How the US and Israel came close to launching a war on Iran 20 years ago

Trump isn't the first president tempted by an Israeli plan to destroy Iran and thereby "remake the Middle East", as this extract from my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations sets out.

Jonathan Cook. 20th Match, 2026

In 2008, Pluto Press published my book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to remake the Middle East”. It was an attempt to explain how Israel had persuaded a group of hawkish allies in Washington – known as the neoconservatives (or neocons for short) – to work from within the administration of George W Bush to support a long-standing Israeli ambition to Balkanise the Middle East: that is, to use force to collapse the regimes there, most especially those resistant to Israel’s military domination of the region. The neocons started in earnest with Iraq in 2003, and then planned to move on to Lebanon, Syria and end in Iran.

The benefits for Israel were manifold. First, regime collapse would weaken Muslim majorities, allowing Israel to better manipulate existing tensions between Sunni and Shia communities; to more easily forge alliances with other minorities such as the Druze, Christians and Kurds that would bolster Israel’s strategic position; and to stymie any revival of a unifying Arab nationalism that had been so evident during the 1950s and 1960s.

Second, failed states, riven by permanent civil war, would leave Israel free to dominate the region militarily and secure its privileged alliance with Washington.

Third, at the time, Israel and the neocons were keen to break up Saudi Arabia’s control of the oil cartel Opec and thereby undermine Saudi influence in Washington, as well as its ability to finance Islamic extremism and Palestinian resistance. (These concerns were later superseded as a new broom in Riyadh, in the shape of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, abandoned the Palestinian cause and moved ever close to formal normalisation with Israel under the Abraham Accords.)

Fourth, with the region in chaos, Israel would be free to complete the expulsion of the Palestinian people from what was left of their homeland.

As my book documents, the 2003 Iraq invasion was an unmitigated disaster; Hizbullah gave Israel a bloody nose when it tried to invade south Lebanon in 2006; as a result, the expansion of the war to Syria had to be abandoned, much to the evident annoyance of the neocons in the Bush administration; and the ultimate goal of destroying Iran had to be put on hold.

Eighteen years is a long time in geopolitics. But I am publishing below an extended extract from my book’s second chapter, The Long Campaign Against Iran, because it offers a detailed record of how Israel and its neocon allies in the Bush administration made the same case for attacking Iran as they do now – and came very close to getting their way. They viewed a war on Iran as the second phase of the 2003 attack on Iraq. They believed the two came as a package. Attacking one only would strengthen the other. Which is exactly what happened after Israel and the neocons engineered regime collapse in Iraq but were unable to continue on to Iran.

Twenty years on, most of the coverage of the current US-Israeli war on Iran tends to make two mistaken assumptions. First, that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the main driver, from Israel’s side, of plans to attack Iran. In fact, as this chapter and the previous one on Iraq demonstrates, the idea was widely shared in Israel’s military and political establishments. And second, that Donald Trump was the first US president dumb enough to fall into the trap laid by Israel – or at least by Trump’s pro-Israel donors. Though there is some truth to this, it is also too simplistic. All the evidence suggests that the idea of attacking Iran – sold as “remaking the Middle East” – gained a foothold in the imaginations of US politicians and officials, including in the Pentagon, more than two decades ago.

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