Abstract:
In September 2002 Benjamin Netanyahu, then a private citizen, testified to a committee of the United States House of Representatives urging the invasion of Iraq. He stated that there was no question whatsoever that Saddam Hussein was advancing towards nuclear weapons, that inspections would never find them, and that removing the regime would guarantee positive consequences across the region. Asked whether other states should also be struck preemptively, he named Iran and Libya. Iraq was invaded, no weapons were found, and between four and five million people died in the wars of that period. This piece traces the same advocacy across thirty years, from claims about Iraq in 1990 to the report commissioned by his own government in January 2025 identifying Türkiye as a state requiring preparation for direct confrontation, and examines why a record of failed prediction has never cost the predictor his standing.
Main Article:
In every field where forecasts are made and checked, being wrong has consequences. A fund manager who loses the money is not given more of it. A physician whose diagnosis kills the patient answers for it. A forecaster whose storm does not arrive is corrected by the next bulletin. The exception is strategic advocacy, where a person may urge a war, be comprehensively wrong about its premises and its consequences, and be invited back to urge the next one without anybody raising the last. The reason is that the advocate is not selling a prediction. He is selling a permission, and a permission is consumed at the moment it is granted. Nobody returns it afterwards for a refund.
In September 2002 a committee of the United States House of Representatives took testimony from a former and future prime minister of Israel who at that moment held no office at all.
He told the committee that there was "no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking" nuclear weapons, and repeated the phrase no question whatsoever several times in the space of a minute [1]. He said that the Iraqi leader was hellbent on obtaining atomic capability as soon as he could, and that once he had it, history would shift immediately.
He then made an argument whose structure deserves attention more than its content. Two decades earlier, he said, a single installation could have been bombed. That was no longer sufficient, because the programme had dispersed into "centrifuges the size of washing machines" which could be concealed anywhere across a very large country, and therefore even free and unfettered inspection would fail to uncover these portable sites [2].
Read what that does. It disposes of the only method by which the claim could have been tested, in advance, as part of the claim itself. Inspectors finding nothing would not count as evidence, because the argument had already explained their failure. No possible observation could have falsified it, which is the definition of an unfalsifiable case, and it was presented to a legislature as a reason to go to war.
Then the guarantee. If the regime were removed, he told the committee, "I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region" [3]. He added that young people in Iran would conclude that the era of such rulers was over.
And when a congressman asked him directly whether there were other nations upon which the United States should launch preemptive strikes, he answered categorically that there were, and named Iran and Libya [4].
Iraq was invaded in March 2003. No weapons of mass destruction were found. Between four and five million people died in the wars of that period across the region, thirty eight million were displaced, and the American expenditure exceeded eight trillion dollars. Libya was destroyed as a functioning state in 2011 and has not been reassembled. Iran has been at war with the United States since February of this year.
Those are the reverberations that were guaranteed.
The advocacy did not begin in 2002 and the record before it is equally public.
In December 1990, as deputy foreign minister, he told an American morning news programme that the Iraqi nuclear programme was accelerating rapidly [1]. In his 1995 book on terrorism he predicted that militant Islamists would bring down the World Trade Center, and wrote that in the worst case the device might be not a car bomb but a nuclear one in the basement of that building [5].
On the day of the attacks in 2001 he was asked by a New York Times correspondent what they would mean for relations between Israel and the United States. He said they were very good, corrected himself to say they would generate immediate sympathy, and added that the bond between the two peoples would be strengthened. In 2008, at Bar Ilan University, he said Israel was benefiting from "the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon" and from the American struggle in Iraq, and that these events had moved American opinion in its favour [6].
Because the frame is the durable thing, and it moves from state to state.
Iraq from 1990. Iran from the early 1990s onward, continuously, for more than thirty years, through every alleged deadline and every predicted breakout. Libya named at the same hearing as Iraq. And now the list has moved again, and this time it is not a speech but a government document.
