A slim hope

Stephen M. Walt, left, and John J. Mearsheimer.

David Seaton's News Links
Why do I think at this point that McCain would be a better foreign policy choice than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama? Basically because I think that on foreign policy, deep down, he is in the line of traditional, Eisenhower Republicanism. It is George W. Bush and Cheney that are outside the party traditions, up to their necks in Wilsonism.

Frankly I think McCain wants to actually do what Dubya said he wanted to do in 2000. That would be a G.H.W. Bush "restoration". Baker, Scowcroft, Powell doctrine stuff. Even Rice was supposed to be in that line. The surprise was when, after 9-11 Bush-II threw in his lot with the former Trotskista neocons. Even Yassir Arafat, who was pretty sharp, thought that Dubya was going to be like his father... they say the disappointment broke the old fellow's heart (sniff).

Although unfortunately phrased, Baker correctly defined the basic relationship between the oilmen Republicans and the Jewish community. I don't think that underlying logic has really changed. I suspect (hope?, pray?) that McCain is a closet Mearsheimer-Walt devotee.

The surprise was Dubya, who went against his entire culture and background to avoid antagonizing the people his father thought had cost him his reelection. I don't imagine that McCain has the same oedipal problems with Bush-I that Bush-II does, nor to share in his evangelical, last-days devotion to maximalist Zionism. In short, I'm hoping that he is an old fashioned, country club Republican.

As to McCain's professions of undying support for Israel, as Master Sun said, "war is deception": you don't telegraph your intentions. Keep AIPAC neutral. Talk about a hyperbolic, "hundred years in Iraq". Talk about, "bomb, bomb, bomb: bomb, bomb Iran". Neither a hundred years in Iraq nor bombing Iran appear doable: America is maxed out.

The fact is that if the USA could go to war with Iran it would have already happened; Cheney would have done it long ago if he could have. However, the United States' military is overextended and weary, and the country is on the brink of financial collapse. Setting the Middle East on fire would only push it over the edge.

Getting out of Iraq with some dignity is the number one foreign policy priority of the USA and the only existent plan for getting out of Iraq is the Baker Iraq Study Group's and negotiating with Iran is the key to its success. That is why the Israelis still hate Baker.

My feeling is that domestic policy (health care, education) should be in the hands of the Democrats and foreign policy should be in the hands of the "realists" and that US foreign policy should be deliberately minimalist, not the sort of Quixotic, Wilsonian brew that Obama is offering up or the Madeline Albright redux that Hillary is flogging.

None of this is at all sure, but frankly I cannot see any other successful alternative. DS

Lady Mearsheimerley's Lover

David Seaton's News Links

I apologize right off for the horrible pun on Mearsheimer and "Lady Chatterley", but as I read all the commentary about Mearsheimer and Walt's book, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" I suddenly had a flashback to when D. H. Lawrence's book came out in the states.

I was a high school freshman when the book was finally allowed to be published and I still remember the scandal around the book and reading a hidden copy of it one summer and how arousing it was then to read in cold print, forbidden language that today is normal currency among eight year old girls.

The same gasping prurience and pussy footing is now hanging around M&W's book as the authors use the "forbidden words" describing what most of world sees as perfectly obvious.

I imagine that before too long, after the taboo is broken, its thesis will be common currency at every level in America and it will be fun to see how the politicians, who are desperate for campaign contributions, will try to avoid mentioning something that everyone else, everywhere, is talking about.

Read the NYT review of M&W:
The reviewer, William Grimes, would obviously like to rip their hearts out, but he cannot dismiss them in Dershowitz fashion. Finally his arguments are reduced to whimpering and whining, here is a sample:

(...)"The general tone of hostility to Israel grates on the nerves, however, along with an unignorable impression that hardheaded political realism can be subject to its own peculiar fantasies. Israel is not simply one country among many, for example, just as Britain is not. Americans feel strong ties of history, religion, culture and, yes, sentiment, that the authors recognize, but only in an airy, abstract way.

They also seem to feel that, with Israel and its lobby pushed to the side, the desert will bloom with flowers. A peace deal with Syria would surely follow, with a resultant end to hostile activity by Hezbollah and Hamas. Next would come a Palestinian state, depriving Al Qaeda of its principal recruiting tool. (The authors wave away the idea that Islamic terrorism thrives for other reasons.) Well, yes, Iran does seem to be a problem, but the authors argue that no one should be particularly bothered by an Iran with nuclear weapons. And on and on.

