ARTICLE: “Backlash Over Book On Policy For Israel: Events featuring authors of a new work are canceled,” by Patricia Cohen, New York Times, 16 August 2007, p. B1.
NEWS ANALYSIS: “Events Prod U.S. to Make New Push for Mideast Deal,” by Steven Erlanger, New York Times, 17 August 2007, p. A5.
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by those venerable, establishment realists, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of U. Chicago, is destined to be a bestseller because nothing sells like controversy, and this tome will come with a boatload.
The book is expected to elaborate on the previous article of the same theme the two published in the spring of 2006. That article created a big stir.
Now, as I know something about what it takes to crank a book, it’s clear they got a big book deal from Farrar as soon as their article became famous. That’s how you get a book out 15 months later with this sort of major PR effort lined up, so clearly they seek to capitalize on the original response, which was white-hot in intensity.
I wouldn’t expect new arguments per se, just lots of supporting evidence and examples, which will be fought tooth-and-nail in what should be a vociferous blowback. Indeed, an opposition research book will be released by Palgrave on the same day by Abraham Foxman (“Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.”).
Man, I would hate to have a book coming out that week! Because not only are two slots gone on the NYT list (amazingly hard to crack), but the media time will be eaten up like crazy, crowding out anybody else trying to break in at the same time.
I am of two minds on the subject: when the article came out last year, I felt like it was the last, sad gasp of the realists playing the Jewish card to explain the complexities of a globalized world where their Newtonian logic no longer holds. [Realists discount globalization in general and economics in particular, preferring to measure power more traditionally, along with their super-abstraction, “national interests,” primarily in terms of military power and the balancing of that power among great powers. To the extent that economics matters, it’s primarily as a trigger for great power competition and warfare over resources and markets.]
So al-Qaeda, the radical Salafis, the war on terror and 9/11 … with none of these things easily explained in balance-of-power terms, we’re essentially treated to this subversion-from-within explanation that portrays how the world’s greatest power was led down this disastrous path of immense blowback (9/11) leading to miscalculations of imperial power (basically, Iraq). Like a Noam Chomsky or a Chalmers Johnson, villains must be found from inside our ranks because the more straight-forward explanations associated with globalization’s advance and traditional Islam’s negative response don’t exactly leave the usual targets to be blamed (corrupt, evil men sitting atop the system).
Arguments for deeper causality are thus refused, because scapegoats are more fun and fulfilling.
In a way, then, these books and their countering books belong to the same sort of 9/11 mythologizing/debunking genre, along with the traditional conspiracy peddlers that tell you the CIA planned 9/11 from start to finish, or that it was a Jewish conspiracy, or whatever. Simply put, people never want to hear that a dedicated small bunch of nuts can do that much damage--or that we’re really that vulnerable. Or that it’s finally time to fix the Middle East because globalization is going to f--k it up so bad in coming years that we have no choice.
No, they want to hear that it’s a vast conspiracy so beyond their everyman capacity to fight that it’s almost god-like, because then it becomes a fear beyond their powers to manage and they’re absolved from any real action beyond nurturing and/or harboring the fear itself. It’s like a religion for crisis freaks, and it’s the fastest growing one out there in this frantic day and age.
Again, to me, the realists are a fading school in crisis. I know, I know, it’s supposed to be the liberal interventionists in crisis because of Iraq’s many disappointments, but with so much of the national security community clearly moving in the direction of progressively solving that equation over time (Why? They can see the future writing on the wall.), the self-congratulatory crowing of the realists (“See! We told you Iraq would be hard! And you can’t fight a war against a tactic!”) sort of came and went with no real impact over the past couple of years.
Yeah, so it’s hard. So it’s complex. So it’s different from the past. What’s your fix for all that? Balancing China? Preparing for WWIII? More missile defense?
As the Middle East refuses to be a “blip” that allows our national security community to return to its past and desired focus on countering rising China, whose main threat now consists of diseased pigs and tainted toys and weird threats over bonds sales, that lengthening “blip” needs to be explained away. You’ve already heard plenty of the oil-Saudi-Syriana-Michael-Moore conspiracy stuff, so now let’s bring on Mel Brook’s “The Inquisition” (What a show!).
Indeed, what a show this will be come 4 September. Get out your race cards, folks...
But having said all that, I don’t find this discussion a bad one per se, despite the desperate motives on all sides. Anything that gets America to question its unquestionable “national interests” is good. If they’re worth defending, that will come out in the wash, but I say, let’s wash ‘em good.
We’re being sold a war right now with Iran that will likely prove the death knell for the Big Bang strategy and all the American lives so far sacrificed for that ambitious goal. And that’s a showstopper that need not occur, especially as dynamics in the region are finally gelling nicely toward the sort of movement I tried to depict in my Mideast-one-year-from-now-column (laid out nicely in the Erlanger piece, where he says “The Bush administration finally seems to understand, one American official said, that there is no sustainable status quo.” To which I reply, “Duh!” Wasn’t that the whole point of the Big Bang?!?!).
To the extent the Walt and Mearsheimer book weakens the go-to-war-with-Iran movement, which is highly fueled by the Israel lobby (I don’t know who could deny that), this will be a good thing. But the blowback such a debate may engender could likewise also get us the war we most surely do not need right now, primarily because it’s the fear of “rising Iran” that gets us so much of the regional potential for transformation.
Admittedly, there are a lot of ways for Big Bang fans to have their cake and eat it too, meaning pathways where we come very close to war with Iran and trigger the movement we want on a host of issues that would not otherwise come about without some shows of strength from our side. The problem is, of course, we’re talking about Bush and Cheney--especially the latter. These guys display no capacity for brinkmanship in that Nixon-Kissinger mode.
Still, the whole thing is gloriously ironic in the sense that Walt and Mearsheimer would never have gotten this sort of opportunity if not for the Big Bang strategy being pursued in the first place, thus opening the door for the full menu of reductionist theories to explain it all away.
Me? I stick with the same explanation I’ve had for years now: Bush the First Term was a lucky break from history, because here was a crowd ripe to rewrite the rules anyway, and 9/11 turned them from a pointless effort on China toward a well-targeted effort on the Persian Gulf. But Bush the Second Term was slated for disaster, for, as I explained in my 2004 call for Kerry, these guys might have been great for proposing new rulesets, they just weren’t the guys we needed to sell them to the rest of the world. In effect, Bush the Second Term is like the revolutionary first generation living too long in power: some guys are good for smashing the old order, but they’re never the ones you want for the rebuild of the next one.
In my grand strategy, then, the Israel lobby is like any other lobby, really: it can screw things up but it can never really make anything good happen on its own, so their sins are almost exclusively of commission in something like this Long War against radical extremism.
So again, if Walt and Mearsheimer weaken the Israel lobby’s current go-to-war-with-Iran effort, that could be a great example of the Big Bang’s many secondary and tertiary effects basically canceling each other out--for the better.
Monday, August 20, 2007 at 5:06AM 
