Nearly 5 years ago Scott McConnell sent me Walt and Mearsheimer’s famous LRB paper on the Israel lobby and I ran around the house saying it was high noon for the lobby. Well, noon has stretched out over many years. I thought that W&M’s gong would encourage many journalists to uncover the workings of the lobby. I was naive. The journalists acceded to the lobby by and large and have left the institution untouched in mainstream debate. Though Grant Smith and the internet have taken up the slack, and been something of a gamechanger, in Mearsheimer’s view, slowly changing public attitudes towards the special relationship.
McConnell himself has now published a long important piece on the special relationship (at the Middle East Policy Council) where he does a lot of the sort of analysis that I hoped W&M would enable, in an Americanist “blood and treasure” vein (which I don’t entirely share). McConnell portrays an Israel that dominates our thinking on the most important foreign policy issues, proving a “transmission belt” of bad ideas to the U.S.– including the Islamophobia that is now infecting out democracy. And he says it’s not the lobby that’s destroying the American brand in the Middle East, it’s the Israel alliance itself. And now it is doing so through nuclear blackmail. I tend to agree with McConnell: I don’t understand why Obama has acceded so much to Israel’s demands, and I conclude that we don’t know the half of it, and that McConnell’s speculation is a very valid one– Israel is a crazy spouse that has nukes; even pragmatic Netanyahu, inflamed by the Holocaust, is a Strangelove; and Obama knows this, and doesn’t want to set these people off.
But let me walk through a few of McConnell’s sharp points before the marriage metaphor.
1. Partition.
Then, as now, they [State Department wise men, most of them WASPs] saw America’s major strategic interest in the Middle East as unfettered access to oil from the Gulf, which was essential to the rebuilding of Europe and to the supply of American armed forces globally. No foreign-policy professional believed a Jewish state in Palestine would do anything but complicate that goal. They regretted that President Truman seemed to be making his Palestine decisions with an eye to domestic politics.
2. McConnell mostly buys that Israel was a “strategic asset” to the U.S. in the 70s and 80s, till the wall fell.
As Martin Kramer, a former Israeli academic who is now a leading advocate for Israel in the United States, puts it, Israel “underpins the Pax Americana” in the Eastern Mediterranean. When the United States kept Israel at arms length (from 1948 to 1973), there were four wars; with the onset of the special relationship and with universal acknowledgement of Israeli regional military superiority, the wars have been small and easily contained.
3. It’s been hell since 91. (And yes, I demonstrated against the Gulf War!)
The initial post-Cold War test of Israel as a strategic asset came in 1991, during the first Iraq war. As a regional ally, Israel proved worse than useless. Washington had to beg Tel Aviv not to attack Iraq, because Israeli involvement would have torpedoed the coalition President George H. W. Bush was building against Saddam Hussein.
4. McConnell agrees with Jonathan Cook on the neoconservatives imbibing the very worst of Israeli militarism and regurgitating it all over the U.S.. He includes a shocking quote about turning the Middle East into Lebanon:
The Israelis were proposing that Jerusalem cement its status as the Mideast’s dominant power by fomenting sectarian and ethnic strife in the surrounding states. As Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist and former senior Foreign Ministry official, put it in a 1982 essay,
“The total disintegration of Lebanon into five regional localized governments is the precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arab peninsula, in a similar fashion. The dissolution of Egypt and later Iraq into districts of ethnic and religious minorities following the example of Lebanon is the main long-range objective of Israel on the Eastern Front. . . [I]n the long run the strength of Iraq is the biggest danger to Israel. . . Iraq can be divided on regional and sectarian lines just like Syria in the Ottoman era. There will be three states in the three major cities.“
Cook contends that strategists such as Yinon did not simply sell their vision to the neoconservatives and seek its implementation. The neocons interpreted these strategies as not only good for Israel, but good for America. Israel’s regional dominance and America’s control of oil could be assured through the same means, the fomenting of chaos in the Middle East and the break-up of its large states…
Jonathan Cook’s argument…helps to explain the seemingly inexplicable: the American decision to allow Iraq to fall into chaos after the invasion.
5. The enormous price of the special relationship. McConnell is concise and deadly here. And it’s obvious. But Chris Matthews couldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
American backing of Israel has been a major, if not the sole, factor in making the United States a target of Muslim terrorists. This is invariably what such terrorists say, whether in custody or at liberty, and no one has explained plausibly why they would misrepresent their motivations… Osama bin Laden began inserting references to Palestine into his public statements in 1994…
the Israel alliance has drawn the United States into the Middle East in a particularly violent way. Over the last decade, cities in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza have been ripped apart by U.S. weaponry.
6. My favorite bit in the piece is when McConnell quotes all the Israeli leaders urging the U.S. to take on Iraq, before the Iraq war, and then posits [emphasis mine, the Israel lobby theory for dummies]:
The Israeli support for the war would not, in itself, be decisive in pushing the president to order the attack, but deference to Israeli sensibilities is what is unique about the special relationship. When Israelis talk, Americans listen. When Israelis want to circulate their views, they have an access to the opinion pages of elite newspapers and slots on network news shows that leaders of no other foreign country can dream of. Several of America’s European and Arab allies objected cogently and clearly to the idea of attacking Iraq. If Israeli leaders had voiced similar sentiments, it is inconceivable the invasion would have taken place.
In this connection, just look at the Wikileaks cables of Egypt’s Mubarak and Jordanian officials. They were strongly against the Iraq war. We paid no attention to them. And imagine if Israel had warned us what a mess it would be, McConnell is dead on…
7. Israel’s latest bad ideas, attacking Iran (the Atlantic and New Republic pipeline crazy Israeli arguments as if they’re rational) and Islamophobia:
Finally, we must consider another cost, one not easily measured in terms of blood and treasure. It is hard to miss that anti-Muslim bigotry is becoming embedded in American political culture, and Israel and its supporters are playing a substantial role in generating it.
8. Now let’s get to the bad marriage payoff. At the end, McConnell cites Ariel Roth of Hopkins, a former IDF soldier, saying that Israel has such a Holocaust complex it must be reassured constantly or it will strike out against those who threaten it. McConnell says this means there will be “no exit” from the disastrous special relationship, and that the State Department had little idea how bad things would get…
The United States is in the position of a wife whose spouse is acting erratically. A “panicked and unrestrained Israel,” armed with an estimated 200 nuclear weapons, could do an extraordinary amount of damage. The only conclusion one can draw is that the special relationship would now be very difficult to exit, even if Israel had no clout whatsoever within the American political system, even if the United States desired emphatically to pursue a more independent course.
I submit that this argument has long been internalized by those U.S. officials who recognize that the special relationship brings the United States far more trouble than benefits. It is the principal reason no major American figure has ever advocated simply walking away from Israel….
In the coming years, as the prospect of a two-state solution disappears, it is likely that Israel will continue its inexorable march toward becoming a state between the Jordan River and the sea, with one set of laws for Jews, who will have the rights of citizens, and another for Arabs, who will be denied full citizenship. What will it cost America’s broader relationship with the Muslim world to maintain a special bond with a state based on this kind of ethnic discrimination? That also would be difficult to quantify. And yet this scenario may be impossible to escape. The threat of Israel’s turning itself into a nuclear-armed desperado striking at will at the oil states in the Gulf cannot, alas, be entirely dismissed. That may be, as Ariel Roth argues, a compelling reason to maintain the special relationship pretty much unchanged.
