Study: U.S. Middle East policy motivated by pro-Israel lobby

[bemildred]

This one goes straight into the dungeon.
:popcorn::popcorn:

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Middle East policy is not in America's national interest and is motivated primarily by the country's pro-Israel lobby, according to a study published Thursday by researchers from Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Observers in Washington said Thursday that the study was liable to stir up a tempest and spur renewed debate about the function of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby. The Fatah office in Washington distributed the article to an extensive mailing list.

"No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical," write the authors of the study.

Haaretz

[IsItJustMe]

1. After seeing the Vice giving his speech in front of AIPAC the other day,

i'm a believer.

[tatertop]

2. And since Israel is no friend of ours this influence will prove fatal

If it has not already done so

[4freethinking]

3. I read the study

Very lengthy and interesting.

[Coastie for Truth]

4. Original story

<<<snip>>>


John J. Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago's political science department and Stephen M. Walt from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government do not present new facts. They rely mainly on an analysis of Israeli and American newspaper reports and studies, along with the findings of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.

The study also documents accusations that American supporters of Israel pushed the United States into war with Iraq. It lists senior Bush administration officials who supported the war and are also known to support Israel, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and David Wurmser. The authors say the influence of the pro-Israel lobby is a source of serious concern and write that it has even caused damage to Israel by preventing it from reaching a compromise with its neighbors.

Look at this:

1. "(the authors),,, do not present new facts. They rely mainly on an analysis of Israeli and American newspaper reports and studies, along with the findings of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem."

2. "It lists senior Bush administration officials who supported the war and are also known to support Israel, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and David Wurmser. The authors say the influence of the pro-Israel lobby is a source of serious concern and write that it has even caused damage to Israel by preventing it from reaching a compromise with its neighbors."

Opinions - without new data.

:shrug:

Disagrees with my scholarship and opinions.--
1) www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=124&topic_id=99064&mesg_id=99167 and

2) www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=124&topic_id=99064&mesg_id=99234

[Poll_Blind]

6. You dare announce scholarship? Betcha didn't even read the paper.

The reason I come to Democratic Underground is to participate in discussion with others about topics which we sometimes do not agree on. This makes for a productive and entertaining environment with the promise of occasional sparks on divisive issues. I sit on one side of the fence in the issues relating to the affairs of the Middle East and you, generally, the other. Unlike some other posters who blindly kiss up to Israel's conservative government, either out of Diasporic Guilt or some other inflammation of the psyche, I've found that you and I actually agree on at least one issue.

This has endeared you to me- I won't mention what the issue is, I imagine it's a wildly unpopular sentiment among your coterie and having been victimized by their endless variations on the ad hominem theme, I would not wish even a fraction of that to be turned on you, despite our differences.

While the real reasons behind it will remain a mystery to me, I chose to use Occam's Razor when trying to discern why:

* You chose to list the same two paragraphs twice, although one was in one of those fancy gray boxes, I'll give you that.

* Those paragraphs which you chose to spam into your message aren't...aren't even in the link you give. Those comments are not from the news story. They're lifted from a blog, Coastie. Why the bait and switch?

* You use the phrase "Disagrees with my scholarship and opinions" when the question of your scholarship is raised by your own shoddy attempt to dupe readers into believing that what you have copied from a blog is the actual content from a news story. If I were you I would have left proclamations of scholarship out- it makes you look not-so-scholarly.

Using Occam's Razor, as I've said, the easiest answer was that you were just being lazy. I've seen this before and even among those you disagree with politically, it's unfortunate.

If you're copying in material from a blog touting it as the content of a legitimate news story, it is reasonable to assume that you didn't sit down and actually read the paper which the news story and the blog both refer to. I hope you did, though. I hope you at least exposed yourself to a different opinion, but your actions don't show it...it just shows lazy.

That's lazy number 5, FYI.

5 : not rigorous or strict <lazy scholarship>

PB

[Coastie for Truth]

8. I read the paper, and just got his book from the Hoover Institution

I know so don't like blogs - but here is his wikipedia entry - I have included his CV and I am reading his book, . I finished reading the paper linked to in the OP.

