I read your resignation letter, and I am deeply sorry about your wife Shannon and I thank you for your years of service.

As the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, you know more about the threat landscape than most people alive. You spent your career studying terrorism. You know, better than almost anyone, what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has done over nearly five decades. Hezbollah. The proxy networks from Iraq to Yemen to Gaza. The assassinations, the bombings, the long arm of a regime that has treated the export of violence as a core instrument of foreign policy. Iran is not a country that stumbled into conflict with the United States. It is the single largest state sponsor of terrorism in modern history, responsible in no small part for the deaths of American servicemen and women, including some of the people you served alongside. 

That context doesn’t make every decision about Iran automatically right. I say that as both an American and an Israeli citizen, writing this from a bomb shelter, listening to interceptions of cluster warheads. After over two years of an exhausting war, one naturally begins to wonder about the purpose of all this and about the end goal. But the Iranian regime is brutal. It deserves to fall. The Iranian people deserve their freedom as much as anyone on earth. And my country experienced firsthand what happens when you don’t address a real threat until it’s “absolutely imminent”. So I find I cannot sign onto the argument that this war is simply a trap manufactured for someone else’s benefit.

Which brings me to where your letter actually goes.

You called the Iraq War “manufactured by Israel.” That word implies the decision wasn’t really American, that someone else was running the room. But George W. Bush and Co. invaded Iraq. Dick Cheney spent years building the intellectual and political architecture for it. Donald Rumsfeld had been pushing toward Baghdad since the first days after September 11th. The neoconservative movement that championed that invasion was a creature of American ideology, American think tanks, and an American conviction that the Middle East could be reshaped by force. These were not men who got steered anywhere they didn’t want to go. They made a catastrophic decision, sold it on false pretenses, and spent years refusing to own it. That failure belongs in Washington.

Now apply that logic to the present. You are essentially arguing that Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Donald Trump to go to war with Iran. I have my own longstanding problems with Netanyahu, and I hold no brief for him here. But Trump is one of the most unpredictable and strong-willed figures to ever occupy the Oval Office, and has spent decades doing what he wants and confounding everyone around him. The idea that Bibi is the primary author of this decision doesn’t hold. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been among the most consistent advocates for a hard line on Iran for the better part of two decades. He built that position through Senate testimony and public statements going back to the early 2010s. And then there’s Pete Hegseth, who’ll do just about anything for the love of the game.

On the lobby: AIPAC’s spending is real, as is its influence on Congressional behavior. But a lobby works by finding politicians already inclined to be persuaded, and America has produced entirely from within generations of hawks whose appetite for confronting Iran needs no outside explanation. The lobby you describe as all-controlling is also, right now, losing races it spent tens of millions to win and being rejected by politicians who once competed for its endorsement.

There is also something worth saying about who your letter is trying to reach. A large part of the MAGA base, the movement whose president you addressed, is furiously opposed to this war. The vice president himself didn’t seem too excited about it. The anti-war argument stands on its own. It does not need Israel as its villain to be coherent or persuasive.

There is also something slightly absurd about the logic that outside influence must explain why Trump abandoned his America First promises. Trump abandoning his promises is not evidence of a conspiracy. It’s his MO. This is a man whose relationship with his own stated positions has always been wobbly and sometimes completely unrecognizable from one day to the next. Using Trump’s ideological inconsistency as proof of Israeli manipulation sets a bar that would implicate Israel in roughly half of everything this administration has ever done.

You of all people know what Iran has done. You built a career around it. The questions you are asking about this war, about goals and costs and who pays the price, those are worth asking. Your credibility on this subject is real, your grief is real, and the combination of the two gives your voice genuine weight.

But the answer to those questions is not Israel.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)