John Mearsheimer

Yesterday, Alpha Media Group--the name for the investors backed by Quadrangle Capital Partners who bought Maxim, Blender and Stuff from Dennis Publishing yesterday for more than $240 million--announced plans to fold Stuff, the shopping-centered T&A men's magazine, and resurrect it as a regular section in its lad mag, Maxim.

Maxim and Blender will be the chief beneficiaries of the new owners' money and time from now on, with plans to increase the rate-base for Blender, the music and lifestyle magazine, to 1 million by January 2009.

Maxim will get "Stuff for Men" as a section of the magazine, now that the title no longer has to compete with FHM magazine, the other lad-shopping mag.

Click "Read More" for more of today's media headlines.  read more »

The deepening political crisis surrounding Iraq has generated fears in the Jewish community that Americans are going to blame Jews for the failure—because so many Jewish leaders supported the invasion of a country that had many times attacked Israel, but never attacked the United States. Detailing that support was of course a theme of Walt & Mearsheimer's paper, to which The Forward responded with an editorial, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." This week The Forward publishes another attack on Walt/Mearsheimer, by Israeli liberal Yossi Alpher, who claims that then-P.M. Ariel Sharon vigorously opposed the invasion ahead of time, and warned the U.S. not to do it.

Had Sharon made his criticism public, citing the dangers posed to vital Israeli interests, might he have made a difference in the prewar debate in the United States and the world? Certainly he would have poured cold water on the postwar assertions of critics, like professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who have fingered Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and pro-Israelis in the administration for instigating the war...

There were, of course, neoconservative types in Israel who did encourage the United States to occupy Iraq and advocated democratic elections wherever possible in the Middle East. But there were also many Israelis, this writer included, who spoke out openly and publicly against the American scheme.

This is rank misrepresentation. Whether or not Sharon warned the U.S. in a back channel, Israeli leadership opinion and U.S. Jewish leadership opinion was 4-square for the invasion. Leftwing Jews like Tony Kushner and myself demonstrated against the war and spoke out forcefully, and were marginalized for doing so. Alpher is either lying or deluding himself when he says he opposed the war. Why did he write this in bitterlemons before the war, in October 2002:

Israel is and will be cheering on the American effort, while the sentiments of the Palestinian population, as well as its key institutions, will be with Saddam Hussein

Or this just before the war:

Removing Saddam is good enough

An American-led attempt to conquer Iraq, remove the Saddam Hussein regime and destroy its weapons of mass destruction will almost certainly succeed. An American occupying force in Iraq will almost certainly pressure neighboring Syria and Iran to reconsider some of their more hostile and repressive actions. For Israel and other moderate countries in the region, this is good news. And it is good enough.... we shall have to suffice with the destruction of a regime of psychopaths who finance Palestinian terrorism and pontificate about the destruction of Israel.

Or this as the war began:

The American war on Iraq, however problematic for much of the world, is for most of us in Israel a welcome attempt by a friend and ally to deal with a strategic danger that we have been struggling to cope with on our own for decades.

Or this, about the power of the neocons (whom he treats as a sideshow in his latest article):

But [the] willful alienation by Washington of the global community and the multilateral approach also bespeaks an extraordinary sense of power in the US, cultivated particularly by the neoconservative lobby.

The sad fact is that many Jewish liberals joined the neocons in pushing the Iraq invasion: Pollack, Friedman, Berman, Alpher, the hits go on and on. I've said before that the war represents a crisis for Jewish identity: it reveals the degree to which Jewish identity is now built upon the demonization of Arabs, hundreds of thousands of whom are now dying and fleeing and suffering in incomprehensible ways in part because of crazy ideas hatched in thinktanks. The Forward is responding with cowardice to an intellectual chore: What was the Jewish role in this mess? Progressive Jews have a part to play in this soul-searching. As LRB editor Mary Kay Wilmers, a progressive Jew herself, who published Walt and Mearsheimer, said to me months ago: "It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby."

I've just gotten a copy of a 79-page paper called "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The scholars began circulating the rebuttal privately in December but have not published it on-line, I gather, because they are working on a book about the lobby and are trying to keep some of their powder dry till publication. Nonetheless, the paper is getting around. I find it exciting, and will be referring to it in days to come.

