Op-Ed: Solid bonds

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It has long been gospel (appropriately enough) in the State Department and American academic circles that the United States has paid a terrible price for its relationship with Israel.

In 2006, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, not anti-Semitic kooks but foreign policy mandarins, elaborated on the gospel by explaining why America was willing to jeopardize its own national security through its slavish devotion to Israel. The culprit, they argued — cue the drumroll — was the “Israel lobby.” Washington’s unwillingness to separate its own interests from those of the Jewish state was responsible for the Arabs’ reluctance to work closely with Washington and for the host of other problems stemming from the Muslim world. Even terrorism.

American Jews and other supporters of Israel fulminated. But it took a while, predictably, for foreign policy aficionados to examine these premises systematically. Two senior national security gurus finally have done so, and have shredded the argument. “Israel, a Strategic Asset for the United States,” written by Robert Blackwill, who served in four White Houses, most recently as George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, and Walter Slocombe, a senior Pentagon official in the Carter and Clinton administrations who worked as a defense adviser in Iraq in 2003, concludes that America’s close ties to Israel have advanced, not jeopardized, its national security interests.

The 17-page essay, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, lists numerous ways in which the U.S. has benefited from its relations with Israel, especially in the defense and intelligence sectors. It also argues America should reject the notion of Israel as a strategic liability and openly embrace it as a strategic asset.


http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/11/06/110611-opinions-column-israel-miller-1-2/