I'm still being surprised by Walt & Mearsheimer's book because they appear to be omitting much of the evidence that Big Oil and the U.S. military-industrial complex still possess a special influence that can drive U.S. foreign policy in a militaristic direction, as much as does the pro-Israeli Establishment lobby. For instance, while Walt & Mearsheimer describe how AIPAC, CAMERA and the other lobbying groups can set the terms of debate within the U.S. mainstream media, they don't seem to examine how Big Oil has exercised a special influence over PBS programming since the 1970s (Jim Lehrer's PBS evening news show, for instance, is funded heavily by Chevron these days).

But as James Ledbetter noted in his Made Possible By…book on public broadcasting in the U.S.:

"The correspondence between the oil crisis of 1973-74, the huge profits reaped by oil giants in the mid-70s, and their sudden interest in public television has been a constant criticism, not limited to marginal Marxist cranks…Oil giants, along with other multinationals, had lavished millions of dollars in bribes on political parties in Italy, Canada, Bolivia and South Korea. Exxon alone, through Italian affiliates, secretly contributed $27 million to that country's political parties between 1963 and 972 (in some cases supplemanting the CIA's contributions)…The overwhelming role oil companies play in funding national public television makes them the most obvious purchases of the medium's silence…When General Motors and Mobil insist that fictional television should be about nineteenth-century England, and nonfiction television should be about business news, the U.S. civil war, and villain-free celebrations of the animal kingdom, who is PBS to object?…"

In addition, if you check out the following link, there might be some evidence that the pro-Israeli Establishment lobby wasn't the only powerful lobby which may have pushed for the 2003 U.S. government seizure of Iraq's oil resources.