And so, as 2002 wore into 2003, every interest group in this town that needed access to an immensely popular president – the media, the Democrats and, yes, Jewish and pro-Israel groups – signed on more or less to the White House policy that arched over all others: invading Iraq.
The authors weren’t buying.
“Never mind” also characterizes the authors’ response to my questions about the recent revelation by Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s planning chief at the State Department and a fierce critic of the Pentagon neoconservatives who pushed for war, that Israeli leaders prior to the invasion made it clear that they thought Iran was the real threat and Iraq was a distraction.
“Once it became clear that the United States intended to do Iran and Syria after it handled Iraq, the Israelis quickly bought into the enterprise and pushed us very hard,” Mearsheimer said.
But who was the “us” being pushed if the Israelis were being pushed by the Bush administration?
It is one thing for the authors to omit telling details that would undermine their theory. When it comes to America’s Syrian policy, however, they omit whole trends.
Mearsheimer and Walt ignore Israel’s panic in late 2005 when it became clear that elements in the Bush administration were seeking regime change in Syria as “transformative.” Israeli officials strove to make clear that they had outlined all post-regime scenarios and none of them were good.
Bush’s fury with the Syrians for undermining the single Middle Eastern success of his pro-democracy policy, Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution” – repeated in dozens of White House statements – receives no mention in the Mearsheimer-Walt book. In fact, the only time the authors cite the successful ouster of Syrian occupation forces is when arguing that Israel’s policies are inviting their return.
The authors forcefully rejected complaints that their book suffers from a lack of original research.
“The critical issue is whether or not we would tell a different story or someone else would tell a different story if they did more extensive interviewing than we did,” Mearsheimer said. “And we’re confident that would not be the case. We regard the story as basically correct, and doing more interviewing would not alter the story line in any way.”
Yet such research would have led them to learn that it was not AIPAC but congressional Republicans who during last year’s Lebanon war undercut the efforts by Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), then the minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, to include a line in a pro-Israel resolution urging “all sides to protect innocent civilian life.”
It would have led them to report that it was White House pressure, in part, that pushed Israel this April to distance itself for a week or so from Pelosi’s efforts to assure Syria that Israel did not want war.
Questions about how Jews, Israel, the pro-Israel lobby and the U.S. government interact are critically important and beg for a little light. But “The Israel Lobby” is not the place to start. All Walt and Mearsheimer have achieved with their massive diversion based on unfounded accusations of overly broad Jewish influence is to help those who want to shut down that discussion.