Here is the National Jewish Democratic Council attack on Walt and Mearsheimer. It includes the NJDC’s head, Ira Forman, arguing in the Jewish Week, that a group of neoconservatives could never have bullied Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al into going into Iraq. The idea is "absurd," he says.
This is the standard line in the Democratic Party, even among liberals. They ought to study Jerrold Nadler, who says the neocons came along with their forceful ideas at just the right moment. They ought to study Glenn Greenwald, who blames the Israel-centric neocons for the war. Or study The Best and the Brightest, or the history of the Peace Corps, or the saga of Ollie North–all cases in which ideologues who had access to the White House successfully pushed their clearly-articulated policy agendas, for good or ill. I’m not blaming the Jews; I’m blaming some rightwing Jews.
I understand Forman’s defensiveness. He must distance the Democratic Party from Walt and Mearsheimer in the same way that Pelosi distanced the Party from Jimmy Carter even before his book was published a year ago–lest fundraising would somehow be compromised. Now is the time when real democrats should be analyzing this war to understand how and why we got into it; and that means understanding that the neocon agenda of remaking the Middle East was forceful and persuasive for a lot of weaker minds, including Bush and many Democrats…
Well at least the debate is on!
