AIPAC Impact on US foreign policy
Political scientists John Mearsheimer (U of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard) bravely take on the issue of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington and the way it distorts US foreign policy in the Middle East. Most American Jews deeply disagree with the policies advocated by the American Enterprise Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, etc., But a sliver of the political spectrum, falsely insisting that it represents all American Jews, manages to skew US politics and reporting on the issue of Palestine.
A longer version of the report is here.
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/18/2006 02:45:00 AM
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Thank you for the link, Prof. Cole. Sooner or later, everyone comes around to what Noam Chomsky has written about the Israeli lobby.
As you say, Prof. Cole, they found the courage. But only after decade upon decade of control of our Middle East foreign policy by these Netanyahu fanboy Likudnik Jacobins.
The report did not go unnoticed - and no, JePo is not impressed. But I can only imagine their reaction if the report employed Norman Finkelstein's argumentation
JePo. NATHAN GUTTMAN. Harvard study: AIPAC makes US act against own interests
The research has sparked instant controversy in the US. It was distributed over the weekend through several Web sites and list serves known for their anti-Israel approach and drew harsh criticism from pro-Israel activists.
An official with a pro-Israel organization in Washington said that the authors' disagreement "is not with America's pro-Israel lobby, but with the American people, who overwhelmingly support our relationship with Israel, and with Democrats and Republicans in successive administrations and Congress, who so strongly and consistently support the special relationship between the United States and Israel."
With all the billions going to Israel for which no accounting is requested, then surely millions are cycled back to the US to corrupt Congress.
I wonder if anyone has been looking into the backwash of cash?
Nur al-Cubicle: You are generally so well informed that I am a bit surprised that you mention Chomsky this way here. Chomsky does not at all agree with M & W's theses. In short M & W think that (a) The Israeli lobby pushes for policies contrary to the US national interest (here understood as identical to US elite interests.) and (b) It is an important formulator of such self-destructive US policies. I agree with both (a) & (b) in general. On the other hand, Chomsky, using IMHO extraordinarily feeble arguments agrees with neither. Chomsky (frequently in a self-contradictory manner) argues that the Israeli lobby and Israel itself is basically just tagging along with US elite consensus and have no independent power, although of course he opposes the policies. He feels that there is some strategic value of Israel & Israeli expansionism to the US (preposterous IMHO) and that this is basically another case of US elites running the world to the detriment of the US popular interest and local interests. Critiques of Chomsky are in the recent book The Politics of Antisemitism, or here http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html .
In fact Juan Cole I DEEPLY DISPUTE your assertion that americans who happen to be jewish, ("falsely insisting that it represents all American Jews")who happen to have enough professional excellence to have risen to positions of high responsibility do NOT represent most american jewish people.
I think that not only is that a false assertion, but since the intifada reached critical mass a fwe years back with the suicide murders during passover seder, kicking off the reinvestment of the west bank, americans who happen to be jewish in fact are more rigid than Israelis who happen to be jewish.
In others words, when it comes to what americans who happen to be jewish think, you don't have a clue. Just consider the massive storm created by the recent statement by the executive of the Reformed Jewish community about Iraq.
The is nothing, NOTHING that those who are running around this world spouting that since we are making up laws out of our own head, we cannot be following god's, that we are the whispering satan to the wholesome shariah follwing salafis, have in common with Jefferson.
NOTHING.
There's not a single jewish person on the planet that has anything to do with that.
When the US spent nothing on Israel, Qutb was here forming his racist, anti human rights credo which his brother then invested at KIng Abdul Aziz U's school of Islamic studies, and inserted into the heads of Abdullah Azzam and Bin Laden.
That is the purvue and concern of the professionals who happen to be jewish you are complaining about.
That Israel is a democracy amid the detritus of US foreign policy of the Dulles's and others, is not their fault. That therefor their enemies are theose spending hundreds of millions filling american mosques with incitement to murder, and racist hate is a coincidence of those nations who share individual rights being inimical to those who think Shariah the immutable.
No perversion of american foreign policy is needed by any group for Israel and the USA to be on SOMEWHAT parallel courses.
Only the descendants of Tamiyya and Qutb are neeeded for that
GU on Iraq and the neocons
Pretty much following the language and logic of Newsmax.com, Guardian's Will Hutton finds the Vietnam war successful and progressive. Next, by analogy, Mr.Hutton appears to be hopeful and optimistic on what we know as civil war in Iraq, he fiercely defends Blair from any serious criticism.
With this exercise in mind, Julian Borger's article about Dershowitz and Harvard report on the Israeli lobby is not particularly surprising. Mr.Borger does not say a word that Dershowitz is a hard neocon with the record of justifying torture and "preemptive" aka aggressive wars. Neither he mentions his crude pro-Israeli PR.
What we have istead is the exact reproduction of all generic neoconservative cursings against prominent Harvard scholars - who are actually very moderate. Professors Mearsheimer and Walt are called "Nazi anti-Semites", etc, etc. The conclusion is, GU could not make its new pro-war and pro-neocon position more clear.
1. Will Hutton. Don't call for his head. Respect his leadership
Blair's millstone is Iraq, but while I opposed the war I am beginning to revolt against the certainty with which apocalypse is now universally predicted. Democracy does in the long run deliver results; and the West cannot be blamed for the murderous enmity between Shia and Sunni. Democracy may be the best way to mediate it.
The analogy with Vietnam is telling. Today it is becoming obvious that American strategy in Asia from 1945 - seeking communist containment while encouraging democratic capitalism - was right. Vietnam bought a crucial 15 years; when Mao died, Deng Xiaoping won power on a prospectus that China had to follow the success demonstrated by the Asian tigers between 1960 and 1975. As a result, 400 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty. History is littered with unintended and unexpected consequences. And in Iraq, today's gloom may prove to be as overdone as yesterday's optimism.
Blair remains, however battered, the great persuader and the man who created the new coalition. If he's prepared to carry on soaking up the punishment, the liberal left should be grateful. When he's gone he'll be sorely missed.
2. Julian Borger. US professors accused of being liars and bigots over essay on pro-Israeli lobby
An article by two prominent American professors arguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a dominant and damaging influence on US foreign policy has triggered a furious row, pitting allegations of anti-semitism against claims of intellectual intimidation.
Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, published two versions of the essay, the Israel Lobby, in the London Review of Books and on a Harvard website.
Professor Walt's fellow Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz - criticised in the article as an "apologist" for Israel - denounced the authors as "liars" and "bigots" in the university newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, and compared their arguments to neo-Nazi literature.
"Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-semitism," wrote two fellow academics, Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, in a letter to the London Review of Books. Critics also pointed out that the article had been praised by David Duke, a notorious American white supremacist.
3. 2006-03-18 JePo on Harvard report
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