WHY CAN'T THE LOBBY GET US TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT HEZBOLLAH?:

Scholars Debate ‘Israel Lobby’ Article (Gal Beckerman, Oct 06, 2006, The Forward)

John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago professor who co-authored a controversial article last winter about the power of the “The Israel Lobby,” met his critics head-on last week for a debate before a rowdy audience on the stage of New York’s historic Cooper Union. [...]

Facing Mearsheimer on the stage at Cooper Union were Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, who were senior Middle East policy-makers in the Clinton administration, and Shlomo Ben-Ami, an Oxford-trained historian and former Israeli foreign minister. Arguing on Mearsheimer’s side were historian Tony Judt, director of New York University’s Remarque Institute and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. The moderator was Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Slaughter fought throughout the evening — more successfully than not — to keep the exchange civil and on topic.

Only a few minutes into the debate, Indyk said that he thought the Walt-Mearsheimer paper “rose to the level” of antisemitism, as many of its detractors have charged. “If he had written a paper about Aipac, which is the lobby, then I wouldn’t have had a problem with that,” Indyk said, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the best-known pro-Israel lobbying organization. “But this notion of a loosely aligned group of people that all happen to be working assiduously for Israel is indeed a cabal, the very thing he insists he is not referring to. This is exactly what he suggests. And this cabal includes anyone that has anything positive to say about Israel… And what does this cabal do? It ‘distorts’ American foreign policy, it ‘bends’ it, all these words are used to suggest that this cabal is doing something anti-American.”

Mearsheimer took many more hits throughout the evening, including quite a few from Indyk. And despite the periodic cheers from the crowd supporting his position, Mearsheimer often seemed lost and out of his depth. Time after time, he repeated vague charges that “the Lobby” had “phoned” the president and delivered orders, or he alluded to specific events that drew retorts from Ross, Ben-Ami or Indyk to the effect of, “I was there and nothing of the sort happened.” [...]

The evening’s sharpest exchanges, however, centered not on the scope and power of “the Lobby” but on the paper’s scholarship, which its three critics repeatedly said was shoddy. The research was “ridiculous,” Ross said at one point, addressing Mearsheimer. “You quote selectively. You basically identify certain things that you think that are important to your case. You ignore every bit of evidence that contradicts your case. And then you make these kind of broad statements.”

This objection came up numerous times when discussing the two major claims in the paper: that “the Lobby” was largely responsible for the Iraq War, and that America’s close relationship with Israel — instigated by “the Lobby” — was the major reason for terrorism against the United States, including the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Mearsheimer, challenged repeatedly, asserted these two points again. “It seems very clear to me and very clear to others,” he said at one point, “that the Israel lobby was one of the principal guiding forces behind the Iraq War, and in its absence we probably would not have had a war.”

The funny thing about all this is that, left to their own devices, the Israelis would have taken Saddam out in '91 when he fired SCUDs at them. But the anti-Zionist (or at least indifferent to Zion) George HW Bush and Jim Baker not only stopped them but failed to deal with him themselves, making the second war inevitable.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 5, 2006 5:39 PM