In the last week, two conversations on television suggest that the idea that the Iraq war was undertaken because of concern for Israel’s security is now conventional wisdom among the chattering classes.

First there was a discussion about foreign policy at the Center for American Progress on December 15, aired later on CSPAN, in which James Mann, the scholar and author, said that Obama had set out to be an old-style realist, in the mode of Zbig Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. The difference between him and the neocons was a question of the status of the Israel/Palestine conflict in considerations of how to get peace in the Middle East.