2-1/2 Experts Fight Over Iran and the Israel Lobby

The other night at Columbia,
student groups including Lionpac, Columbia’s
version of Aipac (the Israel lobby), held a panel on “What to do about Iran?” They invited three experts.
One was a fullblown neoconservative, Herbert London, the ruddy-faced former mayoral
candidate who heads the neoconservative Hudson Institute. Another speaker was
somewhat conservative, Paul Bracken, a Yale professor of management and
political science who formerly worked for the Hudson Institute and has
consulted with the Israeli army. The third expert was a leftwinger: Richard W. Bulliet,
an Arabist, a history professor at Columbia who has traveled widely in Middle Eastern countries and written a book about
the importance of the camel.

I will offer the men’s positions then describe the fight.

It is easy to get London out of the way. He was dispensing neocon Koolaid. He was calling for “regime
change” in Iran because of
Ahmedinejad’s threats to Israel and divisions inside Iran (shades of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi dissidents). There was a glib ideological
flavor to his comments. For instance he said that Iran was bordered by 16 nations, and only Russia had more neighbors. An
Iranian-looking guy next to me in the audience later challenged him about this
and he said that he had meant 12 countries. I believe London is including Arab emirates across the Persian gulf from Iran. In any
case, it was pedantic and foolish.

Bracken was far more impressive. His intellectual model for
international relations seems to be systems analysis. He said that the first
ten years of the nuclear age in the 50s and 60s was extremely dangerous because
the combatants didn’t know what they were dealing with then, “the red line
understanding was not worked out,” and it seemed like they were going to blow
up the world at any minute. He said we are now entering “a second nuclear age” involving
smaller powers.

Globalization has provided us with new means to control
rogue states: “financial warfare.” North Korea had backed off in part
because of financial pressure. “You can attack the elites’ overseas bank
accounts. You can do it fast. And it’s a red hot tool.”

Bracken said he didn’t see imminent war with Iran, but he
felt that the Pentagon was failing to study the next nuclear age. “What are we
going to do when conservative policies don’t work anyway. And they get the
bomb?” We have to figure out ways to defuse small-state confrontations.

Bulliet spoke last and most defiantly. He said the question
was driven by hysteria. He didn’t see a looming threat to America from Ira,
he didn’t think that Iran
was going to get a nuclear weapon in the near future.

Why aren’t people talking about Pakistan? Bulliet asked. There’s a
country with nukes, under dictatorial rule, subject to regime change, with the
Taliban “crawling around.” He said, “I don’t see why there isn’t an effort to
portray nuclear Pakistan as a disturbing phenomenon. Yet Iran
causes people to break out in hives.” And the only way we had of engaging Iran was with
threats, not “carrots.”

Bulliet recalled meeting Ahmedinejad last fall when he
visited the U.S. “Do you
think  America will attack Iran?”
Ahmedinejad was asked. “He said, it’s not going to happen.” This attitude is shared
across Iran,
Bulliet said, where the people see the nuclear issue as “bogus.” He said, “I
don’t know anyone who visits Iran who doesn’t feel this way. There is an effort to build up a mood and panic
toward a country that is not a prominent danger to the United States in the near term or
the short term.”

Yes, Iran wants to join the nuclear club, but there’s no “use strategy” for two or three
nukes. Iran’s
primary motivation is prestige. Bulliet related that in Pakistan, despite half a century of failures as
a society compared to India,
Pakistanis point to one achievement, they have the bomb.

In sum: “We are all being taken for a propaganda ride by
elements in the government and outside the government that would like the
public to think it’s imperative to do something.” I.e., the Israel lobby.

The ensuing fight concerned the urgency of doing something.

London said with his mix of
piety and pedantry that Iran
was the only country in the world that had talked about wiping another country
off the map, and he also said that Muslim millennial religious thinking calls
for a “great conflagration” before the 12^th imam returns.

Bulliet pounced on him. “Shi’ite” eschatology is more
complex than London knows, he said. Indeed it was written that before the 12^th imam
returns, Jesus Christ would return to Jerusalem.
Don’t hold your breath.

