Vance's Strange Netanyahu Revisionism

Vance’s comments about Netanyahu are so strange and divorced from reality that it makes me wonder whether he knows anything about foreign policy at all.

J.D. Vance texted with the blogger Charles Johnson for almost two years, and among the other things he wrote he made this truly bizarre claim:

“If the GOP listened to Bibi we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, wouldn’t have done nation building in Afghanistan, and wouldn’t be threatening a war with Iran,” he wrote. In fact, Netanyahu supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and had pushed for regime change in Iran, telling Congress in 2002, “It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out but when should it be taken out; it’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran but how to achieve it.”

Vance’s comments about Netanyahu are so strange and divorced from reality that it makes me wonder whether he knows anything about foreign policy at all. Netanyahu was one of the biggest cheerleaders for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, as any serious opponent of the war would know. He declared, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons,” and he said that the U.S. “must destroy” the regime.

Netanyahu famously promised that “if you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” Netanyahu’s ludicrous optimism about the Iraq war would make even some of our own hardliners blush if they were capable of shame. In Vance’s fantasy revisionism, Netanyahu was warning us away from the danger. In reality, he was one of the most deranged regime changers on the planet.

Likewise, the prime minister’s obsession with Iran has been going on for so long that it has become a running joke. One of Netanyahu’s great hopes has been to get the U.S. to attack Iran, and he has done everything he could to ratchet up tensions between the U.S. and Iran throughout his career. He actively sought the destruction of the nuclear deal to clear the way, and for the last ten months he has been trying to goad Iran and its proxies into a war that he hopes will ensnare the U.S.

The Iran obsession was on full display during the prime minister’s dishonest propaganda speech to Congress just last month. Netanyahyu sees himself as a heroic Churchillian figure facing down the great menace of our time. You can’t have been paying attention to Middle Eastern affairs for the last thirty years and not know this.

It is bad enough that Vance is a reflexive hawk on practically everything connected to Israel, but it is genuinely odd that he tries to square the circle by pretending that Netantyahu was some sort of paleoconservative anti-interventionist all along. “Oh, if only we had listened to Netanyahu!” is not something that any self-respecting conservative opponent of the war has ever said, I can assure you.

That suggests that he is so ignorant about the relevant issues that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or that he is so gullible that he bought into some fantasy version of Netanyahu’s record that someone sold to him. It would be interesting to know if this nonsense is something that Vance picked up at one of these national conservative conferences (where Vance has said some other ridiculous things), or if it came from somewhere else. Whatever the reason for it is, Vance’s warped understanding of Netanyahu’s record and his role in the region is another reason why it is impossible to take him seriously on foreign policy.