Salon.com on Mearsheimer and Walt
My article on the Mearsheimer and Walt piece, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," is out in Salon.com. Actually, my discussion focuses on the noise around the article, not its substance.
The substance seems to me unobjectionable. A congressman told me not so long ago, "Juan, I'm glad you're speaking out on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, because we can't." He meant by "we" the US Congress. What has happened to Mearsheimer and Walt is illustrative of what he meant by "can't." Mearsheimer admits that the two of them will never now be considered for a government position (e.g. National Security Council).
In contrast, a known Neocon sleazeball, who shredded the US Constitution and lied to Congress, such as Elliot Abrams, can be forgiven and then brought into the National Security Council to run US policy toward . . . Israel and Palestine. After Abrams lied to them, Congressional leaders vowed in the late 1980s that Abrams would never be allowed to come before them again. But they just rolled over when W. brought him into the White House.
See also the response of Michele Goldberg, also at Salon.
The links to the original are given here.
What is striking is that no mainstream American publication has to my knowledge published an Arab-American response. They are after all millions strong, and generally have an interest in the subject. One Arab-American response is that of Joseph Massad, which faults the article for shifting blame from the rightwing, anti-liberation policies of the US for decades onto the Israel lobby.
Actually, I think Joseph is wrong about this one. Eisenhower, e.g., had a policy of fighting communist movements in the third world but of supporting national liberation movements that did not strike him as likely to ally with Moscow. Thus, he twisted De Gaulle's arm to get out of Algeria. He thought that it was dangerous to allow colonial powers to repress mere nationalist movements, lest the nationalists be pushed to the left and into Moscow's arms. Assumptions of constant perfidy in Washington are as unrealistic as assumptions of constant idealism. In this regard, realists like Mearsheimer and Walt are right.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/18/2006 12:01:00 AM
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6 Comments:
I am extremely grateful to Juan Cole for citing the Mearsheimer and Walt article and to those two authors for having the courage to write it. I too think it is excellent and much needed. However, before patting Eisenhower on the back for support of national liberation movements I strongly recommend a reading of what is to me one of the best books I have ever read,"Overthrow" by Stephen Kinzer and just recently published. Eisenhower selected John Foster Dulles as his Sec of State and fully supported Dulles and the CIA's overthrows of Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. Read "Overthrow", its a blockbuster! It should be read by every literate American citizen.
i'm so happy for your article. on salon there's already ten pages of comments since this noon, largely on the thoughtful/productive side.
this fire is not going to be put out any time soon. remember the berling wall fell.
It's good to see your article in Salon - just sorry it's not in NTY, LAT, or WSJ. But they're part of the problem. The key is to keep the issue out there long enough to get the talk at grassroots going. "The Lobby" after the first week of kneejerk defense has shut up, hoping it will go away. Don't let it!
talking about ny times--let's give it a cheer. they have so far published two pieces, 04/12, and today, 04/19.
the first is an interview/report, the second is an op-ed by tony judt. the first is fair, the last is as sunny as one can wish for!
nytimes knows that it can not tie its reputation onto the lobby. also it does not particularly relish an iran war. so some thing is happening. let's keep it up.
Your defense of your friends is very heartwarming, because you do it in the best way possible: you praise them while quietly fixing all their flaws in parenthetical asides. If they had incorporated all of your ideas, they might have written a great article.
The problem is, they didn't. Mearshimer and Walt could have written a great article is they'd simply stuck to their last. They could have changed the debate. And we should encourage them to go back and write that article. Because this one does exactly the opposite: it shores up everything that's wrong with the current debate. Because it shores the logical fallacy at the heart of it all, what you might call the Iron Dichotomy: EITHER our support for Israel is in our interests, OR we are being manipulated by a tiny minority.
The actual fact is that both sides of that dichotomy are false. The way the US currently supports Israel is not in our interests (or Israel's, or the world's). And we are not being manipulated by a teeny minority.
So why are we violating our interests? Good question! The answers are hugely complicated, and not at all settled. (How could they be when we never even get to the starting point?)
But that should be the question everyone starts with. Until then we'll just keep going around in sterile circles. People will keep on accepting weak arguments on both sides because they are so sure the arguments on the other side are completely unacceptable.
Now M&W could have contributing to breaking this circle. They are geostrategists. And they could have written an article that made one point thoroughly: that supporting Israel in our current manner is not in our strategic interests. They could have explained why in exhaustive detail. They could have revealed to the general public that this is a widely held view among experts in the field.
This would have made a difference. Because if that you can establish that point, you can get halfways towards getting out of this circle.
But horrors of horrors, they don't make this argument at all in this article. They just assume it. They act like it's obvious.
On its face this seems like a terrible case of academic myopia. They think the established wisdom in their field must be something everyone knows. When nothing could be farther from the truth. To most people, this seems not only untrue but logically impossible.
What M&W do instead is assume this is true, that the US is violating its own interests, and then try to explain why. And in that context, their explanation is frankly terrible. It's simplistic, unsatisfying and shores up the Iron Dichotomy rather than breaking it down. The fact that they hit on some truths, the fact that some of the reaction against it hysterical and unfair, all of that is beside the point. Given the purpose it wants to achieve, the article stinks.
What they should do is go back to the beginning and start again, this time down the path unchosen. They should explain in exhaustive detail and logic why our current support for Israel is not in our strategic interests. They should defend that point against all comers.
And they should leave the other part of the argument -- if it's against our interest, why are we doing it? -- to other people. They should rest content that the more they push through the strategic argument, the more they will raise the pressure to answer the other question satisfyingly in the public sphere.
I wanted to second Michael Pollack's remarks. I've tried to say the same thing elsewhere, and have been compelled to give up in despair.
Consider the side of the iron dichotomy that condemns Israel AND which declares that US support for it is the result of the Jewish lobby. Why is only Zionist Jews who are influential? Since it is, a logician would be forced to conclude some other category of persons is arbitrating among Jewish Americans to decide which one will be heard. The Jewish critics of Israel are trotted out to by this afore-mentioned side of the Iron Dichotomy only to say, "even so-and-so complains about the abuse of the word 'antisemitism.'" The fact that so many Jewish Americans or Jewish Israelis are critical, often harshly critical, of Israel doesn't register with them. It ought to.
The test of a theory is if it is the simplest and most reliable way of explaining the observed facts; and if it can be used to make predictions. Mearsheimer & Walt's hypothesis does neither. The mere fact that they have also been accused of antisemitism, or that neoconservatives go to the head of the line, does not mean their hypothesis is correct.
James R MacLean
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