That’s them. If you are developing an interest in this, and you should - American ground zero in the fight against ignorance - M & W are the best early investment of your time.
(Well done on the search. Apologies for the mis-spelling, but Mearsheimer , come on, it was bound to happen.)
…Well, the curious thing is that we don’t see a lot of threads asking for us to re-assess our relationship with the UK due to supposed bad intelligence by their intelligence agencies. And yet the UK’s intelligence (and our own) had a lot more to do with us going to war in Iraq than Israel’s did. As I said, had we been following Israel’s master plan we would have invaded Iran…a country who Israel feels is a much bigger threat to itself and regionally.
We went to war with Iraq for our own reasons (which hinged on the past history between Iraq and the US wrt the first Gulf War), so the OP is flawed.
First an oblique accusation of anti-semitism, ulu
Then a bald assertion which is contrary to what the known evidence suggests, yphy.
It is the issue most shrouded in ignorance in the continental USA, by design no less. The curiosity is natural and inevitable, atha.
They do, but decent people everywhere despise imperialism.
You claim it’s easy, but have you really tried?
Ocean_Annie:
I…I view the U.S. relationship with Israel and the rise of Muslim extremism differently than you. I would argue that U.S. intervention in the Middle East fuels militant anger and resentment which manifests into tension and violence in Israel. In other words, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia has caused more problems for Israel than Israel has caused the U.S.
Interesting, bears thinking about. This is prima facie unlikely but it is always best to keep an open mind.
Actually… W&M, in specific, wrote a polemic full of lies, distortions and deliberate omissions of context. They did this to sell an agenda.
They, for instance, used deliberately falsified and/or out of context quotes , chopped up specifically with the purpose of saying the exact opposite of what actually happened.
Things like:
Thus they claim that the following statement by Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, proved that Israel never really accepted partition of the Palestine Mandate into separate Jewish and Arab states, and was always intent on expelling and dispossessing the Palestinians:
After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine. (paper; book, p 93)
Did Ben-Gurion actually say this? Not quite. The above quote is supposedly from a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, the pre-state representative body of the Jews in the Palestine Mandate, and here’s what Ben-Gurion actually said according to the meeting protocol:
Mr. Ben-Gurion: The starting point for a solution of the question of the Arabs in the Jewish State is, in his view, the need to prepare the ground for an Arab-Jewish agreement; he supports [the establishment of] the Jewish State [on a small part of Palestine], not because he is satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we constitute a large force following the establishment of the state – we will cancel the partition [of the country between Jews and Arabs] and we will expand throughout the Land of Israel.
Mr. Shapira [a JAE member]: By force as well?
Mr. Ben-Gurion: [No]. Through mutual understanding and Jewish-Arab agreement. So long as we are weak and few the Arabs have neither the need nor the interest to conclude an alliance with us... And since the state is only a stage in the realization of Zionism and it must prepare the ground for our expansion throughout the whole country through Jewish-Arab agreement – we are obliged to run the state in such a way that will win us the friendship of the Arabs both within and outside the state. (from Efraim Karsh, “Falsifying the Record: Benny Morris, David Ben-Gurion and the ’Transfer’ Idea," Israel Affairs, V4, No. 2, Winter 1997, p52-53)
In other words, Ben-Gurion was stating exactly the opposite of what Walt and Mearsheimer would have their readers believe.
The study was replete with factual, methodological and contextual ‘errors’. W&M are either extremely poor scholars, or they knew full well what they were doing.
Examples include but are not limited to:
The authors also try to undermine the moral case for supporting Israel, arguing, for example, that it is not, and has never been, the underdog in the Middle East conflict. Thus, they claim that:
Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better-equipped and better-led forces during the 1948-1949 War of Independence.
This claim is simply laughable. Consider, for example, the relative strengths of the Israeli forces and the Arab forces arrayed against them during the first critical weeks of the war:
[table omitted]
Thus, contrary to the authors, and in contrast to the invading Arabs, Israel had essentially no tanks, barely any artillery pieces, and few if any aircraft.