On first reading, my chief response is (surprise) positive: the paper humanizes Walt and Mearsheimer, the voice is warmer and more intimate than their stunning original of last March. You have the feeling here of two minds struggling through a difficult subject. For instance, the authors say that it was former Harvard Dean Walt's decision—not Harvard's—to remove the Harvard logo from the on-line Kennedy School version of the original after newspapers began referring to the paper as "the Harvard study," but that given the great symbolism attached to this gesture, it was a mistake, and illustrates the saying, no good deed goes unpunished.

The sense of intellectual engagement here is thrilling. The tone is, Here is what our critics have said, here's our response. W&M itemize a wide range of critical arguments, and detail them, including the Forward's assertion, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." And while they don't give an inch, really, the respectful debate they are pursuing ennobles them and honors the contributions of Benny Morris and even Alan Dershowitz—far more than Dershowitz, who slimed these guys, deserves. For instance, there is a shocking quote in here from Dershowitz on MS/NBC, saying that W&M "copied" their words from neo-Nazi websites. Thus vilified, some people would threaten to sue. These scholars take the argument on calmly. God bless America.

Something else that humanizes the document is the section at the end titled, "Our Mistakes." O.K., a number of these are penny-ante, still the tone is humbling. "...there are places where our choice of words could have been clearer or more nuanced... although we went to some lengths to demonstrate that we harbor no animus towards Israel or its more ardent defenders in America, it is possible that some of our discussion did not make this point as forcefully as would have liked. First and foremost, we regret having capitalized the word 'Lobby' in our original article..." Etc.

The paper concludes with a moving statement about the controversy. The ferocity of the attacks "offers additional evidence of he lobby's efforts to create a climate that discourages questioning of its actions, Israeli policies, or the U.S.-Israeli relationship. This situation is not healthy for American democracy." Hear, hear.

But now the anger over their publication seems to be dissipating, and what they had hoped for is coming to pass: a discussion of the ideas on their merits. Myself, the March day that a friend first emailed me W&M's paper and I read it through at my desk with my eyelids glued open was a great day. I had long felt constrained by the lobby, it had limited my work and freedom. W&M had a liberating effect.

Last night at Columbia's school of international affairs, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector, and former Marine, opened a speech about Iran bracingly, by speaking not of Iran but about the "elephant in the room": Israel. He said that Israel is our close ally; and if Iran actually intends to develop nuclear weapons, not nuclear power (as the Iranian Ambassador had said, in the speech preceding Ritter's), and if Iran fails to repudiate Ahmedinejad's hateful rhetoric about Israel, well then, Israel's "legitimate national security concerns" are ours, and could even bring war. After all, Ritter said, one nuclear strike on an Israeli city and the small country would be deeply and permanently damaged.

The great thing about Ritter's speech, before an ambivalent UWS audience, was its bluntness. In that sense, his rhetoric reflected an important lesson of the Iraq war (which Ritter had opposed). We all know, or we ought to by now, that concern for Israel's security played a role in America's disastrous war plans. Yet as Philip Zelikow of the 9/11 commission has said, It was an agenda that dare not speak its name. It was generally cloaked in language about bringing democracy to the Middle East that reporters who knew better parroted. This lack of straightforwardness has damaged the country. It has corrupted our journalism and our thinktanks, it has caused enormous bitterness and mistrust—and justifiably. The feeling many Americans now have that they were lied to about the causes of one of the greatest mistakes in our history is going to echo through our lives for a long time...

I think the lack of straightforwardness reflected Jewish fears of antisemitism; that if a Christian nation was actually put to the test, and the alliance with Israel actually cost American lives, the American people would abandon Israel. And so the Middle East Forum likes to put up feel-good billboards saying, Israel's interest is also the American interest, and Israeli Ambassador Arens likes to say as he did in the Times yesterday that 9/11 put us and you in the same boat, got that? But attack Saddam in part because he has threatened Israel? Friends of Israel don't like to say that. They fear that the average American would do as Borat says they would do—and throw the Jews down the well. Thus: the Israel lobby, which acts to shield the issue from open public debate.

