Editor’s note: The following is Part I of a two-part series on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. war on terror.

(LifeSiteNews) — As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel seeks to drag the U.S. into war with Iran, few readers will be aware of his extraordinary role in the Iraq war – and the campaign to destroy Libya.

As you shall see, a U.S. war on Iran is simply the third wish of Netanyahu’s 30-year-old wish list. He presented this to Congress – as a private citizen – in 2002.

The fate of the world hinges on whether his third wish is granted. His track record, and the methods by which he fulfilled these dreams of destruction, suggests Netanyahu will once more get what he wants.

Many have forgotten the massive devastation and loss of civilian and military lives that occurred during the horrendous Iraq war that had some uncanny similarities to what is happening now in Gaza.

The following two videos will remind you of what happened in Iraq and better understand the loss of American soldiers’ and others’ lives that will occur should Israel succeed in convincing the U.S. to join it in a war against yet another Israeli “enemy” in Iran.

This second video reveals the next stage of carnage that happened in Iraq.

Weapons of mass distraction

In 1990 Benjamin Netanyahu made the claim that Iraq was developing “weapons of mass destruction.”

Netanyahu suggested that the then-leader of Iraq, the secular nationalist Saddam Hussein, could develop nuclear weapons.

See below Netanyahu trailering a war coming soon, the trillion-dollar completion of which left massive human, financial, and diplomatic costs and the almost total elimination of the ancient Christian presence in Iraq, all of which continues to mount to this day.

These tales foretold the grisly end of the promised “peace dividend,” celebrated at the end of the Cold War. In telling them, Netanyahu was simply developing a narrative whose power to steer the world into disaster has been intentionally magnified by the actions of his, and of previous, governments of Israel.

Two years after this appearance, a leak from the Bush Sr. administration showed how the war machine, and its subversive propaganda methods of “regime change,” would ensure its survival.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine was leaked to the New York Times in 1992. It was never intended for public consumption.

It was a blueprint for the post-Soviet world, which would have no place for peace nor for popular dividends – except, of course, for those in the business of war.

The document, heavily revised after the leak, laid out the doctrine of permanent war in the name of peace. Its main aim was to:

Preclude hostile, nondemocratic domination of regions [Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf] critical to our interests, and thereby strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat.

The initial leak stated the goal as to “insure no rivals emerged” in “Western Europe, Asia, or in the Former Soviet Union.” This blueprint for the preemptive destruction of “allies” such as Germany also dovetailed with an appealing doctrine held by the “number one ally” of the United States: Israel.

That was the principle of the “preemptive strike.”

The combination of these doctrines produced a war of terror which continues to this day, destroying democracy at home as it devastates nations abroad.

Yet the U.S. had other options. It could have chosen a profitable peace.

Only global power

These nation-wrecking doctrines were adopted following an earlier study into what the United States should do with its empire, and the “unipolar” power it was granted on the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In November 1990, Thomas Hirschfeld published a report for the RAND Corporation – the advisory think tank to the Pentagon – called “U.S. Grand Strategy for the 1990s and Beyond.”

The report laid out four options for the U.S. Three of them would see a military drawdown, and a vast peace dividend, securing a strong military as an “arsenal of democracy” – but steering clear of needless foreign wars.

The government of George H.W. Bush, former CIA director, chose option four: “Only Global Power.”

In 1992, the penultimate year of this administration, the Wolfowitz Doctrine was adopted to achieve this.

There were no weapons of mass destruction to justify the war in Iraq

The non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative records that Iraq “dismantled its programs under U.N. supervision following defeat in the 1991 Gulf War.”

By the time of the war, and well before a speech by Netanyahu urging the U.S. to launch it, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Nonetheless, unfounded U.S. and Western suspicions that it was reconstituting its WMD programs led to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and regime change.

“Western” is a strange if common misspelling of “Israeli.”

1981: Israel bombs Osirak

The strange story of the WMDs that were, then weren’t, then were again, begins with the Israeli bombing of an incomplete Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.

Israeli jets struck the reactor without warning the U.S. On the day of the attacks, then-President Ronald Reagan said, “I swear I believe Armageddon is near.”

Reagan lamented the decision of Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to act alone. “He should have told us and the French, we could have done something to remove the threat.”

Yet, according to the scientist who designed the reactor, there was no “threat” at all.

Not only was there no threat of a nuclear weapons program, the Israeli strike succeeded in creating one. Watergate journalist Bob Woodward said this of the result of the Israeli attack, described by the LA Times as “state sponsored terrorism”:

Israeli intelligence were convinced that their strike in 1981 on the Osirak nuclear reactor about 10 miles (16 km) outside Baghdad had ended Saddam’s program.

Instead [it initiated] covert funding for a nuclear program code-named ‘PC3’ involving 5,000 people testing and building ingredients for a nuclear bomb.

The attack was framed by Israelis as a “preemptive strike,” cementing a precedent in international relations for a military attack on a sovereign country before any threat has emerged.

The same principle is now at work in regime-change-inspired censorship at home in the West, with the EU’s determination to “pre-bunk” so-called “disinformation” – such as the widespread public claims that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction to “justify” the “preemptive” war which destroyed it.

Yet a weapons of mass destruction program has existed in the Middle East for 70 years. It has refused to comply with inspections. It has produced nuclear weapons. It refuses to admit this.

