Here’s a link to Glenn Greenwald’s brilliant defenestration of O’Hanlon and Pollack for their comments on Iraq. Read it. I have one addendum. Greenwald states the following about Pollack’s sock, the Saban Center:
The above-the-political-fray Pollack is employed by the "Saban Center for Middle East Studies"
at Brookings — so named because it is funded with many millions of
dollars by billionaire Haim Saban, an Israeli-American neoconservative
who was a 2004 supporter of George Bush,
was a close associate of Ariel Sharon, and spent the 1990s persuading
Bill Clinton (with millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic
Party) to be more supportive of Israel.In a 2004 glowing profile, the NYT
described Saban as "throwing his weight and money around Washington
and, increasingly, the world, trying to influence all things Israeli,"
and in that article, Saban told the NYT: "I’m a one-issue guy
and my issue is Israel." The profile also reported: "While Mr. Saban is
a vocal opponent of President Bush — ‘I think Bush is just messing it
up every day more’ — he supports some of Mr. Bush’s policies. ‘On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk.’"
In essence, Saban is Marty Peretz but with money that he earned
himself. That is who backs Ken Pollack’s presumably large paychecks and
funds his Brookings war "scholarship".
Great. I would note that virtually the same case was made re Saban by Walt and Mearsheimer in their landmark Israel-lobby paper. And I have shown that Pollack’s crucial book on the Iraq invasion The Threatening Storm never once mentioned the Israeli occupation, while presuming to tell Americans how the "Arab street" feels about us.
My point here is that leftlib Greenwald, conservative realists Walt & Mearsheimer, and lefty me are all interested in the same issue, the lobby’s effect on the U.S. discourse. This is potentially a powerful consensus. Greenwald hasn’t gotten as far as we have, he just needs to connect the dots a little more (there’s actually great congruence between the views of a "neocon" like Saban and pro-war Israel-concerned "liberals" like Ken Pollack and Thomas Friedman), and take the lobby on frontally. Come on in, Glenn, the water’s boiling…