Last night, Ritter said, We're not going to abandon "my good friend, the state of Israel," and I'm going to put that agenda right on the table. Very post-Iraq. I wanted to hug him. Such transparency is essential, when we try to sort out what we're talking about when we talk about Iran.

Of course the sequel to all this is that in identifying this interest baldly, we get to scrutinize it, everyone gets to weigh in, even Americans who are appalled by Israel's racialism and militarism. Last night Ritter said that Israel is out of control, "drunk with hubris, arrogance and power." Jimmy Carter says in a book published tomorrow that Israel's policies in the West Bank are apartheid. And John Mearsheimer says that this small country's policies are hurting our standing throughout the Arab world, and America should therefore insist that Israel change its policies, and we should use our full powers to make that happen; and if Israel fails to heed us, change the relationship. There's a word for what Ritter, Carter and Mearsheimer are doing: discussing.

The latest New Republic has an emotional attack on Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt by Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier says that W-M are antisemites who don't understand how policy is formulated and Tony Judt is trading in antisemitic legends. He gets very angry. All this stems from the Walt Mearsheimer paper and Judt's defense of their ideas at Cooper Union.

A few points:

—The piece underscores the fact that the media failed to cover a hugely significant event (the Cooper Union Debate). Wieseltier says that he understands that the moderator Anne-Marie Slaughter refused to engage the question of whether the original LRB paper was antisemitic. I was there. She specifically asked that question at the start. It was openly debated. How unfortunate that a serious publication cannot even get this basic point right, because the author is dealing with hearsay.

—Wieseltier tries to dismiss these ideas by saying that they are tk. He is saying, They're echoing the Protocols of Zion, so there are going to be pogroms. This is a form of name calling, and it keeps people from going near the questions. But the questions are just too important, and in the end journalists and writers should deal with facts. When Judt said that the New York Times required him to identify himself as a Jew before he could write a support of the paper, and when Rashid Khalidi said that he rarely gets to speak about Palestinian issues in a mainstream forum, they were both speaking about the taboo that continues to exist on this subject because of, because of—let's be straight about this, Jewish power in the discourse, and the fear of offending Jews. I've dealt with this from editors too long to try and dissimulate about it. When Judt spoke in the Observer last week about Jewish influence and power, he was speaking openly and honestly.

—The stunning thing about the debate, in retrospect, is that when it was done, no Jews were murdered in the streets of the East Village. At least not on the north side of Cooper Union. I should stop joking. The stunning thing was that 900 people entered a hall with diverse opinions, some of them called out abuse and mockery during the debate, but not many. The seven men and woman on stage exchanged ideas without being muzzled or bitch-slapped

A smart friend tells me that despite the excited crowds gathered outside Cooper Union 3 weeks back, and the great excitement in the hall, there has been hardly a drop of ink spilled on the Israel lobby debate sponsored by the London Review of Books. The Forward covered it, the Observer covered it, so did the N.Y. Sun in passing. But as for the mainstream, zilch, on one of the most fascinating and educational evenings in memory, and an evening that consisted not of bombast or invective or accusation, or even screaming from the gallery, but in an earnest and concerted dialog aimed at determining some part of the truth. The Times is lactose-intolerant on the matter. It will be fascinating to see what coverage John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt get when FSG puts out their book. As it is, the traditional fear persists: that the seas will close over them...

Rebel Bachelors    read more »

Rebel Bachelors  read more »

I got home quite late from the Israel lobby debate and am on deadline for print, so I won't get around to a full report till later, but thought it best to file a few impressions while the world is still making up its mind...

The debate was diffuse. It had few dramatic moments. There were six debaters with five different points of view, and the three men positing the existence of the lobby had not coordinated their points ahead of time and so were sorting out differences on stage. My friend Scott McConnell of the American Conservative said that he missed the great moment, the climactic clash, then reflected that maybe this is something that documentaries manage to create after the fact.

Yet: No one could leave the hall unconvinced that there is an Israel lobby. The quarrel was over scope and character. If the Israel lobby is the elephant in the room of American politics, here were six blind men each naming a different part of it they had felt in the dark. Well actually, four blind men. The three positing the existence of the lobby were joined by Shlomo Ben-Ami, from the other side, in a spirit of intellectual vigor and openness. All four speakers added to the audience's understanding. The other 2, Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, longtime elephant-fattener-uppers, were determined to show the audience that the elephant was a hamster. They failed.

