Back in the Swing Roundup

Go to school, read a book, be a lawyer/
Hell yeah, man, I'm all for the cause.

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New study reveals parents believe all teens but their own to be hyper-sexual (their own teens are entirely asexual).

Fox News is annoyed that President Obama didn't gratuitously insult American Jews (the Jewish community appreciated the gesture). I know exactly how committed the conservative Christian movement is to fully including Jews in the fabric of America.

Statements of Avrom Krengel (chair of the South African Zionist Federation) and Richard Goldstone after their recent meeting.

Lebanon delays asking Hezbollah to disarm.

The Judeosphere predicts a fall into obscurity for Walt & Mearsheimer (the latter's work on neo-realism will not soon be forgotten, but hopefully his ill-considered forays into the study of domestic lobbying and Mideast politics will be).

More evidence of the Catholic Church shuffling around predator priests.

Phoebe Maltz on literature and anti-Semitism.

Resurrected from the Depths

It seems appropriate to note at this juncture that Walt and Mearsheimer are not experts in the area that The Israel Lobby covers, and indeed, their analysis is fraught with embarrassingly elementary mistakes which have nothing to do with whether they are, in some sense, "anti-Semitic" or not. There's plenty to find morally condemnable in their outlook, but that debate shouldn't distract us from the fact that their analysis is just descriptively awful -- lest we get mired in hellish contrarian mush about how they are bold prophets providing the hard truths that everybody else is too cowardly (because of the Israel Lobby!) to say aloud.

A Loose Coalition of Arguments

Stephen Walt makes an interesting two-step in defending his claims regarding the "Israel Lobby's" influence in getting America to go to war in Iraq. First, he dilutes the hypothesis so much that it ceases to have virtually any normative punch, but becomes descriptively banal. Then, having established that banality, he dresses it back up as something shocking, disturbing, and pernicious, for which we should be thankful to have bold truthsayers like Walt pulling back the curtain.

The first thing Walt does is blur together necessary and sufficient conditions. He asks us to consider what Andrew Sullivan calls a "powerful counter-factual":

What if Bush and Cheney had independently dreamed up the idea of invading Iraq after 9/11, but the plan was openly questioned by Israel, AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, and the ADL, on the grounds that it might lead to a quagmire and maybe even strengthen Iran? What if these groups had openly opposed the war, or just quietly pushed for an genuine debate on different options, or simply remained on the sidelines and let members of Congress know that they had their doubts? What if their counsels of restraint had been reinforced by similarly prudent advice from respected think-tanks like the Saban Center at Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)? What if staunchly pro-Israel pundits like Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot, Kenneth Pollack, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Thomas Friedman, among others, had spent 2002 raising questions about the wisdom of an attack, or arguing as passionately against the war as they did in favor of it? It's possible that Bush & Co. still might have been able to stampede the country to war, but surely it would have been much harder.

In other words, if a large quantity of important beltway players supporting the Iraq War had taken the opposite stance, the push for war would have been considerably more difficult. Ladies and gentleman, consider my mind officially blown. It never occurred to me that major reversals in political support would have political consequences. Of course, one can tell the same story about, inter alia, the Evangelical right, or the congressional Republican leadership. Nobody disputes that "neoconservatives" (who are not synonymous with "the Israel Lobby" -- particularly given the expansive definition Walt provides that I'll discuss below) were in favor of the war in Iraq. What's supposed to be controversial is that they were essentially sufficient to get America to go to war. A claim that they were a necessary part of the pro-war coalition is utterly banal. If important elements of the pro-war coalition were not, in fact, pro-war, the pro-war position would suffer. Yes, duh. Can I get a book deal now?

Now let's go to Walt's, shall we say, expansive definition of the Israel Lobby. It isn't just formal lobbying organizations like AIPAC. Nope, it is

a "loose coalition" of individuals and groups that actively works to promote and defend the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel (i.e., the policy of generous and unconditional U.S. support). Having a favorable view of Israel or generally pro-Israel attitude doesn't make someone part of the Israel lobby; to qualify, a person or group has to devote a significant portion of time, effort or money to promoting that "special relationship."

You may note that this definition is amorphous to the point of incoherency. A "special relationship" isn't the same thing as a policy of "unconditional U.S. support". Many of the folks he characterizes as unquestionably part of The Lobby would, I think, hotly dispute that they are in favor of "unconditional support" for Israel. To "devote a significant portion of time, effort or money" to promote this vague vision is a standard begging for scholarly manipulation.

