Israel Matzav

Karl in Washington: 'We didn't go to war for Israel'

A new book hit the stores in Washington on Tuesday, and in it, former Bush adviser Karl Rove demolishes one of the central theses of another book, Walt and Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby. Rove asserts unequivocally that the United States did not go to war in Iraq for Israel.

Rove, Bush’s close confidante and a senior White House adviser at the time of the US invasion in 2003, describes several theories critics offered on why the president attacked Baghdad, among them “that he was doing the bidding of Israel”; teaching the Arab world a lesson; or finishing what his father started in the first Gulf War.

“None of these is true,” he writes. “The reason we turned our attention to Iraq was much more straightforward: We believed Saddam Hussein posed a threat to America’s national security.”

To back up his statement, Rove points to the less-than-complete international accounting Hussein had given of his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program, his support of terrorists, his continued threatening of American pilots overseeing Iraq’s no-fly zone, his evasion of sanctions, and his flouting of 16 UN resolutions following the end of the Gulf War, among other issues.

“In the wake of 9/11, these actions made Saddam Hussein a unique threat,” says Rove in his 520-page book xxCourage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:26 PM