“It is time,” Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt write, “for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country.” But it’s not. And America won’t. That’s realism."(END QUOTE)

That for the "gray lady" is the equivalent of throwing in the towel: they cannot ignore or really trash the book, they would like to, but they can't...

Trying to compare Israel to Britain is really a pitiful ploy... Do you know how many times the USA nearly went to war with the UK? We actually went to war twice. Do you know how much we charged them for the "lend-lease destroyers" when they had their backs to the wall in WWII? Do you know how "special" England is for Irish Americans? What a load of rubbish!

I would say then that it's "official", the book cannot be "ignored". The NYT is America's newspaper of reference and they have not been able to ignore it and Grimes has gingerly waltzed around the charge of antisemitism... hinting around it by calling the analysis, "cold".

Not only is the book not to be ignored, its hot, hot, hot. The Israelis better start their war soon, by next week it might be too late. DS

"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy ": a dangerous road

David Seaton's News Links
What strikes me most on reading all the Mearsheimer-Walt and Finkelstein material is the almost superhuman amount of effort, work and treasure involved in the Lobby's keeping this lead balloon full of bullshit airborn for so many years: really fooling "all of the people, all of the time".

Now the cat is out of the bag, and soon everybody will be nodding and winking and nudging each other every time a Foxman or a Dershowitz opens his mouth, but at the same time all the media support and the campaign financing will still be in place. That will mean that nobody in congress will dare move a muscle. Everybody in the country will be talking about this, at work, at dinner, but no presidential candidate will dare mention it and all of this will then turn into a huge joke. The general public will hold the political class in open, sniggering, contempt.

Of course this will find some political expression somehow... what, I don't know, but it will have to be outside the major parties. If we go to war with Iran and it turns out to be the mother of disasters (imagine an aircraft carrier sunk for starters), something that triggers a severe economic downturn, one that has a sizable quotient of "financial engineering", with poor people being thrown out of their homes, than a sizable part of the American population will lay that disaster square at the feet of the American Jewish community. It has happened before.

There have been three countries in "Christendom" where the Jews have lived "golden ages": Spain, Germany and the United States. Massive waves of antisemitism nearly destroyed the first two. The Spanish have a saying, "When you see your neighbor's beard on fire, put your beard to soak". What is imperative is that we "do nuances", the sheep must be separated from the goats, the wheat from the chaff and babies must not be thrown out with the bath water. The situation that Mearsheimer and Walt present must be clarified and corrected, but without frightening old "Mrs. Goldberg" that owns the corner 'delly' for even a moment. The future of the United States as country any civilized person would care to ever live in hangs in the balance. DS

Bromwich: Iraq, Israel, Iran - Huffington Post
Abstract: The chief orchestrater of the second neoconservative war of aggression is Elliott Abrams. Convicted for deceptions around Iran-Contra, as Lewis Libby was convicted for deceptions stemming from Iraq--and pardoned by the elder Bush just as Libby had his sentence commuted by the younger--Abrams now presides over the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. All of the wildness of this astonishing functionary and all his reckless love of subversion will be required to pump up the "imminent danger" of Iran. For here, as with Iraq, the danger can only be made to look imminent by manipulation and forgery. On all sober estimates, Iran is several months from mastering the nuclear cycle, and several years from producing a weapon. Whereas Israel for decades has been in possession of a substantial nuclear arsenal. How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection. Among many possible lines of inquiry, the senators might begin by recognizing that the United States has other allies in Asia besides Israel. One of those allies is India; and there is a further point of resemblance. In a distinct exception to our anti-proliferation policy, we have allowed India to develop nuclear weapons; just as, in an earlier such exception, we allowed Israel to do the same. But suppose we read tomorrow a statement by the director of the South Asia desk of the National Security Council which declared: "There can be no doubt that Hindus are to stand apart from any nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Hindu to be apart--except in India--from the rest of the population." Suppose, further, we knew this man still held these beliefs at a time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan; and that he had recently channeled 86 million dollars to regional gangs and militias bent on increasing the tension. Would we not conclude that something in our counsels of state had gone seriously out of joint? The Mearsheimer-Walt study of American policy deserves to be widely read and discussed. It could not be more timely. If the speeches and saber-rattling by the president, the ambassador to Iraq, and several army officers mean anything, they mean that Cheney and Abrams are preparing to do to Iran what Cheney and Wolfowitz did to Iraq. They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran. Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen. READ IT ALL

Mearsheimer and Walt

David Seaton's News Links
Mearsheimer and Walt both belong to the "realist" school of power politics. In this view of world affairs, nations have permanent "interests", not permanent allies. If a country is useful to the USA at any moment it is protected and if not it isn't. We support a military dictator in Pakistan because it useful to do so and we strangle Cuba because it opposes our policies.

