Breaking the silence

[acmejack]

By Juan Cole

April 18, 2006 | John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government have put their hands into a hornet's nest with their paper in the London Review of Books, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." As political scientists who routinely analyze U.S. foreign policy, they have gained a reputation for lucid and principled argument, but outside the halls of academia are not exactly household names. In daring to simply describe the well-known operations of the Israel lobby, however, they have made themselves targets of a massive smear campaign. Ironically, this reaction is just what their paper predicted.

Fair and gentlemanly to a fault, and widely respected in their discipline, the two professors are impossible to imagine as fire-breathing racial bigots, devious purveyors of blatant falsehoods or wild-eyed conspiracy theorists prone to ignore obvious evidence, but these are the sort of epithets being hurled at them by their critics.

In "The Israel Lobby," Mearsheimer and Walt argue that U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been dangerously skewed by a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which inhibits free discussion of the issues and has made the pro-Israeli position a political sacred cow. Congress, they point out, virtually never criticizes Israel: It is an untouchable subject. And this taboo has had enormous consequences, which are themselves off limits for discussion. Because America's blank-check support for Israel arouses enormous Arab and Muslim rage, Israel is a strategic liability, not an asset.

Nor, Mearsheimer and Walt argue, is there any moral reason for America to act against its own interests by supporting Israel come what may. Citing distinguished Israeli historians and journalists, they demythologize Israel's history, demonstrating that the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the historical fact that "the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people" -- a crime that Israel's founders explicitly acknowledged, and that has never been rectified. They discuss Israel's illegal, almost 40-year-old occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, and its flawed democracy, which explicitly discriminates against Arabs.

Salon.com Subscription required, free daypass available.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/04/18/taboo/index.html?source=newsletter

[KoKo]

1. Sounds interesting...I'll get the day pass..n/t

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

2. I have a friend who is a foreign service officer

My friend has been saying this for years. They also say that if you tell anyone about it, you get smeared as anti-semetic.

[Bonhomme Richard]

3. Definitely an Untouchable subject.. n/t

[papau]

4. Negative views on the quality of the Walt/Mearsheimer research below

Israeli Lobby (definition by Walt and Mearsheimer):"the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction".

http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/9592/Will_The_Real_John_Mearsheimer_Please_Stand_Up%3F.html

Will The Real John Mearsheimer Please Stand Up?

<snip>It couldn’t be more striking, then, to read Professor Mearsheimer stating in late December of 2004 almost exactly the opposite concerning the origins of the Iraq war. Interviewed on a website called American Amnesia, Prof. Mearsheimer stated clearly that administration officials went to war in good faith, expecting "in their heart of hearts" to find WMD and ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam:

A number of who were in favor of the war believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that he was joined at the hip with Osama Bin Laden. At the same time, I think that they were aware that we had no hard evidence to support either one of those contentions; but in their heart of hearts they believed that both suppositions would be proven true once we were in Iraq and gained access to the evidence. I believe that people like Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were shocked that we found no WMD and no evidence of cooperation between Saddam and Bin Laden. I think that they expected to find that evidence.

So according to Mearsheimer, Wolfowitz and the other senior administration officials were actually acting in the interests of the United States rather than of Israel. The good professor continued:

What you often discovered when debating proponents of the war was that if they admitted that Saddam might not be an imminent threat, they would invariably fall back on the argument that this is actually the ideal time to attack him because he is not especially dangerous at the moment. Why wait until he is armed and a serious threat to the United States? Let's get him when he is weak and vulnerable.

Note that according to Mearsheimer, for these supporters of the war it wasn’t Israel that was the issue, but rather that Saddam could well become "a serious threat to the United States." And in a long answer, Mearsheimer specifically attributed Wolfowitz’s support for the war not to any concern for Israel, but rather to his belief in the transformative power of democracy:<snip>

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5342

Stephen Walt's War with Israel
March 20th, 2006

Harvard Professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer have just published a lengthy diatribe against what they call the “Israel lobby.” Their article http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html appeared in the London Review of Books, and a longer version has been released as a Harvard Kennedy School working paper. The two professors are employed by prestigious universities. But their new paper, a collection of innuendo, half truths, and outright misrepresentations http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/166#m , fails the test of academic integrity and honest research.

It is a work without a trace of balance, in essence no more than an angry polemic disguised as academic research. “The Israel Lobby” is a long, bitter, op-ed piece given a patina of respectability because of where the authors are employed. They may feel themselves protected from criticism by tenure and their titles. They live and work in the proverbial ivory towers of an academic environment that has become an Arab-subsidized lobby against Israel.

Walt and Mearsheimer have an axe to grind. They don’t much care for Israel, and they resent the power of those whom they believe have influenced American policymakers to support Israel in its long conflict with some of the Arab states and the Palestinians. The authors do pay lip service to defending Israel’s right to exist. But their attacks on Israel fail every basic test of fairness, and lead one to believe they would prefer a world without Israel.

One blatant example of this concerns Israel’s role in the 1991 Gulf War. The authors condemn Israel, though it did exactly what the US asked, by electing not to enter the war despite absorbing Iraqi scud missile attacks that killed and wounded hundreds of Israelis.* Israel’s crime, according to the authors, was the placement of Patriot batteries in the country to defend against the scuds. The Patriots, of course, were a failure, and given the American instructions for Israel to stay out of the war, were a minimum contribution by the US to Israel’s self-defense.

But the real problem for Walt and Mearsheimer would seem to be Israel’s existence at the time of the conflict. If it were not there, the US could have ignored it. And were Israel gone, the US could focus on what Walt and Mearsheimer have elsewhere http://realisticforeignpolicy.org/archives/2005/01/ending_the_isra.php argued should be the real strategic goal of our policy in the Middle East: securing a continuing source of cheap oil from the region

[CJCRANE]

5. Conversely

B*sh's close familial and business ties to the islamic oil monarchs is also untouchable by the MSM.

[acmejack]

6. It would be nice to be able to conduct a rational dialog

Without the usual gratuitous charges being flung about prior to any substantive issues being raised. As long as this 1000 pound gorilla remains in the room, no progress will ever be made in the that region.