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I remember, too. I remember the mood over here being largely sympathy for the tragedy and understanding why they would want revenge, but also that this was a terrible idea and was driven by emotion, not any reasonable evaluation of what was going on. I suppose some of the foreign policy hawks also saw it as a chance to get back into the nation-building game, but it was the completely understandable lashing-out of a people who had been hurt.
That didn't make it right, but there was no need of sinister Semitic string pullers to urge it on.
Right, the Iraq War had a huge number of non-Jewish backers and it's ironically quite philosemitic to ascribe agency only to Jews and not to any gentiles and to claim the former persuaded the entire west (with polling routinely showing supermajority public approval) to invade.
Often overlooked is that Bush Sr considered not finishing off Saddam to have been a grave mistake and possibly to have cost him re-election, and imparted this unto his son. So W had a personal vendetta against Saddam and had stacked his team full of his father's advisors (who also had the same personal vendetta). Many of these were gentile and their reasons for wanting to invade Iraq had little or nothing to do with Israel.
The Israelis themselves were ambivalent; Ariel Sharon discouraged the war - certainly the entire Israeli establishment would rather have invaded Iran than Iran. Mossad was more in favor, but it certainly wasn't the case that all the Israeli elite favored the war, and Jewish Americans were one of the most opposed of all American demographics.
You can't invade Iran without controlling Iraq or some other land neighbour. Anyway, Israeli influence is all over the war, notwithstanding the many non-jews who also favoured it.
Israel provided faulty intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destructions. For the last 30 years they've been publicly claiming that Iran is a few months away from a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu wrote an op-ed calling for regime change in Iran, Iraq and Syria (amongst others) in the Chicago Sun-Times, as did Ehud Barak in the Times. Sharon was in favour of the war, as Ha'aretz reported: 'Sharon believes that Iraq poses more of a threat to regional stability than Iran, due to the errant, irresponsible behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime.' Whatever skepticism there was in Israel was about the US stopping short and only invading Iraq as opposed to Iran as well.
And then there are the myriad high-ranking US officials who admit that Saddam was no threat to the US, only a threat against Israel. Zelikow, member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board admitted it. General Wesley Clark admitted that the supporters were truly worried about Saddam's nuclear threat to Israel not the US.
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There's a joke about Rabinovich who was subscribed to every anti-Semitic newspaper there is (probably going back to pre-revolution times in Russia). When asked why he's doing that, he answers - well, you see, if I read Jewish papers - the Jews are attacked, the Jews are oppressed, the Jews are murdered... It only depresses me. But when I read these papers - the Jews run Russia, the Jews run America, the Jews run Europe, the Jews buy everything, the Jews always win... It makes me feel a bit better!
There was (allegedly) a similar joke about a Berliner Jew in 1930 who always read the Nazi papers "Volkische Beobachter," "Der Angriff," and "Die Sturmer" instead of the comparatively-mainstream "Berliner Tageblatt."
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My understanding is that Israelis also didn't like the war in Afghanistan, since happenings in Afghanistan did not serve Israeli interests in any conceivable way?
Except the general sentiment of "kicking the asses of Islamist fanatics can't be bad" I don't think anybody in Israel cared much about what's happening in Afghanistan. They have enough problems with Iran and bordering Muslim states to care about something so far away. It's small enough to not pose any threat, there were almost no Jews there (I think for a while there was two - and of course they didn't get along - but now there's none) - why bother?
Yeah, I didn't mean like man-in-the-street way but moreso in the higher echelons way, who thought that America invading Afghanistan was a distraction from what it should be really doing, ie. invading Iraq and Iran.
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