World
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
Faulty .Analysis
Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Washington
C
overing Israel, its relationship
with the United States and the
influential lobby that straddles
the two often requires the basic skills and
instincts of a reporter on the neighbor-
hood beat.
With that in mind, I approached The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the
new book by scholars John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt, as I would a map of
my neighborhood drawn up by an urban
planning critic who has a known bias
against gentrification.
You know it will emphasize blight and
ignore greenery to the point of unfairness,
but you're interested anyway because you
might learn something. Imagine the sur-
prise, then, with the map laid out on the
table, you see unrecognizable quadrants
describing nonexistent dungeons and
moonscapes. Is this guy on drugs, you
might wonder?
Sitting across from Mearsheimer,
a political science professor at the
University of Chicago, and Walt, an inter-
national affairs professor at the John
E Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University, I recognized that these
guys are not on drugs. But why did they
make up stuff?
Clearly this was not going to be a rou-
tine book tour interview, so I tried to
make that understood from the outset.
I explained to the authors that I was not
going to settle for the usual "How did you
get your ideas?" sort of questions because
their ideas seemed so strikingly wrong.
Others have called the Walt-
Mearsheimer writings borderline anti-
Semitic. I don't think so, but their fantastic
claims — particularly about Israel, the
lobby's role in the lead-up to the Iraq war
and the creation of the Bush administra-
tion hostility to Syria — demand answers.
First let me emphasize that just as The
Israel Lobby is severely flawed on many
counts, the book has its strong points and
weak points that merit less than a tidal
wave of condemnation. For starters, the
chapter outlining who and what consti-
tutes the pro-Israel lobby and how these
combined forces exercise their influence
in Washington is a useful consolidation of
20
September 20 • 2007
reporting by others.
The chapters on what the authors
describe as Israel's dwindling moral
standing and decreasing strategic value to
the United States invite plenty of disagree-
ment on several fronts, but the authors
do ask some hard and helpful questions
about how the lobby functions and wheth-
er more discussion on Middle East policy
matters would be useful.
The chapter on Israel's dealings with
the Palestinians is certainly one-sided,
omitting or downplaying crucial informa-
tion that would provide uninformed and
unbiased readers with a balanced picture,
but at least the arguments put forth by
Mearsheimer and Walt are grounded in an
existing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian
narrative.
It is on the subject of the Iraq war
— specifically the effort to assign blame
to Jerusalem and Jewish organizations —
that the authors go off the rails. Take this
assertion: "There is considerable evidence
that Israel and pro-Israel groups — espe-
cially the neoconservatives — played
important roles in the decision to invade
The first problem with the contention is
in its phrasing, conflating the neoconser-
vative agenda entirely with that of Israel
and the pro-Israel lobby. Certainly the
neoconservative movement is pro-Israel,
but that's not its sum.
On this question I asked Mearsheimer
and Walt particularly about their focus on
Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense
secretary who was an architect of the war.
In making the case that Wolfowitz was
thinking Israel when he argued for an Iraq
invasion, they cite the Jerusalem Post and
the Forward quoting AIPAC members as
saying Wolfowitz is pro-Israel.
Shoddy Evidence
Second-hand quotes from interests vested
in the idea of a pro-Israel polity do not
constitute evidence either of his pro-Israel
leanings or how such feelings influenced
his support for the war. I pointed out to
the authors that AIPAC reflexively brands
every civil servant in D.C. above the rank
of driver as "enthusiastically pro-Israel."
Why, I wondered, no mention of
Wolfowitz's many writings on the general
idea of pre-emptive action, his efforts as
the lead U.S. official shepherding democ-
racy into the Philippines and Indonesia in
the 1980s?
Pho to by Greg Mar t in / Farra r, Straus & Giroux
Probing why Walt and Mearsheimer misunderstand the pro-Israel lobby.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer: scholars under fire for the accuracy of their
new book.
And what about his 2003 endorsement
of the Geneva agreements positing Israel's
return to pre-1967 lines, made explicitly
because he believed the Israel-Palestinian
issue had to be solved if Iraq was to suc-
ceed? (To say the lobby was less than
enthusiastic about the Geneva agreements
would be an understatement.)
Were these not more germane to under-
standing his commitment to war with Iraq
than rumors of his commitment to Israel?
In response to my questions about
the neoconservative case for war,
Mearsheimer responded: "We're not mak-
ing the argument that they were monoma-
niacal, that the United States had to invade
Iraq for Israeli benefits:'
Yet absent other evidence of the Bush
administration's commitment to invade
Iraq, that is exactly how their book comes
across. The writers assemble quotes from
leaders in Jerusalem to show that while
Israel "did not initiate the campaign for
war against Iraq:' it "did join forces with
the neoconservatives to help sell the
war to the Bush administration and the
American people'
All of the quotes offered up by the
authors postdate the May 1, 2002, scene
described in the opening of Hubris, the
best-selling account of the Iraq war by
Michael Isikoff and David Corn, when
President Bush says of Saddam Hussein,
"I'm going to kick his m— f— ass all over
the Mideast:"
And there is an abundance of evidence
dating back to the days following Sept. 11,
2001, that it was Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney directing the push to invade
Iraq. Bush's former Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neil has even suggested that con-
fronting Iraq seemed to be on the minds
of the president and vice president from
the first days of the Bush administration.
In fact, the idea that Israel joined with
neoconservatives to "sell" Bush on Iraq
posits an inversion of how Washington
operates — especially under this admin-
istration. Bush's proxies made it clear to
Jewish leaders — and just about everyone
else — in the first days of the administra-
tion that the tradition of joining forces
on areas of agreement and agreeing to
disagree on all else was null: You either
signed on with the whole Bush agenda or
you were frozen out.
And so, as 2002 wore into 2003, every
interest group in Washinton that needed
access to an immensely popular president
— the media, the Democrats and, yes,
Jewish and pro-Israel groups — signed
on more or less to the White House policy
that arched over all others: invading Iraq.
The authors weren't buying.
"I guess I'm not persuaded by the argu-
ment that the Bush administration told
them,`You're with us or against us and
that's the way we do business," Walt said.
"Because these organizations were not
at all bashful about taking on the Bush
administration when they didn't like his
calling for a Palestinian state, when he
pushed Sharon around, when he tried to
push Sharon around about the reoccupa-