And as for Iran’s
threats to Israel,
Bulliet said that Ahmedinejad was only saying what Arab leaders have been
saying as “a commonplace” for 30 years now.

The Q-and-A began. Bracken defended the Iraq war. We
didn’t go there “because of lies” but “because of beliefs.” We believed they
had WMD. But he said that one factor had changed dramatically since the Iraq invasion:
“the role of the joint chiefs.” “They ain’t going to roll over as they did in
2003,” he said. He said that morale in the military was abysmal; and that the
Bush Administration’s strategic thinking was the equivalent of “a deer in the
headlights… playing two-second chess.” He didn’t think there would be a strike
against Iran, didn’t think Israel would strike Iran. But if he’s wrong about that,
he said, this country is facing things no one has reckoned with. “You will
absolutely be facing a draft.” And a $700-800 billion defense budget.

Bracken said “we get the logic wrong” in the Middle East because our own cold war was between European
cultures. “With the Soviet Union and the United States we were the civil war
of the enlightenment.” But in the Middle East there is a “radically different culture.”

Bulliet broke in angrily. “I think that’s absolutely
baloney.” It was the old false dichotomy, between “western logic and cuckoo
logic.” He grew up with that. We thought the Soviet Union was crazy then too. “It’s not a healthy way to look at the world.”

London (of course) talked about suicide bombing. Bulliet said that if you look at the
first world war, commanders regularly sent units into action where it was
understood that 90 percent would die. That was suicide logic. And these were
our people: “the people you were or your grandparents were.”

A student in front of me wearing a yarmulke got very upset with
Bulliet. He said, “You are not being intellectually honest.” A suicide bomber
straps a vest to himself and walks into a restaurant and kills civilians. “That
wasn’t done in the west. … While in Arab culture, he is the big hero.”

There was no time for an answer. I forget what London said. It doesn’t
matter. Bracken said that strategists are living in the past, and we have to
start preparing for a world in which “small nuclear powers can do vast damage
in a short time.”

Bulliet said that we were engaged in a “fruitless effort to
keep people from acquiring weapons at all.” And he said that Ahmedinejad’s
agenda about Israel was nothing new. The threat to Israel
has been virtually the same, since it began. Ahmedinejad had said himself: “If
Palestinians make peace, that is their business. And Iran will abide by any peace they
make.”

I followed Bulliet outside. I asked him who he meant by the
“elements” inside and outside the government who were pushing for war with Iran. “The
neoconservatives,” he said. I said that he was guilty of mystifying the Israel lobby.
And that this kind of mystification had deeply hurt our country during the Iraq debate. We
should be asking: What is Israel’s
interest? What is ours? Are they the same?

Bulliet agreed with me about those questions. And he said
that the interests were not completely the same. If those interests are
clarified, he said, and Americans discuss the threat to Israel posed by Iran,
they might see Israel’s
standoff with Iran
more realistically.

Israel is said to have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Iran might get a few. Why would Iran target Israel and risk certain total
destruction of its society? It wouldn’t.

It was a beautiful night. The first warm day of spring, and
as another professor came up to Bulliet, I walked away. I thought Bracken made
a lot of sense, in a realist way, and Bulliet had in terms of his knowledge of
Islamic culture. This may be the Cuban missile crisis of our era. It required
statecraft, yes, but also dealing with the Palestinian issue.

I had one other reaction to the talk. Bulliet met
Ahmedinejad last fall, along with several academics and newsmen. At that time,
Columbia International Affairs dean Lisa Anderson invited Ahmedinejad to speak
at the school, and Columbia president Bollinger, a free speech expert, blocked the speech, citing security
and “logistics.” There are rumors that he did so because of concern that the
trustees would not abide Ahmedinejad, an enemy of Israel, on campus.

This was a tragedy for free speech, and a reflection of the
terrible orthodoxies in American public life today. It is an easy matter for pro-Israel student groups to hold a panel at which one member calls for war with Iran.
But when the president of Iran
wants to state his views on that campus, he’s not welcome. Bracken is right, we
live in a very dangerous time. The world seems full of enemies. Globalizaton
has made them into our new neighbors. It’s more important than ever to listen
to them, and learn.