The authors’ chapter on how the lobby and its sympathisers inside the defence department and in the White House propelled the US to attack Iraq the second time is powerful but fails to consider that the US, during the last 50 years, has intervened all over the world for many reasons. After 9/11 in particular, revenge was a big justification for going after Saddam, although he had nothing to do with the assault on the Trade Towers. As Thomas Ricks shows in Fiasco, Saddam was regarded as a pushover whose quick defeat would demonstrate American resolve. Nonetheless, protecting Israel was a main, although not exclusive, justification for the second Iraq war (the authors defend the first Iraq invasion). The Israelis fed the lobby and top Washington officials with false intelligence about WMD and backed the deeply dodgy Ahmed Chalabi as the man to succeed Saddam. Not only was the lobby — which is well funded and can influence congressional elections — important here, but pro-Israel officials, by no means all of whom are Jews, were active as well. The now disgraced Scooter Libby, Vice-president Cheney’s chief of staff, was a central figure, as was John Bolton, under-secretary of state for arms control who, when he became ambassador to the UN, was hailed by the Israelis as the sixth man in their delegation.

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