For decades, the canard that Israel tricks America into fighting wars on its behalf has been a favorite of anti-Semites of both left and right. Among those who have echoed it is Colin Kahl, who served as then-Vice-President Joe Biden’s national-security adviser and whose nomination for undersecretary of defense for policy is now being considered by the Senate. Kahl made the insinuation after Israel announced the capture of an Iranian nuclear archive in 2018, tweeting, “Let’s see what this is. But this sure has an eerie pre-2003 Iraq vibe to it”—implying, it seems, that Jerusalem hoped the U.S. would use the finding as reason to invade the Islamic Republic. Tony Badran comments:
How can we understand that Kahl’s response to reported news of Israeli spies uncovering a “huge amount of new and dramatic information on the Iranian nuclear program” was to retail, publicly, a patently false anti-Semitic conspiracy theory? The possibilities are finite. . . . Maybe the top-secret U.S. government intelligence that Kahl was privy to before 2018 was in fact blind to Iran’s nuclear program, and really did make it seem reasonable to assume that the Iranian documents were forgeries. If not, and U.S. intelligence had long corroborated Israel’s eventual findings, then Kahl’s use of an anti-Semitic canard to deflate the new revelations was viciously cynical.
From an American national-security standpoint, Kahl’s inability to tell the difference between friends and foes would appear to be matched by his failure to analyze intelligence material correctly, which might ordinarily seem like a prohibitive defect for the guy in charge of policy at the Pentagon. But these are not normal times. For Kahl’s brazen public supporters, the nominee’s empty toolkit must come second to his allegiance to the party line—which now apparently includes the idea that Israel lies America into wars.
It is worth noting that the Jewish state was a victim of the 1991 Gulf War, during which it bowed to U.S. pressure and did not defend itself against Saddam Hussein’s rocket attacks. As for the 2003 Iraq war, whose “eerie vibes” so trouble Kahl, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cautioned President George W. Bush against it.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/colin-kahl-israel-iran-nuclear-archives-war-tony-badran