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At any rate, "the lobby" had, I think, hoped that Walt and Mearsheimer's piece could buried under a pile of smears and abuse -- it was clever of the New York Sun to ask David Duke's opinion of it, so anyone who wanted to treat it as tainted could mention that, and it took up a lot of rhetorical space that might have been given to the merits of the actual piece. But praise be to the liberal establishment and the Left because after Phil Weiss in The Nation, Tony Judt in the New York Times, and Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books had treated the piece favorably, it essentially gave permission to the rest of the country (or that part interested in foreign policy ideas) to discuss it. Walt makes an excellent presentation, glib and precise, extremely moderate in his demeanor. At the Committee for the Republic he had a friendly audience, and it is testament to how much he and Mearsheimer have moved the ball that there is an "establishment" audience for something like this, a subject that might have been mere dinner table conversation five or ten years ago.
Walt is unsparing of George W. Bush, who has adopted Caligula's foreign policy of not caring if they hate us so long as they fear us. He explained that his main intention was to start a discussion -- it is seldom pointed out that though Israel is a rich country, we give it $500 per Israeli in aid a year, that the U.S. would have stopped the settlements long ago if the lobby was weaker, and that Israel would have been better off for it. I recall that former Kennedy and Johnson foreign policy aide George Ball made these points about 20 years ago when there were far fewer Israeli West Bank settlements and caused some ripples in the foreign-policy establishment but no further resonance. That is, of course, the problem: you may get a majority of foreign policy experts to agree that the Israel lobby distorts American policies, but there is no political follow through. Walt says that the guiding "moral" reason Americans might change their policies is self-interest -- we would be a safer and more prosperous country with a more intelligent Mideast policy. But as one veteran writer for The Nation pointed out to me after the event, self-interest is likely to be defined by the people who give the biggest campaign contributions.
Walt radiates a kind of middle-of-the-road nice-guyness, and it is hard to dispute his view that if the United States had, in the aftermath of 9/11, devoted as much energy and resources to bringing about an Israeli-Palestinian settlement as it had to invading Iraq, its position in the world would be vastly better than it is now. This seems so obvious -- and yet, sadly, it is really difficult to imagine any American government that would have taken that advice -- not just Bush but anyone with a plausible chance of being president. Walt acknowledged that he would "whiff on three pitches" a question of how to expand the Mideast policy debate beyond the readers of the foreign-policy magazines. I certainly don't know either. I once worked for a presidential candidate (my colleague Pat Buchanan) who had great communication skills and was very much committed to doing this, and, well, we know how that turned out.
For my part, it is more frustrating than satisfying to hear Steve Walt speak with subtlety and brilliance before an audience of 300 or so establishment Washingtonians. Walt and his co-author John Mearsheimer need bigger, younger audiences. They need to go on college speaking tours. They need to expand their paper into a book. (I have heard much speculation about whether any mainstream publisher will actually take the risk of signing up the authors of the most widely discussed magazine article in the past ten years, and a friend who is a book review editor at a big establishment publication thinks probably not.) They need to get on TV. But they are academics, believers that a well-modulated essay will slip into the cultural stream and actually change things. Perhaps so, but the change won't come soon enough or dramatically enough.
Scott McConnell, editor of the American Conservative.
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Posted by dmeyer at June 6, 2006 01:41 PM
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I can't think of anything that needs discussing and CORRECTING more than the zionist Lobby. They are bigger danger to this country than all the Islamic radicals put together. They have made this county more than just like Israel, they have made it worse than Israel. It's sickening. They and all the politicans they own, which is 80% of our congress, need to have their US citizenship yanked and be deported to Israel.
Maybe when the newly created "Office of Anti-Semitism" within the US State Department actually arrest an American citizen for critising Israel or zionist your average Joe Lunchbox will realize something is very wrong here.
Tell Walt and John if I win the lottery I will finance a book for them, buy them prime time on TV and provide a private jet for them to tour colleges and speak on the Lobby and American foreign policy...and provide them around the clock protection by the Blackwater group from the Lobby and their minons...and oh yes, set up a trust fund for them so they won't have to worry about supporting themselves in academica when the swiftboating of academics begans with the advent of our new law on "monotoring" universities for anti-semitism in Mid East studies....
Come to think of it why aren't some WASP sponsoring Walt and John on this, they already have the money to do it...don't they care about their country?..or too busy playing golf?
Posted by: Carroll at June 8, 2006 03:16 AM
The WASPs are too busy playing golf and watching basketball felons while illegal aliens mow their precious lawns or build houses for them to sell at outrageous prices. Meanwhile, their daughters are dreaming of sex with "cool, smooth" multiple black "playas," and their neighborhoods are filling up with illegals and their illegal relatives, 20 of them per house...But as long as Jewish-owned Fox News trumpets mass murder ("collateral damage") of "ragheads" on the other side of the globe, everything is A-OK with America. "I SUPPORT THE PRESIDENT." Too bad he doesn't support you, isn't it?
Posted by: DR at June 9, 2006 09:16 AM
Excuse me if I am dense, but this is satire right?
Are you really saying "The problem with America is that WASPs have lost control"?
Or worse, "The problem with America is that WASPs have lost control because they are over-privileged douche-bags more interested in golf than power"?
This is a joke, right? Right?
All kidding aside, our foreign policy is FUBAR. If we don't drop this arrogant BS and start working *with* the rest of the world, rather than at cross purposes, we are going to find ourselves confronted with a lot of international organizations who's unstated (or stated) purpose is to constrain American power. China and Russia in particular. Putin has found anti-US rhetoric useful. Comrade Wolf, that's US! The EU should be a natural ally, and yet the people of Europe are greatly suspicious of US power. Do we want South Americans looking to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro for leadership and inspiration? We should work *with* the rest of the world as a leader, not ride into a hundred stupid gun fights like some lone cartoon cowboy.
And for solutions? Perhaps we should start WASPAC? Help get the Old Boy's Network back in charge. Good news folks, the future is lookin WASPy as hell!
Posted by: ron at June 9, 2006 09:35 AM
As a British Isles WASP I am sad to hear that my American kinfolk have apparently lost control of their great nation. I hope they get it back again soon.
BTW re Fox News - Rupert Murdoch is Irish-Australian Catholic, right? Not Jewish.
Yes, and the demographic contract that conservative Catholics have made with Israelis with often secular goals lies at the center of the support Fox and Catholic organizations give Israel, even though Israel persecutes many Palestinian [and Lebanese] Catholics on a regular basis.
The Israelis share the Catholic conservative cultural matrix, and the Angry Left does not.
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