Mearsheimer and Walt

My outline of Gelb's critique of Mearsheimer and Walt book
Leslie Gelb published a great review of the troubling book by Mearsheimer and Walt in the NYT book review section Sunday. Here is MY OUTLINE of his arguments using his words. Dual Loyalties By LESLIE H. GELBPublished: September 23, 2007Jennifer DanielTHE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. 484 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26. 1. John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard, can’t, because the Middle East is vital and because they’re arguing that the Jewish lobby pushes policy in directions that “jeopardize U.S. national security.” 2. This commentary could not be more serious, and I believe that the authors are mostly wrong, as well as dangerously misleading. Former President Jimmy Carter made similar points, if rather hotly and self-righteously, in his recent book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.” Mearsheimer and Walt, together with Carter and their phalanx of backers at universities and research institutes, have to be answered, not by calling them anti-Semites, but on the merits.3. no one familiar with their extensive scholarship or their lives ever accused them of harboring anti-Semitic sentiments ... until the appearance of their article last year. …“They asked for trouble” — by the way they make their arguments, by their puzzlingly shoddy scholarship, by what they emphasize and de-emphasize, by what they leave out and by writing on this sensitive topic without doing extensive interviews with the lobbyists and the lobbied.Specifics:1. Publishing these one-liners as some kind of evidence is not the stuff of good scholarship.2. Mearsheimer and Walt move on to one story after another, premised on the lobby’s domination of United States policy toward the Middle East. But they rarely back that premise up. 3. There isn’t much discussion about the $2 billion yearly aid package for Egypt. The United States regards this $5 billion as insurance against an Egyptian-Israeli war, and it’s cheap at double the price.4. But instinctively and without being lobbied, American presidents don’t want to gang up on Israel, since virtually every other state does so. While most countries hammer Israel for crackdowns on the Palestinians, they hardly ever criticize Palestinian terrorists or other Arab terrorists and say little about the misdeeds of Arab and Muslim dictators. 5. As for the American government, the record clearly shows that when Israel crosses certain important lines, as when it expanded Jewish settlements into Palestinian areas like the West Bank and Gaza, Washington usually expresses its displeasure in public and, even more so, in private. Mearsheimer and Walt just don’t mention that.6.. More troublingly, they don’t seriously review the facts of the two most critical issues to Israel and the lobby — arms sales to Arab states and the question of a Palestinian state — matters on which the American position has consistently run counter to the so-called all-powerful Jewish lobby.7. But at a deeper level, one ignored by Mearsheimer and Walt, these problems would not disappear or seriously lessen if Washington abandoned Israel. The main source of anti-Americanism and anti-American terrorism is America’s deep ties with highly unpopular regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not to mention the war in Iraq. 8. Similarly, Mearsheimer and Walt mostly dodge the question of how to fix this problem. They don’t want to abandon Israel, they say, but they do want the United States to distance itself from Israeli policies. Does that mean talking to the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists? These groups are relentlessly committed to violence and to the total destruction of Israel. What is there to talk about? 9. As for pressing Israel to turn over the territories and accept Palestinian statehood now, there is the slight problem of which Palestinians to bargain with — the Hamas leaders, who genuinely have broad support, or the far less popular and far more corrupt Fatah party. Besides, what concessions do Mearsheimer and Walt want Israel to make beyond what it has made? In the closing days of the Clinton administration, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met almost all Palestinian demands for a negotiated solution and was effectively turned down.10.. historically, the prime effect of the relationship has been to provide Arab leaders and discontented Arabs with an excuse for not putting their own houses in order. I doubt Mearsheimer and Walt believe that if Washington stiff-armed Israel, this would induce Arab leaders to address their real problems or produce peace in the Middle East. 11. Then there is the issue of nuclear weapons and taming the proliferation genie. Yes, Israel’s nuclear ability adds to the hurdles Washington faces. But Mearsheimer and Walt should know that the driving force behind Saddam Hussein’s quest for these arms had much less to do with Israel’s nuclear weapons than with the threats he saw from Iran and the United States. The same is true for Iran today. Like Hussein, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows that only the United States can topple him and the regime of the mullahs he represents, and he wants the bomb principally for deterrence.12. America’s central strategic problem in the region — the main reason to worry about future terrorists, nuclear proliferation and energy supplies — is that we need our corrupt, inept and unpopular Arab allies because the likely alternative to them is far worse. There is no reliable and strong Arab moderate force in the Middle East at present. Washington’s long-term goal must be to help build one. Yet Mearsheimer and Walt offer us no counsel on how to do this.13. As it happens, America’s commitment to Israel rests far more on moral and historical grounds than on strict strategic ones. Israel does not harm American security interests to anywhere near the degree that Mearsheimer and Walt claim it does. And the major reality is that despite whatever difficulties the Israeli-American relationship might cause, the United States is helping to protect one of the few nations in the world that share American values and interests, a true democracy. This is the greatest strategic bond between the two countries. (And not to be overlooked is the fact that when push has come to shove, Israel has always defended itself.)14. The inevitable last question is this: Why have two such serious students of United States foreign policy written so weak a book and added fuel, inadvertently, to the fires of anti-Semitism? The answer lies in their treatment of the Iraq war. Their vitriol about the Iraq war — about being so right while others were so wrong — is so overwhelming that they minimize two key facts. First, America’s foreign policy community, including many Democrats as well as Republicans, supported the war for the very same reasons that Wolfowitz and the lobby did — namely, the fact that Hussein seemed to pose a present or future threat to American national interests. Second, the real play-callers behind the war were President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. They hardly have a history of being in the pockets of the Jewish lobby (more like the oil lobby’s), and they aren’t remotely neoconservatives. The more we know, the clearer it is that the White House went to war primarily to erase the “blunder” of the elder Bush in not finishing off Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.Now, Mearsheimer and Walt fear that Israel and the lobby will shove the United States into a new war with Iran: “They are the central forces today behind all the talk ... about using military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. Unfortunately, such rhetoric makes it harder, not easier, to stop Iran from going nuclear.” …Meanwhile, plenty of foreign policy experts and politicians now call for “getting Iran.” And by the way, so do the two most powerful men in America, who neither need nor heed lobbying — George Bush and Dick Cheney.Leslie H. Gelb, a former columnist for The Times and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is finishing a book on international power in the 21st century.