By Coleman Hughes
Monday, October 06, 2025
Israel is pulling the strings.
It’s a trope that just won’t die—and has reared its head
in recent months. It’s Candace Owens blaming
the Jewish state for Charlie Kirk’s death, or Glenn
Greenwald arguing
that America is supporting Ukraine in order to advance
Israeli interests. Or take my recent podcast guest, Dave Smith, blaming Israel
for getting America embroiled in the Iraq War.
Ask a boomer for an influential voice on foreign policy,
and they’ll probably cite a New York Times columnist or a cable news
fixture like Fareed Zakaria. Chances are they won’t have heard of Dave Smith,
who is a comedian. But Smith has recently emerged as an influential voice on
foreign policy, far better known to younger Americans than old-fashioned journalists
and veteran talking heads. Thanks to appearances on, among many others, Joe
Rogan’s podcast and Piers Morgan’s show, he has amassed a large following—and
earned a reputation as an effective debater.
Debating skills, however, should not be confused with
substantial arguments. And Smith is sorely lacking in the latter department.
I recently had Smith on my
podcast, Conversations with Coleman, for a three-and-a-half-hour
deep dive into his views on jihadism, the Iraq War, the Israel-Palestine
conflict, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In a nutshell, Smith believes that
America has become a nefarious empire whose foreign policy decisions are largely
determined by what Israel wants us to do, rather than by what we believe is
good for us and the world. In his view, our enemies are rarely acting out of
their own malevolent ideologies; they are merely reacting to our imperialist
provocations.
The clearest example of this shtick in action is Smith’s
argument that America invaded Iraq because Israeli interests manipulated us
into it—a theory he has advanced several times on Rogan’s show (including in
his debate with
Douglas Murray), and which he reprised in our own conversation.
How does Smith justify his arguments?
Well, when he is not conveying outright misinformation,
his modus operandi is to cite obscure and unimportant documents that few people
have heard of, exaggerate their importance, and ignore mountains of evidence
that directly contradict his theories.
In an age where podcasts have replaced television news
and influencers have replaced experts, it is important not to dismiss people
simply because they don’t possess the traditional credentials. For better or
for worse, that ship has sailed. We must meet the challenge of the modern
information age on its own terms, which means rolling up our sleeves and
showing the conspiracy theorists exactly why they’re wrong—using hard evidence.
***
Let’s start with that mountain of evidence Smith
overlooks, when he says Israel manipulated America into going to war in Iraq.
There’s plenty to show that the Israelis tried to persuade President George W.
Bush not to invade Iraq, and only once those efforts failed did they
pivot to a position of support for the war—so as not to alienate their most
important ally.
In February 2002, when President Bush had just begun
exploring the possibility of an Iraq invasion, the Israeli prime minister,
Ariel Sharon, visited the White House for the express
purpose of persuading him that Iran, not Iraq, was the
real threat. According to TheWashington Post, Sharon’s visit came on the
heels of a diplomatic blitz wherein a “series of Israeli leaders” had “carried
that message to Washington.”
Israeli sources have corroborated the claim. Yossi
Alpher, former senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, wrote an article
entitled “Sharon
Warned Bush,” in which he explained that “sometime prior to March 2003,”
Sharon “advised Bush not to occupy Iraq.”
In the same article, Alpher cites Danny Ayalon, Israel’s
then-ambassador to the United States, who was in the room during the
Bush-Sharon meetings. According to Ayalon, Sharon warned Bush against trying to
implant democracy into Iraq. “In terms of culture and tradition,” Sharon
reportedly told Bush, “the Arab world is not built for democratization”—hardly
words of encouragement.
An American source confirms the story too. In
an interview with the Inter Press Service,
then–Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson
recalled: “The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the
enemy.” He described the Israeli warnings against invading Iraq as “pervasive”
during this period in early 2002.
Wilkerson also confirmed the reason for their eventual
pivot to supporting the war. He is quoted in The New Republic saying: “The Israelis tried their
best to persuade us that we were focused on the wrong enemy. . . . But once
they understood that we were going to war, come hell or high water, they
weren’t going to get on the wrong side of the president of the United States.”
Wilkerson emphasized that Israel wasn’t responsible for
the Iraq War, despite the fact that he
hated the neocons and the domestic pro-Israel
lobby—just like Dave Smith, who therefore ought to find him particularly
credible.
