoy." Barak also maintained that toppling Saddam would "create an opening for forward movement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."150

In August 2002, Yuval Steinitz, a Likud party member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told the Christian Science Monitor, "After Iraq is taken by U.S. troops and we see a new regime installed as in Afghanistan, and Iraqi bases become American bases, it will be very easy to pressure Syria to stop supporting terrorist organizations like Hizbullah and

{p. 257} slamic Jihad, to allow the Lebanese army to dismantle Hizbullah, and maybe to put an end to the Syrian occupation in Lebanon. If this happens we will really see a new Middle East.151 Similarly, Aluf Benn reported in Ha'aretz in February 2003 that "senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Advisor Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel's other enemies: Arafat, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad, the ayatollah in Iran and maybe even Muhammar Gadaffi. Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction."152

The New York Times also reported that Halevy gave a speech in Munich in February 2003 where he said, "The shock waves emerging from post-Saddam Baghdad could have wide-ranging effects in Tehran, Damascus, and in Ramallah.153 The author of the article noted that Israel "is hoping that once Saddam Hussein is dispensed with, the dominoes will start to tumble. According to this hope ... moderates and reformers throughout the region would be encouraged to put new pressure on their own governments, not excepting the Palestinian Authority of Yasir Arafat." The Forward summed up Israeli thinking about regional transformation in an article published just before the war: "Israel's top political, military and economic echelons have come to regard the looming Iraq war as a virtual deus ex nachina that will turn the political and economic tables and extricate Israel from its current morass."154

Some might argue that Israel's leaders are too sophisticated and experienced to believe in a deus ex machina and countenance such an ambitious scheme, and too familiar with the complexities of their region to believe it could succeed. But in fact, Israel's leaders have a long history of favoring remarkably ambitious plans to remake the local map. The original Zionist dream of reestablishing a Jewish state where none had existed for nearly two millennia was nothing if not ambitious, and as discussed in Chapter 1, David Ben-Gurion had hoped to seize all of the West Bank, part of Lebanon, and portions of Egypt in the 1956 Suez War. Similarly, Ariel Sharon believed the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 would lead to the creation of a pro-Israel Chris tian state there and vanquish the PLO once and for all, thereby cementing Israel's control of the Occupied Territories. Given that history, it is perhaps not so surprising that many Israeli leaders held out the hope that the United States might be able to succeed where their earlier plans had failed.

{p. 258} THE LOBBY'S ROLE IN REMAKING THE MIDDLE EAST

By 2002, many neoconservatives were also heavily invested in the idea that the United States could democratize the Middle East and make it a more friendly environment for America and Israel. They had reached that position over the course of the 1990s as they became increasingly disenchanted with U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War.

Pro-lsrael groups - and not only neoconservatives - have long been inter- ested in having the U.S. military directly involved in the Middle East so that it can help protect Israel. They are especially interested in seeing large numbers of American troops permanently stationed there.155 But they had limited success on this front during the Cold War, because America acted as an offshore balancer in the region. Most U.S. forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept "over the horizon" and out of harm's way. Washington maintained a favorable balance of power by playing local powers against each other, which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War ( 1980-88).

This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of "dual containment." Instead of using Iran and Iraq to balance each other - with the United States shifting sides as needed - the new strategy called for stationing substantial American forces in the region to contain both of them at once. The father of dual containment was Martin Indyk, who first articulated the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.156 As Indyk's Brookings colleague Kenneth Pollack observes, dual containment was a policy adopted largely in response to "Israel's security concerns." Specifically, Israel made it clear to the Clinton administration that it "was willing to move ahead in the peace process only if it felt reasonably secure" from Iran.157

There was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment by the mid-1990s, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and it forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both of them. As discussed in Chapter 10, AIPAC and other groups in the lobby not only saved the policy, they persuaded Congress and Clinton to toughen it up. The neoconservatives went even further, however; they were increasingly convinced that dual containment was not working and that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power and replaced by a democratic government. Their thinking was reflected in the two open

{p. 259} letters that they sent to President Clinton in early 1998 as well as their support for the Iraq Liberation Act.

