Good Riddance

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

At first blush, the resignation of America’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in wartime — indeed, in protest against a war with the world’s foremost exporter of Islamist terror — is an unnerving development. Fortunately, the former director, Joe Kent, authored an open letter explaining the thinking that led him to abandon his post. A cursory survey of his deliberative process should reassure trepidatious Americans that they’re better off without him.

 

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote at the outset of his letter. If that’s his biggest problem with this war, then it calls into question not America’s actions but the author’s judgment. At no point since 1979 has the Islamic Republic of Iran not represented an imminent threat to the lives of U.S. civilians and service personnel, as well as American national interests across the globe. The Iranian threat is measured in degrees, not in its presence or absence. The amount of time and resources America devotes around the clock to containing the Islamic Republic’s bloody ambitions has been prodigious. If the National Counterterrorism Center didn’t know that or simply discounted it, he was in the wrong job.

 

But that’s not Kent’s foremost objection to this war. Rather, his frustrations seem to be linked almost exclusively to Israel and the pernicious influence he believes it exercises over American political actors, including President Trump.

 

“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” he wrote.

 

Where exactly are these pro-war sentiments Kent is describing? Republicans are behind the U.S.-Israeli campaign in the Persian Gulf, but much of the rest of the country remains skeptical. Indeed, the president acted on his repeated campaign trail insistence that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon (or a ballistic missile shield around a nuclear bomb program) despite the absence of public consensus in favor of those operations. What is Kent talking about?

 

Unfortunately, the former director’s thinking doesn’t get any clearer from there.

 

“This echo chamber was used to deceive you,” Kent wrote directly to Trump, “that you should strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory.” Was Kent not paying attention at the outset of this war when Trump said that combat operations would take at least 4 to 5 weeks but could go “far longer” if warranted?

 

“This was a lie,” Kent continued, “and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

 

Israel did not push the Bush administration into the Iraq War. To say as much ignores the constant maintenance of the post-1991 status quo in Iraq, which put Americans in uniform in harm’s way every day, to say nothing of Israel’s thoroughly documented skepticism of the invasion of Iraq.

 

“In the weeks preceding Sharon’s meeting with Bush on February 7, 2002, a procession of Israeli officials conveyed the message to the US administration that Iran represented a greater threat,” read a Ynet summary of the Washington Post’s reporting around a meeting between President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

 

Indeed, Kent appears to even blame his wife’s tragic death in combat against the Islamic State militia on Israel when he alleges that the Syrian Civil War — or, at least, America’s intervention in it — was “manufactured by Israel.” Does he mean that Syrian instability was an Israeli project? If so, Jerusalem is also to blame for the Arab Spring revolts that ignited many conflicts in the region and ousted figures like the relatively Israel-friendly Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in favor (briefly) of a figure in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. Bit of a blooper there.

 

Or maybe Kent resents America’s introduction of soldiers into Eastern Syria to protect the area’s oil infrastructure. If so, his grievance is with Barack Obama, who spent two years resisting the necessity of intervention inside Syria even as he reluctantly committed U.S. troops and air assets to the campaign against ISIS in Iraq in 2014.

 

None of this is especially persuasive — that is, unless you don’t need any persuading to assume the worst of Israel and its American puppets. In fact, the letter is so clearly influenced by addled thinking informed by anti-Israel biases that it’s reasonable to conclude that Americans are better off without Joe Kent as the nation’s anti-terrorism czar.