I’m still doing penance for making mean comments about
Aaron David Miller's book, The Much Too Promised Land, after reading just 30 pages
or so. I'll be doing penance for a long time. Now I'm 300 pages in, and it's just fabulous. What Miller has done here is provide the flesh to the
Israel Lobby book, by Walt and Mearsheimer. They are academic outsiders, he is a total insider. He has been a presidential/State
Department adviser on Israel/Palestine forever and he shows how much domestic
political considerations (White House euphemism for the Israel lobby) again and again distorted the process. Here's the
latest example in my reading. In 2001, George Mitchell, who of course has made
peace everywhere, came back with a report that Bill Clinton had assigned him to
do. He said, "Ban the settlements" and stop Palestinian terror, as
prerequisites. Mitchell complains angrily to Miller in this book that Bush
ignored the advice, did nothing to enforce the recommendations. Certainly with respect to settlements.
The greatness of
Miller’s book is that he shows how this policy nullification has gone on for
nearly 40 years. Nixon and Ford were against the settlements. They got nowhere.
Carter threw himself into the process and got further than anyone, at the price
of his reputation. So did Bush senior; he disliked Shamir and held up those
loan guarantees in ’91 over the settlements. Look what happened to him.
Which brings me to my topic this morning. George Bush the First apparently
believes that his and Jim Baker’s opposition to settlements played a major role
in the ’92 election. Miller writes that Bill Clinton ran in ’92 with a
pro-settlements message, to gain support in the Jewish community. Of course, George H.W. Bush
lost that election. And Miller suggests that Carter’s stance re Israel hurt him
politically in ’80 (not that he could have withstood the landslide even with the Jewish community completely behind him).
It’s a commonplace for liberal critics of Bush the Second to say that he has
Oedipal issues and that’s why he invaded Iraq. Wanted to do what his father
couldn’t do. Or, wanted to avenge Saddam’s threats against his dad. Whatever.
But what about a more straightforward teaching? Isn’t it actually more likely
that Bush’s father instructed him that if he ran against Israel he would lose a
key constituency to any president, not just a Democratic one–and that
constituency was—yes– elderly Jewish voters in Florida, but also the editorial
writers, and a lot of Republican Jewish Coalition money? It was Mel Sembler, after
all, of the RJC, and now of the prowar group Freedom’s Watch, who took then
Governor Bush up in the helicopter with Ariel Sharon in ’98, two years before
the presidential run, that famous trip on which Bush said, we got driveways
longer than this in Texas… (All this too is in Miller’s book.) Occam’s razor
says the simplest explanation is usually the truest. Wasn’t this the real
lesson of his father’s defeat? Don’t take on Israel, don’t take on American
Jewish leadership. Jim Baker had talked tough to AIPAC in ’89, saying Give up your dream of a greater Israel, Miller says; and the Jewish leadership promptly turned on him.
I’d add that the greatest politician of our time had already demonstrated the
wisdom of this teaching. Bill Clinton ran the most philosemitic White House in
history and did so not so much out of a natural love for Jews—no Bill Clinton
will love anyone who loves him—as a sense of political importance. Miller shows
that Clinton’s
Israel/Palestine team was wholly imbalanced, almost all Jewish, and more than
that, invested in the Israeli narrative. I’ll be blogging about this in days to come, but Miller’s portrait of Clinton is scathing. Has anyone read this book? It’s amazing. Clinton comes off as weak, a peoplepleaser, and Ehud Barak’s pantaloon. Well of course George W. Bush wasn’t going to do anything like Bill Clinton. Thought Clinton was “Satan’s finger on earth.” Per a Bush adviser. Wow, another stellar piece of reporting by the assiduous Miller. But that was morals. In politics, Bush emulated Clinton. He found his own real estate in the Jewish leadership, the neocons. And married them. And never told AIPAC to give up its dream of a greater Israel.
Gotta run. I’m at the AIPAC convention. Yes baby. And McCain’s coming this morning. Wonder why….
