Walt and Mearsheimer’s book tour comes to New York next week. Maybe some publications will finally do the feature story, Who are Walt and Mearsheimer and why did they do it? Here are my impressions.
At almost 60, Mearsheimer is the older of the two, and the more forceful personality. People who don’t like him describe him as "contentious." Even friends say he is a "contrarian." My own sense of the University of Chicago professor is that he is passionate and independent. In this interview with Berkeley realist Harry Kreisler, Mearsheimer says that his parents were oldfashioned and told him that God had put him on the planet to work hard and tell the truth. The son of a leading engineer for a railroad company, he grew up in suburban New York and enlisted in the Army in 1965 and after a year chose Vietnam over West Point. His father told his son he’d be crazy to become an infantryman instead of going to the Academy. Mearsheimer went to West Point. Later he became an Air Force officer. He has said that he left the military because he didn’t like to shave or sleep in tents, and he saw the military bureaucracy as corrupt.
The larger reason he left was that he was called to intellectual activity. He began studying ideas as an officer, and taking graduate school courses. Mearsheimer has a little bit of the autodidact and maverick thinker about him. Though always an admirer of Israel–I believe he has been there several times–he was moved intellectually when he discovered the new historians in the 1980s and saw the true story of Israel’s foundation, which wasn’t that different from a lot of other nations’ formation.
I’ve always warmed to Mearsheimer because he has a sharp sense of humor, passion, and toughness. There is fire in his belly. He told one friend that he could take the charges of antisemitism around the London Review of Books article last year because the army taught him to be tough. He is at his best when he’s stirred. His eloquent speech to the Naval War College last year about how the Vietnam War and the Iraq War are like plagues that visit a society was delivered off the cuff.
Mearsheimer threw in with his old friend Walt on the Israel lobby because the idea of doing the article (let alone book) was incomprehensible to him without a partner.
To me, Walt is the more perplexing character. A former Harvard dean, he is a courtly, polished man of 52 who knows how to handle himself in a room. The one occasion I met him he was gracious and humorous and capable of small talk. (Mearsheimer has a more intense presence; one academic told me that "Mearsheimer is not a polite person.") Though a colleague says that Walt can be combative and doesn’t shy away from a fight. "In the divide between WASPy and Jewish styles," one prof said to me, "Walt is Jewishy." I.e., he engages.
"I don’t think Israel had emotional resonance for him," says that prof. Where it did for Mearsheimer. That is the conventional theory: Walt was dragged into it by the more passionate Mearsheimer. I doubt this. Walt is a big, comfortable guy. He published a book called Taming American Power in 2005 that contained many of the arguments later repeated in The Israel Lobby. He obviously believes what he wrote. And one former student says that Walt–the son of a one-time physicist at Los Alamos– is more devout than Mearsheimer in his application of realist theory.
The other day I was driving through my boyhood neighborhood of Brookline, where Walt lives, and saw Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue with the banner outside it, "We Stand With Israel In Her Quest For Peace." Walt has lived a life in a Jewish milieu. When he was smeared by the Washington Post a year ago as a blue-eyed Teuton, Walt responded to my email question and told me something about his own background. "As you might imagine, I find this whole type of discussion disheartening. Our country shouldn’t be debating important issues by focusing on people’s individual characteristics and backgrounds. That is what racists and anti-semites do: they look at someone’s heritage and claim to know what they think…" He is of Danish extraction. He is married to a half-Jewish-woman from a sophisticated New York family. His wife’s maternal grandmother escaped the Holocaust. His wife’s family were involved in the arts and letters in New York, Jewish culture.
One colleague says, "30 percent of Walt’s friends are Jewish." Another colleague said he had seen a menorah in Walt’s house. More to the point, with his Stanford-Princeton-Harvard-dean pedigree, Walt has been doing fine all his life in a world with tons of Jews in it. I imagine some of that life is now affected. One colleague said a dean couldn’t very well invite Walt to a meeting of a visiting committee because a lot of the donors are Jewish and they might be angry. Then there’s Robert Belfer, whose name is on Walt’s chair at the Kennedy School. A big Jew, as we say, he gives a lot of money to Jewish causes and the Sun reported that he was angered at Walt’s paper last year. It is impressive that with Belfer’s name on his professorship, Walt went where he did…
Why did he do it? I think that Walt is a cool cucumber, a little detached; and so in the end, Ideas came first. A hard scientist’s son, he saw this as an important intellectual undertaking.
