This weekend I had my first houseguest, a critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and he passed on a rumor that he had picked up from an academic, that John Mearsheimer had said privately, or in so many words, that if he had to do it over again, knowing now about all the flak he would get, and the smearing and the marginalization, he wouldn’t have attacked the Israel lobby. I found this unlikely, an I asked Mearsheimer about it. He said: "Neither Steve nor I have ever expressed misgivings about doing the work on the lobby, either publicly or privately to each other. Indeed, we almost always say when asked, that we have no regrets and that we would do it all over again knowing what we now know. We believe, like you, that the truth will win out over the long term."
Related posts:
- Mearsheimer: Walt and I welcome a debate on the lobby with the director of the American Jewish Comittee
- AJC’s David Harris sure seems to be running away from debate with Mearsheimer and Walt
- Chris Matthews’s Coyness About Jewish Money in Politics Is Downright Irresponsible and Irritating
- American Jewish Committee and Mearsheimer agree on debate
- Israelis Have B*g B*lls (Burg Got Blurb From Mearsheimer)
{ 23 comments }
OT: Here's a link to Finkelstein's talk at the Universty of Toronto this past November 29 (Palestinian Solidarity Day). It's interesting because he spoke on something a little different from his normal theme: "the coming breakup of American Zionism"
pt. 1 (intro and beginning)
http://www.rabble.ca/rpn/files/nni/nni-2008-01-12.MP3
pt. 2
http://www.rabble.ca/rpn/files/nni/nni-2008-01-13.MP3
pt. 3 (q&a)
http://www.rabble.ca/rpn/files/nni/nni-2008-01-14.MP3
"Since 1967 Israel has been a stage on which North American Jews have played out their perverse fantasies and a strategic asset in their pursuit of power and priveledge. If Israel has become a crazy state, and in my opinion it has, it is in no small part due to North American Jews. By abetting, supporting, its worst tendencies and freeing it of needful restraints, they have exerted a terrible influence on Israeli society. How fortunate Palestinians and Israelis will be when, in the days perhaps not far off, American Jewry bids Israel farewell."
Jewish Zionists always attempt to create a myth whereby anyone who speaks out against them has "regrets" later, as if they eventually came to their senses. It's a canard designed to ward off future critics–just another in a long line of Machiavellian dirty tricks designed to make them appear beyond reproach. But their feet of clay are crumbling. Support for Zionism in the US is a mile wide, but less than an inch deep, and the levy has been breached.
LA times editor has been fired by Zell:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/business/media/21latimes-web.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
This is the same LA Times that has been under fire from CAMERA for being insufficiently pro-Israel:
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=33&x_article=1427
Many media watchers were predicting that Zell was going to make changes at the LA Times in order to "improve" its coverage of Israel once he had gained control:
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/?p=163
Is this the end of any positive coverage of Mearsheimer and Walt in the LA Times?
"The truth will win out in the long run".
Beware of what you wish for.
To Witty
Truth winning out…
Wishing or propaganda wont ultimately matter–the truth will win out.
The US empire is coming to an end. And as resources shrink the goyim are gonna start asking questions about the US foreign and economic policy.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Be very afraid you JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSS
We are coming to get YOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUU
Everything is all YOUR fault.
All the problems in the world.
We can't wait to start killing the Joo babies again
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH
Be afraid. Be very afraid. OOOOHHHHHHHH
BOO!
Richard Witty on Weiss's comment that the truth will win out in the long run:
"Beware of what you wish for."
I'm hard pressed to imagine what you're saying here unless you think that the real truth about Jewish support for Israel, when it finally comes out, will make Weiss look foolish, or worse.
I don't think we have many worries from hearing too much truth, especially since so many people are working such long hours to make sure we never hear any truth at all. In Canada now there are commissars who can haul you into special courts for saying unpalatable truths. Furthermore, your offense becomes more egregious if you support your claim with news stories, magazine articles and other corroborating evidence. The commisars reason that real evidence makes your claims more believable and thus more dangerous. Silly me. I always thought of Canada as our friendly and sensible neighbor to the north.
Richard Witty on Weiss's comment that the truth will win out in the long run:
"Beware of what you wish for."
I'm hard pressed to imagine what you're saying here unless you think that the real truth about Jewish support for Israel, when it finally comes out, will make Weiss look foolish, or worse.
