The U.S. embarked on the “war on terror” with Israel as a model. Occupy Muslim lands, bomb civilians to defeat political opposition. It didn’t work in Afghanistan; and the U.S. withdrawal will force the Israel lobby to come up with new messaging to maintain the false belief that Israel and the U.S. face the same “bad neighborhood.”

The neocons were a conspiracy in plain sight who fomented the Iraq war, says star academic Heather Cox Richardson, dismissing “tin foil hat” theorizing. Though even her questioning about the causes of the war stops short of the role of Israel in neoconservative thought.