Lobbying Degree Zero (Page 2)

So where does that leave us? With a pro-Israel lobby consisting, not surprisingly, of pro-Israel activists who are essentially unopposed in a foreign-policy establishment in which the pro-Israel consensus is virtually 100 percent. The arrangement calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges's sly parable about a map so detailed that it was as big as the empire it was meant to depict. The Israel lobby, by the same token, is a conspiracy so vast that it is essentially conterminous with the policy-making centers it aims to control. Since it has the field to itself in Washington, it is no longer a lobby but a kind of committee of the whole. It has no need to manipulate the government because, considering the extraordinary degree of bipartisan support that it enjoys, it pretty much is the government.

Thus, the lobby paradigm (to lapse for a moment into wonk-speak) is inadequate to the subject at hand. Yet Mearsheimer and Walt cling to it regardless. They advance a dualistic view that has the US national interest in one corner and the Israel lobby in the other, with the latter consistently riding roughshod over the former. This entirely artificial distinction leads to some remarkable conclusions, the most astounding of which is that the invasion of Iraq did not originate in a breakdown or crisis in American politics but rather was imposed on a reluctant Bush Administration from without: "There is abundant evidence that Israel and the lobby played crucial roles in making that war happen.... Had the circumstances been different, they would not have been able to get the United States to go to war. But without their efforts, America would probably not be in Iraq today."

The same goes for US policy regarding Syria and Iran. According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the lobby has pushed Bush "to take a more confrontational line toward Syria than he would probably have adopted on his own," while "Israel and the lobby...are the central forces today behind all the talk in the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill about using military force to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities." If it wasn't for the lobby, they add, "the United States would almost certainly have a different and more effective Iran policy," which is to say, one that relied more on persuasion than military force.

The United States as inherently diplomatic and nonconfrontational? Few people, on either the right or left, would take such a notion seriously. Mearsheimer and Walt assume a degree of pliability on America's part that is astonishing given the record of American belligerence during the postwar period and especially since 9/11, when the United States has gone into imperial overdrive.

Nowhere is this upside-down Weltanschauung more apparent than in the authors' contention that oil was not a factor in the invasion of Iraq because Saddam, rather than hoarding Iraq's oil or giving it to America's enemies, would have been happy to sell it to anyone who could pay hard cash. With the price of crude hovering around $30 a barrel, roughly forty percent of the current level, petroleum in the months leading up to the war was cheap and abundant and therefore irrelevant to the decision to invade. "Moreover," Mearsheimer and Walt write, "if the United States wanted to conquer another country in order to gain control of its oil, Saudi Arabia--with larger reserves and a smaller population--would have been a much more attractive target." And since Osama bin Laden is a Saudi, like fifteen of the nineteen hijackers involved in 9/11, the attacks would have provided "an ideal pretext" for going after Saudi Arabia. Yet the United States did not attack Saudi Arabia; it attacked another country, with a larger and better armed population--and fewer oil reserves. Mearsheimer and Walt's conclusion: whatever goals the Bush Administration had on its mind going into Baghdad, gaining control of Persian Gulf oil reserves was not one of them.

This is remarkably simplistic. True, oil was cheap and abundant in 2003. In fact, had it not been for the US-led trade sanctions on Iraq, oil would have been more abundant, since Saddam would have had sufficient export earnings to modernize the Iraqi oil industry and increase production. But the value of oil is based on more than just its spot price, a fact that's crucial to understanding both Saddam's hold on power and America's increasingly hostile response to it.

The nations of the Persian Gulf are not only major oil exporters but also among the world's biggest consumers of military hardware. Between 1995 and 2002, according to Michael T. Klare's Blood and Oil (2004), eight Persian Gulf nations (Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) accounted for more than $87 billion in arms purchases, more than 60 percent of it from non-US sources. The combination of petrodollars and advanced weaponry has fueled nearly three decades of war in the region and, in the process, allowed Saddam to amass an enormous amount of power even as his support was eroding at the base. The United States did not mind when he used his weaponry to attack Iran in 1980, but it was unforgiving when he used it to invade Kuwait, a close American ally, a decade later. Saddam was no longer a useful counterweight to revolutionary Iran but a problem waiting to be solved. Accumulated oil wealth and military hardware kept him in power a dozen years longer, but the delay made Bush all the more determined to take him down.

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