I don't think we have many worries from hearing too much truth, especially since so many people are working such long hours to make sure we never hear any truth at all. In Canada now there are commissars who can haul you into special courts for saying unpalatable truths. Furthermore, your offense becomes more egregious if you support your claim with news stories, magazine articles and other corroborating evidence. The commisars reason that real evidence makes your claims more believable and thus more dangerous. Silly me. I always thought of Canada as our friendly and sensible neighbor to the north.
"Guilt, Bloodlust and Presidential Politics: Ol' 'Blood and Freedom' Fred Thompson"
at Rudely Stamped.
Michael Blaine
http://www.rudelystamped.blogspot.com
The truth that there is a lobby that supports Israel is no revalation, and therefore doesn't really deserve special treatment.
The assertion that the "Israel lobby got us into Iraq" is ludicrous. The "Israel Lobby" included strongly those that opposed the war in Iraq.
It is true that Israel is on the frontier of the middle east, including on the frontier of states that harbor terrorists, and on the frontier of states that control oil.
And, it is a nation that has European and American-like academia, free press and speech, elections, so is familiar, comfortable, attractive to those that regard civil institutions as desirable.
Whether diaspora Jews wish that post-trauma
European Jews had alternative havens (they didn't) or that naziism wasn't the last straw (it was), those are revisionist wishes.
Israel was the place at this point in history that Jews stood (rather than crawled).
A good thing to stand. A good thing to stand for good, for one's own and for others.
I'm actually surprised, and somewhat incredulous, that Mearsheimer would have honestly said "I have no second thoughts".
EVERYTHING that I've ever done with backbone, that had any element of risk of criticism or risk of harm to others, I had second thoughts about.
That is to me an indicator that they are NOT inquiring, but instead putting their heads down and pushing forward.
Phil:
What Richard said about standing is true. Having raised a few infants to toddlerdom, I can tell you that standing is better than crawling. It's worth the effort too, despite the fear that greets it. Once you conquer that fear you might even walk like a man, Philip.
Witty, willfully ignorant or just obtuse?
The Israel Lobby didn't single-handedly "get us into Iraq".
And Mearsheimer and Walt don't say it did, actually.
But then, you knew that, because despite having not read their book, you've looked into their minds eye and can read their intentions.
(Let me guess–they're anti-semitic?)
Of course they are. They are stubborn and closed-minded. They are not INQUIRING like you are, about the brutal reality of ethnic chauvinism in the Middle East. Tell us, what "second thoughts" have you had about Zionism? Should you all have grabbed Judea and Samaria when you still had the chance? Was it a big mistake to give back the Litani river catchment basin and all that water that southern Lebanon needs? Were there enough assassinations, home demolitions, kidnappings, torturings or should you have done more to break the Palestinian extremists' backs?
I can tell you have gone through real introspection about the nature of your supremacist vision for Palestine. Muslims and Christians in the end just can't be trusted. A nuanced and sensitive view, and not the least bit fundamentalist, irrational and passive aggressive. You've weighed the benefits and losses, and for you, supporting the slow genocide of the Palestinians is the only REASONABLE choice.
Richard, please, impress us more with your calm and reasoned approach to the Palestinian Problem.
If the Palestinians democratically elect Hamas, aren't we indeed forced to starve them and turn the hospitals' lights out? Mustn't we always send the message that Palestinians are not the top priority of the government which rules over all of Palestine?
It's easy; just starve those palestinian kids and cut off their electricity and drain their water. It's worth it–just ask any tier one American presidential candidate.
MM – Jews "grabbing" Judea. THAT's rich! "Slow genocide" of Palis undergoing population explosion. That's even RICHER!
A people can not be occupiers in their own Homeland.
There is no Palestinian problem. There is a European Arab-pandering problem which prevents the dragging on Arab/Israeli conflict from reaching its immediate resolution by recognizing the realities on the ground, after the 60 year campain of aggression and attempted genocide – REAL genocide – by Arabs against the Jews in Israel, acknowledging the existing borders and repatriating the remaining enemy population. The solution of population exchange which rightfully got its proponents the Nobel Peace prize when applied to Greco/Turkish conflict in the 1920s. The Jewish communities all throughout the ME already are uprooted and relocated to today's Israel. All that's left is to do the other half. That would only be FAIR.