The debate belonged to Tony Judt. He arrived late to the hall in a turtleneck—everyone else was in ties—and might have been Mariano Rivera, for his confidence and dispatch. He was the most imaginative speaker, and imagination is required when you are describing a King kong sasquatch no one has seen and whose wranglers say doesn't exist. When Shlomo Ben-Ami and Martin Indyk said that John Mearsheimer was antisemitic for speaking of a collection of Jews who influence policy, Judt demolished them by quoting Arthur Koestler when he became an anticommunist and said that Just because idiots and bigots share some of his views doesn't discredit the views. The job of the social scientist is to describe the true conditions of society; are these statements accurate or not? That is the only issue. I'm paraphrasing. Judt was way more eloquent.

Judt's second great moment was when he accused Indyk of being "faux-naive" —a civilized way of saying, You're lying—when Indyk kept saying that the lobby was one small factor in an American president's exertions of power. Here again, he used his imagination. Because when you're talking about something about which there is very little information, and those who know something about it are trying to deny its existence, you need imagination. Anyway, Judt described the real exercise of power. He said that when a small state defied an American president, and the president wanted to do something about it, he had a great number of seen and unseen ways of compelling that state to fall into line, all sorts of bullying and pressure and fury. None of these had been deployed in Israel's case, and lo and behold the settlements had continued to expand, over four decades... Again I'm paraphrasing. Judt also got the last word of the night when he explained to a hungry audience that knew in its bones it has been deprived, that this discussion was an astoundingly rare one, and mind you it was organized by the London Review of Books. Thus he gave the audience a real sense of how the U.S. discourse/policy works, which is what the evening was after all fumbling towards.

The most resonant moment of the debate was Judt's, too. He pointed out that when he had endorsed the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, in an article for an unnamed major North American newspaper, he was asked by the editors whether he is Jewish, and told to stick that fact in the article. (Otherwise they couldn't publish it, was implicit or explicit, I'll have to check my tape). The newspaper—obviously—was the New York Times, in which Judt's op-ed taking Walt/Mearsheimer's side, appeared last April, as I recall, to stunning effect. I say resonant, and damning: Let's consider the lesson of this story: You can only speak out on this issue if you're Jewish? Oh my god, how did we get here...

The other three intellectuals' knowledge was more limited. John Mearsheimer deserves the greatest credit of all for breaking the seal on this discussion. But his actual knowledge of the lobby is drawn from reports of people who have seen Kong in the jungle, and lived to tell. So he read from one account or another of the lobby's existence, and its function in pushing for the Iraq war. Living in Chicago, he lacks intimate knowledge of its workings. His best moment came when he said that the U.S. ought to put pressure on Israel to come into line on matters that are important to us and if it fails to do so, or chooses a different course, the U.S. and Israel "should go their separate ways." This was a clean and bracing view of the relations of states. While ideal, in a realistic way, it certainly describes the usual behavior of the U.S. when a small state defies it on a critical question. E.g., the settlements. And the absence of democracy in the West Bank. We could have frozen those settlements with a wave of the hand...

Rashid Khalidi was the emotional life of the debate. He spoke of the lobby in more sweeping terms than Mearsheimer; he conveyed in a way no one else was able the ways in which the pro-Palestinian view is suppressed in the American scene. He got off the best line of the debate. His neighbor Dennis Ross's mike wasn't working. Khalidi passed him his own. "This is the first time that a Palestinian has ever enabled the Israeli side to narrate..." he said, in so many words. Laughter. And after that the audience waited on his words.

Enough for now. It was a fabulous night. We all left improved. The London Review of Books had extended the boundaries of knowledge, and freedom.

Tonight's the big debate. I haven't been so excited since Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag squared off over feminism. As a pipsqueak, I was on the wrong side then (Mailer's), now I'm on the right one.

One cool thing about this event is you can play the West End in London or the Arena Stage in Washington forever, but nothing really matters till you come to New York. That's the function of a cultural capital. New York has suppressed these ideas for a long time, but thanks to the London Review of Books, it's taking them on tonight, as it should. As it provided the venue for Mailer and Greer, when they wrestled over the power of women.  read more »

The big question this time around is simple: Can we talk about the political power of Jews? I'm firmly in the yes camp.

