LIBBY LOBBY LIABILITY

Reply to The Nation's dismissive -- and Jewish*: see below -- review of Mearsheimer and Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"

LIBBY LOBBY LIABILITY
A Reply to:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060424/editors2
The Nation editorial, April 24, 2005

‘’THE LOBBY’

“There are few topics as sensitive in American foreign policy debates as the relationship between Israel and the United States. So it should come as no surprise that two academic heavyweights of the realist school, John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, a professor and outgoing academic dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, aroused a furor when they published an article alleging that US Middle East policy "is due almost entirely...to the activities of the 'Israel Lobby,'" and that this lobby has damaged US national security. Such arguments have been made before, of course, but never by such key luminaries of the foreign policy brain trust. In addition, the article carries the imprimatur of the Kennedy School's Faculty Research Working Papers Series (a shorter version was originally published in The London Review of Books after it was rejected by a US magazine).

“The professors deserve credit for addressing such a controversial topic, especially at a time when dissent is being challenged as unpatriotic. Unfortunately, too much of the initial response to "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has been characterized by reckless, ad hominem denunciation; notable in this regard are the Likud-flavored New York Sun, Harvard lawyer and Zionist pit bull Alan Dershowitz and New York Representative Eliot Engel, who called the authors anti-Semites. These attacks, some bordering on the hysterical, are designed to shut off debate and intimidate the professors and anyone else who asks hard questions about the US-Israel relationship (*) In an astute editorial in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Daniel Levy, a former policy adviser for prime minister Ehud Barak, deplored such "bullying tactics" and "the McCarthyite policing of academia" as "deeply un-Jewish. It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there."

“An open debate, after all, isn't the same thing as approval. Although Mearsheimer and Walt are correct in their claim that a powerful Israel lobby often bullies critics and has extraordinary influence on Capitol Hill, they never clearly define US national interests in the region, and thus the claim that Israel undermines them--and that the tail wags the dog rather than serving those interests--remains an undemonstrated assertion, …”
*****/ Though pious in tone, how honest in sentiment these editorial remarks are can be judged only, I submit, by willingness to apply Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis to U.S. foreign policy on Iran.

If Israel is left aside, is it in America’s interest to insist on regime change, which would require military force; or accept the International Atomic Energy Agency’s auspices and focus on preventing nuclear bomb threat?

Isn’t that a no-brainer? – by cost-benefit analysis alone, forget morality. America retains as much security as it has now vis a vis states with nuclear arms (Pakistan, India, N. Korea, Russia, China), it just learns to deal with Iran as an autonomous entity. However, according to Seymour Hersh, a “Pentagon advisor on the war on terror” said that “allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table.” This is out of consideration of Israel. Robert Joseph, Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control is quoted as telling I.A.I.A.’s ElBaradei in no uncertain terms “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies and we will not tolerate it.”

Is it in America’s interest to take Mossad-Israeli estimates of when Iran could deliver a bomb – one to two years – or that of non-proliferation expert Robert Galluci (echoed by most responsible U.S. intelligence estimates) – 8 to ten tears away?

Is it in America’s interest to pay attention to A.Q. Khan, Pakistan bomb builder reported to be singing like a canary (“he’s suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives – read “The Lobby” – what they want to hear)? -Or to give credence to a walk-in delivery to a U.S. embassy in Europe of an Iranian lap-top computer with “new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program…more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems.” But European intelligence officials aren’t thumbs up: “There was some hesitation on our side and we are still not convinced…the drawings had the character of sketches…It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.” This last is surely a tweak at Bush, who announced that some rusty mobile fertilizer trailers found in northern Iraq after the ’03 invasion proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Saddam Hussein had a bio-chemical weapons program, and was moving it around, just like they said. Today it was revealed he should have known that was false when it said it.

Would it be in America’s best interest for someone to plant or otherwise fabricate evidence that Iran was, say, about to attack Israel? To provoke IDF to retaliate against Lebanon, and perhaps Syria, by a Hezbollah faction, or someone acting in their name, lobbing a missile into northern Israel?

Is it in America’s interest to be brandishing nukes at this little country? Hersh states that high ranking officers up to the level of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have talked about resigning over putting this option on the table. But the Pentagon advisor he quotes links “a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles,” calling it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” The phrase “Pentagon civilians” refers those installed by Rumsfeld at The Office of Special Plans headed by Douglas Feith, i.e., The Lobby.



These questions are intended to be rhetorical. None of the antecedents proposed is in Americas interest, I submit, and cannot imagine any progressive thinker disagreeing.

Thus, when the editors fault Mearsheimer and Walt for “never clearly defining what US interests are in the region,” either they are dissembling, knowing the professors argument is sound without such “clear definition”. Or, God forbid, they entertain the opposite. Nuke Iran For Israel. ?

No. Israel is a liability, not an asset to America’s national security and the war on terror. It cannot be in our interest even to consider using nuclear weapons against Iran. Unless The Nation’s editors can bring themselves to acknowledge this point, the affected pious scrupulosity goes for naught, as does Ehud Barak’s former prime minister Daniel Levy’s Ha’aratz quote deploring the McCarthyite policing of academia as "deeply un-Jewish. It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there." If fact, given the above, open and critical debate here would mean Israel wouldn’t call the shots anymore, therefore the hysterics are right in using the weapons of silence, insult, smear, and “anti-semitism” to keep the rational effects of Mearsheimer and Walt’s article from talking hold, for anyone clinging to Israeli-centric U.S. Mid East policy. So the piety itself doesn’t come off

But quote me as finding it quintessentially “Jewish” (in the sense of “deeply un-Jewish”, above) to be trying to have it both ways.

FOOL ME TWICE

… that’s not nice