It happens every time now. The United States jumps headfirst into a Middle Eastern quagmire, and, like clockwork, voices start rising, blaming it all on Israel. The two most salient cases of this exercise unfolded around the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the George W. Bush administration, and the joint US-Israeli onslaught on Iran that began on February 28, 2026, led by the second Trump administration.

The best-known “blame it on Israel” controversy remains the one touched off by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. It began with an article of theirs published in the London Review of Books in 2006 before being developed the year after into a hefty book of close to five hundred pages, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The two authors began this work at a time when the Bush administration’s fiasco in Iraq had become so blatant that the US Congress had to intervene and appoint a bipartisan commission — the Iraq Study Group, also known as the Baker–Hamilton Commission — tasked with designing a way out of what had evolved into a damaging morass.

This fact alone raises a question: Why hadn’t the two authors reacted in the same way to the previous devastating war waged on Iraq by the United States, the original 1991 onslaught led by the George H. W. Bush administration? After all, Israel’s interest in destroying both Iraq’s armed forces and the country’s infrastructure back then was certainly greater than any interest it might have had in seeing American troops occupy the country in 2003, especially as they brought with them from exile the Iraqi allies of Israel’s regional archenemy, Iran, and included them in the postinvasion Coalition Provisional Authority.