Way back here I briefly wrote about a paper that John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt had written arguing that the Israel lobby exerts influence on American foreign policy way out of proportion to Israel's strategic importance to the United States. They have now expanded their paper into a book, and it's getting slammed and praised (mostly the former, from my limited reading, which may prove their point). Here's one of the columns denigrating it.
The reader should easily be able to figure out that the author of the following paragraph is a former speechwriter for Bush. Bush wouldn't recognize a strategic insight if it bit him. Political insight, sure, but strategic?
President Bush's emphasis on democracy has been driven not by outside pressure but by a strategic insight. He is convinced that the status quo of tyranny, stagnation and extremism in the Middle East is not sustainable -- that the rage and ideologies it produces will cause increasing carnage in the world. The eventual solution to this problem, in his view, is the proliferation of hopeful, representative societies in the Middle East.This argument is debatable. But it is at least as likely as Walt and Mearsheimer's naive belief that "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel" -- the equivalent of arguing that Britain had a Nazi problem in the 1930s because it was so closely allied with Czechoslovakia.
That's a stupid and incorrect analogy. There's been racial hatred towards Jews for millenia; since the establishment of Israel it's been easily focused on that tiny strip of land along the Mediterranean coast. The Nazis had no racial hatred of the Czechs and Slovaks; they had a desire for lebensraum, "living space," and Czechoslovakia was a convenient target.
I think America's problem with terrorism is exacerbated by its unquestioning support of Israel; think about Hezbollah's attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad's murder of the American University president (Malcolm Kerr) in 1984, and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro. There are other reasons for terrorist attacks on the US: its propping up of dictators through aid and political support in various parts of the world, its high profile, and its cultural reach. But the overarching theme of terrorism against the US seems to me to be tied greatly towards its perceived unwillingness to criticize Israel (particularly during the GWB years) even when Israel's actions seem to do nothing to advance peace. For example, Israel has been settling previously-Palestinian land with its own people for decades, and even when the US mildly remonstrates, it's continued to do so. Here's an example from 1991:
In early September of 1991, Israel's right wing government had asked Washington for a loan guarantee for $10 billion in commercial paper – seeking the new credit line to finance the resettlement of Jews leaving the Soviet Union. Bush had six months earlier driven Saddam Hussein's armies from Kuwait, helped by a broad Arab coalition; he then was planning to convene an unprecedented peace conference in Madrid. And he didn't want to undermine the conference by subsidizing massively the settlement of a million new immigrants to Israel on Palestinian land in the West Bank – where the Shamir government was inclined to place many of them.This was the effort which resulted in Bush One's famous comment "I heard today there were something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy doing it." He spoke further about being "up against some powerful political forces."Bush asked Congress to delay the loan guarantees for four months. The Israeli lobby shifted into gear; one day, about a thousand lobbyists began paying visits to Congressional offices, making the case for the United States to dispense the guarantees immediately.
Mearshimer and Walt are making an argument that seems self-evident to this objective observer: Israel's lobby exerts undue influence on American foreign policy to the detriment of its best interests, and it would behoove American policymakers to recognize it and try as best they can to push the lobby back into the same place other major lobbiests inhabit; that of a group which has a viewpoint to be weighed but not blindly followed.
Posted by Linkmeister at September 21, 2007 09:46 AM | TrackBack