In my one long interview with Mearsheimer, he said the following about realists: "It’s commonplace to say that realists don’t care about morality. This is not true. Just look at E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, both of them talk about morality in foreign policy at great length. Foreign policy based purely on power would be a bankrupt foriegn policy. But the point they make, that all realists make, is that when power/political considerations and moral considerations come into conflict, power political considerations win."
Of course, moral/human/emotional elements play a role in this book. Its
most stirring words are about the Palestinian experience. I believe Mearsheimer initiated this project because of his own anger post-9/11–one that
he shared with many other opponents of the Iraq war–that
Related posts:
- It’s time for Yivo to host a debate with Walt and Mearsheimer
- Yivo Owes Walt and Mearsheimer an Apology. Or a Stage
- Legendary ‘NY Review’ Hasn’t Gotten Around to Walt & Mearsheimer, Now Out for a Year
- Mearsheimer: Walt and I welcome a debate on the lobby with the director of the American Jewish Comittee
- At a Philadelphia Synagogue, Fear of Walt/Mearsheimer (and the Myth of Jewish Powerlessness)
{ 24 comments }
"Are they Jews?" seems to be a fixation of both philo-Semites and anti-Semites. This is no accident. Both see the world racially. Both want to see their respective orientation as supreme. Both are fundamentally one-dimensional.
Walt and Mearsheimer have made a detached, objective examination of the obvious: The Israel lobby is a quasi-fascist enterprise, more supremacist fraternity than earnest defender of a culture.
This is controversial because for all these years we have been told that "the Jews" are historical victims. It turns out that in practice, when they get the upper hand, they quickly embrace totalitarianism. The neocons and Israel lobby are just the latest incarnation of, for example, the Jewish Bolshevik mentality of the Soviet Union.
The question does not regress to "is he a Jew" or "is he a Muslim" or "is he a Christian" or "is he a Leftist" until one exhibits totalitarian behavior. At that point, the question becomes crucial in order to ascertain his intended victims.
Drop the totalitarian intentions, and a man's creed becomes irrelevant.
Until organized Jewry drops its totalitarian component, it will be persecuted — and rightly so. The question is, can it divorce itself from totalitarianism and continue to perpetuate its own existence? In other words, is its fundamental nature totalitarian? Perhaps it views totalitarianism as the key to enforcing the view that the Jews are God's "chosen," — in its own eyes and the eyes of the rest of the world.
Of course, this is a dangerous game it can ultimately never win.
You didn't answer your own question Phil.
Patriotism and bravery aren't shown only on the battlefield. Our troops have died in many wars so that Americans can have freedom of speech, yet few have the courage to use it. Mike Gravel, interviewed on the PBS NewsHour, Oct 1, spoke out against Senator Lieberman's Iran resolution which, like Lieberman's Oct 2002 Iraq resolution, is a pretext for war. Gravel said AIPAC put Lieberman up to it. When asked why he was spending all his money running for president against all odds, Gravel responded that he loved his country. Clearly John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt do too.
Ed makes some points.
I lived and worked in Israel for a year, had a fantastic Israeli girlfriend and had lots of fun. But my history with Jewish people doesn't begin there.
My stepfather was a Phd of music with a master in psychology, who was a pioneer in musical therapy for the mentally ill and since we had the piano there was chamber music every Saturday or Sunday night at our house.
Most string players are Jewish and nearly all psychiatrists are too. Between shrinks and cellists, their wives and their kids our house was filled with Jews every weekend Their kids and I played together in our backyard every Saturday, while the daddies played quintets during most of my childhood.
Not only am I not an antisemite, until a few years ago I couldn't even understand what antisemitism was about… but now I understand how it happens… It just doesn't happen out of the blue, it is not some mysterious divine curse, it is pure cause and effect. Believe me, if it has come to the point where somebody like me can understand antisemitism, then there is big, big trouble on the horizon and I'm afraid it will tear the contry apart.
i do not think that WM, these two guys cooked up this project out of the blue.
i am waiting for the exposure on the original spark.
it could be the work of a clever manipulator.
even possibly, some seed money was thrown in, too.
their claims are untrue. reasonable people do not write such a book.
israel is luckily enjoying a good relationship with the usa, germany, england, italy…
only dictators and despots object israel. the list of the enemies of israel is a who's who of murderous dictators. i do not think that there is a decent name on the list. count in putin too.
many israelis are progressive peace makers.
they have made attempts to end the war.
unfortunately, too many israelis are too obsessed with faith, and deeply suspicious.
the best advice would be to israelis, to maintain a modern enlightened society.
i hope that most nations will stay on the same path, and refrain from violence inside and outside.
