# Posted 9:03 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WALT & MEARSHEIMER: IS THERE ANYTHING LEFT TO SAY? Well, they came out with a new book, so something has to be said. It would be easier to ignore them, but it is dangerous to let such misinformation go unanswered. Perhaps that is why TNR devoted its cover to a lengthy review of Walt and Mearsheimer's new book.

But lengthy reviews aren't the most effective response. Details can only persuade those willing to commit a significant amount of time to a subject. Much more important is just a few sentences that expose this pseudo-scholarship for what it is. The simple case for Walt and Mearsheimer runs as follows:

Two distinguished Harvard professors believe that the US alliance with Israel damages US security by provoking terrorists to attack us. The terrorists' anger is a result of Israel's horrific abuses of Palestinian human rights.

If that's all that most people remember about this small episode, then it is a victory for Walt and Mearsheimer. (Especially for Mearsheimer, who actually teaches at Chicago.) So how do you dismantle a perception like that? You could try to defend Israel's record on human rights, but that isn't an argument that anyone can win without writing a book of your own. At a cocktail party, it always comes out a tie. You could try to point out the many other reasons that terrorists have for resenting America, but it's pretty clear that Al Qaeda and the rest really do hate Israel.

A third strategy is to try and argue that Walt and Mearsheimer are anti-Semites. But Walt and Mearsheimer knew better than to make any statements that could easily be clealry labeled as anti-Semitic rather than anti-Zionist or anti-Israel. This issue isn't irrelevant, but it isn't a winning point in a short discussion.

I think the real way to go is to brand Walt and Mearsheimer as conspiracy theorists. It's an approach that should work because it's true and because it's a category of thinking that people understand. But the words "conspiracy theorist" aren't a magic talisman in the same manner as "tenured professor at Harvard". The former is a judgment, the latter is a fact. So you have to be able to back it up in no more than a sentence, maybe two. Here's my one sentence:

Walt and Mearsheimer say that the Jewish lobby pushed American into invading Iraq.

Here are the exact words from the Harvard working paper that started this whole fiasco:

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element...the war was motivated in good part by adesire to make Israel more secure... (p.30)

But wait, didn't they also write in the same paper that:

It would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on "Jewish influence." Rather, the war was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it. (pp.31-32)

Walt and Mearsheimer want to have it both ways, but they can't. A distinction between "Jewish influence" and "the Lobby" (with a capital 'L') just won't cut it. Their lobby includes everyone, from the Jewish left to the Jewish right, even Howard Dean, who isn't a Jew. As TNR observes in its review, Walt and Mearsheimer say that Dean's "unabashed" support for Israel makes sense because "Dean's wife is Jewish and his children were raised Jewish as well." [No page citation provided.]

So, getting back to the point, is it self-evidently conspiratorial to argue that the Jews and their Lobby pushed us into invading Iraq? Although I am not against sophisticated discussions of the role that lobbying groups play in American government, also you really have to say to make this point is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are all Christians. Some folks will go on and on about Wolfowitz and the yidn at the Weekly Standard -- and I'm one of them! -- but if you really want to say that the President, Vice-President and Secretary of Defense didn't really control the government, then you're retreating into the darkest reaches of conspiracy theory, where:

Jews, operating in the shadows, manipulate gentile leaders to unknowingly advance Jewish interests. In order to believe this in the case of Iraq, the argument would have to be made that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were not merely idiots, but also uninterested in ruling.

A couple of years ago I asked Rumsfeld to comment on accusations that the Jewish lobby maneuvered the administration into war. "I suppose the implication of that is the president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs," he said. But Mearsheimer and Walt mention Cheney and Rumsfeld only for fleeting instants in their discussion of the origins of the war.

That is another quote from TNR, whose review was written by Jeffrey Goldberg, so perhaps it suffers from an inherent lack of credibility.

It really all comes down to the "Jews in the shadows" argument. Anyone who advances that argument in American political automatically compromises their credibility. The challenge facing Walt and Mearsheimer's critics is really just to ensure that they cannot escape their own words and aren't allowed to masquerade simply as distinguished professors.

You might say that any argument about Jews' secret power is anti-Semitic. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Personally, I think it is a trope that has simply migrated to the paranoid extremes of the political spectrum, both left and right. But that isn't the point. The issue here is how to prevent pseudo-scholarship from entering the mainstream. The answer: keep it simple and keep it true. They are conspiracy theorists.

Labels: Israel, Walt and Mearsheimer

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