At about the same time, the belief that spreading democracy across the Middle East would pacify the entire area was beginning to take root within neoconservative circles. A few neoconservatives had flirted with this idea in the wake of the Cold War, but it was not widely embraced until the latter part of the 1990s.158 This line of thinking, of course, was evident in the 1996 "Clean Break" study that a group of neoconservatives had written for Netanyahu. By 2002, when invading Iraq had become a front-burner issue, regional transformation had become an article of faith among neoconserva- tives, who, in turn, helped make it the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.159 Thus, Israeli leaders, neoconservatives, and the Bush administration all saw war with Iraq as the first step in an ambitious campaign to remake the Middle East.

CONCLUSION

The Bush administration's plans for Iraq and the wider region have been a stunning failure. Not only is the American military stuck in a losing war, but there is little prospect of exporting democracy across the Middle East anytime soon. Iran has been the main beneficiary of this ill-conceived adventure and it seems as determined as ever to acquire a nuclear capability. Syria, like Iran, remains at odds with Washington, and both states have a powerful interest in having the U.S. military bogged down in Iraq. Hamas now dominates Gaza and the Palestinian Authority is badly split - making peace with Israel even more elusive - and Hezbollah is more powerful than ever in Lebanon, after having stood up to Israel in the 2006 war. We may be witnessing the "birth pangs of a new Middle East," to use Secretary of State RiceÕs regrettable phrase, but it will almost certainly be more unstable and dangerous than the one that existed before the United States invaded Iraq.160

The war in Iraq has not been good for Israel either, especially since it has strengthened Iran's hand in the region. Indeed, the Forward reported in early 2007 that there is a "growing chorus" of voices in Israel who are saying that the Jewish state "could find itself in more danger" now that Saddam has been removed from power.161 Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on Iraq who argued for Saddam's ouster in prewar interviews in the AIPAC newsletter Near East Report, now says, "If I knew then what I know today [January

{p. 260} 2007], I would not have recommended going to war7 because Saddam was far less dangerous than I thought." Moreover, he admitted that the invasion had produced "much, much more [terrorism] than I expected."Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, said in February 2006, "I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam."162

As the United States looks for ways to extricate itself from this disastrous situation, pressure has been growing on the Bush administration to talk with Iran and Syria, and to make a concerted effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The neoconservatives and the Israelis, of course, believed that the road to Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. Once the United States won in Iraq, they believed, the Palestinians would make peace on Israel's terms. But the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and many others believe the opposite is true: the road to Baghdad runs through Jeru- salem.163 In other words, creating a viable Palestinian state will help the United States deal with Iraq and other regional problems. Israel and the lobby have vigorously challenged this line of argument, insisting that America's troubles in Iraq have nothing to do with the Palestinians. Indeed, Ha'aretz reported in late November 2006, just before the release of the Iraq Study Group report, that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "hopes the Jewish lobby can rally a Democratic majority in the new Congress to counter any di version from the status quo on the Palestinians."164 Similarly, a number of pro-lsrael groups still maintain that the United States should refuse to talk with Iran and Syria until these states agree to all of Washington's demands.165

The Bush administration faces growing pressure to pull out of Iraq, but Israeli leaders have encouraged it to stay and finish the job. Why? Because these leaders believe that a U.S. withdrawal would jeopardize Israel's secuity. Both Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Prime Minister Olmert made this point to AlPAC's annual conference in March 2007. Livni said that "in a region where impressions are important, countries must be careful not to demonstrate weakness and surrender to extremists."166 Olmert was even blunter: "Those who are concerned for Israel's security ... for the stability of the entire Middle East should recognize the need forAmerican success in Iraq and responsible cxit." He ended his remarks by saying that "when Amcrica succceds in Iraq, Israel is safer. The friends of Israel know it. The friends who carc about Israel knov it.167 Critics castigated Olmert for making these remarks, mainly because his comments provided additional evidcnce that Israel had backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Bradley Burston, who writes for Ha'aretz, was especially angry with Olmert for venturing into

