I Have a Question, Doctors
A few years ago, two professors wrote a book. Stephen Walt (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (Chicago) published The Israel Lobby in 2007, and it made quite a splash. Its central thesis was that US foreign policy was directed by Israel and its friends, to the detriment of America’s real interests. In other words, the Jews are running this country.
Accusations of anti-Semitism arose, but were deftly parried by the authors and their defenders. It’s about Israel, they responded; it has nothing to do with Jews!
(This is why I wish that Ben Gurion had given the Zionist entity a different name, like maybe Semitia. But then the world’s W’s and M’s would have patiently explained that they are not anti-Semites, but anti-Semitians. If he’d named it Jewland, W and M could explain that their problem is with Jewlandians, not Jews. Oh, well.)
Here I note that I venture no judgment on the inner prejudices of W and M. But I do note that if you check their book on Amazon, you will learn that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Beyond Chutzpah; On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism; Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid (by Jimmy Carter); The Holocaust Industry; and The Power of Israel in the United States.” I know that guilt is not proven by association. You may draw your own conclusions.
So, in the dark days of the dreaded neocon likudnik administration of George W. Bush, professors M and W surveyed US mideast policy and made an interesting discovery. Every action occurred in Israel. The Muslim states were mere passive observers, reacting to Israeli and US provocations. The best example was in their look at Iran.
“Israel’s perception of the Iranian threat underwent a fundamental change in the early 1990’s, as evidence of Teheran’s nuclear ambitions began to accumulate. Israeli leaders began warning Washington in 1993 that Iran was a grave threat not only to Israel but to the US as well. There has been no letup in that alarmist and aggressive rhetoric since then, largely because Iran has continued to move ahead on the nuclear front.”
“Israel and the lobby are also troubled by Iran’s…refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist.”
OK. I could quote this stuff for pages, but you get the idea. Iran develops nuclear weapons, threatens to destroy Israel, develops missiles that can strike Europe, and the problem is…Israel’s “alarmist and aggressive rhetoric”.
Bending over backwards to excuse Iran’s official ideology of “Death To Israel”, W and M write: “Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel ‘to vanish from the pages of time’ (or to be ‘erased from the pages of history’) is often mistranslated as a call for Israel’s physical destruction (i.e., to ‘wipe Israel off the map’).” How unreasonable of the Jews not to be reassured by such a clarification!
The Israel Lobby was not merely an indictment, but also a call for a new foreign policy. As they argue, the US hard-line approach since 1993 (under both Bush and Clinton) “has left the US worse off than if it had pursued a strategy of engagement.” So, they argue for a new direction.
“This alternative approach asserts that while it would be better for the US if Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons, there is good reason to think a nuclear Iran could be contained and deterred…”
(It is not clear why they think it would be better for the US if they didn’t get nukes, after they spend pages explaining away any Iranian threat. And it should be noted that, in this scholarly, meticulously-footnoted book, there is no note explaining the “good reason” for believing in deterrence of fanatical 12th-Imam ideologues.)
Back to the new foreign policy. “The best way to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons is to engage it diplomatically and attempt to normalize its relationship with the US.”
OK. So we elected Barack Obama. He disavowed any “special relationship” with Israel. He reached out to Iran. He apologized for our past misdeeds. He offered engagement and normalization.
The question, professors, is this. How is that working out?