Even as the Washington Post continues its effort to blackball Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites, how interesting that their ideas gain wider and wider circulation. Later this month the giant issue they raised, the Israel lobby, will be the subject of a debate, sponsored by the London Review of Books, in the great hall at Cooper Union in New York on Sept. 28.

Something else about this debate is the roster. On one side are the inevitable Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Joined now by Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli foreign minister, who in his fine new book on the Arab-Israeli "tragedy" acknowledges the Zionists' "expulsions and atrocities" that resulted in ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948.

On the other side John Mearsheimer is joined now by the eloquent Rashid Khalidi and the redoubtable Tony Judt, who in a brilliant piece in Haaretz last spring described Israel as an indulged adolescent that refuses to grow up. (Though, witness Haaretz, the discourse on these issues in Israel is at a much higher level than ours). Expect the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis to be textured and expanded by the addition of an Arab and a Jew. To gain the psychological and geographical dimension that the authors, realist political scientists, were not able to supply. Their achievement in breaking the seal last March will only be magnified in this way. An event not to be missed!

I've heard from several journalist-friends who were appalled by Dana Milbank's smear of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in Tuesday's Washington Post, in which he likened the scholars to Nazis. So: the mud has splashed back on to Milbank. That said, two "points" Milbank made deserve further rebuttal.

1. Milbank says he overheard Walt saying after his talk at the Council on American-Islamic Relations that if you take a position against Israel, your business will suffer. Wrong. Walt is no businessman, he's a student of policy, and what he said is that if you talk about this stuff, your academic/professional career suffers. (It's the same point he made several weeks back on the Diane Rehm show and that I blogged about then.) Many colleagues have said to Walt, "You're never going to work in Washington." He adds, "I find it interesting that that is so frequently the reaction, that this has made us compete pariahs. Quite remarkable." Yes, and Milbank is now running around collecting wood to burn the heretics in Lafayette Park. 2. Milbank hinted that Walt and Mearsheimer are Nazis because their names sound German. I emailed Walt to ask him about two things I'd heard (and never thought worth writing about before) —he's of Danish ancestry, his wife is Jewish. Walt wrote back to amend those reports:

I am 1/4 Danish, insofar as my maternal grandfather was an immigrant from Denmark, who arrived here as a very small boy. His mother was a widow, and she died shortly after they emigrated here. He was subsequently adopted by an American family, although he still spoke a bit of Danish as an adult. The rest of my ethnic background--if it matters-- is some mix of English, German, French, and I think a bit of Swedish.

My wife's background is a bit more complicated. She comes from Russian and Rumanian Jews on her father's side, and Episcopalians and Catholics on her mother's side. (Interestingly, her maternal grandfather worked in the 1930s helping German Jews escape Nazi Germany.) She grew up in New York City, in what might be loosely termed a culturally Jewish extended family, and there's been lots of inter-marriage throughout. She was not raised in any particular faith.

As you might imagine, I find this whole type of discussion disheartening. Our country shouldn't be debating important issues by focusing on people's individual characteristics and backgrounds. That is what racists and anti-semites do: they look at someone's heritage and claim to know what they think, what they believe, and how they will act. Instead of focusing on our arguments and evidence, people want to look for some hidden motivation.

Walt's note is interesting on a couple of grounds. For one thing, it underscores the scholar's largeness of mind. Walt is no provincial. He is a sophisticated guy, his resume is Mandarin through and through: Stanford-Princeton-Harvard. He was a dean at Harvard; he is, or he was, going places. Yet he put everything on the line because of an idea. Impressive.

His note also echoes something he said at CAIR when discussing the dual-loyalty charge some lodge against Jewish neocons: "All of us have many affiliations and commitments—to religion, families, even employers. It is OK for those different commitments and attachments to manifest themselves in politics." Walt went on to say that when those attachments shape how people think about things, it's OK to bring them up in political debate. I liked the way he said this. It got us past the whole rancorous dual-loyalty issue.

My critics are going to say, Weiss, ala Milbank, opened the door on this stuff by discussing Jewish tribal affiliations so bluntly. It's true, I opened the door, and I'll open it again (hopefully with accuracy). The point is, these affiliations have real meaning in our lives—but important ideas transcend them.

