Joe Kent Has A Point About The Israeli Role In The Wars In Iraq And Syria.

Joe Kent Has Been Attacked For Implying That The U.S. Wars In Iraq And Syria Were For Israel- But He Has A Point.

In my last article, I covered Joe Kent, the Trump administration’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and his resignation letter over the war in Iran where he said, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

While the Israeli role in pushing and lobbying for the current war in Iran is out in the open, Kent sparked more controversy for his stating in his resignation letter that, Israeli lies about Iran were, “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women” and for writing that he, “lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel” in reference to his late wife Shannon Kent losing her life in an ISIS attack after being deployed to northeast Syria in 2018.

These lines have caused controversy. Vox writer Zack Beauchamp for example wrote that “The 2003 invasion of Iraq was, in his telling, not the result of US intelligence failures or post-9/11 rage or even neoconservative hubris; rather, he says, it was the result of an Israeli ‘lie’ (what exactly that lie was is never explained)” and “Even more bizarrely, he describes the tragic death of his wife Shannon in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing as part of ‘a war manufactured by Israel.’”

But Kent, in reality, has a point about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Syria having Zionist motives behind them.

Greater Israel Was A Main Motive Behind The Iraq War.

The Israeli role in selling the Iraq war was not as out in the open as its role in selling the current war in Iran, but it was just a prevalent.

Years before their role in the Bush administration, many of the architects of the war, Donald Rumsfeld advisor Richard Perle, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith and Middle East Adviser to Dick Cheney, David Wurmser, advocated a regime change war in Iraq, explicitly for the benefit of Israel.

In 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser wrote a letter to the newly elected Benjamin Netanyahu titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, which was essentially the blue print for the greater Israel project, advocating that Israel abandon the prospect of a two state solution and instead take out governments in the region sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, adding that, “This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”.

Perle, Feith, and Wurmser, years later, got key positions in the Bush administration and were the lead architects behind the war they openly described as “an important Israeli strategic objective”.

In their detailed study on the Israel Lobby, political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote that Douglas Feith, the lead author of clean break document, “is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories” adding that, “The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments ... and Israeli interests’.”

Israel also played a major role in selling the Iraq WMD deception used to justify the Iraq war.

A number of Israeli politicians repeated the claim of WMD’s in the American media and in testimonies.

As Mearsheimer and Walt documented:

Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’

At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’

Israeli intelligence similarly played a large role in cooking up the WMD hoax used to justify the Iraq War.

CBS News reported in 2002 that :

Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday.

Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, said Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin.

“Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose,” Gissin said. “It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction.”

In 2003, journalist Bob Dreyfuss reported that a “rump unit established … in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel”, “prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans”.

The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans- which was createdto cook up the WMD deception- according to the Guardian, “forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.”

The Guardian added that, “The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.”

The LA Times in 2005 reported that , “A former senior Israeli military intelligence official asserted Thursday that the nation’s spy agencies were a ‘full partner’ to the United States and Britain in producing flawed prewar assessments of Iraq’s ability to mount attacks with weapons of mass destruction” adding that, “a senior researcher at one of Israel’s leading think tanks, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said intelligence produced by Israel played a significant role in augmenting the case for toppling Hussein.”

Furthermore, the Israel lobby also played a role in pushing for the Iraq War.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt noted, “Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical” adding, “leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the ... war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’”

Mearsheimer later documented that , “two months before the war, AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, said that ‘quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq’ was one of ‘AIPAC’s successes over the past year.’”

U.S. representative Jim Moran said in 2007 that AIPAC, “has pushed [the Iraq war] from the beginning. I don’t think they represent the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all, but because they are so well organized, and their members are extraordinarily powerful—most of them are quite wealthy—they have been able to exert power”.

Israel’s Role In The Dirty War In Syria.

Kent’s most controversial statement in his resignation letter was when he wrote that he “lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel”, in reference to the fact that his wife was killed in an ISIS attack after being deployed to Syria in 2019.

But Kent again certainly has a point.

The U.S.’s real motive for sending troops to north east Syria was not fighting ISIS, but a small part of a larger dirty war designed to topple the Syrian government, a dirty war in which Israel played a large role.

U.S. official Dana Stroul, in 2019, explaining the real motive for leaving U.S. troops in Syria , said, that the U.S. was occupying “the resource-rich,… economic powerhouse of Syria, so where the hydrocarbons are … the agricultural powerhouse”, in order to impoverish government-held Syria and effect regime change.

