It is testament to the strength of the U.S. discourse that nearly 5 years on, Walt and Mearsheimer keep on tickin. I know I say our politics are broken all the time, and they are broken, but as Mearsheimer himself has said, the internet has been a game-changer, and these men have been given oxygen by the internet. Given international oxygen, actually; though it has served the American discourse.
Mearsheimer is speaking at University of Wisconsin tomorrow night:
During the talk, sponsored by Student Progressive Dane and the Middle Eastern Law… Student Association, Mearsheimer will explain why there is not going to be a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and instead Israel will control of all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, it already does.
That Greater Israel, as former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barack and Ehud Olmert have argued, will be an apartheid state. However, it will be impossible for Israel to maintain itself over the long term as an apartheid state, because apartheid is antithetical to mainstream Western values as well as core Jewish values. In the long run, Greater Israel will become a democratic bi-national state dominated by its Palestinian citizens, who will outnumber the Jews in the entirety of the land.
Note that the list of sponsors includes Sister City Rafah-Madison, American Jews for a Just Peace, and the National Lawyers Guild. So Mearsheimer has found a community; and it largely on the left.
As for Steve Walt, people are passing around his takedown of George W. Bush’s memoir:
Don’t believe a word of it. George W. Bush’s presidency really was that bad — and the fact that Obama has largely followed the same course is less a measure of Bush’s wisdom than a reminder of the depth of the hole he dug his country into, as well as the institutionalized groupthink that dominates the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.
The piece includes many critiques of Bush’s Middle East policy, including his ignoring an overture from Iran in ’03, and invalidating the Palestinian elections of ’06 and giving the greenlight to Israel’s devastation of Lebanon in ’06.