On the sixth of January 2025 the Nagel Committee delivered its report to the prime minister, the defence minister and the finance minister. It had been established by Netanyahu himself in August 2024 to set Israeli security strategy and the defence budget for the coming decade. Among the threats it identified was Türkiye [7].
The committee recommended that Israel prepare for direct confrontation with Ankara and with Syrian forces aligned to it, warning that Turkish ambitions to restore Ottoman era influence could escalate into conflict, and stating that the danger from Syria could become "even more dangerous than the Iranian threat" [7][8]. It proposed increasing the defence budget by up to fifteen billion shekels annually for five years, and acquiring additional F-15 aircraft, refuelling tankers, drones and satellites, which is a procurement list for reaching a country that is not adjacent [7][9].
The prime minister endorsed it. Iran had long been the greatest threat, he said, but "new forces are entering the arena" and Israel must be prepared for the unexpected [9].
A fellow member of the Atlantic alliance, which is what Türkiye is, has been designated in a document commissioned by a head of government as a state to prepare for war against, and the budget has been written accordingly.
On Egypt the position is narrower and we will not overstate it. The expansion of Egyptian military capability has become a recurring theme in Israeli strategic commentary, with analysts describing an arsenal exceeding defensive requirements and warning against complacency. That is commentary rather than declared policy, and no state committee has yet named Cairo as the Nagel report named Ankara. We draw that distinction rather than collapse it. What is not commentary is the long standing arrangement under which the hardware Cairo is permitted to receive is governed by the requirement to preserve a qualitative Israeli military edge, which is the same instrument operating quietly and without the need for a published report.
The boundary of this piece is the same one this series has kept throughout.
Nothing here asserts foreknowledge, involvement or arrangement in the attacks of 2001. Nor does this publication pronounce any such claim false. They are unproven, and unproven is not the same verdict as disproven. We endorse nothing and we reject nothing, we record the question as open, and if the record ever establishes more we will publish that instead. What we assert is what the documents show, and we assert nothing beyond it.
The finding is narrow and it does not need to be more than this.
A foreign head of government gave a guarantee to the legislature of the United States about the consequences of a war he was urging it to fight. The premise was false, the guarantee was catastrophically wrong, and the cost was borne by populations who had no say in any of it. In the twenty four years since, he has not been asked a single question about that testimony by anybody in a position to require an answer, has addressed that same Congress repeatedly, and is now making the identical argument about a fourth state and a fifth.
In every field where forecasts are checked, being wrong has consequences.
The record is not hidden. It is a congressional transcript, a book on sale since 1995, a university lecture, and a government report published last year with its budget annexes attached. Anybody may read it, and the reason it produces no consequence is not that it is unavailable. It is that nobody with the standing to ask has ever wanted the answer, and the list continues to lengthen while the guarantee from 2002 remains outstanding.
References:
1. The Real News Network. "Netanyahu Long History of Crying Wolf over Fake Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iran and Iraq," including the transcript of the September 2002 congressional hearing and the December 1990 television interview.
2. LobeLog. "Lest We Forget: Bibi Wisdom on Iraq," reproducing the testimony on dispersed centrifuges and the futility of inspections.
3. Cato Institute. "Benjamin Netanyahu Is Pushing for War with Iran," April 2026, quoting the 2002 congressional testimony.
4. Record of the hearing before the Committee on Government Reform, United States House of Representatives, September 2002, including the exchange in which the witness named Iraq, Iran and Libya as candidates for preemptive strikes.
5. PolitiFact, January 19, 2024, on the contents of the 1995 book "Fighting Terrorism" and its passages concerning the World Trade Center.
6. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "After 9/11: The Israel and US Catastrophe." September 13, 2011.
7. The Jerusalem Post. "Nagel Committee Warns Israel Must Prepare for Potential War with Türkiye." January 6, 2025.
8. International Institute for Counter Terrorism. "Türkiye under Erdogan: An Emerging Immediate Strategic Threat." June 25, 2026.
9. The European Conservative. "Government Report: Israel Must Get Ready for War with Türkiye." January 2025.
10. Costs of War project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, figures on deaths, displacement and expenditure.