As for Israel being better led, the authors are apparently unaware that the invading Arab forces were professional armies, while the Israeli forces facing them were no better than militias, with experience only in small unit operations. Just how foolish the authors’ claims are can be seen by looking, for example, at the Jordanian army, which was led by a highly experienced British officer, General Sir John Bagot Glubb, along with roughly 40 other British officers serving in senior ranks. At the time Israel simply had nothing to compare to this level of experience and professionalism.
And, of course, what conspiracy yarn would be complete without facts deceptively taken out of context:
[
One obvious target for the authors is the supposedly massive level of US aid to Israel.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War II. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain.
Interesting that the authors mention Israel being a wealthy industrial state, like South Korea. The implication being that South Korea doesn’t get huge amounts of U.S. aid, while Israel, supposedly because of the lobby, does, to the tune of about $3 Billion annually.
However, we have had around 40,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea for about 50 years. The presence of these troops is a direct subsidy to the South Koreans – because we are there protecting them, they have that much less a defense burden, and we have that much more a defense burden (that is, if we didn’t have to defend them, we could have a smaller, less expensive, military). The money that South Korea saves can be used to reduce taxes, or to create, say, a car industry, or a steel industry, or a chip industry, producing goods which they can then sell to the U.S., and jobs that they can take from the U.S. All subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer. And what do those troops and their equipment and other related items cost the U.S.? About $3 Billion a year. (source: New York Times, Jan. 8, 2003)
](Study Decrying “Israel Lobby” Marred by Numerous Errors | CAMERA )
Or:
[
The villains in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy are almost entirely Jewish. Many of the chapters of the book contain extensive lists of Jews (even Rothschilds) who, the authors claim, act against the best interests of the United States. And act effectively: the Israel lobby in this book is an invincible juggernaut. In some of Mearsheimer and Walt’s pages, AIPAC resembles SMERSH or THRUSH. The America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, you see, “has an almost unchallenged hold on Congress,” and therefore on the United States. (In the London Review article, the “hold” was described as a “stranglehold.”)
And how do we know that AIPAC has a hold on Congress? This is a very good question. For Mearsheimer and Walt are so thoroughly under the spell of their own assertions that they do not seem to notice the circular (or more precisely, agitprop) quality of what they have written. Consider a typical sentence: “The real reason why American politicians are so deferential [to Israel] is the political power of the Israel lobby.” That is not a proof. That is what requires a proof.
So what are Mearsheimer and Walt’s methods? A hasty survey of a vast literature on Israel and the Middle East, clearly unfamiliar to them until very recently, so as to cite every and any remark that suits their purpose, its context or its veracity notwithstanding. Most significantly, and by their own admission, Mearsheimer and Walt did no reporting. They did not interview a single member of Congress for their book about Congress. Perhaps it is beneath them as scholars to behave like journalists. But their methodological arrogance, their failure to meet any serious standard of empirical inquiry, their slavish reliance on second- and third-hand works, is astonishing. The truth of what they say is just completely obvious to them. At an appearance in September at the bookstore Politics and Prose, in Washington, Walt confidently asserted that “I think if we had interviewed every member of Congress and every lobbyist at AIPAC we would not have found a substantially different story than the one we reported.” How does he know?
After baldly declaring, in the manner of conspiracy theorists, and over and over again, also in the manner of conspiracy theorists, that AIPAC dominates Congress (at the same time claiming, risibly, that “we do not believe the lobby … controls important institutions in the United States”)
](http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=523b5134-8643-4f5e-a314-ac9b8a786b16&p=4 )
The pro-Israel lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt contend, goes to any length to steer media coverage in Israel’s favor: “If the media were left to their own devices, they would not serve up as consistent a diet of pro-Israel coverage and commentary.” And whose devices, precisely, are they left up to? We are awfully close to the Elders of Z. here. Mearsheimer and Walt’s opinion that the press in America is robotically pro-Israel only betrays their ignorance of the American press. They are apparently unacquainted with the work of the editorial boards of, say, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. They might recall the life and work of the late Peter Jennings. They identify such columnists as Richard Cohen of The Washington Post and Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times as Israeli sympathizers, which is true in the sense that Cohen and Friedman do not support the murder of Israeli civilians or the extinction of the Israeli state. But when Friedman’s words suit their own tendency, when he writes critically of Israeli policy, they cite him. So Friedman is an agent of Israeli interests, except when he is not.
