There’s an excellent piece over at The Nation about the Mearsheimer-Walt article. It’s by Philip Weiss.
Weiss gives some significant background to the writing of the piece, which was originally commissioned– from Mearsheimer alone– by The Atlantic Monthly back in 2002. Mearsheimer brought in Walt, well understanding the kind of reaction he could expect to any objective treatment of the topic:
- “No way I would have done it alone,” Mearsheimer says. “You needed two people of significant stature to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication of the piece.”
… “We understood there would be a significant price to pay,” Mearsheimer says. “We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged.” They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. “[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote,” managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic’s policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.
“I believe they got cold feet,” Mearsheimer says. “They said they thought the piece was a terrible–they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened.” The writing as such can’t have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.
Weiss writes that, “in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha’aretz saying it was a ‘wake-up call’ to Americans about the relationship.” (I guess that would be this piece by Daniel Levy.)
In the US, by contrast, as Weiss notes…
- Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says the issue of Jewish influence is “so incendiary and so complicated that I don’t know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know that’s a problem. But there’s not enough space in any article you write to do this in a way that doesn’t cause more rancor. And so much of this paper was glib and poorly researched.”
(Of course, Fleshler doesn’t actually give any instances of this… )
Weiss writes,
- The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have peeled away from addressing the neocons’ Israel-centered view of foreign relations. “It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby,” Mary-Kay Wilmers, LRB‘s (Jewish) editor [who was of course the person who did decide to publish a shortened version of the piece], says with dismay. Certainly the old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns about Israel’s security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean was forced to correct himself after–horrors–calling for a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker’s courageous opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby’s powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive, mistrustful of Americans’ ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast Israel aside.
Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. [New America Foundation scholar and writer Anatol] Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. “If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue–my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government–has so much difficulty publishing, it’s a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country.”
Anyway, as someone whose work and personal integrity have both been viciously attacked, and whose career and earning power have been harshly damaged over many years by various strands of the pro-Israel lobby, I can tell you that’s a good piece of writing– including both good reporting and solid argumentation– from Weiss there. Go on over and enjoy it. (And of course you can come back and discuss it here.)
Motive? What, are you a detective?
There’s a “Lobby” in Johannesburg, too, by the way.
Davis, are you one of them? Do you live in Sandton?
If you do, then I think we know each other.
Justin Raimondo had an article about liberals and this issue, specifically this study. He wrote that liberals felt oil, not israel, was the driving force of the Bush Administration. I was surprised that Democratic underground, which i read but don’t post at, had nothing on the study really. Most of the yahoos there were on the oil not israel side or were simply uninterested.
Oops, sorry, I’d deleted a comment from “Davis” here because I banned him from the blog a while back for majorly violating the ground-rule here on courtesy. But I guess Dominic was referring to that comment.
Seems Chomsky agrees on the oil thing.
Frankly, this study strikes me as rather shoddy work – it contains some major factual and logical errors and omissions, and seems to assume its conclusion beforehand. For example of what strikes me as one of the most significant logical errors, the authors posit the US has a specific interest, which doesn’t include support of Israel, and therefore any such support must be the result of the Lobby. The possibility that others might not see the US interest in the same way they do (or for that matter, whether any country can be said to have a unitary interest, rather than many – and sometimes contradictory – interests in the first place) – is not so much as addressed.
It’s of course quite legitimate to criticize American and Israeli foreign policies, or to support a much more evenhanded policy on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Congress; those are critiques I enthusiastically support.
However, there is an unbridgeable distance between any responsible and truthful critique and Mearsheimer and Walt’s lopsided caricature.
As policy analysis or scholarship, their piece is indefensible. The large majority of their critics, myself included, have avoided the issue of M & W’s personal biases, and responded directly and substantively to their argument and evidence. It is difficult to do so, because both are thoroughly unconvincing and far beneath the standards expected of doctoral students, never mind venerated scholars. I am a doctoral student, and I couldn’t pass an introductory course by handing in this kind of mono-causal silliness to any professor of IR or foreign policy.
For critiques of the piece which do not raise any questions about Mearsheimer and Walt’s personal biases (and the majority of the numerous critiques don’t raise that issue), see:
Joseph Massad, Blaming the Lobby, Al-Ahram Weekly Online
Noam Chomsky, The Israel Lobby?, Znet
Benny Morris, And Now for a Few Facts, The New Republic
In bullet points, the most glaring weaknesses of the M & W piece are the following:
1) An analysis of US Middle East policy that denies any importance to oil or energy interests; this is like analyzing the economy while refusing to discuss money. For this administration in particular, it is beyond ridiculous. Our current chief executives built their family fortunes and personal careers in the oil business. They both have extensive and enormously profitable personal and business networks in the Middle East; those ties are due east of Israel, in the Persian Gulf. The phrase is “Texas oil man”, not “Texas Israel man”. Republican analyst Kevin Phillips’ two extensive tomes on the Bush family and administrations shed light on which Middle Eastern countries are in fact the center of the world in this White House, and why.
2) The Israeli/Palestinian part of the piece is a sideshow designed to garner support for the imputation of Iraq War guilt, which it has in fact done. On Israel/Palestine, they say nothing new (there’s literally no original research at all) and nothing so controversial. In much of academia, especially Middle Eastern studies, their stance on Israel/Palestine is the dominant paradigm.
The centerpiece of their piece is blaming the unpopular Iraq War on a laundry list of Jewish and pro-Israel advisors, intellectuals and lobbyists, rather than the “decider”. That’s scapegoating, not scholarship, and it’s what made this piece a sensation.
It is not difficult at all to understand why the Atlantic would not want to publish this piece on its own (lack of) merits. The piece’s defenders consistently invoke Mearsheimer and Walt’s previous scholarly reputations precisely because that’s the only leg this piece can stand on.
I invite Ms. Cobban, Juan Cole, Tony Judt or any of the piece’s supporters to explain why they have lowered their standards to defend this piece in particular. Rather than making much ado about anti-Semitism, just explain how controlling strategic energy reserves is irrelevant to this administration’s Middle East policy. In order to make a credible argument, I suggest that they present some hypothesis as to what happened at the meetings of Cheney’s “Energy Task Force” in February 2001, and why the administration continues to battle in court to keep every aspect of those meetings classified. What we know so far is that the heads of America’s energy corporations met the Vice President, who promptly issued directives to the National Security Council concerning strategic control of oil reserves in “rogue states”. That sounds relevant to me.
I also request of Ms. Cobban to refrain from the absurd portrayal of M & W as martyrs; they are tenured professors at the top of their careers; their livelihoods are guaranteed in a way that few other people can dream of; they are at the absolute top of their food chain. Not only have they risked nothing, lost nothing, and faced no vulnerability whatsoever for making this argument, they have earned themselves unprecedented fame; it’s popular in many circles to say that Jewish lobbyists started the war. It is not, however, credible or fair.
I also recommend perusing some of Mearsheimer and Walt’s previous work, in order to get a sense of the ethical and philosophical teachings upon which they have built their distinguished careers. For a short version, you can see my piece in Ha’aretz, “The Irony of Great Power Politics” (available on “Occupation Magazine”, http://www.kibush.co.il with other pro- and contra- pieces on this issue).
KarlikSuka4