America's permanent interests in the Middle East are: access to oil at a reasonable price, free movement of goods and warships through the Suez canal and more recently that its regimes not export terrorists to the United States and its "clients".

During the Cold War, specifically after the Six Day war of 1967 where Israel thrashed, trashed and humiliated the Soviet Union's clients, Israel was seen to be a valuable asset for the USA in the Middle East and much interest was shown in fostering the relationship. Perhaps the most important dividend of supporting Israel was to woo Egypt, the most important country in the region, away from its alliance with the USSR. Israel then became America's "watchdog" in the ME.

What is more curious is Norman Finkelstein's theory that these American Jewish elites themselves only really became interested in Israel when the Jewish state became a major strategic asset for the USA. (Before 1967, Zionists were seen to be too socialist for American elite taste) These Jewish elites, again according to Finkelstein, have used their role as "intermediaries" of Israel as a tool to pry open the doors of American power elites and join the WASP elites at the trough.

If the by any chance Israel were ever to be seen as a gross liability to US interests (as it seems to be now to many observers here and abroad), and that for the Jewish elites being seen to promote Israel a handicap to their access to those corridors of power, than these Jewish elites might suddenly cool off toward Israel considerably. I remember an article written by Charles Krauthammer (sorry no link) during last summer's war in Lebanon where he bluntly and nastily (Krauthammer the antisemite?) warned the Israelis that military failure would have such an effect on the "special relationship".

This why I think that the book will not be "ignored", just as Mearsheimer and Walt's LRB article was not ignored. Because although the Jewish elites of America are very powerful and influential, they are not the only powerful and influential ones in America and I think that a lot of coldblooded, thin lipped, rich old WASPs of the Brent Scowcroft, James Baker variety have come to the conclusion that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, is now a geopolitical millstone around America's neck. And these "old, white men" want these views fully aired and debated and the more effort Foxman and Dershowitz (to name two) make to "silence" the book, the more it will sell and the more people will talk about it. That is why the professors were encouraged to write the article and that's why the book is getting a top publisher.

As this collides with the neocon fall campaign to start a war with Iran, I think we are going to see one of the nastiest political seasons in Washington since the late 1850s. DS

Vacations End

David Seaton's News Links
A long month of peace and quiet has finished for me, and much rested and refreshed, I'm back staring at this screen and trying to figure out what's going to happen next and what it means.

The first thing that seems to be on our plate in the next few weeks is the conflict between a neocon drive to start a war with Iran ASAP and the publication of Mearsheimer and Walt's seminal book, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" to be in book store shelves in the next few days.

These two campaigns are on a collision course. Whatever the rights and wrongs of all of this are, I can see that something of train wreck like proportions is going to happen and after it has happened the United States will be another country and not a very pleasant one, I fear.

Anyhow , it's nice to be back and I hope you are well, bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready for another year of endless war, Bush and his gang of idiot's nauseating mendacity and the nightmare like feeling of paralyzed helpless as disaster unfolds in slow motion. DS