What is more, it routinely threatens to use them, and has a doctrine of “preemptive” strikes, attacking without warning where it imagines a future threat.

Most harrowing of all, this is a description of a state which appears to have a doctrine of destroying all other nations by launching a massive wave of first-strike nuclear weapons – to bring everyone else down with itself.

That state is Israel.

Netanyahu urged preemptive strikes on Iraq, Libya, Iran in 2002

Benjamin Netanyahu arrived before the U.S. Congress in September 2002 as a private citizen.

He urged the U.S. to launch a preemptive strike on Iraq, claiming the country had nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq did not.

He nevertheless told Congress, “there is no question whatsoever that Saddam is developing nuclear weapons.”

The Iraqi WMD program was dismantled in the 1990s and no WMDs were ever found, following the Iraq war which was launched six months after this speech.

Netanyahu was present at the September 12, 2002, congressional hearing “Conflict with Iraq: An Israeli perspective” as an “expert witness.”

His expertise was in urging “preemptive strikes” on three nations. He based his urgent demand for wars in which U.S. servicemen would die – with no Israeli casualties – on a lie. He said this lie was “fact.”

“It is fact. Iraq, Iran, and Libya are racing to develop nuclear weapons. So now what is the next step? I believe that the next step is to choose – it is not a question of whether you have to take action or what kind of action and against whom.”

The next step, of course, is a “preemptive” war on Iraq, and the destruction of Libya. The fate of the world now hangs on whether the U.S. will move to grant Netanyahu’s final wish.

Before it does so, it should know its soldiers died for a known and deliberate hoax, with an act of “state terrorism” invoked as its justifying precedent.

As the congressional record shows, Netanyahu lied to Congress about the 1981 strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor:

The dangers posed by a nuclear-armed Saddam is understood by my country. Two decades ago, well before September 11th, in 1981, Menachim Begin dispatched the Israeli Air Force on a predawn raid that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. This probably took place months away from Saddam’s ability to assemble the critical mass of plutonium for the first atomic bomb, or more than one.

Why was this a lie? The facts about Osirak had been known for decades. It was designed to be incapable of producing weapons grade material, and was designed and supervised by French technicians who guaranteed this.

Richard Wilson, a professor of physics at Harvard University who visually inspected the partially damaged reactor in December 1982, said in a 2005 letter to the Atlantic:

First, the Osirak reactor that was bombed by Israel in June of 1981 was explicitly designed by the French engineer Yves Girard to be unsuitable for making bombs. That was obvious to me on my 1982 visit.

He continued:

Much evidence suggests that the bombing did not delay the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program – but started it.

Netanyahu’s “expertise” continued, invoking the preemptive strike on Osirak as a fine example for the U.S. to follow. It was also a crime, but that did not halt Israel before as it does not today:

Did Israel launch that preemptive strike because Saddam had committed a specific act of terror against us?

Did we accord our actions with the international? Did we condition this operation on the approval of the United Nations? No, of course not. Israel acted because we understood that a nuclear-armed Saddam would place our very survival at risk.

Netanyahu is using Israel’s blatant contempt for international law and convention as a model for the U.S. to adopt. It did so.

What did Wilson say about this? In a 2012 piece warning “Bomb Iran and they will certainly produce nuclear weapons,” he was quoted as saying tha the “Iraqis couldn’t have been developing a nuclear weapon at Osirak. I challenge any scientist in the world to show me how they could have done so.”

Dan Reiter, author of The Osirak Myth and the Track Record of Preventive Military Attacks, was literally on the same page. He said this “preemptive” strike created the threat that was its declared intention to destroy.

“Rather than delaying the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, the 1981 attack may actually have accelerated it,” Reiter added.

As a result, Iraq began an underground WMD program. According to Reiter:

The attack appears to have heightened Saddam’s interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. After the attack Saddam started an underground nuclear weapons program, unbeknownst to the international community and hence free from the fetters of IAEA inspection.

The wisdom of Netanyahu’s “expertise” – and that of preemptive strikes suggested on Iran to this day – is called into question.

“Given that Osirak is supposed to be the prototypical success story of preventive attacks against a rogue state’s nuclear program, this episode should give considerable pause to advocates of future preventive strikes,” Reiter warned.

Eight days after Netanyahu urged the U.S. to launch preemptive strikes on Iraq, Libya, and Iran, the George W. Bush administration adopted his doctrine as a matter of U.S. grand strategy. This was published in the 2002 National Security Strategy.

Announcing a campaign against “global terrorism” which would go on to ignite the very thing itself, the fifth article of the document stressed Iraq’s “biological… and nuclear weapons programs” as it pledged to “Prevent Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s testimony helped to shape the U.S. policy of “regime change” – ushering in one of the most murderous, obscenely profitable, and despicable periods in history. The pursuit of this policy of starting wars “to secure peace” has brought the world to the brink of the Armageddon feared by Reagan in 1981.

The doctrine of “preemptive force” had become a matter of U.S national security. Based on the creation of the WMD threat, this doctrine would inspire the wars directed, at Netanyahu’s behest and by the “neocon” faction including Wolfowitz himself, into a series of wars which have never been won, at a cost of over $9 trillion, and whose human and social costs at home and abroad continue to rise.

This is the principle of a machinery of death which is now destroying democracy at home, and its origins may surprise you.