Offensive Realism

John Mearsheimer is the leading proponent of a branch of realism called offensive realism. Offensive realism is a strucural theory which, unlike the classical realism of Morgenthau, blames security conflict on the anarchy of the international system, not on human nature. In contrast another structural realist theory, the defensive realism of Waltz, offensive realism believes that states are not satisfied with a given amount of power, but seek hegemony for security. Mearsheimer summed this view up in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:

Given the difficulty of determining how much power is enough for today and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to become hegemon in the system because it thought it already had sufficient power to survive.

In this world, there is no such thing as a status quo power, since according to Mearsheimer, "a great power that has a marked power advantage over its rivals is likely to behave more aggressively because it has the capability as well as the incentive to do so." He has also dismissed democratic peace theory (which claims that democracies - specifically, liberal democracies - never or rarely go to war with one another).

Here's a link to the book

and his .

Sorta, kinda a NEOCON, IMHO.

[bemildred]

9. The haggling of political ideologists is so amusing.

The fundamental problem of great power politics is that great power allows you to be a fool and get away with it. Eventually it becomes habitual and leads to decline and overthrow.

[Englander]

10. No, he isn't.

Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism
John J Mearsheimer
19 - 5 - 2005
The renowned American foreign-policy realist Hans Morgenthau (1904-80) opposed the Vietnam war. He would have regarded the neo-conservatives’ adventure in Iraq as equally flawed, says John J Mearsheimer.

>snip

In conclusion, neo-conservatives and realists have two very different theories of international politics, which were reflected in their opposing views on the wisdom of invading and occupying Iraq. Actually, the war itself has been a strong test of the two theories. We have been able to see which side’s predictions were correct. It seems clear that Iraq has turned into a debacle for the United States, which is powerful evidence – at least for me – that the realists were right and the neo-conservatives were wrong.

I think that Hans Morgenthau, who some four decades ago made the realist case against escalation in Vietnam using arguments similar to those realists employed in the run-up to the Iraq war, would have opposed that war as well if he had been alive.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-americanpower/morgenthau_2522.jsp

[bemildred]

11. Correct, he's more along the lines of Zbig or Kissinger. nt

[Coastie for Truth]

12. I will let you know my thoughts

when I finish reading The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

But, based on the summary of the book - Mearsheimer "seems" to believe in a post cold war hegemony - as do the neo-cons. Let's agree on this - he is not a "progressive" and is not motivated by any innate love for the Palestinian people. The guy's a West Pointer and teaches at University of Chicago.

[bemildred]

16. That seems correct, also.

The main distinction I see with the Neocons is that they seem to see no need to take into account inconvenient facts or "reality based" limitations on their ambitions. The "realists" continue to allow for the possibility that they could be wrong or overextend themselves. Neocons are more of the school (like Hitler or Napoleon) that thinks that the disasters they cause were the fault of the peoples they led, and not themselves; at the end Hitler thought that the Germans had proved unworthy of him, and I believe Napoleon expressed similar sentiments, and (IMHO) that is all you need to know about them.

[Coastie for Truth]

17. Martin Kramer contribution

Martin Kramer has anayzed this "study" at http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/2006_03_17.htm

I am not going to parse it or edit it to fit within four paragraphs -- just suggest that your read if and only if seriously interested. Here is Kramer's CV, http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/webcv2.htm

[bemildred]

19. I'm not that interested.

In some respects it belabors the obvious, that US and Israeli policies are intertwined, and in others it is merely silly, in suggesting that US policy is "controlled" by Israel, and then again obvious in asserting that the Israeli government works assiduously to influence US policy in its own interest, and with considerable success. The thesis is not the sort of thing that may be proven or disproven, in any case, it is an opinion about the present situation and the historical facts, which might be well or ill supported; and one's opinions on the subject are likely to be largely subjective, based on where one's own interests lie.

What I found interesting in the story was that they chose to publish this, knowing full well (I assume) the controversy that would follow.

Edit: spelling.

[Englander]

20. Would Kramer qualify as being a Neo-Con?

It sounds like he might do...

' Neocon Man

Daniel Pipes was a busy man in the days following September 11, 2001. The Philadelphia-based foreign policy analyst and commentator on terrorism and Islam first learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center when a local television producer called to invite him to the station for an interview. Over the next twelve months, Pipes would appear on 110 television and 450 radio shows. His op-eds graced the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. The New York Post signed him up as a columnist. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "smoking-hot."