The U.S. regime change war in Syria was strongly supported by Israel due to the former Syrian government’s ties to Iran and Hezbollah.

In 2012, at the start of the CIA regime change operations in Syria, then advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan, wrote :

One particular source states that the British and French Intelligence services believe that their Israeli counterparts are convinced that there is a positive side to the civil war in Syria; if the Assad regime topples, Iran would lose its only ally in the Middle East and would be isolated. At the same time, the fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders, would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies. In the opinion of this individual, such a scenario would distract and might obstruct Iran from its nuclear activities for a good deal of time. In addition, certain senior Israeli intelligence analysts believe that this turn of events may even prove to be a factor in the eventual fall of the current government of Iran.

Another state department Cable from 2015 , referring to regime change in Syria, wrote, “Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will see the United States as a friend, not an enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab world, not the corrupt regimes. For Israel, the rationale for a bolt from the blue attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be eased. And a new Syrian regime might well be open to early action on the frozen peace talks with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsor since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles” adding, “America can and should help them (Syrian rebels) - and by doing so help Israel”.

In other words, Shannon Kent was sent by the U.S. to Syria in the service of a longstanding regime change war that was strongly supported by Israel and which was carried out in the name of “helping Israel”.

Furthermore, given that Shannon Kent was killed by an ISIS attack in Syria, one cannot ignore Israel’s apparent collaboration with ISIS in Syria.

Journalist Max Blumenthal documented in his book, “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump” that:

At the Likud Party-linked Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, its director, Efraim Inbar, promoted the Islamic State in Syria as a boon to Israel’s strategic deterrence. In an op-ed entitled ‘The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake,’ Inbar argued, ‘The West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction.’ Instead, he insisted, it should exploit ISIS as a ‘useful tool’ in the fight against Israel’s true enemy, Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, which operates on Israeli frontiers from southern Lebanon. ‘A weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS,’ Inbar concluded. Inbar went on to argue for prolonging the conflict in Syria for as long as possible on the grounds that extended sectarian bloodshed would produce ‘positive change.’

While Israeli military honchos took satisfaction from the bloodshed of Syria’s civil war, ISIS commanders tiptoed around the Israeli military. During a public forum in Israel, the ever-candid former minister of defense, Ya’alon, revealed that an ISIS cell operating alongside the rebels in southern Syria had accidentally launched a mortar into Israeli-controlled territory. ‘On most occasions, firing comes from regions under the control of the regime,’ Ya’alon commented. ‘But once the firing came from ISIS positions—and it immediately apologized.’ Pushed by Israeli media to clarify his statement about ISIS formally apologizing to Israel—an open admission of an Israeli backchannel to the jihadists—Ya’alon refused further comment.

Furthermore, the regime change program in Syria that was supported by Israel helped create the presence of ISIS in Syria.

Journalist Seth Harp, in his book “The Fort Bragg Cartel”, documented :

Washington’s efforts to overthrow Assad, who, like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, was an outspoken and belligerent foe of Israel, redoubled amid the Arab Spring protests. One of the most expensive CIA programs in history, a billion-dollar fiasco code-named Timber Sycamore, plowed thousands of tons of guns and ammo fresh from German and American factories into Syria in an effort to arm the Sunni portion of the population that had long chafed at the brutal and corrupt rule of the house of Assad. Arms traffickers working for the CIA also shipped stockpiles of seized weapons and munitions from the Libyan port of Benghazi to Syria, pouring accelerant onto the flames of a spreading civil war.

Chief among the Sunni extremist groups that benefited from the instability in Syria and the flood of black-market arms into the country was the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known by the acronym ISIS.

Referring to Timber Sycamore, U.S. official Phil Gordon admitted to journalist Charles Glass that , “the worst guys were the ones that would take and use the weapons”.

Glass noted that the weapons flow in Syria often ended up in the hands of ISIS and other radical jihadist groups, writing, “The most extreme elements, the Al Qaeda offshoots Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State, not only used the weapons but also advertised them in videos that included beheadings, the hurling of gay men off towers to their deaths, the murder of American journalists and British aid workers, and the rape of Yezidi women.”

On top of the fact that U.S. troops were sent to Syria to further the Israel-supported regime change goal, the U.S. and Israel flooding Syria with weapons undoubtedly helped ISIS- the group that killed Shannon Kent - grow.

Joe Kent is no doubt going to continue to be smeared over his comments regarding the Israeli role in the wars in Iraq and Syria, but he certainly has a good point.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber