See No Evil
The Teflon Alliance with Israel
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

Two recent offhand comments, both widely publicized, have seriously undermined whatever progress might have been made in exposing the fact that the Iraq war was initiated at least in large part to guarantee Israel's safety and regional dominance in the Middle East.
In late August, Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was secretary of state, told Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service that, when Israel first got wind of U.S. planning for a war against Iraq, a wide range of Israelis, including political and intelligence officials, began warning against such a war. "Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy -- Iran is the enemy," Wilkerson said. Israeli warnings against an attack on Iraq were "pervasive" in Israeli communications with the administration during early 2002, according to Wilkerson.

This story garnered a fair amount of publicity and in at least one instance was used by a radio talk show host to shut off discussion of the John Mearsheimer-Stephen Walt book on the influence of the Israel lobby, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Just a few days after the Wilkerson story came out and also only days after release of the Mearsheimer-Walt book, a caller to the Thom Hartmann radio program commended the book, urged Hartmann and his guest at the time, Senator Bernie Sanders, to read it, and asked Sanders to address the issue of Israel's and the lobby's support for the Iraq war. Hartmann shut the caller off with a comment that "we don't hype books on this program" (after having just allowed another caller to hype another book). Sanders then proceeded to denounce "conspiracy theories" such as the notion that Israel had anything to do with the war, and Hartmann finished off with a remark that, "besides," a report just came out --obviously meaning the Wilkerson story -- that demonstrates there was no Israeli link to the war. LINK