By David Brog
Wednesday, November 05, 2025
US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon prior to talking with the press in the Cross Hall of the White House on
14 April 2004. Wikimedia.
The MAGA Right is passionately united in its condemnation
of the Iraq war. But this unanimity collapses when the topic turns to America’s
alliance with Israel. One faction, which by all indications includes President
Donald Trump, sees Israel as a valuable asset: a front-line ally fighting
shared enemies on our behalf so that Americans don’t have to. Others see
something more sinister: a client state that takes American military aid and
then drags the United States into its wars.
Given the power of MAGA opposition to the Iraq War, it
should come as no surprise that Israel’s opponents are doing their best to link
Israel to that war. As Tucker Carlson recently put it during an interview
with Glenn Greenwald, “At the behest of a foreign government—Israel—the
United States began preparing for war against Iraq immediately after the
attacks on 9/11. ... I’m not suggesting that, y’know, they staged 9/11 for that
purpose. But I am saying unequivocally that they used 9/11 for that purpose. We
know that. It’s not a conspiracy theory. And it’s appalling. It’s disgusting.” If
Tucker and his allies persuade a majority of the MAGA movement that Israel is
to blame for the Iraq war, then Israel’s support on the Right will quickly
wither away. The claim is MAGA kryptonite.
The claim that Israel pushed America into Iraq, however,
is baseless. If anything, the opposite is true. While Carlson supported the
Iraq War in 2003, the Israeli government most certainly did not. Israeli prime
minister Ariel Sharon and most of his government were deeply concerned that the
invasion of Iraq would unleash and embolden a far more troubling enemy: Iran.
They repeatedly warned the Bush administration that invading Iraq would be a
disaster. Only after the decision to go to war was taken did Sharon and major
American Jewish organisations decide to get on board rather than risk
alienating the US government.
Israel’s Warnings
Despite Carlson’s suggestion to the contrary, American
administrations do not act “at the behest of” Israel. In the US–Israel
relationship, Israel is very much the junior partner. President Trump’s recent
statement that he will “not allow” Israel to annex the West Bank is just
the latest example of the actual power dynamic. The Israelis have sometimes
criticised US presidents perceived as hostile to their security interests, most
notably President Barack Obama as he pursued a nuclear deal with Iran. But they
never publicly criticise friendly administrations. When they’ve disagreed with
a friendly president, the Israelis have always voiced their concerns in
private. This is exactly what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Reports began to reach Israeli officials in December 2001
that the Bush administration was beginning serious planning for an attack on
Iraq. Shortly thereafter, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon asked for an
in-person meeting with President Bush. The meeting was scheduled for 7 February
2002.
In the intervening weeks, Israeli officials began
previewing the argument they would make at the February meeting and in the
months that followed. They noted that, since the 1990 Gulf War, Iraq had been
largely contained and no longer posed the threat it once had. Iran, on the
other hand, was aggressively pursuing its regional ambitions and nuclear
program. They warned that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would remove Iran’s
greatest enemy and the main obstacle to Iranian regional domination. This would
almost certainly empower and embolden Iran.
These warnings were made in private, but the message from
Sharon and his government was so insistent that it quickly became common
knowledge. Conversations on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington about the
planned invasion assumed Israeli scepticism. These warnings eventually reached
the press. As Israeli historian Martin Kramer has
noted, during 2002, three major US newspapers reported the steady stream of
Israeli warnings.
On 6 February 2022, the Washington Post ran
a story under the headline “Israel Emphasizes Iranian Threat,” in which
Alan Sipress reported:
As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
arrives today for a White House visit, Israeli officials are redoubling efforts
to warn the Bush administration that Iran poses a greater threat than the Iraqi
regime of Saddam Hussein. … A series of leaders have carried that message to
Washington recently in the hope of influencing a debate that has centered not
on Iran but on whether to pursue the overthrow of the Iraqi government.
That article also included a rare public critique from
Israeli defence minister Fouad Ben-Eliezer: “Today, everybody is busy with
Iraq. Iraq is a problem. … But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran
is more dangerous than Iraq.”
As the planning for the war continued, so too did the
Israeli warnings. On 6 October 2002, the New York Times published
a story under the headline “Sharon Tells Cabinet to Keep Quiet on U.S.