Antisemitism: a footnote - II

David Seaton's News Links
Continuing from a previous post it important to underline that murderous, antisemitism still exists. The charming youngster in the photo on the right is a German neo-Nazi. Antisemites still exist and they hate Jews... all Jews, just as they always have. They would hate Tony Judt as much as the ADL or AIPAC apparently do... Not because of his political stand, but because he is Jewish, they don't consider him a "self-hating Jew". They don't need any Jewish help to hate Jews. They would hate Amira Hass or Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, or even Sandy Koufax if it came to that, simply because these people all are Jewish. It is not acceptable that people who make a reasonable criticism of Israel and its relationship with the United States, as former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter has, be hysterically smeared or that two well qualified and respected academics such as Mearsheimer and Walt be classed with the skinhead in our picture. This really can't continue. At this moment it is absolutely imperative for Americans to define the terms, "antisemite", "antisemitism" and "antisemitic", with great precision. Why? Because the United States is in the process of suffering (it is only beginning) the greatest humiliation of its entire history in Iraq. The origins of this war of choice are obscure and as its story unfolds and as the disaster and sense of humiliation deepens, Americans will want to get to the bottom of who was responsible. It appears at this point that the Israeli right wing have their fingerprints all over it. Their relation to the neocons and to AIPAC is going to be studied under a microscope. This is inevitable. With today's viral technology if the debate is suppressed, even the result of a "who killed Kennedy?" treatment of this subject would be devastating for US/Israeli relations. It is absolutely essential to distinguish the individuals and the specific organizations responsible and to avoid at all cost a "vee vas stabbed in der back," antisemitic surge, because that would literally tear the American social fabric apart as it did Spain's and Germany's before. It is absolutely essential that a natural surge of anti-Israeli feeling; natural, because it appears that a foreign country has led the USA into a great disaster, that these feelings not be turned against America's Jewish community, a community which is an essential, fundamental, part of the United States of America, warp and woof. Accusations of "double loyalty" should not be bandied about frivolously, the question of "double loyalty" has always existed in the USA, a country of immigrants. I'll give a personal example: as a boy I have been at parties with Irish-Americans, where the hat was passed for the IRA and it was soon filled up. The IRA is a terrorist organization and also a symbol of Irish independence and the US government has always frowned upon it, to say the least. The accusation of double loyalty never came up, because the USA has no strategic interest in Ireland or Britain's relation with Ireland. For the USA the "troubles" are a domestic issue for courting the Irish vote. Israel and American Jewish support of Israel has been more or less an element of US domestic politics (this is horribly unfair to the Palestinians) till now. That has changed forever. Israel's fatal mistake was to draw the USA into a military adventure which is tearing American power and prestige to shreds. This is going to cost Israel dearly, but there is no reason it should cost America's Jewish community. The only way it could is if this hysterical attacking of anyone who states the obvious as an antisemite, making them out to be like the fellow in the photo, continues unabated. Nobody likes to be insulted, not just Jewish people. DS

PS. Phil Weiss (who is Jewish and thus also hated by antisemites) has a "must read" post over at New York Observer, the subject is, "Jimmy Carter Can't Say What Jewish Critics of Israel Are Free to Say". He proceeds to cite Israel's famous UN Abba Eban, chapter and verse on the subject of Jewish pressure and influence in US politics.

In New Middle East, Tests for an Old Friendship - New York Times

David Seaton's News Links

I have made an extremely long excerpt from this front page article of the New York Times and have taken the liberty of putting certain key phrases in bold face, because for a careful reader they spell out the clear message that the Israelis feel that they have only a narrowing window of opportunity to solve the Iran question to their satisfaction. The Republican "realists" led by James ("fuck the Jews") Baker are back. The only way for the USA to leave Iraq with even a shred of dignity is to make a deal with Iran. The only way to preserve US interests in the Middle East is to ensure the independence and safety of the Palestinian people. That means the Israelis would have to abandon the land they took in 1967. What comes after Bush? How much traction are Mearsheimer and Walt getting among American elites? The entire flow of the situation is going against Israeli interests. It is quite possible that before the new US Congress takes office that Israel will attack Iran and that the Democrats (Hillary Clinton is Senator from NY) will accuse Bush of "abandoning Israel". This may be the only chance the Israelis have of postponing the internationalization of Jerusalem for another few years. DS