>snip

In Pipes's view, universities these days are overrun by extremists who are reflexively hostile to the United States and Israel, blind to the dangers of Islamic terrorism and intolerant of students who dare to veer from the party line. Although Pipes is not wrong that some Middle Eastern scholars underestimated the danger of militant Islam during the 1990s, his portrait of the field as a whole is nothing if not extreme itself. Yet, with the help of Martin Kramer, who edits the journal Pipes founded, Middle East Quarterly, and Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and contributing editor at National Review Online, Pipes has succeeded in popularizing this view.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040510/press

Btw, where did you find those links, Coastie?

[Englander]

22. ~~

[Malikshah]

24. Uh....yup.

His Ivory towers in the sand. His workings with Pipes and all the issues around campus-watch

It would be like having David Irving review Michael Oren's work.

[Englander]

21. He's a 'neo-realist'/'realist', apparently.

'Through the Realist lens
Conversation with John J. Mearsheimer'

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Mearsheimer/mearsheimer-con0.html

[bemildred]

23. Candid, at least.

This is my main complaint with them, they have a Hobbesian view of the world, and it's a self-fulfilling assumption. They assume that we can do no better, which justifies them in their amoral pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Yet the record of history is much more ambiguous than they admit, governments that endure are characterized by pragmatism, not a hog-in-the-trough approach, and the overly aggressive commonly get pounded flat. And the realists pay no attention to those historical situations where empires have existed in splendid isolation for periods of some length, as a guide to what one might expect with a global government, or of how such aggregations were made to work. Last of all, Machievelli, among a long list of other historical commentators, says that it is essential to govern well, if one would hold on to power, that bad rulers have short reigns.

But, these people are in the nature of paid stooges and enablers for the ruling elites, do I don't suppose one should expect much more from them than from the Neanderthal swine they work for.

[4freethinking]

5. The study

is posted here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html

[Jim Sagle]

7. Hogwash!

[TomClash]

13. And what in this article is untrue? nt

[NVMojo]

14. here's another copy of the study before it disappears:

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/%24File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf

snip...


Two professors from Harvard University and the University of Chicago have just released an 81-page study on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" that concludes that the "overall thrust of U.S. policy in the is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the 'Israel Lobby.'"

The study is currently available as a Harvard <http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=95866989&url_num=2&url=http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/%24File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf>"working paper" with extensive footnotes or as a <http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=95866989&url_num=3&url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html>shorter version published in the London Review of Books.

The authors systematically examine the facts of the U.S.-Israel relationship, concluding that Israel is neither a strategic asset nor a "compelling moral case for sustained U.S. backing," and point a finger squarely at the Israel lobby for " to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical."

The authors examine the entire scope of the Israel lobby's efforts, from its intimidation of the press, think tanks and academia into presenting a misleading image of Israel to its success at co-opting the Congress and the Executive Branch into implementing Israel's policy aims.

The paper is significant not just for its substance but also for the fact that it was published at all. The authors note in their section on the lobby's intimidation of the press: "Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one."

<http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=95866989&url_num=4&url=http://ksghome.harvard.edu/%7Eswalt/index.htm>Stephen Walt is Academic Dean and Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His latest book is "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy" (W. W. Norton & Co., 2005). According to his faculty website, he has previously worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and as a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, in addition to consulting for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University.

<http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=95866989&url_num=5&url=http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty/mearsheimer.html>John Mearsheimer is a Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, where he is an authority on security affairs and international politics. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force.

Both authors previously wrote <http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=95866989&url_num=6&url=http://johnmearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0032.pdf>"An Unnecessary War," which argued against invading Iraq, in the January/February 2003 edition of Foreign Policy magazine.

snip...

[NVMojo]

15. lest we forget who the leading neocons of the PNAC are:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/aboutpnac.htm

Project Directors

William Kristol, Chairman

Robert Kagan

Bruce P. Jackson

Mark Gerson

Randy Scheunemann

Project Staff

Ellen Bork, Acting Executive Director

Gary Schmitt, Senior Fellow

Thomas Donnelly, Senior Fellow

Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow, Director of the Middle East Initiative

Timothy Lehmann, Assistant Director

Michael Goldfarb, Research Associate



and from their same PNAC site on their statement of principles:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:

• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global
responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;


• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;


• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;


• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.

Elliott Abrams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett Jeb Bush

Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes

Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney Fred C. Ikle

Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby Norman Podhoretz

Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen Henry S. Rowen

Donald Rumsfeld Vin Weber George Weigel Paul Wolfowitz

[meti57b]

18. ...and your point is??