CK – never in history it was demanded of a country to support an enemy country which is at WAR with them, the war of extermination no less, as per HAMAS/PLO charter. Are Israelis supposed to mend the electrical systems, destroyed by rocket fire, UNDER that same rocket fire, risking their lives – so that those firing those rockets will have electricity? Is this a RESONABLE demand?
Walt & Mearsheimer are simply instruments of the ZOG in order to throw us off the track of their infernal designs. Certainly if they were really a threat to the JEW menace they wouldn't have got a book contract
Forget for a moment what you read and hear in the MSM. Look at the deeds, not words.
USA demands of Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders. These borders are INDEFENCIBLE. They mean sure destruction of the cut down state in the next war which would follow very shortly. This has been a CONSISTENT American demand for the last 40 years.
This is not a demand a friend would make of a friend.
The forcing of Israeli withdraw under the black propaganda of "peace" (and now even without it) is markedly ANTI-ISRAELI policy.
USA pursues this anti-Israeli policy which only an Israel's enemy would pursue.
Therefore, USA is no friend of Israel.
Pushing Israel into the see would be very profitable to (in the interest, or so it seems, of) America, especially American oil elites. Is it very courageous thing to do?
Of course there is an internal American problem with that. The American people may not be ready to such a cold blooded murder in the name of greed. Those pesky Jews and their agents call to the good-hearted American people all the time for help – how dare they, when the oil elites stand to profit so much from the Jewish state's demise!
Enter the repeated lies of being the Greatest friend to Israel etc. while actively promoting an agenda which is sure to get it KILLED. VANISH.
Enter the repeated lies of supposedly cruel and inhumane Israeli actions. That's when the ratio of civilian deaths is 1:30 to 1:20. That's when your own army has it more like reversed, 20:1, in Iraq (soldiers freely admitting on TV, more than once, the policy of shooting back in general direction of incoming fire, when fired upon). The dehumanizing lies preparing the legitimacy of the harshest anti-Israeli actions. Done by – "ZIONIST-CONTROLLED" – US/Europian media?
Give me a break!
That's the situation as attested by deeds, not words.
You of course may support the destruction of Israel not in the name of greed but out of perversed idealism and total misreading of a situation. That's your prerogative. Be prepared to support the genocide of its Jewish population. There could be no other outcome.
I finished going through Mearsheimer & Walt's book the other day. What I like most about the book is that it reveals the powerful special political influence the Lobby can exercise on U.S. government foreign policy in the Middle East. But Mearsheimer and Walt don't really examine powerful special political influence that the U.S. military-industrial-university complex can exercise on U.S. government foreign policy in the Middle East. Also, one reason Mearsheimer and Walt supported the Pentagon's high-technology attack on Iraq in 1991 and appear to support the 2001 Pentagon attack on Afghanistan, is that they appear to be proponents of a U.S. government Middle East foreign policy of "No Blood for Israel, But Blood for Big Oil," instead of being proponents of an anti-interventionist, pacifist U.S. government foreign policy.
While Mearsheimer and Walt accurately describe how the Lobby is able to pressure the U.S. mainstream media to critics of the lobby and continued U.S. military aid to Israel access to the airwaves, Mearsheimer and Walt don't seem to want to examine why the U.S. mainstream media denies access to the airwaves even more to U.S. pacifists who are are critical of the U.S. military-industrial-complex's dominance of U.S. foreign policy objectives and U.S. government budgetary priorities. According to the 1992 edition of Louis Rukeyser's Business Almanac, for instance, "led by McDonnell Douglas ($8.6 billion in defense contracts), General Dynamics ($7 billion), Lockheed ($2.7 billion), Boeing ($2.9 billion), General Electric (5.8 billion), Raytheon ($3.8 billion), and other top contractors, the defense lobby is undoubtedly the most powerful in Congress, where a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans has protected it from every onslaught in the lasst 40 years."
Mearsheimer and Walt also write on page 41 of their book:
"When an escalating series of clashes between Israel and Syria in 1966-67 led Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to order troops back into the Sinai in May, alarming Israel's leaders and raising the dangers of a wider war, the Johnson administration was nonetheless convinced that Israel was militarily superior to its Arab adversaries and exaggerating the danger of an Arab attack. General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed Johnson, `Our best estimate was that if there were a war, that the Israelis would win it in five to seven days,' and Johnson himself told Israel Foreign Minister Abba Eban that if Egypt attacked, `you will whip hell out of them.'"
