The Bush administration arrived at the conviction that the sepsis of which the 9/11 attack was a single, lethal thrust was a variant of the Islamic fundamentalism that had taken over the country of Afghanistan and almost certainly was festering in Iraq. And the latter was governed by a totalist dictator who had already used weapons of mass destruction and was accumulating an inventory for strikes against his neighbors and nations of the West.
Israel, by geographical proximity, would have been an obvious target of Saddam Hussein's belligerence, but not necessarily the exclusive target of it. Saddam Hussein, in the past, had attacked not Israel but Kuwait, and before that, Iran.
The hostility to Israel on the part of the Muslim community is a fact of life, but to say that the war against Iraq bolstered Israel's security is not to say that we went to war in Iraq in order to bolster Israel's security. There was no distinctive pressure, in 2003, to send U.S. Marines to Iraq in order to destroy a regime hostile to the state of Israel. And associates of the administration would probably confess, if out of earshot, that they would not have recommended the war on Iraq except for their conviction that it was becoming a storehouse of weaponry that Saddam was entirely capable of using, whether against Kurds, Kuwaitis, Iranians or Israelis.
The neocon movement, it is being suggested, is motivated by concern for Israel, but more by its affinity for the Likud Party of Gen. Ariel Sharon, which represents militant and, many believe, shortsighted policies, contrasting with policies advocated by many Israelis, including past Israeli leaders, Ehud Barak prominent among them.
It's an unreasonable polarization of opinion: (1) everything a neocon advocates is animated by a concern for Israel, and (2) every criticism of neocon policy is animated by anti-Semitism. That is straitened thought, and should be resisted.