WM should study john rawls.
this book is bad.
would have hegel, kant or schopenhauer written such a paper?
was it worth?
WM will have remorse about this one day.
ps
jews unfortunately got around this planet.
some can be communists, others capitalists, others fascists etc.
not all can be all these all the times.
there is no general tract, all jews can follow.
give us a little break, please.
israeli jews are multi-faceted.
american jews are multi-faceted.
one knows a few jewish musicians as david seaton. fine. not all jews are musicians.
we should end this obsession to hurt lots of people without justification for such a long time.
can we end these selfdestructive acts?
as i understand, phil became more critical about israel, when he realized that many palestinians and iraqis have died in the conflicts.
it is sad, but the superficial criticism of all past, living and future israelis is simply an unqualified opinion.
i have experienced cheap hungarian socialist propaganda, cheap plo propaganda, cheap gush emunim propagand, cheap khomeinist propaganda, can you end the cheap wm propaganda?
"This lobby has become a Golem. And like the Golem in legend, in the end it will bring disaster on its maker."
–Uri Avnery, Counterpunch
"only dictators and despots object israel. the list of the enemies of israel is a who's who of murderous dictators. i do not think that there is a decent name on the list. count in putin too."
"Banner headline Steve" keeps on trumpeting his embarrassing notions.
Here is one of them:
"only dictators and despots object israel. the list of the enemies of israel is a who's who of murderous dictators. i do not think that there is a decent name on the list. count in putin too."
We have just been told again that Israel was very pally with apartheid South Africa. It is apparently pally enough with the dictatorship in China to sell it American military secrets.
If you claim that Israel has such great friends just look at the list of countries that voted in support of it when the UN resolutions condemning it came up. Who was it beside the USA – some fly dot in the Pacific (yes, I know, on one occasion also Australia – the more fool they)?
Look at recent international polls on Israel. It is now (rightly) regarded as one of the greatest threats to world peace.
On the Anholt Nation Brands Index (which is based on the quarterly polling of a world wide panel of about 25,000 people)for 2007 Israel occupies the lowest but one place.
Retired CIA couple (Kathleen and Bill Christison) on the phone about the Mearsheimer and Walt book & Israeli Apartheid:
Kathleen and Bill Christison on the phone with a caller named James whom Thom Hartmann cut off because he mentioned the Mearsheimer and Walt book:
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/kathleen-and-bill-christison-on-phone.html
Philip, I wonder why you have not mentioned the Chicago Tribune article on the new revelations regarding the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. It seems a non-Jewish fraction of the US establishment, perhaps emboldened by M-W, is trying to fight back. But other than the Chicago Tribune and the Balitmore Sun, the counter-attack has been well contained. Imagine what could happen to the presidential campaign, presently owned by AIPAC, if the candidates had to explain where they stand on the Liberty, which every American administration and every Israeli government has brazenly lied about.
Here is a link to the original article:
And here is a comment by Ray McGovern:
Well, Arie, Khomeini's Iran is deadly objecting, threatening, harassing Israel.
The rest of Iran's allies are taking economical aid, and are obliged to join the harassment.
The Israeli society has produced Peace Now under fire from the Palestinian and neighboring allies.
You are comfortable, but when hard working people in the boarder kibutz sites take missiles and sniper fire, you imagine that Israel is a threat to world peace.
I lived with Black September Palestinian refugees in European refugee absorption centers and we were good friends. The Fatah forcefully drafted them into commandos, but Israel is the threat to world peace.
Irrational Palestinian circles have massacred innocent nurses, doctors, civilians from 1929 on. It was a crime all the time.
The authors of Geneva Accords were peaceful Israelis.
Iran's ayatollahs payrolled Hezbollah, Syria, and Hamas to resist all peace efforts.
But you repeat the claims of uninformed circles that Israel is a threat of world peace.
