Tucker Carlson now insists that the United States prepared for the Iraq War “at the behest of Israel.” He made this claim on Glenn Greenwald’s podcast, and it was not a slip of the tongue. It is a deliberate attempt to recast one of America’s greatest blunders as the product of Jewish manipulation.
The historical record shows something very different. Israeli leaders were not urging Washington to invade Iraq. They were cautioning against it. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff, recalled that “the Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy, Iran is the enemy.” Ariel Sharon assured George W. Bush in early 2002 that Israel would not pressure the United States in either direction. Sharon’s aides warned that removing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the region and shift attention away from the true threat in Tehran. Israel did not mastermind the war. It tried to dissuade Washington from it.
Carlson cannot accept that the Iraq War was an American failure. It was conceived in Washington, justified by flawed American intelligence, and executed by American leaders. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld believed war would demonstrate American supremacy. George W. Bush considered Saddam unfinished business from the Gulf War. The CIA assured them that weapons of mass destruction remained. These were American mistakes. Yet Carlson insists on finding a foreign hand. He does so by replacing the word “neoconservative” with “Israeli,” reducing ideology to ethnicity and debate to conspiracy.
He indirectly points to Jewish figures in the Bush administration and recasts them as agents of a foreign power. Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, David Frum. All American citizens. All senior officials or advisers in Washington. None serving Israel. Carlson erases their Americanness and treats their arguments, however misguided, as proof of foreign disloyalty. It is not policy critique. It is slander through identity.
This is not an isolated case. Carlson has made a habit of this fixation. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, he conjured men in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus” and plotting murder. He has claimed that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence. He has suggested that Americans who served in the Israel Defense Forces should lose their U.S. citizenship. He called Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to Kirk’s death “ghoulish.” Time after time, he portrays Jews as conspirators and traitors.
Carlson knows exactly what he is doing. He understands the power of stories about Mossad, about betrayal, about cabals in Jerusalem. He packages them as brave truths others are too timid to say. In reality, he is trafficking in myths that poisoned Europe for centuries and now risk corroding American conservatism.
The Iraq War was America’s mistake. It was born of American arrogance and American misjudgment. Carlson himself supported it. On CNN, he declared that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and “we know today for certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction they have chemical and biological weapons.” He also said “the question is there’s a lunatic with weapons that could kill the civilized world. What do we do about it. And I await an answer.” Those are his own words. He was not a prophet of restraint. He was a cheerleader. Today he denies his own record, exonerates those who made the real decisions, and scapegoats Jews as the villains of history. That is not truth-telling. It is dishonesty in its most corrosive form.
This guy is going the Candace Owens direction on steroids.