If Iraq had not been an oil exporter--if, as Noam Chomsky once observed, it had been a pickle exporter in the middle of the Indian Ocean--it would never have come into America's line of fire. Mearsheimer and Walt's failure to consider this is perplexing, as is their failure to consider what would have happened had the invasion gone according to plan. If, through some miracle, Washington had succeeded in transforming Iraq into a peaceful little outpost of American-style liberal capitalism, the United States would have gained a commanding position at the center of global oil production, one that would have enabled it to bring Iran to heel and impose "reforms" on Saudi Arabia as well. OPEC might still control energy production, but America would control OPEC, and a generation of critics of US militarism would have had to hold their tongues. As Alan Greenspan puts it in his new memoir, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

As for Mearsheimer and Walt's comment that Bush would have been better off invading Saudi Arabia, all one can do is shake one's head in disbelief. The House of Saud is America's oldest ally and business partner in the Middle East, older even than Israel. For the United States to invade it after 9/11 would have been an admission that it had been wrong to go to war against Baghdad ten years earlier to protect the Saudis from the threat of an Iraqi invasion. And admitting a mistake is something an imperial power like the United States will rarely do.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is filled with such bewildering moments. The authors cannot understand why Bush only mildly rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when Sharon ordered a helicopter missile attack on Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi in the Gaza Strip in June 2003. (The attack was unsuccessful, although a second strike finished him off the following April.) The best explanation Mearsheimer and Walt can come up with is that House Speaker Tom DeLay, a Christian Zionist and therefore a charter member of the Israel lobby, threatened recriminations on Capitol Hill if the White House's response was any stronger. Yet they fail to mention that just a few months earlier in Yemen, the CIA had used a remote-controlled Hellfire missile to destroy a car containing an accused Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and five others. Bush bragged about the incident in his 2003 State of the Union address, which is the chief reason he was unable to protest too vigorously when Israel used the same tactics against a leading "terrorist" of Hamas.

Curiously enough, Mearsheimer and Walt's thin sense of history resembles Bush's. Like Bush, who sees terrorism in essentially metaphysical terms (it is something evildoers do because they are evil), the authors have little to say concerning the actual social, political and historical conditions that have allowed organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to grow so powerful in the first place. The closest they come to acknowledging such conditions is when they write that "the lobby's effectiveness...reflects the basic dynamics of interest group politics in a pluralistic society. In a democracy, even relatively small groups can exercise considerable influence if they are strongly committed to a particular issue." The United States is vulnerable to manipulation by certain well-organized groups, in other words, because it is open and democratic. It is a case of America yet again being too benevolent for its own good.

Bush was a good deal more cogent when he told AIPAC in May 2004 that the reason America and Israel are natural allies is that they were both founded by immigrants escaping religious persecution in other lands. We have both built vibrant democracies, built on the rule of law and market economies. And we're both countries founded on certain basic beliefs: that God watches over the affairs of men and values every life.... The Israeli people have always had enemies at their borders and terrorists close at hand. Again and again, Israel has defended itself with skill and heroism. And as a result of the courage of the Israeli people, Israel has earned the respect of the American people.

Stripped of its self-serving rhetoric, what Bush's remarks boil down to is that Israel and the United States are both Zionist entities, or, if you will, crusader states convinced that they are a chosen people on a sacred mission to conquer and purify the Holy Land. Because God "values every life" within their borders, they feel justified in taking the lives of those outside to further divine goals. If "Israel has earned the respect of the American people," it is because the United States, devastated by its experience in Vietnam and humiliated by the embassy takeover in Tehran, watched with growing envy as Israel racked up stunning military victories in 1967 and 1973 and then sent specially outfitted jets streaking across the desert to bomb Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 (a feat the White House would dearly like to emulate in Iran). The Israel Defense Forces were everything that aggressive imperial elements in Washington wanted America's traumatized military to be. Hence, in their bipartisan struggle to overcome "the Vietnam syndrome," the Republicans and Democrats set about remodeling themselves as overseas branches of Israel's hawkish Likud Party. Groups like AIPAC did not grow of their own accord. Instead, the war party in Washington encouraged them to grow to help it win its battles on Capitol Hill.

Lobbyists did not force members of Congress to give the Likud heavyweight Benjamin Netanyahu a five-minute standing ovation when he addressed a joint session in 1996. When Ariel Sharon told William Safire a couple of months after 9/11, "You in America are in a war against terror. We in Israel are in a war against terror. It's the same war," no one forced members of Congress to nod like so many bobble-heads in agreement, as Hillary Clinton did a few months later when, just as Israeli troops were invading Nablus and Jenin in the West Bank, she declared, "We are one with the Israelis. Those who have supported Israel in the past have even more of a reason to do so now." And they did so because they wanted to, because they thought the voters wanted them to or because they worried that they would be deemed unreliable if they did not. The problem is not that America is too democratic but that democratic debate about the Middle East has all but collapsed, which is the sole reason the militarists have been able to flourish.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.