Or:
[
Who belongs to “the Lobby”? Walt and Mearsheimer acknowledge that the lobby is not monolithic in its composition. 33 They point to extremists on the religious and political right as included in this Lobby, 34 though they consciously omit non-Jewish liberal supporters of Israel, ranging from Senators Edward Kennedy and Evan Bayh to former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore to Father Robert Drinan and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Yet they claim that the Lobby is single-minded in its pursuit of Israel’s interests over that of the United States.35
Walt and Mearsheimer include in their catalogue of “Lobby”-ists: journalists
This explains why, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, “the American media contains few criticisms of Israeli policies.” 46 This statement will sound especially bizarre to anyone who regularly reads the The New York Times, which is frequently critical of Israel, and whose editorial board seems particularly antagonistic toward the Likud Party, which dominated Israeli politics during the period under discussion by the authors.47 Indeed, some members of the so-called Lobby organized a boycott of The New York Times for its perceived bias against Israel.48
A careful review of other media outlets that are allegedly part of the Lobby will also show repeated criticism of specific Israeli policies.
](Harvard Kennedy School | Harvard Kennedy School )
Or:
[
The book’s problems start very early and run very deep. Mearsheimer and Walt outline the case they plan to make on page 14: “The United States provides Israel with extraordinary material aid and diplomatic support, the lobby is the principal reason for that support, and this uncritical and unconditional support is not in the national interest.” Note the slippage. The “extraordinary” support of the first clause quietly mutates into the “uncritical and unconditional” support of the last. “Extraordinary” is hardly the same thing as “uncritical and unconditional,” but the authors proceed as if it were. They claim the clarity and authority of rigorous logic, but their methods are loose and rhetorical. This singularly unhappy marriage – between the pretensions of serious political analysis and the standards of the casual op-ed – both undercuts the case they wish to make and gives much of the book a disagreeably disingenuous tone.
Rarely in professional literature does one encounter such a gap between aspiration and performance as there is in The Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt fail to define “the lobby” in a clear way. Their accounts of the ways in which it exercises power, as well as their descriptions of the power it wields, are incoherent. Their use of evidence is uneven. At the level of geopolitics, their handling of the complex realities and crosscurrents of the Middle East fails to establish either the incontestable definition of the national interest that their argument requires or the superiority they claim for the policies they propose.
](Jerusalem Syndrome )
The problems start with the definition. The Israel lobby, write Mearsheimer and Walt, is “a convenient shorthand term for the loose coalition of individuals and organizations” working “to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” The lobby, as they see it, includes both hard-line groups such as AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and CUFI (Christians United For Israel) and dovish groups such as the Israel Policy Forum, the Tikkun Community, and Americans for Peace Now. All of these groups agree that Israel ought to be defended, and the groups and individuals in the lobby work in various ways to shape U.S. policy toward the Jewish state along what they consider to be favorable lines, but they have occasionally deep divisions over exactly what policies are best for Israel.
Mearsheimer and Walt say clearly that the lobby is neither conspiratorial nor antipatriotic. They concede that the overwhelming majority of those involved sincerely believe that what is best for Israel is best for the United States, and vice versa. Moreover, the tendency to reflexively support the Israeli government has diminished over time. And individual groups that are part of the lobby have broken with Israeli policies at various points, even if the largest groups tend to embrace hard-line views.