Dana Milbank thinks that it important that John Mearsheimer mispronounced a congressman's name, or two of them. Mearsheimer says we need a "freewheeling" debate about the role of the Israel lobby in our policy.

Freewheeling means mispronouncing a politician's name, freewheeling means shooting from the hip sometimes. Freewheeling means a real American debate, at a time when our national interest is mired in fantasies about the Middle East. Freewheeling means, People actually saying what they think about something, rather than what they know they're supposed to say...

Addressing the issue of why liberals don't speak up about Israel, Kevin Drum, the Political Animal, justifies silence by saying the issues are "complex" and because "posts that display any sense of sympathy for the Palestinians run the risk of provoking a shitstorm of accusations of anti-semitism."

Drum should be applauded for his candor; it's important to understand why writers obey taboos. But his admission underlines the fact that the pro-Israel lobby is the loose coalition of journalists, thinktankers, outspoken professors, Hill staffers and lobbyists that Walt and Mearsheimer said it is. I don't think the professors went far enough; I think the lobby functions in social ways. My reading of Drum is that he is saying that he may feel sympathy but he's afraid to express it because he'll catch a lot of flak from his friends, somebody who he doesn't wish to offend. Living in Washington, Drum surely knows and hangs out with people who will take offense. The same reason Harvard professors who sympathized with Palestinians pulled their heads down after Larry Summers accused them of antisemitism: they were alienating colleagues down the hall. Those liberals justified their silence, Well I don't really understand the mess over there... Years ago the great Mike Kinsley wrote that his real fear of sticking his neck out on Israel issues wasn't the lobbyists, he was worried what his old friend Marty Peretz would say. Just as I worry what my mother will say, what my editor will say.

It's as if America depended for information about Fidel Castro from media companies based in Miami. These are all real forces, and not to be mocked or diminished. But because these issues are so important in the "war on terror", and because the Palestinians are suffering such collective punishment, a handful of Americans have chosen to overcome these concerns, and even accept the antisemitic labelling, in order to express their true response. Scott McConnell, Norman Finkelstein, John Mearsheimer, Henry Siegman, Stephen Walt, the Presbyterian Church—have walked through the doorway marked "sympathy for the Palestinians" and, yes, suffered great abuse, but lived. Isn't this what brave journalists (and even liberal ones) are also supposed to do?

I have tried to inject the Israel lobby question into the Connecticut Senate race. I gather that on Sunday on C-Span Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, also raised the question of where Lieberman and Lamont stand on this issue (in a discussion with Lanny Davis). Vanden Heuvel and I are for Lamont. But yesterday in the New York Sun, Lieberman-supporter Seth Gitell made the same plea in reporting on a Lamont appearance before the faithful at an Episcopal church in West Hartford:

[Having praised Zbig Brzezinski, Lamont] was not asked about and did not volunteer on his own Mr. Brezinski's recent defense of the authors of the "Israel Lobby" thesis, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in the journal Foreign Policy.

Sarcastic that. But Gitell seems to want what I want: a public discussion of Walt and Mearsheimer's bombshell paper. Will George Bush, Joe Lieberman or Ned Lamont please give us a little help?

The other day I got a copy of Stephen Walt's 2005 book Taming American Power:The Global Response to U.S. Primacy and was surprised to read the section on the Israel lobby. It was nearly as forceful as the paper on the same subject that he and John Mearsheimer published three months ago in the London Review of Books. It had many of the same ideas (including the red-hot assertion that the Israel lobby helped propel us into the Iraq war). Yet I didn't know Walt's name till the day in March that his LRB piece appeared, when a political friend emailed it to me after he was sent it by a realist friend of the authors. And when Walt spoke last month at the Naval War College, lieutenant commanders weren't bringing up the book; they were bringing up copies of his paper to be autographed. Walt himself said that the paper had been downloaded from the Kennedy School website over 200,000 times in the first month or two after publication. Wow. I wonder how many copies of the book Norton has sold.