Indeed, as best I can tell, this standard is just double-speak for "people who publicly advocate views on Israel Stephen Walt disagrees with". It hardly restricts itself to uncritical allies of Israel -- elsewhere in the piece Walt completely gives up the ghost by characterizing J Street and Americans for Peace Now as part of The Lobby under this definition. Now, I speak as a staunch supporter of J Street when I point out that there is no conceivable world in which it is uniformly uncritical of Israel. That is, bluntly, a bizarre claim. If everyone to the right of Jewish Voice for Peace (which is, literally, where Walt places the border) who speaks out on Israel is part of the Israel Lobby, the term encompasses nearly the totality of the American Jewish community. A community which, we might point out, was disproportionately opposed to the Iraq War.

Third, even conceding that it makes sense to speak of the Israel Lobby in Walt's broad, messy brushstrokes, he still falls into a trap we've seen before: that folks who hold a particular set of views on Israel (that Walt finds distasteful) can't possibly hold any other policy positions. Everything that they say, do, or advocate for has to stem, ultimately, from determinations of Israel's best interest. And that's clearly false (and offensive). The absolute most generous interpretation of Walt's evidence is establishing a correlation between Israel Lobby views and support for the Iraq War. But this doesn't imply any sort of causation, and as Andrew Sullivan himself noted, in 2003 he'd have qualified as part of the Israel Lobby under Walt's definition, yet his support had nothing to do with Israel in all "but a peripheral sense." At most, Sullivan writes, "Israel was one factor, if one of the least prominent ones, in their [the neo-conservatives] case."

And Walt's essentially concedes this. Turning back to the testimony of Tony Blair which sparked this debate in the first place, he writes:

I made it clear in my post that Blair's comments were not a "smoking gun" that proved we were right, and I neither suggested nor implied that Blair's testimony demonstrated that Bush went to war at Israel's urging or to accommodate the Israel lobby. I merely noted that Blair had said that concerns about Israel were part of the discussion, and that Israeli officials were consulted as part of the conversation. Indeed, after summarizing Blair's testimony, I wrote:

Notice that Blair is not saying that Israel dreamed up the idea of attacking Iraq or that Bush was bent on war solely to benefit Israel or even to appease the Israel lobby here at home. But Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation, and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning for the war."

Yeah, that's pretty peripheral if you ask me. Indeed, to characterize this as even remotely mendacious is absurd. "Concerns about Israel were part of the equation"! You're kidding me! You're telling me that, in determining whether to take a relatively major foreign policy operation (say, invading a country), we including in our deliberations considerations about how the shockwaves would affect regional entities particularly vulnerable to the reverberations? How irresponsible! Clearly, the only patriotic approach is to adopt an appropriate, devil-may-care attitude to how launching a war would affect other countries in the region.

So what are we left with. It's hard to say, mostly because the inconsistent definition Walt provides for the Israel Lobby defies cohesive analysis. But at worst, we have (1) Actors who take certain views on Israel that Walt finds disagreeable (2) were part of a pro-war political coalition, which would (naturally) suffer if they weren't part of it (which is somewhat implicit in the notion of a coalition) (3) whose support for the war seems to have stemmed from policy stances entirely independent of their views on Israel but (4) may have acted to insure that Israeli concerns were "part of the equation" in the deliberations over war.

Shocking.

Hearing Voices

The somewhat infamous Stephen Walt (of, with John J. Mearsheimer, "The Israel Lobby" fame) has a blog on the Foreign Policy website. I don't have a problem with this per se. Walt is an important thinker, albeit one I disagree with rather stridently on a few choice issues (fun fact: posts like this really reduce the credibility of posts like this). And, as Matt Yglesias says, it's probably a good thing to get a few more neo-realist voices into our foreign policy discussion.

But -- always a but -- let's not get too excited. Yes, "The sort of 'realist' perspective that Walt comes from (and helps define) is definitely one that looks better in light of the past eight years worth of events." But recall why realism spent some time in the IR doghouse in the first place (not much -- it is and always has been the dominant player in international relations theory): Because it was massively, dramatically, and embarrassingly wrong in predicting the 15 years prior to that: both missing the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then not really knowing how to handle either the rise of multilateralism in the Clinton administration or the emergence of non-state actors as serious players in the international sphere (Cf.).

That isn't to say it deserves permanent exile: it remains the dominant player, and with the utter collapse of neo-conservatism and with neo-liberalism remaining on shaky territory, it has done a nice job stepping into the gap. I'm just trying to keep folks from jumping on the neo-realist bandwagon too quickly. It deserves attention -- not blind obedience (not that I think Matt is doing that, but I just wanted to give his post a little bit of historical perspective).

