FP: Blaming Israel lets Washington off the hook

Joe Kent (right), Trump and Netanyahu

Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent’s resignation letter raises a question that’s going to become increasingly important in the coming months and years: How do we talk about Israel’s undeniable role in pushing the United States into a catastrophic war without either letting Washington, and President Donald Trump himself, off the hook or slipping into the spreading morass of antisemitism? – ‘Foreign Policy’ puts a question.

When it comes to the war in Iran, Kent has reaffirmed what we already knew. In his letter, which he posted on social media, Kent stated that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The first part of Kent’s assertion should not be controversial. The Trump administration has offered no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat (that is, other than Israel’s determination to attack Iran). Officials have barely bothered to try to make the argument beyond occasional servings of word salad about a nuclear weapons program that Iran doesn’t have, or claiming that Iran actually has been at war with the United States since 1979 and Washington is only now really responding, or just that Trump’s Spidey sense was tingling. It’s incoherent and ridiculous.

The second element in Kent’s initial assertion — that Israel and pro-Israel organizations in the United States backing the war put pressure on Trump to join in launching it — should be equally uncontroversial. Yet a number of these lobby groups jumped in to cast this fact as not merely untrue, but inherently antisemitic.

Netanyahu's role

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been campaigning for a U.S.-led war against Iran for much of his political career. He aggressively opposed U.S. diplomacy with Iran, taking the unprecedented step of coming before Congress to argue against the nonproliferation agreement signed between the United States and its international partners and Iran 11 years ago. He successfully lobbied Trump to withdraw from that agreement in 2018, putting the United States on course for the current war.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2 that the precipitating factor in the war was Israel’s intention to attack, which would’ve triggered an Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces. House Speaker Mike Johnson reaffirmed this version of events after a classified briefing, as have multiple other members of the House and Senate.

Kent makes a great effort to absolve Trump from responsibility for his own decisions, claiming, in the tradition of “good tsar, bad boyars,” that Trump has been duped into this war by a “misinformation campaign” by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media.”

And this is where it’s important to understand the deeper historical context that produced this war. The fact is that there is a well-organized and lavishly funded faction of hawkish U.S. and Israeli leaders, policymakers, lobbyists, think tankers, and journalists who share a particular vision of U.S.-Israeli military hegemony in the Middle East, and who for many years have relentlessly attacked anyone who disagreed or proposed alternatives. They supported the Iraq War; they opposed U.S. efforts to broker an end to the Israeli occupation and create a Palestinian state (indeed, they have opposed any effort whatsoever to put pressure on Israel for anything); and they opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The list goes on.

Kent’s version of events carries real risks

Stripped of this context, Kent’s version of events carries real risks. Laying so much blame on the state of Israel for wars that have drained the United States of so much blood and treasure veers into antisemitism, which unfortunately would sit comfortably among the other conspiracy theories that Kent has espoused in the past.

The other problem with Kent’s claim is that it lets the U.S. foreign-policy establishment off the hook. Yes, Netanyahu has been in Trump’s ear. So has Sen. Lindsey Graham. So has Sen. Tom Cotton. The fact that such people enjoy such influence in the Washington foreign-policy conversation isn’t an Israel problem; it is very much a Washington problem, and not just a Republican one. There is a hawkish faction of Democrats responsible for this, too.

While the Israeli government and its supporters have considerable influence, the United States ultimately makes its own decisions. The main problem is in Washington, not in Jerusalem or anywhere else.

Israel thought it could spur rebellion inside Iran – That hasn’t happened

As the United States and Israel prepared to go to war with Iran, the head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, went to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a plan, ‘The New York Times’ reveals.

Within days of the war’s beginning, said David Barnea, the Mossad chief, his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government. Mr. Barnea also presented the proposal to senior Trump administration officials during a visit to Washington in mid-January.

Mr. Netanyahu adopted the plan. Despite doubts about its viability among senior American officials and some officials in other Israeli intelligence agencies, both he and President Trump seemed to embrace an optimistic outlook. Killing Iran’s leaders at the outset of the conflict, followed by a series of intelligence operations intended to encourage regime change, they thought, could lead to a mass uprising that might bring about a swift end to the war.

“Take over your government: It will be yours to take,” Mr. Trump told Iranians in his initial address at the war’s start, after saying they should first seek shelter from the bombing.

Weeks into the war, an Iranian uprising has not yet materialized. American and Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that the theocratic Iranian government is weakened but intact, and that widespread fear of Iran’s military and police forces has dampened prospects both for nascent rebellion in the country and for ethnic militias outside of Iran to launch cross-border incursions.

The belief that Israel and the United States could help instigate widespread revolt was a foundational flaw in the preparations for a war that has spread across the Middle East. Instead of imploding from within, Iran’s government has dug in and escalated the conflict, striking blows and counterblows against military bases, cities and ships around the Persian Gulf, and against vulnerable oil and gas installations.

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former American, Israeli and other foreign officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss national security and intelligence issues during a war. The New York Times interviewed officials with a variety of views on the likelihood of an uprising.

Mr. Barnea’s predecessor at Mossad, Yossi Cohen, decided that trying to foment rebellion inside Iran was a waste of time and ordered that the resources devoted to the matter be reduced to a minimum. During Mr. Cohen’s tenure, which ended in 2021, Mossad calculated how many of the country’s citizens would need to participate in protests for them to truly threaten the Iranian government, comparing the estimates to the size of actual protests since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

“We wondered if we could bridge this gap,” Mr. Cohen said in 2018, “and we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t.”

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