The Princetonian has an OK piece on last night’s debate at the school featuring Walt and Mearsheimer. How great that Princeton hosted the scholars, how great that it engaged their ideas. (I say OK piece because the Princetonian chose to fearfully echo the negative mainstream reviews of W&M rather than look into the European reviews. No independence of thought).
A couple points worth mentioning. W&M’s antagonist, Prof. Robert Keohane tried to blow away the claim that the Israel lobby bears any responsibility for the Iraq war by listing a bunch of other reasons for the war, including principally, Bush and Cheney. Applause. I see this sort of argument as forcibly stupid, or anti-intellectual. Of course Bush and Cheney bear principal responsibility for the war. The question intellectuals must ask is, Where did the ideas come from? This is what students of policy do all the time, with welfare policy, the Peace Corps, the Great Society, the Vietnam War. The late great David Halberstam made his name showing the social structure from which the stupid ideas for Vietnam came. Any book about the Peace Corps (I wrote a book on a related subject, so I know) isn’t about John Kennedy, it’s about his adherents and braintrust. The issue with Iraq is, Who was the braintrust? How much did they care about Israel? And the reason there is a crisis in Jewish identity right now, says me, is that the answer is: they were mainly Jewish neocons, and Israel was central to their thinking about foreign policy…
A related point. In this article, it’s said that Aaron Friedberg, neocon who has reroosted at Princeton following a spell in the corridors of power, attacked the scholars saying it doesn’t matter whether they are antisemites or not, they are parroting antisemitic ideas. David Remnick made a similar point in the New Yorker some months back. And I believe Dennis Ross made the argument on the stage at Cooper Union lo these many years ago, 2006, the great debate. At that time Tony Judt quoted Koestler to the point that just because an argument has been used by a monster doesn’t discredit it, apropos of anti-Communism. To Friedberg and Remnick’s credit, it is obvious that some of the statements I make and that W&M make have appeared in antisemitic literature. I don’t think this can be denied. But some of the same statements have been made in chauvinistic-semitic literature. AIPAC and Dershowitz speak of the power of the lobby. Benjamin Ginsberg and Murray Friedman write of the Jewishness of the neocons and Ginsberg specifically addresses the influence of Jewish financiers in modern history (in The Fatal Embrace). Are they antisemites? No. The real issue here is whether a statement describes reality or not. This should be the aim of journalists and scholars, to describe reality for the public. When Keohane immunizes the neocons, he is trafficking in a kind of liberal sentimentalism.