Not Russia, not Iran, not China, but the 5 million Israelis.
Hegel would give you a lecture on world history to understand the reality.
Wait a minute Mr. Seaton I'm not sure I agree with this. "Believe me, if it has come to the point where somebody like me can understand antisemitism, then there is big, big trouble on the horizon and I'm afraid it will tear the country apart."
Let’s say we attack Iran and it turns out to be the catastrophe that everyone but our President knows it would be. Who should Americans really be angry with, the few of those who bribed or those that we elected that got bribed? I think our first targets in the event of catastrophe should be our President and Vice President and the members of his administration (from day one) and the congress that sold us out so cheaply don't you. Most of these folks possess our genetic materials. Maybe that’s where we should start. Turn them all over to the international courts. Or better yet the Iraqi judicial system. Sadam got a fair trial didn't he?
liberal white boy: "I think our first targets in the event of catastrophe should be our President and Vice President and the members of his administration (from day one) and the congress that sold us out so cheaply don't you."
I think you’re right. With a proviso. Neocon intellectuals and wealthy Israel-firsters led the charge into Iraq and, more importantly, are now demanding, on behalf of preventing another holocaust, that we attack Iran as well. War with Iran will be a catastrophe to America. The resulting Mideast war will destroy our economy, if not that of the world as well, and give the rest of the world an excuse to hate us (and attack us) for decades. America will become a failed bankrupt empire.
I for one would be happy to support any move to impeach Bush but it will never happen. Still, there are things we can do, such as expose those Israel lobby types who pressured Nancy Pelosi to drop her demand that Bush get congressional approval before waging war on Iran. That is blatant disregard of our constitution by people who put Israel’s defense ahead of America’s well-being. Bush's sins are well known. Those of the Israel lobby so far are not.
Steve, if Israeli PR depended on you it would even have less traction than it has today – in spite of all the millions poured into it.
You seem to be stuck in a time warp. The kind of stuff you come up with still had some credibility in the fifties and sixties – but today even Netanyahu would find it difficult to say these things with a straight face.
You keep clinging to your security blanket even invoking the ghosts of Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer to tug you in.
If you really wanted to inform yourself you would go to the websites of human rights organizations such as B'Tselem, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch etc.
I am not going to do your homework for you. If you keep saying these embarrassing things we should just leave you at the back of the class ignoring your raised hand.
Two fine men. Two fine, honorable, white men, a pride of their race. Like M.L. King was a pride of the black race and we should all be proud of these fine representatives of human race.
When I say I understand antisemitism I certainly don't mean to say I condone it. But, rather see it as a repeating phenomena, which is not purely the result of the bottomless perversity of the goyim visited on the permanently and forever innocent Jewish people. Not always, and certainly not now,
Of course, Bush is responsible for what Bush does, just as the American people are responsible for re-electing him.
Realistically, however, history shows us that when there is a disaster or plague or economic collapse, any Jewish person who happens to be passing by tends to get blamed for it. Therefore it seems even more likely that if there is a major disaster, such as Iraq/Iran/?, which actually has Jewish fingerprints all over it, then the ancient curse is going to kick in.
My idea is that that a major wave of antisemitism would be fatal to whatever is left worth saving in American culture and society and must be avoided at any cost except sacrificing the truth.
I think the way forward for those unhappy with the Lobby and Neoconservatism generally is to start extracting a price from our Congressmen and women for blindly following the Lobby's lead. Here is Howard Friedman explaining its effectiveness, quoted by John Walsh: "'AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship–so it's clear where they stand on the subject.' (Would it not be great to see these "position papers"? I wonder how many candidates would release them? And what do the candidates get for all this effort? A pat on the back?)"
I think John Walsh is right. [Note that "completely understand," as if that were possible, seems an obvious code for, "understand the consequences of noncompliance."]Let's ask our Congressmen to produce those position papers. Let's voice opposition to war crimes and other overly aggressive positions, in terms politicians understand. Enough with this self-damning silence. Let's call a warmonger a warmonger.
Doppler
Doppler:
Let us stop equating money and speech – that will in turn stop the freedom to bribe be equated to the freedom of speech which will take the money out of politics and bring the Davy Crocketts back to Congress. I 'd love to see AIPAC asking Davy to write them a "position paper" on Israel!
