Judging by the union’s vocal opposition to the war, the problem, if anything, appears to be the reverse: What is “good for the Jews” seems to concern the organization less than what is good for American liberalism. A premature withdrawal from Iraq would be devastating to the cause of the Jewish state. That observation does not reflect the motives for having gone to war, but simply the outcome of abandoning a fellow democracy without condition and regardless of consequence–and the obvious consequence would be Iraq’s transformation into a den of terror. None of this seems to have made an impression on the reform Jewish organization. ~Lawrence Kaplan, OpinionJournal.com

Mr. Kaplan’s article performs what seems at first to be a clever sleight of hand. He tries at one and the same time to dismiss the charge that invading Iraq had anything to do with Israel (that would be silly, of course!) while castigating the antiwar Union for Reform Judaism for being insufficiently pro-Israel and inadequately committed to the welfare of the Jewish people on account of its call for withdrawal from Iraq. Following him so far?

The usual pro-war canards are trotted out: most Jews oppose the war (true, but fantastically irrelevant) and Israeli officials would have preferred that we attack Iran (as if the most vocal proponents of the Iraq invasion believed something else–Iraq was, in the memorable phrase of Mr. Wolfowitz, “doable”). Yes, most Jews oppose the war, but then most Jews are not neocons (and no one I know of has ever claimed any different, just as no serious war opponent has ever used the term neocon as slang for Jew as the neocons themselves accuse us of doing).

However, many (if not most) of the most prominent ‘intellectual’ neocons, when the term is very specifically defined, are Jewish. More broadly, neoconservatism as the ideology of ‘muscular’ use of military force to advance American “ideals” and expand American hegemony, er, leadership (Max Boot’s Hard Wilsonianism) has all-too-extensive support among evangelicals and security-state Republicans. But the fact that neoconservatism has metastasised in the body politic and spread to new tissue does not make its original cancerous cells any less dangerous. Besides Sharon’s conviction, attested before the invasion, that removing Hussein would be a great boon to Israel, there is also reason to believe that Sharon’s government cooperated seriously with key policymakers at the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the cooking and control of intelligence information, so even the label “Sharon’s war” is not so terribly far-fetched. The only danger of calling it this would be to underestimate the desire in some circles in this country to have this war, regardless of what Sharon or anyone else in Israel might have wanted.

During what I believe was his third boilerplate speech on Iraq in his series of four, Mr. Bush dismissed what Mr. Kaplan calls elsewhere “the Israel card” (along the lines of “we didn’t do it for Israel”) only to play that card to shore up support for the war. Thus he said this in another boilerplate speech on Iraq: “Israel’s long-term survival depends upon the spread of democracy in the Middle East.” In other words, Mr. Bush may not admit to having invaded for Israel, but we must apparently “stay the course” for Israel. It doesn’t matter what one thinks of America’s relationship with Israel to see that his statement is batty–but it is consistent with the bizarre faith in the idea that “democracies don’t war.” A Hamas government, because it is elected, will be peaceful towards its democratic neighbour–this is apparently how the world works in Mr. Bush’s eyes!

What most war supporters have consistently misunderstood or willfully distorted the claims that pro-Israel policymakers pushed (and have long been pushing) for an Iraq war is that few if any antiwar pundits have claimed that the Iraq war was actually good for Israel. As is the case with so many other neocon forecasts, they got this part wrong, too. What those of us against the war have said time and again is that some domestic supporters of Israel imagine that democratising the Near East will be in Israel’s interest (for a ready refutation, see Gaza, Iranian and Iraqi elections), just as Mr. Bush apparently foolishly said recently, just as they imagined that deposing Hussein would serve Israel’s turn. Neither is true, but these people believed both things and set policy accordingly. Intending to “drain the swamp,” as these folks used to euphemistically call their “transformation” of the Near East, they have destroyed some of the dams that prevented the creation of more ‘swampland’.

The claim is that these policymakers capitalised on Mr. Bush’s post-9/11 hypersensitivity to terrorist threats, exploited his existing internationalist and hegemonist instincts and naively optimistc Wilsonian American universalism and focused his attention on the imaginary “threat” of Iraq because they believed it would enhance Israeli security and American hegemony. While I think it is more than likely that many of these men would put Israeli interests first if forced to choose, they are just delusional and ideological enough to believe that there is no real divergence of interests. These policymakers (e.g., Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Libby, Perle, etc.) are just doctrinaire enough to believe almost sincerely that it is America’s role in the world to bring revolution to the four corners of the globe. How they actually think this will guarantee security for Israel is anyone’s guess–they are playing a purely short-term game, aimed at eliminating regimes presently hostile to Israel without any concern for what emerges later. If I were particularly concerned for Israel’s security, I would find this doubly troubling.