But when Smith advances his “Israel got us into Iraq”
theory on podcasts, he rarely acknowledges the evidence that contradicts his
view.
***
So, what evidence does Smith present?
He has four lines: (1) Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2002
testimony to Congress, (2) the Project
for the New American Century, and (3) the Clean Break memo, and
(4) the mysterious Wesley
Clark memo.
If you squint at these things in just the right light and
ignore everything else, you can paint a misleading picture of Israeli
manipulation. But with even the most basic context, the whole narrative falls
apart.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2002 Testimony to Congress
Netanyahu, who was a private citizen and former prime
minister at the time, gave testimony in support of the Iraq invasion in
Congress. Smith sees this as crucial. But as I explained to him on the podcast,
the testimony occurred after Bush had already decided to go into Iraq.
Bush announced his
decision to invade Iraq in a meeting with all of his
principals on September 7, 2002, according to then–National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, who was in the room. Netanyahu testified on September 12,
2002.
What Netanyahu, who was not even prime minister, said in
public after the decision was made cannot have had more weight than what the
actual prime minister said to Bush when the president was still deciding. And
as we’ve seen, Sharon said: Don’t do it.
The Project for the New American Century
An important pillar of Smith’s theory is that the
neoconservatives used “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) as a false pretext
for the Iraq War, when in reality they wanted regime change in Iraq because it
would help Israel.
He explained his reasoning in his debate with Josh Hammer (hosted by the late Charlie Kirk):
. . . in the ’90s, when the
neocons admitted they wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein, they never said it
was because he had nuclear weapons. They said he was a problem for Israel in
the region. They only made up that lie after 9/11 because they knew that’s what
would sell.
This is simply untrue.
One of Smith’s go-to sources for characterizing
neoconservative thinking in the ’90s is the Project for the New American
Century, a think tank that existed between 1997 and 2006. The very first time
they advocated overthrowing Saddam was in 1998, via an open
letter to President Bill Clinton. The WMD threat was
their main argument. Indeed it was their entire argument. Here is how
the short letter ends:
We urge you to act decisively.
If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the
U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national
security interests of the country.
The Clean Break Memo
Smith’s other go-to source for “what the neocons said
pre-9/11” is the Clean
Break memo, a policy document written in 1996 by a group of pro-Israel
American neoconservatives led by Richard Perle. Smith often misrepresents this
document as proof that the neocons admitted they wanted to overthrow Saddam in
order to help Israel.
But the purpose of the document was not to make
suggestions for American policy, but to make suggestions to then–Prime Minister
Netanyahu. Though not primarily about Iraq, the document’s brief mention of
Saddam reads as follows:
Israel can shape its strategic
environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing,
and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as
a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
For Dave Smith, this passage is the smoking gun. Not only
did the memo suggest regime change in Iraq, several of its authors ended up
working at the Pentagon during the Bush years—when regime change became the
policy.
Coincidence? Smith doesn’t think so.
But a closer look at the Clean Break memo reveals that,
although it may have shaped Netanyahu’s thinking (or simply mirrored
it), it could not have been important vis-à-vis America’s Iraq policy.
According to the memo, the point of overthrowing Saddam
was not to install democracy but to replace him with the Hashemite monarchy,
which had ruled Iraq between 1921 and
1958, and would be friendly to Israel if restored. (Remember, this memo was
written for the Israeli administration, not the American one.) “Were the
Hashemites to control Iraq,” it explains, “they could use their influence over
Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and
Syria.”
Not only did we not restore the Hashemite monarchy
in Iraq, there is nothing in the public record to suggest that we even
considered it. So how could the Clean Break memo have been the blueprint for
America’s goals in Iraq?
What Smith has done here is plucked one sentence out of
its original context and twisted its meaning to fit his desired narrative.
The Mysterious Wesley Clark Memo
The second memo Smith relies on is even flimsier, because
it doesn’t exist in the public record at all, and nobody who read it has ever
come forward and relayed its contents. We have reason to believe it existed
only because General Wesley Clark heard about it secondhand.
According to Clark’s book Winning Modern Wars and public
interviews, just after 9/11 someone at the Pentagon told him in casual
conversation about a memo that revealed an American five-year plan to do regime
change in seven countries in a specific order: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya,
Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran.
