Israel Didn’t Make Us Do It
Israel Didn’t Make Us Do It
Joe Kent, the Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday in protest against the war on Iran.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote. So, what, in his estimation, was the reason for this war? Simple: The Israelis wanted it, and they get what they want.
Kent accused “Israeli officials” and their American fifth columnists of mounting a “misinformation campaign” that “sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” They whispered sweet falsehoods into President Trump’s ear about the “path to a swift victory” before him. That was a “lie.” Indeed, it was the same lie “the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War.”
Israeli perfidy is so extensive that Kent even blamed them for the rise of ISIS in the last decade and the “manufactured” war against them in which the former director tragically lost his first wife, a Navy cryptologist killed in an ISIS suicide attack in Syria in 2018.
If these are the baseless suppositions Kent took with him into public service, Americans should be gratified by his departure.
Iran may be more of an existential threat to Israel, but the Iranian threat to U.S. civilians, service personnel, and interests abroad is constant and has been since 1979.
Iran has killed hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks throughout the decades in Lebanese and Saudi barracks, in U.S. embassies, and on the streets of Iraq. They have plotted assassination campaigns and terror attacks on U.S. soil targeting foreign dignitaries, American civil servants, and even U.S. presidents. They built the region’s most formidable arsenal of missiles, were racing toward a nuclear bomb that many Iranian officials insisted they had every intention of using, and aligned themselves with America’s foreign adversaries in an active campaign designed to overturn the U.S.-led world order.
Such a regime cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, as every recent American president has said.
Israel didn’t drag us into the Iraq War. In fact, as the historical record demonstrates, Ariel Sharon’s Israeli government lobbied George W. Bush’s administration against toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime in favor of neutralizing Iran.
As for ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (or Greater Syria, essentially the Levant), it was al-Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise, before breaking away. Al-Qaeda arose in the 1980s out of the Afghan mujahideen’s jihad against the Soviet Union. While it is doctrinally opposed to the Jewish state, as are all jihadist groups, the principal mission al-Qaeda defined for itself was global jihad against the United States. It thus serially attacked our nation throughout the 1990s, culminating in the 9/11 atrocities that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the faction that evolved into ISIS, dedicated itself to jihad against American troops and the fomenting of insurrection in Iraq; it opposes Israel in principle, but its preoccupation, like al-Qaeda’s, is jihad against the West and the “head of the snake” (us).
But the facts are no obstacle when the goal is to accuse Israel of hypnotizing the American political class into doing the bidding of the Jewish state.
Much has been made of a statement Secretary of State Marco Rubio made at the outset of hostilities that was distorted to suggest that the U.S. had no choice but to join Israel’s war. But Rubio was explaining the simultaneity of the initial U.S. and Israel attacks — if Israel went first, we’d get hit anyway — not the justification for the war. About that, he was clear: Within a year to 18 months or so, he said, Iran “would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it, because they could hold the whole world hostage.”
Given the unwillingness of Iranian negotiators to abandon their nuclear weapons program even in exchange for U.S.-provided civilian-grade radioactive materials, the administration concluded that this project could not be allowed to mature.
It’s not surprising that Trump made this determination, given that he has been an Iran hawk for a long time. In 1980, amid the Iranian hostage crisis, Trump called it “ridiculous” that Jimmy Carter’s administration allowed that “horror” to continue. So, should that president have ordered a major military operation to rescue them? “I absolutely feel that, yes,” he said, adding that “we would be an oil-rich nation” if we had.
In 1988 he told a reporter: “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look [like] a bunch of fools.” And Trump appeared to have a granular understanding of what it would take to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island,” he said of Iran’s primary oil transshipment hub in the Persian Gulf on which he ordered airstrikes last week. “I’d go in and take it.”
“I would never take the military card off the table, and it’s possible that it will have to be used, because Iran cannot have nuclear weapons,” the future president reiterated in 2011. If it wanted to, the U.S. could “blow them away to the Stone Age,” he said the following year.
In both presidential campaigns, he said Iran must never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. In his first term, he tore up Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal in favor of a policy of “maximum pressure” and ordered the killing of Iran’s terror chief Qasem Soleimani. During his second run for president, Iran tried to assassinate him, which he did not forget. In comments about the elimination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Trump boasted, “I got him before he got me.”
At times, Trump has said that presidents he didn’t like would launch a war against Iran only to boost their domestic popularity — comments his critics often cite. But the president has consistently entertained a military solution to the dangers posed by the Islamic Republic. There is no indication that Israelis and their interests ever factored into his thinking on the question over the years.
The notion that now Donald Trump has been cowed by Bibi Netanyahu into meekly following him into the Iran war is manifestly absurd. It is contradicted daily by Trump’s evident passion — relish even — for the mission, and the president has been happy to pull the reins on Israel in the past, whether at the end of the Twelve-Day War, over the war in Gaza, or on the question of Israeli settlements.
There are legitimate reasons to oppose, or be skeptical of, the Iran war, but they are not the ones offered by Joe Kent, or the conspiratorial claque that sees Israeli or Jewish manipulation behind U.S. foreign policy, indeed all of American national life. Evidence and common sense mean little to this faction. You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
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