New ideas are exchanged on the internet. That's the thoroughfare. Walt and Mearsheimer might be able to sell a big book contract now, because people want to curl up on the couch at night with a good solid story about something they know is important, but the flow of new ideas is all electronic.  read more »

If you go to the Foreign Policy website, you see the new magazine cover with the giant question: "Does the Israel Lobby Have Too Much Power?" This is of course a response to Walt & Mearsheimer, who are given the last word in an FP roundtable.

This is amazing. When Walt & Mearsheimer came forward in March in LRB, they were chopped down immediately by Alan Dershowitz and Eliot Cohen as "anti-semitic." Dershowitz said they had "destroyed their professional reputations." Now here they are with their professional reputations in tatters—on the front of Foreign Policy?! FP was acknowledging the fact that these men's ideas are simply too important, and too many people agree with them, not to be taken on fairly.  read more »

The item I did on John Mearsheimer's talk at the Naval War College in which he likened Iraq to The Plague has generated a great deal of comment, all favorable. Frankly, I'm honored to have gotten his words out to a wider audience and learned, through this process, of what a sophisticated military our country has. Props to Mearsheimer and the men and women in white!

In his speech at the University of Chicago commencement last weekend, Mayor Bloomberg did a most honorable thing, and, in attacking political correctness, praised the University for its support of John Mearsheimer. Here's the quote:

From the University's defense against accusations of communist teaching 70 years ago to its support of Professor Mearsheimer's right to criticize the Israel lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy, this has been a place where open debate is encouraged and cherished.

No, that's not an endorsement. But at a time when Walt and Mearsheimer have come under unfair and vicious political attack for a brave and important contribution, it sure is fair. I understand from a friend who was there that the line got the loudest applause of anything Bloomberg said. So the hive of Leo Strauss is now a hive of realists.  read more »

The reason I went to the Naval War College was to hear Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of the controversial paper on the Israel lobby, address an audience of officers and experts at the Navy's 57th annual Current Strategy Forum. It's remarkable when you think about it. Back in April, Harvard people were saying they were going to have all kinds of forums on the paper—to denounce it, as Hillel director Bernard Steinberg told me. Well, no forums. There's been an embarrassed silence. And as has been argued here before, that probably stems from the fact that there is strong underground support for the paper's findings, including its assertion that the disastrous decision to invade Iraq came partly out of pro-Israel pressure. Yes, that's hard to talk about.  read more »

Meanwhile, (as Col. Larry Wilkerson has already indicated) the military is listening.

If anyone asks you why this is a great country, tell them this story.

Yesterday the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, opened its annual conference on international strategy with a speech from the Navy Secretary in a vast hall, followed by a panel on American power composed of three scholars, all of whom had opposed the war in Iraq. Indeed, in the biographical notes that were given out to the audience of officers—men and women wearing their dress whites—one of the scholars stated bluntly that he had written about the "folly of invading Iraq."

For an hour the panelists gave their reasons for why they believe America will remain the most powerful country in the world well into this century, regardless of the morass in Iraq. There were about ten questions. The last one was from a Navy commander named Cladgett from Syracuse, who rose in the middle of the audience.

"My question to the panel is, What is the path to success in Iraq?"  read more »

I want to complain more about the job conditions. The worst thing about blogging is that it sets up this interior surveillance. We all complain about the increases in surveillance in our exterior lives, or we should complain—all the cameras and cops in public spaces. Well blogging is the interior equivalent. There is no such thing as a private thought, or you are not sure anymore what is public and what is private. The lighthouse light must be constantly sweeping the interior horizon, looking for news like fugitives. There are no idle thoughts on this landscape.

Last night for instance I had a great dream about John Mearsheimer, the co-author of the important paper on the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books. Do I report it, or not? I suppose I do. I had sought out Mearsheimer for an interview yesterday in real life and then last night I was having it. We were at a very elite college room, oakpanelled, and he was wearing a beautiful figured vest and jewelry, sort of a donnish Robert Bly character, and sitting in his chair telling me about his feelings about Israel and his commitment to moral causes, that had begun when he was reading a poem or a Biblical verse at 10. He read the poem to me in Greek. Then he was wearing these gogglelike eyeglasses, like scientist's eyeglasses, and crying. I was taking notes and not really hearing him. The feeling I had for him was on the one hand hugely impressed; here was an elite professor at an elite chamber of a university, the elite into which my own people have clambered. And then there was also a kind of Jewish pity, rachmones. Of course the people in dreams are not people but yourself. I suppose the Robert Bly stuff and the scientific eyeglasses mean that it is about my father. I think that's where I got my moral sense, such as it is, from my poetic scientist father, and also there is some wound there too. My dad and I didn't always get along. And more than that—who cares.