Yet a de-classified May 24, 1967 "Memorandum for the Record" regarding the "National Security Council Meeting held on May 24, 1967 at 12 Noon–Discussion of Middle East Crisis" states:
"General Wheeler responded by saying that our first approach should be to give Israel military aid and all the support it needs for long-term military ooperations…The President returned to the question of what we would do after relying on Israeli forces. General Wheeler noted that a long war would hurt the Israeli economy. At that point we would have to decide whether we were going to send in forces and confront Nasser directly.
"Secretary McNamara saw the whole situation evolving somewhat differently. He thought the initial exchange would be a fierce air battle for air superiority which would deplete aircraft inventories on both sides…"
And a de-classified May 26, 1967 "Memorandum from the Central Intelligence Agency's Board of National Estimates to Director of Central Intelligence Helms" on the subject "The Middle Eastern Crisis" signed by CIA Board of National Estimates Committee Chairman Sherman Kent states:
"5. The Israelis face dismaying choices. Surprised and shaken by Nasser's actions, they failed to take the instant military counteraction which might have been most effective. If they attack now they wil face far more formidable opposition than in the rapid campaign of 1956…It would certainly cost them heavy losses of men and materiel."
In addition, in a de-classified June 1, 1967 memo from Sherman Kent to Helms, CIA Official Kent estimated just a few days before the June 1967 Middle East War that the Israeli war machine "probably would not prove able to pull off the kind of smashing defeat of Egyptian forces they accomplished in 1956."
So while Mearsheimer and Walt have to be supported for the moral courage they showed in being willing to expose the undemocratic powerful role that the pro-Israeli Establishment lobby continues to play in U.S. government Middle East foreign policy formulation, readers should, I think, examine carefully whether some of the sweeping historical assertions they make throughout the book (often based on "the public record") can be backed up by an examination of some of the de-classified documents and by what's described in previously-published historical books.
"USA demands of Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders. These borders are INDEFENCIBLE. "
Actually, nearly the oppossite is true compared to the current settlement maze.
The maze is indefensible.
AS W & M point out, in 66-67, if Egypt attacked, Johnson's view (told to Eban) was that the Israel " would whip hell out of them." And that key Israeli leaders agreed with this assessment but continued to send Washington alarming reports as part of a deliberate campaign to elicit sympathy and support. The US tried feebly to prevent the outbreak of the war, choosing not to use any carrots or sticks on Israel–the usual story, repeated in '82 in Lebanon, and later, as any one can google.
You are generalizing Charles.
5 states attempted to invade Israel in 67, after blockading the Straights of Tiran.
witless one — no one tries to defend the MAZE. THAT would be foolish (IOW, witless).
The whole contiguous geographic area of Western Palestine has a reasonably DEFENCIBLE natural border along the RIVER JORDAN. Which happens to be the border in effect right now.
No need to change THAT.
All that is needed is to apply the well established principle by the precedent of post-WWII European settlement whereas the agressor looses the area won by the defending side in a rightful defensive war who gets to keep it to ward off any future aggression and mostly, to punish the agressing side (Germany, or in the ME, their allies and disciples the Arab conglomerate) – and the enemy population is repatriated to the consolidated territories still held by the agressor. Which is the only step left to do, which coincidentally is the only thing that can ensure peace and stability in the region.
Pandering to the Arab Revanche-ism is a sure way to bring about great new losses and human suffering to the peoples of the ME.
Instead of misguided attempts to rid themselves of their guilt for the Holocaust by smearing and demonizing the Jews of Israel, Europeans would be wiser to work together with the Arabs to overcome their shared demons of bigotry by applying the equal standards and measures as they were implemented in the post war Europe.
That would be of course much harder yet meaningful and decent an enterprise to undertake – instead of turning on Jews yet again in hopes for great rewards from oil-rich and relentless Arabs – or out of repressed and denied fear of being overrun by them.
Now if you were an American, there woud be one less excuse for you to take this stand – namely, the fear. The greed stands.
Atrocious state-sponsored Lebensraum fantasy had a price 1944-1950. Two million were killed and fifteen million more ethnic Germans were driven from their land. All over Eastern Europe they were expelled from communities that had been established for centuries. Many of them had supported Hitler, but the great majority of them (East Prussian farmers, Silesian industrial workers, their wives and children,etc) were innocent.
They were guilty of being German on the wrong side of the new postwar borders.
Comments on this entry are closed.