General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander and former presidential candidate, said in August 2002 that “those who favor this attack now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid that at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." In January 2003, a German journalist asked Ruth Wedgwood, a prominent neoconservative academic and a member of the influential Defense Policy Board (chaired by Richard Perle), why the journalist should support the war. I could “be impolite,” Wedgwood said, “and remind Germany of its special relationship with Israel. Saddam presents an existential threat to Israel. That is simply true.” Wedgwood did not justify the war by saying that Iraq posed a direct threat to Germany or the United States.>

A few weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, the journalist Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine, “A stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is a part of the argument that dare not speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neo-conservative faction in the Bush Administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish community.” Former Senator Ernest Hollings made a similar argument in May 2004. After noting that Iraq was not a direct threat to the United States, he asked why we invaded that country.” “The answer,” which he said “everyone knows,” is “because we want to secure our friend Israel.” A number of Jewish groups promptly labeled Hollings an anti-Semite, with the ADL calling his comments “reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.”® Hollings adamantly rejected the charge, noting that he had long been a staunch supporter of Israel and that he was simply stating the obvious, not making an untruthful claim. He demanded that his critics “apologize to me for talking about anti-Semitism.”

A handful of other public figures—Patrick Buchanan, Arnaud de Borch-grave, Maureen Dowd, Georgie Anne Geyer, Gary Hart, Chris Matthews, Congressman James P. Moran (D-VA), Robert Novak, Tim Russert, and General Anthony Zinni— either said or strongly hinted that pro-Israel hard-liners in the United States were the principal movers behind the Iraq war.!° In Novak’s case, he referred to the war well before it happened as “Sharon’s war” and continues to do so today. “I am convinced,” he said in April 2007, “that Israel made a large contribution to the decision to embark on this war. I know that on the eve of the war, Sharon said, in a closed conversation with senators, that if they could succeed in getting

rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel’s security problems.”"!

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy John J Mearsheimer, Stephen M Walt, 2008