Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent’s resignation letter raises a question that’s going to become increasingly important in the coming months and years: How do we talk about Israel’s undeniable role in pushing the United States into a catastrophic war without either letting Washington, and President Donald Trump himself, off the hook or slipping into the spreading morass of antisemitism?
When it comes to the war in Iran, Kent has reaffirmed what we already knew. In his letter, which he posted on social media, Kent stated that “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.”
Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent’s resignation letter raises a question that’s going to become increasingly important in the coming months and years: How do we talk about Israel’s undeniable role in pushing the United States into a catastrophic war without either letting Washington, and President Donald Trump himself, off the hook or slipping into the spreading morass of antisemitism?
When it comes to the war in Iran, Kent has reaffirmed what we already knew. In his letter, which he posted on social media, Kent stated that “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.”
The first part of Kent’s assertion should not be controversial. The Trump administration has offered no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat (that is, other than Israel’s determination to attack Iran). Officials have barely bothered to try to make the argument beyond occasional servings of word salad about a nuclear weapons program that Iran doesn’t have, or claiming that Iran actually has been at war with the United States since 1979 and Washington is only now really responding, or just that Trump’s Spidey sense was tingling. It’s incoherent and ridiculous.
The second element in Kent’s initial assertion—that Israel and pro-Israel organizations in the United States backing the war put pressure on Trump to join in launching it—should be equally uncontroversial. Yet a number of these lobby groups jumped in to cast this fact as not merely untrue, but inherently antisemitic.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been campaigning for a U.S.-led war against Iran for much of his political career. He aggressively opposed U.S. diplomacy with Iran, taking the unprecedented step of coming before Congress to argue against the nonproliferation agreement signed between the United States and its international partners and Iran 11 years ago. He successfully lobbied Trump to withdraw from that agreement in 2018, putting the United States on course for the current war.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2 that the precipitating factor in the war was Israel’s intention to attack, which would’ve triggered an Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces. He later claimed to have been misunderstood, but House Speaker Mike Johnson reaffirmed this version of events after a classified briefing, as have multiple other members of the House and Senate.
What is controversial, however, is Kent’s claim that the United States had also been pushed into the Iraq War by Israel, as well as his deeply sad but unfounded claim that he lost his wife Shannon, a U.S. Navy technician killed in a 2019 suicide bombing in Manbij, Syria, “in a war manufactured by Israel.”
Kent has a lot of other far-out, conspiratorial views. He has said that he believes that the 2020 election was stolen; that federal officials instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; that the COVID-19 vaccine was actually “an experimental gene therapy”; and that former health chief Anthony Fauci should face murder charges. Unfortunately, many of these views are shared by the Republican base, including the president.
Kent makes a great effort to absolve Trump from responsibility for his own decisions, claiming, in the tradition of “good tsar, bad boyars,” that Trump has been duped into this war by a “misinformation campaign” by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media.”
Kent’s claim that Israel was responsible for the Syrian civil war falls into the same category as his views on Jan. 6. Regarding the Iraq War, the truth is more complicated. Some commentators have insisted that the Israeli government simply opposed it. Indeed, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took a cautious position, partly because Sharon saw the conflict as a distraction from the real threat: Iran. At first, Sharon privately urged the Bush administration not to invade, but then publicly supported the operation once it became clear that the president was committed to doing it. But the bottom line is that the United States would’ve almost certainly gone to war in Iraq with or without the support of the Israeli government. The same is not true of the Iran war.
However, if the Sharon government’s position on the Iraq War was nuanced, there was no such nuance from Sharon’s political rival Netanyahu. Netanyahu came to Washington to aggressively lobby for the invasion, insisting in congressional testimony“if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” which stands alongside Neville Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” speech as one of history’s most incorrect predictions. While Netanyahu was out of power at the time, for many Americans, a former Israeli prime minister publicly advocating the war effectively put Israel’s imprimatur on it.
And this is where it’s important to understand the deeper historical context that produced this war. The fact is that there is a well-organized and lavishly funded faction of hawkish U.S. and Israeli leaders, policymakers, lobbyists, think tankers, and journalists who share a particular vision of U.S.-Israeli military hegemony in the Middle East, and who for many years have relentlessly attacked anyone who disagreed or proposed alternatives. They supported the Iraq War; they opposed U.S. efforts to broker an end to the Israeli occupation and create a Palestinian state (indeed, they have opposed any effort whatsoever to put pressure on Israel for anything); and they opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The list goes on.
Stripped of this context, Kent’s version of events carries real risks. Laying so much blame on the state of Israel for wars that have drained the United States of so much blood and treasure veers into antisemitism, which unfortunately would sit comfortably among the other conspiracy theories that Kent has espoused in the past. We can already see some commentators embracing Kent’s claims in their entirety and suggesting, as Cenk Uygur didthat anyone who disagrees “works for Israel.” In moments of democratic crisis, we must be especially wary about buying into these kinds of simplistic yet dangerous arguments.
The other problem with Kent’s claim is that it lets the U.S. foreign-policy establishment off the hook. Yes, Netanyahu has been in Trump’s ear. So has Sen. Lindsey Graham. So has Sen. Tom Cotton. The fact that such people enjoy such influence in the Washington foreign-policy conversation isn’t an Israel problem; it is very much a Washington problem, and not just a Republican one. There is a hawkish faction of Democrats responsible for this, too.
Unfortunately, this faction was influential in the Biden administration, including President Joe Biden himself, who, in addition to backing the Gaza genocide, also backed Israel’s regional “mowing the lawn” strategy that has now been extended to Iran. It’s not a coincidence that over the past few weeks, probably the most visible former Biden administration official has been Brett McGurk, now championing Trump’s war.
As the Center for American Progress’s Patrick Gaspard pointed outKent is a higher-level resignation than the country ever got from anyone in the Biden administration over the Gaza genocide. This does not reflect well on the Biden administration.
Ultimately, Kent’s claim about the Israeli origins of the United States’ forever wars is both wrong and harmful. It is bad history that feeds bigotry against Jews and undermines the existentially important project of reforming U.S. foreign policy. While the Israeli government and its supporters have considerable influence, the United States ultimately makes its own decisions. The main problem is in Washington, not in Jerusalem or anywhere else.
