Joe Kent, who resigned last week as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center to protest America’s attack on Iran, is a brave man. It takes courage to resign on principle from a top government job—Kent is far more senior than any of the officials who resigned to protest Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza—and his decision is especially risky given Donald Trump’s thirst for retribution.
His resignation letter also contains some essential truths. In it, he declares that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” That should be obvious given that Tehran possesses no nuclear weapons and no missiles capable of hitting the US, that it tried to avoid war despite being struck repeatedly in recent years by Israel and the US, and that it complied with the stringent nuclear inspections required by the 2015 nuclear deal. Kent also writes that “we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” a reality that was corroborated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself.
Unfortunately, Kent’s letter includes other assertions about Israel’s role in America’s wars in Iraq and Syria that are not only unconvincing, but suggest a myopic and conspiratorial view of US foreign policy. Opponents of this criminal war can applaud his resignation without endorsing his most outlandish claims, which cast Israel as the sole cause of America’s imperial violence in the Middle East, and suggest that the US was duped into its own wars.
In his letter, Kent argues that in convincing the Trump administration to attack Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters employed “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” But Israel did not draw the US into Iraq. If anything, it was the US that convinced Israel to support invading Iraq, not the other way around.
Advocates of the claim that Israel and its US supporters were “a critical element” in America’s decision to invade Iraq—as the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt famously argued in their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby—often cite two pieces of evidence. The first is a 1996 memo entitled “A Clean Break,” written by several Americans who later served in the Bush administration to help guide Netanyahu when he first became prime minister, and which proposed toppling Saddam’s regime. The second is Netanyahu’s own congressional testimony, in September 2002, in which he predicted that “If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
But these data points become less compelling when one remembers that Netanyahu was not in office in the run-up to the Iraq war; Israel’s prime minister at that time was Ariel Sharon. And there is ample evidence that Sharon and his top advisors reacted skeptically when the Bush administration began turning its attention to Iraq in early 2002.
The reason is that in the early 2000s, like today, the Israeli government was obsessed not with Iraq but with Iran. Though Iraq had been Israel’s primary foe in the 1980s, by the early 2000s, Saddam’s power had been shattered by his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War and a decade of brutal Western sanctions. In February of 2002, The Washington Post reported that, “As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrives today for a White House visit, Israeli officials are redoubling efforts to warn the Bush administration that Iran poses a greater threat than the Iraqi regime.” Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told the Post that, “today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq.”
Bush officials reported hearing that same message. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, later recounted that when Israeli leaders heard that the US was considering an attack on Iraq, they began “telling us Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the enemy.” According to Martin Indyk, US ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2002, Israeli officials spoke about “Iran, Iran, Iran, all the time. The Israelis were not that bothered by Saddam.” Even Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, one of the authors of the infamous Clean Break memo, later recalled that, “What you heard from Israeli officials in private discussions was that they were not really focused on Iraq. They were much more focused on Iran.”
Pro-Israel organizations in Washington echoed the Sharon government’s caution about war. AIPAC staffers insist they did not lobby for the invasion. In fact, two of the books that most carefully reconstruct the Bush administration’s decision to attack—Melvyn Leffler’s Confronting Saddam Hussein and Michael Mazarr’s Leap of Faith—do not mention the pro-Israel lobby at all.
Over the course of 2002, as it became clearer that the Bush administration was determined to oust Saddam, Sharon and his American backers did endorse war. In an August interview, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told CNN that attacking Iraq would be “quite dangerous, but postponing it would be more dangerous.” In mid-October, after Congress granted Bush the authority to invade, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations—the umbrella group that includes AIPAC—publicly endorsed military force.
But there’s a vast difference between noting Sharon and AIPAC’s eventual support for the war and claiming, as Kent does in his letter, that Israel was its primary cause. As late as October 2002, even after Peres had endorsed invading Iraq, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, still said he was “not losing any sleep over the Iraqi threat.” That same month, Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Farkash, disputed the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq was close to acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Remarkably, Joe Kent himself has conceded that Israel did not push the US into war. In his recent interview with Fox News host turned independent streamer Tucker Carlson, Kent noted that Sharon “initially was against it because he wanted us to focus on Iran. But then towards the end, he got on board”—a statement that contradicts Kent’s resignation letter. If Israel’s prime minister was initially skeptical of invading Iraq, and only supported it “towards the end,” how can Israel have drawn the US into war?
Later in his resignation letter, Kent makes another dubious claim. He says that his late wife, Shannon Kent, who was killed by ISIS in northern Syria in January 2019, died “in a war manufactured by Israel.” So Kent is claiming that Israel caused the war in Syria, too.
