Four days into his new blog, Steve Walt has reponded to the smears against him by Jeffrey "Uh-oh, Discourse is Changing Fast, I Staked Out the Wrong Position on Gaza Slaughter" Goldberg and Russ Douthat. Walt specifically takes Goldberg apart on his accusation that Walt and Mearsheimer said that Jews start all wars, something Goldberg said at the Yivo monsterball in '07.Walt:
Now Goldberg refers to me as someone who thinks "the Jews start all
wars." Does he have any evidence to support this very serious
accusation? Of course not. He's just using the same tired smear tactics
that Israel's defenders commonly rely on when they can’t refute what
someone actually wrote.
If anyone's curious, here's my off-the-top of my head coding of Arab-Israeli wars since 1948:
1948:
Palestinian Arabs attack nascent Jewish state; several Arab states
eventually join in. Zionists/Israelis win, and approximately 700,000
Palestinians are expelled or flee from the new Jewish state.
1956:
Israel, France, and Great Britain attack Egypt. U.S. pressure
eventually forces all three to withdraw from the territories they
captured in the war.
1967: Israel launches surprise attack
on Egypt and then Syria. Jordan foolishly enters the war and loses the
West Bank and East Jerusalem.
1969: Egypt launches the
"War of Attrition" against Israeli forces along the Suez Canal Zone.
Fighting ends via ceasefire agreement in June 1970.
1973:
Egypt and Syria launch surprise attack against Israeli forces on the
Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula and are eventually repulsed by the
IDF.
1982: Israel invades Lebanon and IDF occupies southern portion until 2000.
Hezbollah captures/kills IDF soldiers in cross-border raid, Israel
escalates to open warfare against Hezbollah and broader Lebanese
society.
So I don't think "the Jews start all wars" and I never
did. Maybe Goldberg thinks I "blame the Jews" for the Iraq war. If so,
he’s wrong. We did write that the influence of the neoconservatives was
one of the main causes of the war, a point that the neocons used to brag about [amazing link to Kristol piece gloating about the war] and one that many other writers have made. That claim is simply not very controversial at this point: it was the neocons who dreamed up the idea and pushed it when nobody else was, so it's hard to imagine our doing it absent their influence.
