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The most serious split between ourselves and our allies was over the war in Iraq. As White House chief of staff Andrew Card observed, “You don’t roll out a new product in August,” so it was September 2002 before the administration officially announced it planned to attack a country that had not attacked us or anyone else. The administration initially maintained that it needed approval from neither the United States Congress nor the United Nations. Public opinion forced them to get both. Democrats were perfectly inert, but respected Republicans, including Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and to some extent Henry Kissinger, began raising questions. The impetus for war came from a small group of neoconservative hawks, including Deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Advisory Board,* and Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. This is a dicey subject, but these gentlemen, along with a posse of neoconservative hawks in the pundit corps, including William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Marty Peretz, are not only Jewish but also the American equivalent of Israel’s

Likud Party. To say that we have Likudniks in the administration is not to endorse the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Get a grip, people. This is not a plot, it’s a situation.

In 1996 Feith and Perle were among those who wrote a foreign-policy/strategy paper for Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu. In it they recommend abandoning the Oslo peace process for a much tougher line. Their primary concern at the time appeared to be Syria: “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria.” (In midwar with Iraq, Rumsfeld accused Syria of shipping sensitive military technology to Iraq, specifically, night-vision goggles. “We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government responsible,” said Rumsfeld.) In 1998 Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld started a full-scale lobbying campaign to get President Clinton to start a war with Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Both were then in the private sector and connected to a right-wing think tank, Project for a New American Century, established by William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. In a letter dated January 26, 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz state that a war with Iraq should be initiated even if the United States could not muster support from its allies. “We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing U.N. resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the Security Council.”

Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld had been agitating for a second Gulf War for years. Their long-held view that America was somehow chained and crippled by international agreements is reflected in their later foreign policy. That Americans had not signed up for this program or even been informed of it seemed to make no difference.

According to Josh Marshall writing in The Washington Monthly, the plan stretches far beyond Iraq and envisions a complete remaking of the Middle East. That such an ambitious undertaking is fraught with risk seems to be of little concern to these rather cavalier gentlemen. In an April 6, 2003, interview on Meet the Press, Wolfowitz repeatedly referred to Hussein’s contempt for “the international community” and warned Syria that it too must respect “the international community.” Since much of the “international community” was by then united against the United States, it was a masterpiece of chutzpah. Despite months of pledges to bring democracy to Iraq and despite promising that Iraqi oil would be used