Somebody tried to post above the links to the Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune articles on the new revelations regarding the USS Liberty plus the comment by McGovern in Counterpunch.
For some reason these links did not appear.
They follow here below.
McGovern points out that Mearsheimer and Walt have not dealt with this case even though it might be more revelatory about the power of the lobby than almost anything else.
I have, since I heard of it, always been mystified by this. Who were the main culprits on the American side ? Who countermanded the order given by the commander of the 6th Fleet for carrier fighters to go to the Liberty's assistance ? The finger points to Johnson and McNamara who were also instrumental, it seems, in ordering the later cover up.
This is what the Senior Legal Counsel to the Navy Court of Inquiry, Captain Ward Boston, said about this later:
"In an affidavit signed on January 9, 2004 Captain Ward (now retired) swears that, "Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew. I am certain that the Israeli pilots that undertook the attacks, as well as their superiors who had ordered the attack were aware that the ship was American. I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
Admiral Kidd was president of this Court.
I haven't read McNamara memoirs and can't consult them here. Would anyone know what he says about it?
I did read Dean Rusk's memoirs though ("As I saw it"). He was Secretary of State at the time and presumably had access to classified information. Rusk said flat out that he didn't believe the Israeli explanation (a case of 'mistaken identity')at the time and still didn't believe it.
I understand that McNamara is still alive. It might be a good idea to email or phone him. That would be somewhat less drastic than suggesting that he be arrested for treason as Stanley Heller recently did in Counterpunch (even though there might be a good case for this).
Here are the links:
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern10062007.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,0,1050179.story?coll=chi_business_ugc
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-liberty1002,0,2758369,full.story
Supposedly the Israeli pilot had thought he was shooting at an Egyptian ship. When he returned to base he was originally told he had accidentially hit "one of our own". Then he was told that it was a French ship.
The Israeli story was that it was mistaken for an old out of service Egyptian horse-carrier.
The survivors say that it couldn't have been mistaken for that. For one thing it had all along the American flag in top.
Here is a crucial passage of the Chicago Tribune article. It concerns a transcript of an alleged conversation between the pilots involved and Israeli ground control that was published in the Jerusalem Post:
"The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.
"The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.
"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors."
Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely."
"He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."
Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.
Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots' communications.
One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.
"It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."
Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.
The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said. "The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?'
"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"
Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.
"There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way pilots and controllers communicate."
Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that "the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article." "
But why?
Good question.
Ray McGovern mentioned the two most popular explanations:
"Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of sinking a ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move. Another theory: James Bamford, in "Body of Secrets," adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.
As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation."
I suggested earlier that McNamara should be approached about what he knew about it.Somebody apparently did so recently (it is mentioned in the Chicago Tribune article). McNamara claimed that he had no recollection of the matter at all. Well, this could be the effect of age (he is 91),it could also be that he still has something to hide.
You are correct in that the question is one of intentionality. What were the actual intentions of the Israelis?
Did they genuinely set out to attack an American ship? That doesn't make any logical sense. While the US wasn't the major ally of Israel at the time, it was still an important one. Could the Israelis be that stupid?
Did a rogue officer(s) order the attack? If not, how high up the command did it go?
Did someone panic after an initial mistake was made and hope to protect themselves by sinking the ship and its crew? While it's possible, could the person(s) involved be that stupid and that heartless?
Did the Israelis believe it wasn't a US ship or that the flag was a trick by the Egyptian Navy?
Did the Israelis knowingly sink the ship in order to protect secret operations that they didn't want anyone else to know about, such as Arie alludes to? I find it hard to picture Moshe Dayan thinking through this issue and deciding that the best course of action is to sink a US spy boat.
Johnson's decision to not order retaliation seems very odd, but if one imagines a scenario in which the US and Iran are at odds and the Kurds are fighting a war with the Iranians, and a group of Kurdish soldiers attack an American platoon that surprised them, it is not inconceivable that Bush would order the Army to stand down from retaliating against the Kurds.
That there was a cover-up seems to be at least partly attributable to the powers that be (non-lobby)wanting to cover their own asses after the fact.
Israel did admit to attacking the ship, explaining it was a case of mistaken identity in the midst of battle and did pay damages to the families of our fallen sailors. I don't know how plausible the Israeli explanation is, but it has apparently been researched pretty intensely by a retired Air Force officer.
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