Plans” for Iraq. Cabinet officials may have refrained from criticising a
friendly president, but Israeli military leaders did not. The Times quoted
a speech by Israel’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, in which he said,
“I’m not losing any sleep over the Iraqi threat” since Iraq’s military strength
was declining. And it cited an interview in which Israel’s chief of military
intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Farkash, stated that Iraq had grown militarily
weaker since the 1990 Gulf War and was much further from a nuclear weapon than
commonly thought.
Finally, on 16 October 2002, the Los Angeles Times
ran
a front-page story entitled “Not All Israelis Welcome Prospect of War with
Iraq.” The article concludes that “Israeli military specialists have been
debating for several years whether Iraq or Iran poses more of a threat. Most
specialists believe it is Iran, because it is richer and has been more directly
implicated in international terrorism.”
In time, people who were in the room when Israel gave
these private warnings stepped forward to confirm the reported accounts. Most
prominent among these was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served in senior
positions on secretary of state Colin Powell’s staff. In 2007, Wilkerson gave an
interview to Gareth Porter in which he said, “The Israelis were telling us
Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the enemy.” The main Israeli message to the Bush
administration, he said, was: “If you are going to destabilize the balance of
power, do it against the main enemy.” According to Wilkerson, these warnings
against invading Iraq were “pervasive” in Israeli communications during the
run-up to the war and were conveyed by a wide range of Israeli sources,
including political figures, intelligence officials, and private citizens.
The Bush administration did not heed Israel’s warnings
and launched the Iraq War on 19 March 2003, at which point the Israeli
government changed its tune. On 29 July 2003, Ariel Sharon publicly praised the
military campaign in Iraq during a joint press conference at the White House.
“Only you, Mr President,” said Sharon, “have shown the courage, determination,
and leadership needed to spearhead the successful campaign to oust this
ruthless, merciless despot, his dynasty, and evil regime.”
This reversal should surprise no one given the power
dynamics discussed above. Publicly opposing a major US foreign-policy
initiative—especially one driven by a sympathetic administration—would have
risked alienating Israel’s most important ally.
The Argument for Blaming Israel
Given such repeated, well-known, and widely reported
Israeli warnings about the Iraq War, how on earth did the myth that we fought
this war “at the behest of Israel” begin? Tucker Carlson didn’t invent this. He
is merely regurgitating something he’s heard Israel’s opponents say for many
years.
It seems that the first people to contend that Israel
lobbied for the Iraq invasion were Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. In their
2008 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Walt and Mearsheimer
devote an entire chapter to this claim. But while they do their best to connect
Israel to the Iraq War, they offer very little support for their thesis. Their
argument is so weak, in fact, that they punctuate it with major disclaimers.
While insisting that pressure from Israel and pro-Israel groups “was a critical
element” behind the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq, they
repeatedly acknowledge that Israel was not the main force behind the war at
all.
If not Israel, then who? “The driving force behind the
Iraq war,” Walt and Mearsheimer write, “was a small band of neoconservatives
who had long favored the energetic use of American power to reshape critical
areas of the world.” They further note that these advocates for toppling Saddam
Hussein were “losing the argument inside the administration” until 9/11 but
were able to prevail after that tragedy.
Walt and Mearsheimer are correct on both points.
Neoconservatives inside and outside the Bush administration were pushing
for the United States to finish the work of the Gulf War and depose Saddam
Hussein. It’s also true that they were getting very little traction in the
White House and on Capitol Hill until 9/11 changed America’s risk calculus. The
neoconservatives were able to convince Bush that the United States could no
longer tolerate Saddam Hussein’s lawless regime or the chance that it would
develop weapons of mass destruction.
If an ideology peddled by Americans and a devastating
terrorist attack combined to convince President Bush to invade Iraq, then how
is Israel to blame? Israel’s critics often note that many of the leading
neoconservative thinkers were Jewish Americans, and that some of them argued
that toppling Saddam would benefit Israel as well as America. But while this
may be compelling evidence for the conspiracy-minded, Walt and Mearsheimer seem
to understand the absurdity of blaming Israel for the actions of people who
argued so vehemently against the Israeli position (and complained about
the Israelis’ “lack of vision” to anyone who would listen). The authors
therefore tried to bolster their argument by compiling evidence of direct
Israeli involvement in the US decision to go to war. And since there is none,
they were reduced to elevating press releases from American Jewish
organisations and op-eds from Israeli opposition leaders into history-changing
interventions.
