The Washington Post has an attack on Congressman Jim Moran that is full of casual and dismissive invective, the suggestion that he’s an antisemite who is afraid of the bogeyman, and is a captive of the Arab lobby (when of course there’s no such thing as a pro-Israel one…). The writer takes the usual tack that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are not Jewish so what does the Israel lobby have to do with the Iraq war–once again ignoring the importance of ideas and braintrusts in American history. (What was the Peace Corps without a braintrust? What was Vietnam without the best and brightest?) The piece is remarkably similar to an attack in the LA Times on Walt and Mearsheimer that employs the same belittling, sniggering tone, in arguing that the two professors’ work is "sinister."
The pieces suggest a pattern: the mainstream media are not able to take W&M’s critique seriously; it simply makes them uncomfortable. The media cannot say: These are serious men who have spent a few years studying this and come to this troubling conclusion about the Israel interest in the Iraq invasion, based on a huge pile of evidence, including statements from Colin Powell and other high officials; let’s have a discussion.
Compare that to the "oil cause" for Iraq. The other day when Alan Greenspan’s book came out saying that the oil interests were behind the war, it had big headlines on Yahoo and elsewhere. Greenspan’s argument strikes me as slapdash, unsupported (and on ’60 Minutes’ Greenspan came off as charming in his lack of sophistication). But at least it’s getting a mainstream hearing.
The true danger here is that the conversation will happen outside the mainstream media. People are buying the book, it’s creating a kind of groundswell. So we get two conversations, an official one in which these guys are delusionists and not to be heard out, and an alienated, unofficial one where The Israel Lobby Explains Everything. Neither reality is correct. We need to meld the conversations, and have a serious discussion.