Abstract: Even before the American elections, a certain wariness had crept into the intimate friendship between Israel and the United States. The summer war in Lebanon produced questions in Washington about the competence of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In Jerusalem, there were worries about the American approach to Iran and the Palestinians. (...) the Israelis balk at President Bush’s embrace of regional change through promotion of Arab democracy. They view his effort as naïve and counterproductive, (...) officials here have long focused on what they consider a much bigger concern: preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons. They say the American policies that have empowered Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have been counterproductive to Israel’s interests That concern is bound to be the subtext when Mr. Olmert goes to the White House on Monday. And now the Democratic sweep has created fresh concerns that the administration(...) will turn more to accommodation and compromise. President Bush has chosen as his next secretary of defense Robert M. Gates, who in the past has been highly critical of the administration’s refusal to engage in dialogue with Iran. The defeat for the party of Mr. Bush, “possibly the friendliest president we’ve ever had,” said Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, “raises question marks regarding the administration’s ability to promote its diplomatic and security objectives.”(...) one senior Israeli official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, after long, recent discussions with top Bush administration officials. “Are they committed to keeping the Iranians from actually building a weapon? I think so. Are they committed to keeping them from putting together all the parts they need? I’m not sure.” The Israelis say Washington was disappointed in their performance against Hezbollah. They are right: inside the White House, said one senior official there, who agreed to speak about internal deliberations on condition of anonymity, “Bush and Cheney believed that this would be another Six-Day War, or on the outside, two weeks.” “They believed it because that’s what the Israelis said,” the official said For Israelis, this failure to deliver poses a risk that cannot be ignored, especially when Iran is on the table. “Most people in Israel are not satisfied by our performance in Lebanon,” said Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, foreign minister and ambassador to Washington. “So if Israel enjoys this preferred position as an ally of the U.S. and a valuable ally in the fight against terrorism and now is shown to be not that effective and maybe not even that valuable, and to some extent even disappointing, that could put something of a damper on what’s happening.(...) Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States who is president of Tel Aviv University, said that Israelis, no matter their appreciation for American support, could not hand over the problem of Iran to Washington. He said: “Can we rely on the United States alone and say we abdicate our responsibility for dealing with the matter, and let the United States do what it wants? No, by no means.”(...) In September, Israel was abuzz over a speech by an American official that got little coverage in the American news media. Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to Ms. Rice, had addressed the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, considered sympathetic to Israel’s interest(...) Mr. Zelikow, in the last of 10 points, suggested that to build a coalition to deal with Iran, the United States needed to make progress on solving the Arab-Israeli dispute. “For the Arab moderates and for the Europeans, some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is just a sine qua non for their ability to cooperate actively with the United States on a lot of other things that we care about,” he said. The message seemed perfectly clear to Israelis: the Bush administration would demand Israeli concessions on the Palestinian issue to hold together an American-led coalition on Iran.(...) Mr. Zelikow’s close ties to Ms. Rice are well known, and the furor over his comments was amplified because they appeared to some to echo criticisms published in March in The London Review of Books by two American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.They suggested that from the White House to Capitol Hill, Israel’s interests have been confused with America’s, that Israel is more of a security burden than an asset and that the “Israel lobby” in America, including Jewish policy makers, have an undue influence over American foreign policy. In late August, appearing in front of an Islamic group in Washington, Mr. Mearsheimer extended the argument to say that American support of the war in Lebanon had been another example of Israeli interests trumping American ones. The essay argued that without the Israel lobby the United States would not have gone to war in Iraq and implied that the same forces could drag the United States into another military confrontation on Israel’s behalf, with Iran. It urged more American pressure to solve the Palestinian question as the best cure for regional instability.(...) The Iran confrontation, Mr. Arens said, will bolster that partnership. “The president said that he sees a clear and present danger with Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons and it’s obvious that this is a clear and present danger for the state of Israel,” he said. “Although a small country, we are not a minor party. When people talk about the possibility of a military option, what are they talking about? The U.S. or maybe Israel to take that move, not the U.S. or Germany or France.” He acknowledged, however, “That inevitably will lead people who are critical of the position of the president to be critical of Israel, because we are seen as a partner in this campaign, and it is not a very big step to say that Israel is leading the U.S., or misleading the U.S., by the nose in this thing.”(...) No Israeli knows if the next American president will be as tough on Iran or as loyal to Israel as Mr. Bush. If Mr. Bush does not act, Israelis say, by the time the next president takes office, in January 2009, Iran will be well on its way to a bomb, and Washington may not back Israeli responses.(...) Mr. Alpher, the former Israeli negotiator, is concerned that if Mr. Bush ultimately negotiates with Iran, “we need to ensure that the United States doesn’t sell us down the river.” It is fine for Israel to say that Iran is the world’s problem, he said. “But if the world solves it diplomatically,” he added, “will it be at our expense?” The world looks different to nearly all Israelis across the political spectrum than it does to people in most other countries. “Unlike Bush, an Israeli leader looks at Iran through the prism of the Holocaust and his responsibility to the ongoing existence of the Jewish people,” Mr. Alpher said. “It may sound pompous, but at the end of the day it matters, and so we may be willing to do the strangest things.” (...) Despite the anxieties here over Lebanon, Iran and academic essays, opinion polls show that Americans are solidly in support of Israel, with new support coming from evangelical Christians. Mr. Arens, the former defense minister, said of the Europeans: “They don’t like us — what can we do? What else is new? We would like to be liked by everyone, of course, but it’s the relationship with the United States that really matters.” (emphasis mine) READ ALL