In his interview with Carlson, Kent explained his logic. He claimed that “Syria was always a major problem under [Syrian President Bashar] Assad for the Israelis.” When the Obama administration insisted that “Assad must go,” Kent added, “that was not like an organic American desire. It wasn’t like Americans woke up and were like, you know, the problem really is this ophthalmologist from Syria, he must go . . . That reflected the priorities of Israel.”
Kent’s account ignores the will of the Syrian people, who rose up against former ophthalmologist Bashar Assad’s notoriously vicious regime during the Arab Spring in March 2011. Five months later, the Obama administration did indeed call for Assad to resign. But it didn’t do so because of Israel. By the summer of 2011, the entire European Union had urged a transfer of power in Damascus. In January 2012, the Arab League followed suit. Israel was a relative latecomer: It didn’t call for Assad to leave power until September 2013.
Nor was Israel especially supportive of Assad’s opponents. As Joshua Landis, a Syria expert who directs the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, explained to me, Syria’s rebels initially received the greatest support from Qatar, with Saudi Arabia and Turkey later playing dominant roles. Israel, by contrast, “wanted to weaken Assad,” an ally of Iran’s, but was also “frightened of the opposition,” which included elements tied to Al Qaeda. For that reason, Israel initially opposed American and European plans to arm Assad’s foes. And while Netanyahu’s government softened its objections over the course of 2013, it still lobbied against giving the rebels anti-aircraft weapons, which the Israelis feared might fall into the hands of jihadist groups. When Congress debated arming Syria’s rebels that year, AIPAC took no public position.
Just as there is scant evidence that Israel “manufactured” America’s efforts to oust Assad, there is also no reason to believe that Israel caused the US to launch direct military action in Syria in 2014. That happened because of ISIS. With Islamic State fighters rapidly gaining ground that year in both Iraq and Syria, the Obama administration and its European allies began bombing from the air. In 2015, the US announced it was deploying ground troops to help Kurdish forces battling the jihadist group. It was as part of this effort that Shannon Kent found herself in northern Syria.
In December 2018, the month before Shannon Kent was killed, Donald Trump declared victory over ISIS and announced that he was removing the 2,000 US troops then in Syria. That full withdrawal, however, didn’t occur. Netanyahu reportedly urged Trump not to remove US forces because he feared that Iran would use their absence to expand its influence. It’s possible that Joe Kent holds Israel responsible for his late wife’s death because he believes that, absent Israeli pressure, the US would have ended her deployment by then.
But Trump’s failure to fully withdraw US troops from Syria cannot be blamed solely on Israel. Saudi leaders opposed the withdrawal for reasons similar to the Israelis’. British officials condemned it because they feared a US pullout might allow ISIS to mount a comeback. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell expressed the same concern. Even within Trump’s own administration, his action prompted fierce dissent. National Security Advisor John Bolton reportedly opposed the move. Most significantly, Trump’s defense secretary James Mattis resigned in late 2018, in part to protest Trump’s decision, which he believed betrayed America’s Kurdish allies. Given this avalanche of domestic and international pressure, it makes little sense to blame Israel alone for Trump’s partial reversal, which left Shannon Kent and her colleagues in harm’s way.
Joe Kent’s claims about Israel’s role in the Iraq and Syrian wars are not isolated inaccuracies. They are symptoms of a conspiratorial worldview that puts Israel at the center of a number of nefarious plots for which there is no credible evidence. Near the end of Kent’s interview with Tucker Carlson, the two mused about Israeli threats to Donald Trump’s life. Carlson asked if Kent had heard reports that “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s security detail was caught twice by Secret Service attaching some kind of device to [Trump’s] Secret Service emergency response vehicle.” Kent replied, “I’ve read it in the media. I don’t know if that’s true.” But less than 30 seconds later, he speculated that “when the president sees that he’s got issues with his own security detail, when he sees what happened in Butler”—the town in Pennsylvania where Trump survived as assassination attempt in 2024—“when he sees what happened with Charlie [Kirk], I think it’s reasonable to believe that somewhere in his head, he thinks that like, maybe I don’t have a choice [to invade Iran]. Maybe they could harm me, or they could harm my family.” Kent goes on to suggest that while Trump may have joined Israel’s war because he “was just simply deceived by the echo chamber,” it’s also possible “that there’s an element of coercion, intimidation, whatever words you want to use there, that is also influencing his decision-making.”
These are not the statements of a man who is merely outraged by Israel’s well-documented crimes. They suggest a willingness to speculate, without evidence, about the most fantastical of hidden treacheries, and a refusal to acknowledge that the United States might have motivations for dominating the Middle East that don’t originate in Tel Aviv. Opponents of America and Israel’s war should welcome Kent’s resignation. But they should take care to avoid the habits of mind from which it sprung.