Is Samantha Power a Closet Walt & Mearsheimer Disciple?

It doesn't make sense to me, but at the end of this post Paul Mirengoff asserts that Obama adviser and foreign policy guru Samantha Power "subscribe[s] to the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis that that the U.S.-Israel relationship is the product of Jewish power politics, rather than strategic interest."

He's not the only one saying this. Here's The American Thinker making a similar claim, as well as Anti-Liberal Zone.

Noah Pollak appears to be the source, linking to this May 2007 interview with Professor Power. I've bolded the part they think is important, but I include the entire question for context:

Q. Though some analysts see U.S. foreign policy woes as a recent phenomenon, you argue that recent foreign policy missteps by current U.S. leaders have exposed and exacerbated long-standing structural and conceptual problems in U.S. foreign policy. Please explain.

Power: It is tempting to see Iraq as the source of all our woes now, whereas I see Iraq as the symptom, in some measure, of a number of longstanding trends and defects in American foreign policy.

One example is the US historic predisposition to go it alone. Because we have long undervalued what international institutions have to offer, we believed that we could go into Iraq, and as soon as we declared the mission accomplished, we expected to be able to turn the problem over to others, regardless of how they had been treated in the run up to the invasion. This thinking is very flawed, but not all that new. In a uni-polar world, the Clinton Administration was able to get away with an instrumental relationship with international institutions, but that is harder with the rise of new powers who are willing to challenge the United States in international bodies. It is also harder now that the Iraq war itself has exposed so many US weaknesses.

In addition, we long saw international authorization as a luxury, something good for global public opinion, but not very relevant to US national security. But what we have seen, by revealing our indifference to international legitimacy both in the Iraq war and in the practices carried out in our counter-terrorism efforts – the disavowal of the Geneva conventions, prisoner abuse, extraordinary rendition, etc. – is that being seen to thumb our nose at international law actually has profound security ramifications, as more and more people seek to take up arms against U.S. citizens and interests.

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the “national interest” as a whole is defined and pursued. Look at the degree to which Halliburton and several of the private security and contracting firms invested in the 2004 political campaigns and received very lucrative contracts in the aftermath of the U.S. takeover of Iraq. Also, America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests – especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace – seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq.

This is not the W&M hypothesis. At worst, it's a very diluted form of their thesis, in that it argues that sometimes the US listens to pro-Israel special interests, and that sometimes leads to bad results. This, she says, is emblematic of a broader, systemic flaw in how the US conducts foreign policy -- we let special interests construct what the "national interest" is and it leads us away from where we ought to go (Contra Pollak, it is not arguing in any way that Israel was responsible for America's war in Iraq).

W&M, of course, argue that US foreign policy in the area is controlled by the "Israel Lobby", and more importantly, that this is a unique exception to the way foreign policy decision-making operates. Far from being emblematic of anything, the Israel Lobby, from W&M's Realist stance, represents a dangerous exception to the Laws of the International System, which dictate that nation's have fixed and concrete security interests and always pursue them. This exceptional quality is the key reason why W&M's thesis is so offensive -- it's essentially an argument about Jewish hyperpower. But that makes it qualitatively different from persons (like Power) who believe that many factors beyond bare security interests influence how foreign policy operates, and observes that special interests advocating for Israel are one of them.

It is, of course, possible that Power has written something more directly on point that affirms W&M's hypothesis. But I highly doubt it, seeing as they come from drastically different schools of thought on international relations. W&M's thesis operates from a premise that Power doesn't share -- namely, that domestic, moral, or transnational forces never exert meaningful influence on foreign policy. Power appears to believe the opposite -- that these factors are extremely important influences on foreign policy decision-making (for good and for ill).

UPDATE: I sent Paul an email and asked for clarification. He responded with another Power quote, that her version of a sound mid-east policy would require "'alienating a domestic constituency.' That's close enough to the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis for me."

Not only is that not even close to the W&M thesis, it borders on being a truism. Americans (including Jewish Americans) have differences on what we want our mid-east policy to be. For example, I suspect Paul and I differ significantly. One of us is going to be alienated by whatever proposal ends up being adopted. If it's now controversial to point that out, we've got a serious problem on our hands.

Of course, to reiterate again, Walt & Mearsheimer's thesis is not about who opposes their ideal vision of mid-east policy. It's about their perception that the Israel Lobby possesses extreme control over US foreign policy that leads us to do things their predictive model says shouldn't happen. When we collapse every policy that deviates from the Commentary Magazine line as "subscribing to the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis", we're exploding their argument way beyond its actual scope.