I'm sure he's a nice guy, but as I have said before, California lefty Stephen Zunes has made idiotic statements about the Israel lobby and the Iraq war. Here is the smoking gun of idiocy. In lamenting the Rahm Emanuel appointment on alternet for good leftwing reasons–he's a tool and a hawk–Zunes notes with helpful clarity that Emanuel said on Meet the Press that he would have supported the Iraq war even knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction. Zunes then interprets the admission: "effectively acknowledging that his support for the war was not about national security, but about oil and empire."
Much later in the piece, Zunes includes a pro forma paragraph about Emanuel's fondness for Israel, ending with this piece of boilerplate: "Emanuel himself served in a civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early 1990s." When Iraq attacked Israel, I would add.
The great sadness here is that the minds of the respectable left, such as they are, recognize that Israel plays some considerable role in Emanuel's mental landscape, but are simply unable to process this information in a logical manner. To assign it any real functionality in Emanuel's Iraq-war-planning would, they reason, contribute to anti-semitism. Ergo: "oil and empire." They are hopeless as interpreters of the Iraq fiasco. And providing cover to the neocons. (Zunes has attacked Walt and Mearsheimer over just this issue, of Zionist motivation for fostering the Iraq disaster.)
Imagine for one moment that a Christian agenda were involved, that we were talking about, say, buses from churches bringing voters to defeat a gay-rights measure. Would leftwing "thinkers" fail to speak of a religious motivation for destructive political action?
