Israeli officials were exuberant when neoconservative and hard line Zionist Paul Wolfowitz was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense in 2001. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had already expressed his belief in overthrowing Saddam Hussein in two open letters to former President Clinton. Wolfowitz, Vice President chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, and Princeton historian Bernard Lewis played prominent roles within the Regime to convince Bush to go to war on Iraq. Wolfowitz advocated for an attack on Iraq before Afghanistan at a Camp David meeting so strenuously that Cheney asked him to back off. Libby was also responsible for the report pushed on Secretary of State Collin Powell for his address to the UN on the issue of Iraq's WMD. Powell later regretted giving the address because the report was riddled with factual errors. The authors of The Israel Lobby say that these neocon officials were "obsessed" with removing Saddam from power. The push for war within the government was supported by sympathetic media commentators such as Charles Krauthammer and William Safire who wrote numerous articles insisting on war. The most visible Israel pressure group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) also backed the war. AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the neocon newspaper, New York Sun, in January, 2003 that the use of force in Iraq counted as one of the group's successes in the past year.
At the Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith was in charge of the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Both groups were staffed with ideological fellow travelers. David Wurmser and an associate of Richard Perle, Michael Maloof, were charged with finding links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. According to one journalist Israeli intelligence played a role in convincing Wolfowitz to bypass the CIA and rely heavily on the dubious exile, Ahmed Chalabi for information. Abram Shulsky, another neoconservative with long ties to Wolfowitz, headed the Office of Special Plans. The office was responsible for finding information that could be used to sell the Iraq war. According to the Guardian newspaper, the OSP forged a close tie with a parallel ad hoc intelligence capability within Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office for a source of alarmist reports that the official intelligence agency, Mossad, was not prepared to authorize. Michael Ledeen, neoconservative and fascist sympathizer, meet privately with fascist members of Italy's military intelligence with the knowledge of US government officials. In this commentator's opinion, Ledeen facilitated the entry of the forged and sensational Niger yellowcake documents, probably created by members of the notorious P2 Masonic cell, into the data stream collected by OSP and sent directly to the Vice President. The false report of attempted buys of enriched uranium ore by the Saddam regime had already been discredited by the CIA by the time the allegation made it into a presidential speech to Congress.
Chalabi had credence with the neoconservatives in government because he went to great lengths to establish links with individuals and groups in the Israel lobby. He was especially close to JINSA, but also had close ties with AEI, HI, WINEP and the most influential Israel support group, AIPAC. Chalabi pledged to forge good relations with Israel once he was installed in power in Iraq. Bernard Lewis, the academic and pro-war Bush advisor, was advocating that the INC leader be placed in charge of Baghdad after the invasion. Chalabi even offered to rebuild the oil pipeline between Mosul and Haifa. Benjamin Netanyahu boasted in mid June, 2003 that, "It won't be long when you see Iraqi oil flowing to Haifa." In view of subsequent events that statement certainly qualifies as another Chalabi pipe dream.
An operative delusion was the President's dream of transforming the Middle East into a region of peaceful democracies, starting with the toppling of Saddam Hussein. This vision is said to come from Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, whose writings apparently impressed the Charlatan, but was also a vision shared by many in Israel. Six years after the invasion encouraged by Israel and it's American lobbyists that dream has clearly turned into a nightmare for both America and Iraq.