{p. 261} the American debate on Iraq. He had a simple message for the prime minister: "Stay the hell out of it.168

Olmert had actually expressed his support for America's continued presence in Iraq during a visit to the White House in November 2006, saying, "Ale are very much impressed and encouraged by the stability which the great operation of America in Iraq brought to the Middle East.169 Even some of Israel's consistent backers were put off by Olmert's prowar remarks, with Congressman Gary Ackerman saying, "I'm shocked. It's a very unrealistic observation. Most of us here understand that our policy has been a thorough and total disaster for the United States.170

Given that many Americans now share Ackerman's sentiments about the war, we should not be surprised that some Israelis and their American allies have tried to rewrite the historical record to absolve Israel of any responsibility for the Iraq disaster. In March 2007, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz, wrote about "the false notion that Israel encouraged the US to fight the Iraq War.171 Similarly, Shai Feldman, former head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies and now head of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis, told Glenn Frankel of the Washingto Post in the summer of 2006, "Look, Israel didn't mobilize anybody over Iraq, and associating Israel with the neocons on this issue is preposterous. Israel didn't see Iraq as a danger, and what's more, it had no interest in pushing the Bush administration's democracy agenda.172 This view undoubtedly reflects Feldman's beliefs about Israel's interests and the hierarchy of threats it faced, but as we have shown, it is contrary to what Israel's leaders were actually saying and doing in the run-up to the war.

Not to be outdone, Martin Kramer, a research fellow at WINEP, claims that any attempt to link Israel and the lobby with the war in Iraq is "simply a falsehood," arguing that "in the year preceding the Iraq War, Israel time and again disagreed with the United States, arguing that Iran posed the greater threat.173 But as shown above, Israel's concerns about Iran never led it to undertake a significant effort to halt the march to war. To the contrary, top Israeli officials were doing everything in their power to make sure that the United States went after Saddam and did not get cold feet at the last moment. They considered Iraq a serious threat and were convinced that Bush would deal with Iran after he finished with Iraq. They might have preferred that America focus on Iran before Iraq, but as Kramer admits, Israelis "shed no tears over Saddam's demise." Instead, their leaders took to the American airwaves, wrote op-eds, testified before Congress, and worked

{p. 262} THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

closely with the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the vice president's office to shape the intelligence about Iraq and coordinate the drive to war.

Yossi Alpher, an Israeli strategist at the Jaffe Center, now maintains that former Prime Minister Sharon had serious reservations about invading Iraq and he privately warned Bush against it. Alpher even hints that Sharon might have been able to prevent the war had he spoken out about his concerns. He writes, "Had Sharon made his criticism public, citing the dangers posed to vital Israeli interests, might he have made a difference in the pre- war debate in the United States and the world?174 This is a convenient alibi now that the occupation of Iraq has gone south, but there is no evidence in the public record that Sharon ever advised Bush not to attack Iraq. In fact, there is considerable evidence that the Israeli leader and his key advisers strongly endorsed the war and encouraged Bush to begin it sooner rather than later. If Sharon believed the war to be a mistake, why did his own spokesman repeatedly stress the danger of Iraq's WMD and why did Sharon himself warn the Bush administration that putting off the attack"will not create a more convenient environment for action in the future''?175

It is possible that Sharon made different arguments behind closed doors than he made in public. This is not likely, however, as word of Sharon's opposition to the war would surely have leaked out before it began, if not in the first year or two after Baghdad fell. Sharon was rarely reticent about expressing his views - even when doing so involved disagreements with the United States - and it is hard to believe that he would have kept silent in public if he thought that the decision to invade Iraq would be harmful to Israel. In short, neither facts nor logic support Alpher's claim.

"Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." As the various progenitors of the Iraq disaster now seek to deny their paternity, President John F. Kennedy's rueful remark is more appropriate than ever. But Iraq did not always look like the blunder it has turned out to be. For a few short months in the spring of 2003, the United States appeared to have won a stunning victory and there was little need for Israel's defenders to deny responsibility for the war. During this brief window of opportunity, in fact, key Israelis and their American allies began to pressure the Bush administration to bring U.S. power to bear on Syria and Iran, in the hope that these two rogue states would suffer the same fate as Saddam Hussein's regime. Let us now consider how Israel and the lobby influenced U.S. policy on Syria, and then turn to Iran.

{p. 357} NOTES

{p. 426} 8: IRAQ AND DREAMS OF TRANSFORMIN6 THE MIDDLE EAST

1. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Girou, 2005), 46. Former CIA director George Tenet offers a similar view, writing in his memoirs that "one of the great mysteries to me is when the war in Iraq became inevitable." George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: Harper 2007), 301.

2. As the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman reportedly observed in May 2003 "It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris." See Ari Shavit, "White Man's Burden," Haaretz, May 4, 2003.

3. Quoted in Emad Mekay, "Iraq Was Invaded 'to Protect Israel'ÑUS Official," Asia Times Online, March 31, 2004. We used these quotations in our original article in the London Review of Books, and Zelikow challenged our interpretation of them. We based our discussion on a full and unimpeachable record of his remarks, and his challenge has no basis in fact. For a more detailed discussion of Zelikow's charge and our response, see "Letters," London Review of Books, May 2 5, 2006. Zelikow also served with Rice on the National Security Council during the first Bush administration and later coauthored a book with her on German reunification. He was one of the principal authors of the document that is probably the most comprehensive statement of the Bush Doctrine: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, September 2002).

4. Quoted in "US Assumes UK Help in Iraq, Says General," Guardian, August 20, 2002.

5. Quoted in an interview with Sascha Lehnartz, "Dann helfen uns eben die Osteuropaer," FrankfurterAllgemeine Sonntagszeitung, January 26, 2003. On the influence of the Defense Policy Board in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, see Stephen J. Hedges, "Iraq Hawks Have Bush's Ear," Chicago Triune, August 18, 2002.

6. Joe Klein, "How Israel Is Wrapped Up in Iraq," Time, February 10 2003.

7. Senator Ernest F. Hollings, "Bush's Failed Mideast Policy Is Creating More Terrorism," Charleston Post and Courier (online), May 6, 2004; and "Sen. Hollings Floor Statement Setting the Record Straight on His Mideast Newspaper Column," May 20, 2004, originally posted on the former senator's website (now defunct) but still available at www.shalomctr.org/node/620.

8. "ADL Urges Senator Hollings to Disavow Statements on Jews and the Iraq War," Anti-Defamation League press release, May 14, 2004.

9. Matthew E. Berger, "Not So Gentle Rhetoric from the Gentleman from South Carolina," JTA org, May 23, 2004; "Sen. Hollings Floor Statement"; and "Senator Lautenberg's Floor Statement in Support of Senator Hollings," June 3, 2004, http://lautenberg.senate.gov/newsroom/video.cfm .

10. Aluf Benn. ' Scapegoat for Israel," Ha'aretz, May 13, 2004; Matthew Berger, "Will Some Jews Backing for War in Iraq Have Repercussions for All'" JTA.org, June 10, 2004; Patrick J. Buchanan. "Whose War' ' American Conservative, March 24, 2003; Arnaud de Borchgrave "A Bush-Sharon Doctrine'" Washington Times, February 14, 2003; Ami Eden, "Israel's Role: the 'Elephant' they're talking about," Forward, February 2, 2003; "The Ground Shifts," Forward, May 28, 2004; Nathan Guttman, "Prominent U.S. Jews, Israel Blamed for Start of Iraq War," Ha'aretz., May 31, 2004; Spencer S. Hsu, "Moran Said Jews Are Pushing War," Washington Post, March 11, 2003; Lawrence F. Kaplan, "'Txic Talk on War," Washington

{p. 427} Post, February 18 2003; E. J. Kessler, "Gary Hart Says 'Dual Loyalty' Barb Was Not Aimed at Jews," Forwari, February 21, 2003; Ori Nir and Ami Eden, "Ex-Mideast Envoy Zinni Charges Neocons Pushed Iraq War to Benefit Israel," Forward, May 28, 2004; and Robert Novak, "Sharon's War?" CNN.com, December 26, 2002.