For months or even years a conversation has been boiling just beneath the surface in political circles, in dinner parties or offices, and finally it's come up for air. That's the discussion of the pro-Israel lobby, and how large a role it plays in a, our Middle Eastern foreign policy and b, the (disastrous) decision to invade Iraq. The worst thing about this discussion is that it has essentially been suppressed. It's not in the newspapers, not on television. Imagine talking about the politics of social security and not talking about the elderly bloc-- that's the kind of omission our media have had when it comes to the pro-Israel lobby, whatever its strength. Happily, the seal may lately have been broken by two leading American professors in an article in the London Review of Books. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html As the professors point out, their article would likely not have been published in the United States, though the shockwaves of the explosive article are being felt here more than abroad. Indeed, their standing-- John Mearsheimer is at the university of Chicago, Stephen Walt is a dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government-- has granted their argument an audience that other analyses of this question has never gotten. In other words, everyone I know is talking about it. I'm going to be writing about this article off and on in days to come-- it's that important, I think historic. It makes two controversial assertions. One is the argument that the pro-Israel lobby has exerted a "stranglehold" on American policy in the Middle East-- that our actions have reflected Israel's interests, often damaging our own. The second is the idea that the Iraqi war came out of a pro-Israel agenda within the Bush administration, fostered of course by the neconservatives. I tend to agree with Mearsheimer and Walt on both points. Our politicians' passive acceptance of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, an ongoing neocolonial tragedy that is doing no one any good, can be laid to some greater or lesser degree at the feet of the lobby. And second, the Iraqi war-planning party in the Bush Administration included as an important and even necessary component a Likudnik faction that often confused American interests with Israeli interests. Making the Middle East safe for democracy has turned out to mean mirroring and thereby validating Israel's experience-- occupying Arab lands, suffering grisly terrorist attacks, rationalizing indiscriminate attacks on locals as a justifiable response to amorphous "terror." Oh, and demonizing Arabs. The paper has drawn sharp attacks from the usual suspects. Alan Dershowitz has said that its argument draws on neo-Nazism, the New York Sun would like to see its professors defunded, Christopher Hitchens has said (on Slate) that the paper is a "vapid" effort to escape the truth: that we're in a clash of civilizations. The most interesting thing about the response so far is the resistance to it among the Jewish left. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime activist in the Peace Now crowd, reluctantly put himself behind AIPAC in a piece in the Forward http://www.forward.com/articles/7511 And here is Adam Shatz, the literary editor of the Nation, demurring on the paper in the Guardian. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/adam_shatz/2006/03/post_9.html "The vision of Mearsheimer and Walt of a lobby with the power to recast American foreign policy in its image strains credulity," Shatz says, arguing that Israel's location and ideology and militarism make it an appealing ally any way you cut it. I'm not convinced. If the lobby doesn't sway politicians, then a lot of rich shrewd people are spending a lot of money that they could better spend on other things. If it didn't exert a stranglehold, why is it that only retired politicians, like Fritz Hollings and Jimmy Carter, dare to criticize Israel openly? That John Edwards interrupts his vice-presidential debate with Dick Cheney to pander to the lobby? Or, tragically, that the 9/11 Commission Report, the official word on why they hate us, says not one word about our Israel policy as a motivation for Osama bin Laden when bin Laden has said that the Palestinian cause was high on his list of grievances against the west? I'm not sure what the lobby's true dimensions are. The one thing I'm sure about is that there is fear about examining it. Many friends of mine in the media seem to think that crediting the lobby with any power at all publicly amounts to trading in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence. I know where the fear comes from, but it doesn't show any faith on their part in the democratic process. The issue has become simply too important to keep ignoring, and meantime the prohibition against discussing it raises real issues about how free our speech is. That's the great thing about the Walt and Mearsheimer paper. It's torn down a wall. Let the discussion begin openly.