I've pointed out several times on this blog that contrary to those who argue that Israel somehow pushed the U.S. into war with Iraq, Israeli leaders actually thought Iraq was a distraction from the much greater threat of Iran. Here's a piece on the same theme:

Israeli officials warned the George W. Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilizing to the region and urged the United States to instead target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, then a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and later chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, recalled in an interview with IPS that the Israelis reacted immediately to indications that the Bush administration was thinking of war against Iraq. After the Israeli government picked up the first signs of that intention, Wilkerson says, "The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy -- Iran is the enemy."

Wilkerson describes the Israeli message to the Bush administration in early 2002 as being, "If you are going to destabilize the balance of power, do it against the main enemy."

The warning against an invasion of Iraq was "pervasive" in Israeli communications with the administration, Wilkerson recalls. It was conveyed to the administration by a wide range of Israeli sources, including political figures, intelligence, and private citizens.

It's true, as the article suggests, that American neoconservatives prepared a policy paper for Binyamin Netanyahu arguing "for a more aggressive joint U.S.-Israeli strategy aimed at a 'rollback' of all of Israel's enemies in the region, including Iran, but beginning by taking down Hussein and putting a pro-Israeli regime [update: sic, no one was naive enough to think that, they were hoping for a regime at least willing to live and let live, and perhaps sign a peace treaty] in power there." But this has been consistently misrepresented as reflecting the Likud's position, as expressed by its American allies. Quite the opposite; this was the American neoconservatives' position, and they were trying to get their friends in Israel to go along with them. Israel's view on such things does have some influence in Washington, and the neoconservatives were unsuccessfully looking for allies for their crusade to spread American power and democracy (in that order).

Why unsuccessfully? With the partial exception of Natan Sharansky, who has been for some time a rather marginal figure in Israeli politics, no important Israelis have ever even come close to endorsing the neoconservatives longstanding goal of spreading American influence through the use of force to establish pro-American democratic regimes. If anything, Israeli policy has consistently erred on the other side, preferring to deal with dictators like Arafat and Sadat and King Hussein who can impose peace without worrying about public opinion, rather in trying to encourage democracy and having to make peace with democratic regimes. While neoconservative foreign policy may be too idealistic, Israeli foreign policy, Likud, Labor, Kadima, or otherwise, is if anything too cynical.

Short and sweet, the Likud is not neoconservative, and neoconservative foreign policy, while pro-Israel and hawkish, is otherwise not much like Likud's. "Experts" who fail to recognize this very basic fact simply don't know what they are talking about.

That still leaves the possible argument that even if the neocons weren't acting in concert with Israel, they still believed that they were acting on behalf of Israel, as opposed to U.S. interests. But since the neoncons have supported just about every proposed or actual use of U.S. military force for the last 35 years, and their underlying ideology presupposes the aggressive use of military force by the U.S. to spread democracy, to attribute neocon support for toppling Saddam primarily to concern for Israel makes one wonder why the necons bothered opposing the Panama Canal Treaty, supporting aid to the Contras, opposing nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviet Union, supporting U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia, and so forth and so on. Just a thirty-year smokescreen so they could get George Bush to intervene on behalf of Israel when the moment presented itself? Not likely.

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