SURVEYING THE ISRAEL LOBBY.-Oil and Vinegar - New Republic

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a "faculty research working paper" recently produced for Harvard's John F. Kennedy (trade) School of Government by Stephen Walt, its academic dean, and John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, weighs in at nearly 35,000 words. The word "oil," however, appears in the document exactly seven times--all of them generic or trivial. None of the references relate to the systemic U.S. dependence on foreign crude or, more to the point, to the truly powerful lobby that has worked for many decades to satisfy it through arranging that the producer governments get what they want: mainly protection against radical Muslims or Muslim radicals and against fuel-efficient cars. Israel's friends--foreign affairs idealists and realists, rightists, leftists, centrists, Christians, Jews, nonbelievers--know the power of this oil lobby, with which they have tangled to ensure that the United States supports an ally against its many unworthy enemies. Emphasis added

Support for Israel is, deep down, an expression of America's best view of itself. Mearsheimer and Walt clearly have no clue that U.S. support for the Jewish restoration, rather than a result of Zionist machinations, dates back to the Puritans. And it carries through Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman to, if you'll forgive me, George W. Bush. But rarely without colossal struggle. Indeed, how could the authors forget Truman's certified nutcase secretary of defense, James Forrestal, who held paranoid views of Zionist perfidy congruent with their own and could only relieve himself of them by jumping from a sixteenth-story window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital? (In a TNR article at the time, Harold Ickes wrote that Forrestal was a satisfied reader of this magazine!) As that incident shows, Israel's opponents were overruled during the Truman administration. But they were not when James Baker was the steward of U.S. foreign policy under Bush père. The truth is that the Clinton-era peace processors (Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller), whom Walt and Mearsheimer blithely and falsely associate with the Lobby, were either leftovers from the Baker team or held a stubborn view of how to force peace: Squeeze Israel. Time and again, they imperiled Israel in order to get Yasir Arafat to accede to, in De Gaulle's phrase, the "peace of the brave."



This paper is not research in any serious sense, although its academic paraphernalia--211 scholia, most with more than one reference--are intended to lend it an undeserved seriousness. But the apparatus deployed in this tendentious work is the labor of obsessives with dark and conspiratorial minds. Have you ever received a letter from a crackpot in which every stray fact fits together in a coherent whole? Sometimes the academy produces genuine theories-of-everything, such as those of Spengler and Sorel, Sorokin and B.F. Skinner, men of immense learning. Ingenuous and suggestive, yes. Still, even these serious men were touched by maniacal fantasies.

Mearsheimer and Walt, despite their standing as exemplars of the realist school of international politics, know ironically little about reality. They are abstractionists, constructing imaginary solutions to real conflict. Mearsheimer, for instance, has argued that nuclear proliferation is the best guarantee of peace. Germany should have the bomb--also Japan and Ukraine. This, he maintains, is not simply manageable, but preferable. What's so dangerous if Iraq and Iran have it, too?

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