HERE we go again. It is time to blame the Jews. That seems to be this month’s explanation for the Iraq war. Obviously, this is hardly a new idea on either side of the Atlantic, particularly for readers of, say, The Guardian or Le Monde. But in America, the emphasis on the theory has reached almost French proportions. Earlier this month the retiring senator for South Carolina, Fritz Hollings, insisted that President Bush went to war “to secure Israel” and “take the Jewish vote from the Democrats.”

More recently, the respected retired general, Anthony Zinni, made a seemingly similar charge. While promoting his new book, he told 60 Minutes on CBS that a small group of advisers “saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilise American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel”. The group, which just happens to be entirely Jewish, includes the usual suspects, starting with, of course, Paul Wolfowitz.

The inanity of Mr Hollings’s comments are too numerous to catalogue here. But a few need to be illuminated. First, there are never enough Jews willing to vote for George Bush to make going after their votes cost-effective — not even in Florida, where the elderly Jewish vote is sizeable and the margins of victory are famously small. Why? Because the Jews who live in Florida are children of the New Deal and voting for Republicans is less kosher than clams casino (clams, bacon and cheese for those unfamiliar with the unholy trinity of unkosherdom).

Nowhere else will picking up an additional 10-20 per cent of American Jews — who constitute 4 per cent of the population and voted for Mr Bush at lower rates than gays — swing a state. Now, Jewish money does matter. Liberal Jews give huge sums to the Democrats, so discouraging these pro-Israel donors from opening their chequebooks would be shrewd, though certainly not worth going to war over.

There’s more. Last autumn, Mr Hollings explained that he voted for the war precisely because he thought that it was a war to defend “our little friend Israel”. He only came up with this “the Jews made me do it” twist when the war became unpopular.

He also said that we know Saddam wasn’t a threat because if he had been a threat then Mossad would have taken his weapons of mass destruction out already or taken us to them. But, if that is the case, why would Israel have got on the Hebrew Hotline to Vulfie in order to trick America to take out an enemy it considered harmless?

And that brings me to an important point lost on the scads of truly anti-Semitic readers who send me e-mails everyday. The theories of General Zinni and Mr Hollings conflict with each other. If that perfidious cabal of bagel-snarfing Rasputins were manipulating the President to do Israel’s dirty work, then it is hard to also see why he and Karl Rove cooked up the Iraq adventure to pander to the Jewish vote. It gets even harder when you factor in the addtional theory that Mr Bush “ lied” to the public about WMD and would presumably therefore have known that he would be found out. Pandering to the Jewish vote is one thing. Doing it when you know that every Jewish vote you win will lose you several goyish ones is stupid.

Moreover, it is a myth that either American Jews or Jewish organisations were particularly gung-ho for war. The paranoiacs said the same thing in 1991 before the Gulf War, even though a majority of Jewish congressmen voted against the war while, duh, the major-ity of non-Jews voted for it.

This is the basic problem with most of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and, frankly, anti-George Bush theories — they all tend either to contradict one another or to take obvious facts and make them seem sinister. An example of the former is the widespread notion that Mr Bush is both a blithering idiot and the architect of the greatest feat of mass propaganda in 60 years. An example of the latter is the allegedly shocking observation that a large majority of Jewish Republicans favoured toppling Saddam. Quite right; but so did tall Republicans, fat Republicans and blond Republicans. Indeed, 90 per cent of Republicans, period, supported the war.

American liberals were divided and — surprise — so were American liberal Jews and American liberal unicyclists. Of course, little of this will sway those who believe in Jewish conspiracies precisely because the lack of evidence is always the best proof for the male- volent genius of Jewish conspiracies. After all, that’s what makes the Jews “the Jews”.

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