The Bush administration began planning for war with Iraq
in the closing months of 2001, and they finalised the decision in the summer of
2002. In September 2002, they launched a campaign to build public support for
the invasion, during which they brought enormous pressure to bear on
politicians, pundits, and public-policy organisations to support the effort. Few
organisations—especially those that supported Israel—wanted to disappoint.
Walt and Mearsheimer make much of the fact that a number
of American Jewish organisations issued supportive statements, but they ignore
the timing and power dynamic underlying those statements. Almost all of them
were issued after the administration had decided to go to war. And these
organisations were not the ones doing the lobbying—they were the ones being
lobbied.
In this environment, administration pressure on the
leading pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC, to support the war must have been
intense. Yet AIPAC never took an official position on the Iraq War. Walt and
Mearsheimer address this gap in their narrative by claiming that AIPAC
“quietly” lobbied in favour of the war. But even this less ambitious claim
breaks down upon further examination.
As the
Forward reported on 12 March 2015, Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) made
the mistake of repeating the claim that AIPAC lobbied for the Iraq War during a
meeting with AIPAC leaders. Faced with “vocal resistance” from the very people
who would have done this lobbying, Frank “clarified that while calling for war
was not the lobby’s official position, some of its top members advocated for it
personally in their meetings with him.” Yes, many individual Jews did support
the Iraq war and made the case for it. But many other Jews, including Rep.
Frank himself, opposed the war. And neither the Israeli government nor the
Israeli lobby actively supported the war.
When it came to the actions of Israel, as opposed to
those of American Jews, Walt and Mearsheimer were able to marshal even less
evidence. They relied primarily on the fact that two former Israeli prime
ministers—Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak—wrote op-eds and made other public
statements in favour of attacking Iraq. But neither man was serving in the
Israeli government at the time. They spoke for the Sharon government every bit
as much as Kamala Harris speaks for the Trump administration.
Stephen Walt put a most public exclamation point on the
weakness of the Israel connection in February 2010, when he published a self-congratulatory
article in Foreign Policy titled “I don’t mean to say I told you so,
but…” Here, Walt claimed that a shocking new revelation had finally vindicated
his argument that Israel played a major role in the decision to invade Iraq.
Walt’s smoking gun is testimony given by former British
prime minister Tony Blair before the UK’s Iraq War Commission. When discussing
a visit he had paid to President George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas in April
2002, Blair stated that: “The Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I
think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we
even had with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there.”
This statement was hardly a surprise. Bush and Blair were
planning to invade a large Middle Eastern country, a decision that required
constant communication with all of America’s and Britain’s regional allies. Of
course they spoke with the Israelis. They most certainly spoke with the Saudis,
the Kuwaitis, and the Qataris as well. Failing to speak with Israel and our
other regional allies would have been diplomatic malpractice. Only a fool—or
someone desperate to find a link where none existed—would try to spin Blair’s
statement into a sensational admission.
Following the US invasion of Iraq, Israel’s warnings
proved to have been prescient. With the greatest obstacle to their ambition
removed, the Iranians had a free rein to build allied Shi’ite militias in Iraq,
extend their influence into Syria, and double-down on their domination of
Lebanon. The dream of a Shi’ite crescent of Iranian influence stretching from
Tehran to Beirut soon became a reality. Israel’s recent wars against Iran and
its proxies—including 7 October itself—all flowed from the Iraq War. Americans
were not the only ones to suffer from our error.
But just because Israel was right about Iraq, that
doesn’t mean it is right about Iran or any other regional adversary. Americans
must make up their own minds about what advances their national interest. But
they must do so free from the lies, distortion, and propaganda of those who
have an axe to grind. Tucker Carlson has admitted that his support for the Iraq
War was a mistake. He should now admit he’s making another mistake when he
blames Israel for what his folly—and that of so many other American pundits and
policymakers—ultimately wrought.
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