The first thing to note is that we executed or backed
regime change only in two of the seven countries (Iraq and Somalia) during
Bush’s presidency. And in three of the seven countries (Lebanon, Sudan, and
Iran) we never did regime change at all, let alone within the allotted time
horizon. Meanwhile, we did do regime change in countries not on the list like
Liberia, where our intervention ended a bloody civil war and likely saved tens
of thousands of lives. Any way you slice it, the supposed “plan” outlined in
this memo clearly wasn’t carried out.
Of course, just because a plan didn’t happen, it doesn’t
mean it never existed. But, crucially, there is no reason to believe this memo
was ever important to begin with.
During the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld ran the
Pentagon, and his memos were derisively called “snowflakes” because he would
write 20 to 60 per day, and they would pile up on people’s desks like snow. His
aide
estimated that Rumsfeld produced about 20,000 memos
during his years with Bush. And Richard Clarke, who worked with National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, recalls that she was told to ignore his
memos.
Smith has never produced evidence that this particular
Pentagon memo was anything other than Rumsfeld’s thoughts of the hour. And the
only source who claims that it was important is General Wesley Clark—who wasn’t
in the administration and, by his own admission, never read the memo.
***
There’s another plank to Smith’s theory: He points to the
idea that American organizations which lobby for Israel were a key villain in
the story of how we got into Iraq.
While it’s true that the Israel lobby mostly supported
the Iraq War, it’s absurd to think that their influence was anywhere near big
enough to tip the scales. During Bush’s presidency, $17 million was spent by
domestic organizations lobbying Congress on Israel, according to OpenSecrets.org. To put that in perspective,
the cigarette company Philip Morris spent about $200 million over the same time
span. And even with all that money, Philip Morris was unable to prevent
Congress from passing the federal tax hike on cigarettes in 2009.
During Obama’s presidency, according to the same source,
pro-Israel domestic organizations spent a total of $30.2 million lobbying the
Hill. That means they were outspent by the dentistry lobby, which shelled out
$32.8 million over the same time span. And both the dentistry lobby and the
Israel lobby represented a drop in the bucket compared to the real heavyweights
like Big Pharma which spent around $2 billion over the same period.
Aside from noting that the Israel lobby is about 100
times smaller than the big lobbies, there is the further question: If the
Israel lobby is so powerful, how come it can’t get America to do favors much
smaller than a full war?
In her memoir, Condoleezza Rice recalls the story of
President Bush’s 2002 Palestine speech. In the speech, Bush planned to call for
eventual creation of a Palestinian state. The Israelis didn’t mind this. But
crucially, Bush was going to call it “Palestine.” Rice writes that when she
informed Danny Ayalon, the Israeli ambassador to America, of this, he objected:
“He can’t do that,” Danny
protested. “Palestine is Judea and Samaria, the biblical home of the Jewish
people.”
Rice goes on:
I listened calmly for a while
to the history lesson and repeated, “Danny, he is going to call it Palestine.”
Danny said that he needed to talk to the prime minister. I said that the
President had made a decision. When he called back, Danny asked if we could
call it “New Palestine.” I replied that “New Palestine” sounded dumb and that
the President wouldn’t accept any change in the language. “And Danny, don’t
lobby the Hill,” I said. “It’s not gonna work.”
In other words, the Israelis couldn’t get Bush to add one
little word to his Palestine speech in 2002. For 36 years, they could not get
the U.S. to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which would
have required one stroke of the presidential pen. They couldn’t get Bush to
mount a campaign against
Syria’s admission to the UN security council in 2002.
They couldn’t get Bush to bomb
Syria’s nuclear facilities in 2007. Yet we are
supposed to believe that a country with the size and population of New Jersey,
which couldn’t get America to do any one of these smaller favors, somehow got
us to fight an entire war—and they accomplished all of this with a lobbying budget
the same size as Big Dentistry?
If it weren’t such a serious slander, it would actually
be laughable.
The truth is that nobody is controlling us. If the war in
Iraq was a mistake, then it was our mistake. The American security
establishment, for good and for ill, makes its own choices—and in the end, it
must answer to one authority and one authority only: the American people.
But this idea that Israel made us do it is just one shard
in a wider ecosystem where anti-Israel propaganda goes down smoothly and where
misinformation isn’t cross-examined; it’s rewarded. Repetition—and vibe—beat
evidence and context. Loose claims congeal into conspiracy theories with
remarkable speed. If we want a politics tethered to reality, we have to resist
that gravitational pull: Demand sources, distinguish performance from analysis,
and refuse to let style masquerade as substance.
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