11. Quoted in Akiva Eldar, "Sharp Pen, Cruel Tongue," Ha'aretz, April 13, 2007 .

12. Michael Kinsley, "What Bush Isn't Saying About Iraq," Slate.com, October 24, 2002. Also see Michael Kinsley, "J'Accuse, Sort Of," Slate.com, March 12, 2003.

13. Nathan Guttman, "Some Blame Israel for U.S. War in Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 5, 2003.

14. Bill Keller, "Is It Good for the Jews?" New York Times, March 8, 2003.

15. Ori Nir, "FBI Probe: More Questions Than Answers," Forward, May 13, 2005.

16. Shai Feldman, "The Bombing of OsiraqÑRevisited," International Security 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1982); and Dan Reiter, "Preventive Attacks Against Nuclear Programs and the 'Success' at Osiraq," Nonproliferation Review 12, no. 2 (July 2005).

17. Joel Brinkley, "Confrontation in the Gulf: Israelis Worried by U.S. Restraint," New York Times August 30, 1990; Joel Brinkley, "Top Israelis Warn of Deep Worry over Diplomatic Accord in Gulf," New York Times, December 4, 1990; Hugh Carnegy, "Pullout Not Enough, Says Israel," Financial Times, January 10, 1991; Sabra Chartrand, "Israel Warns Against a Gulf Retreat" New York Times, December 6, 1990; Jackson Diehl, "Israelis Fear Iraqi Threat Will Endure," Washington Post, August 29, 1990; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "Israel's Call for Action," Washington Post, August 24, 1990; Michael Massing, "The Way to War," New York Review of Books, March 28, 1991; Martin Merzer, "Israel Hopes Diplomacy Won't Let Iraqi Stay in Power," Miami Herald, August 29, 1990; and "Sharon to Americans: Blast Iraqis Immediately,"Jerusalem Post, August 12, 1990.

18. Aluf Benn "Sharon Shows Powell His Practical Side," Ha'aretz, February 26, 2001.

19. Seymour Hersh "The Iran Game," New Yorker, December 3, 2001; Peter Hirschberg, "Background: Peres Raises Iranian Threat," Ha'aretz, February 5, 2002; David Hirst, "Israel Thrusts Iran in Line of US Fire," Guardian, February 2, 2002; "Israel Once Again Sees Iran as a Cause for Concern," Ha'aretz, May 7, 2001; and Alan Sipress, "Israel Emphasizes Iranian Threat" Washington Post February 7, 2002.

20. Robert Novak, "Netanyahu's Nuke Warning," Chicago Sun-Times, April 14, 2002; Robert Novak, "War on Iraq Won't Be 'Cakewalk,"' Chicago Sun-Times, April 25, 2002; and William Raspberry, "To Solve the Crisis," Washington Post, April 15, 2002.

21. Elizabeth Sullivan "Sharon Aide Expects United States to Attack Iraq; He Says Saddam Must Be Stopped from Making Nuclear Arms," Cleveland Plain Dealer (online), May 3, 2002.

22. Quoted in Joyce Howard Price, "Peres Encourages U.S. Action on Iraq," Washington Times, May 12, 2002.

23. Ehud Barak, "No Quick Fix," Washington Post, June 8, 2002.

24. Quoted in Gideon Alon, "Sharon to Panel: Iraq Is Our Biggest Danger," Ha aret