Still, questions arise. If everyone from AIPAC to Americans for Peace Now is part of the lobby, what, exactly, is the political agenda the lobby supports? And if a variety of U.S. policies are consonant with the different agendas of different components of the lobby, what criteria should be used to measure the impact of the lobby as a whole? What is the relationship between the internal dynamics of this divided lobby and the politics and policies of both Israel and wider American society?
When it comes down to it, Mearsheimer and Walt do not seem to know who, exactly, belongs to this amoebic, engulfing blob they call the lobby and who does not. Take their own case. They describe themselves as pro-Israel, in that they believe in the state’s right to exist. They admire its achievements and wish secure and prosperous lives for its citizens. They state categorically that the United States should aid Israel “if its survival is in danger.” They frequently argue that current Israeli policies and U.S. support for them are counterproductive – that is, Washington should make its aid to Israel more conditional not because the two states do not share interests but precisely because they do. Conditional aid, Mearsheimer and Walt believe, will lead Israel to act in ways that ensure its survival while also benefiting the United States. And they care so passionately about this that they have written a long and controversial book on the subject. “We are obviously not part of the Israel lobby,” they say. But under their own definition, is that really true?
Or as Benny Morris put it:
[
In order to highlight the authors’ methodology and to give an accurate picture of their scholarship, I wish to focus on several historical points that they make to sustain their case. (I will leave it to others to show what should be perfectly obvious: that the pro-Israel lobby is not the conspiratorial tail that wags the American dog.) I must confess to a personal interest in the matter. Like many pro-Arab propagandists at work today, Mearsheimer and Walt often cite my own books, sometimes quoting directly from them, in apparent corroboration of their arguments. Yet their work is a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades. Their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity. Were “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” an actual person, I would have to say that he did not have a single honest bone in his body.
](http://www.somebodyhelpme.info/lobby/And_Now_For_Some_Facts.htm )
One of the major elements of “U.S. intervention in the Middle East” and of “U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East” is the U.S. relationship with Israel and the policy decisions that this influences. It’s impossible to evaluate Middle East attitudes to the U.S. subtracting this out. I actually, therefore, think we are saying the same thing two different ways.
XT
January 20, 2009, 7:36pm
47
I disagree. The primary impact on US foreign policy in the ME hinges around all that oil stuff. Our relationship to Israel, while important, is secondary to that consideration. I’d say that US’s relationship to Saudi has a much larger impact on our attitudes and actions than that of the US’s relationship to Israel.
-XT
I’m not even sure you do. I said “major,” which is surely true (how many times has the U.S. been on the “1” end of a x:1 U.N. vote over something related to Israel? Not that I give a rat’s ass about the U.N.), not “predominant” or “primary.”
Taking your position on oil, and Saudi, etc., as proved – I’d be interested in your answer to my Warren Buffett hypothetical. Does adding the Israeli element into that mix help, or hurt, at the margins? And isn’t that the question a self-interested sovereign nation (can there be any other kind? I doubt it) should be asking?
I agree that the relationship with Israel complicates U.S. policy in the Middle East. And Israel is important to U.S. strategic interests in the region, but it isn’t the reason for U.S. foreign policy.
Israel’s struggles are used – quite effectively --to appeal to emotion and right wing fundamentalism. The Bush administration and corporate media equate Palestinians to terrorists, ignoring the complexity of the situation and deflecting the role of a U.S. foreign policy intent on protecting an unsustainable American lifestyle. It would be nice to believe we support Israel for moral reasons, but the truth is Israel is an excuse and provides political cover.
A fascinating (if somwhat convoluted) thread. anyway, Israel posesses excellent intelligence on the Arab world. i am quite sure that had a few agents inside iraq, and kept tabs on Saddam’s weapons programs.
Israel knew Iraq had no WMD, says MP | Politics | The Guardian Israel knew according to this article in the Guardian. It was never about WMDs .That was a manufactured excuse by those who felt they had the power to change the world. Wars are about money, economic power. it is sold as a defense of the homeland but rarely is.
XT
January 22, 2009, 9:26pm
52
What was the Brits excuse? Or did they ‘know’ as well?
-XT