Did the First President Bush Lose His Job to the Israel Lobby?

Two newly-published reports suggest that the first President Bush, George H.W. Bush, lost his bid for a second term in the 1992 general election because of the Israel lobby.

First there's yesterday's Washington Post Magazine piece on the lobby. It explored the standoff between Bush and Yitzhak Shamir in 1992, when Bush tried to stop Israel from building more settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Bush paid a price... He got crushed in a small group of heavily Jewish precincts in states such as New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Florida in his November 1992 election loss to Bill Clinton.

The argument is made more emphatically in the Summer 2006 issue of Security Studies, in an important article on the effect of the Holocaust on our foreign policy titled: "The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy," by Michael Desch, a professor at Texas A&M.

The article states:

"Many believe that George H.W. Bush's defeat in 1992 was the result of Jewish-American opposition fueled by his hard line against Israeli settlements under the Shamir government."

Desch's evidence includes informal comments to students by the former President himself, in a visit to the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M in February 2005, a visit at which Old Man Bush decried the power of AIPAC (the preeminent pro-Israel lobby).

Neither of these reports is completely convincing to me. Yes, the Jewish vote turned against Bush. He had won 27 percent of it in '88, only 15 percent in '92. And the turn may well have cost him New Jersey and Ohio, states he had won by big margins four years earlier (and lost narrowly to Clinton). But Clinton won the presidency in '92 by a resounding electoral margin, 370 to 168, and Bush's gaining N.J. and Ohio wouldn't have changed the outcome.

Maybe there's a more extended analysis of how AIPAC and pro-Israel money changed the '92 race, but I haven't seen it...

But let's focus on what matters here. A former President believes that the pro-Israel lobby cost him his job. His son runs for President and is far more responsive than his father was to the Israel lobby. Right there you have a good indication of the power of the lobby. Of course we don't know what W.'s political calculations were on this issue. But everyone else has a theory about the effect of Papa Bush on W.; this is now mine. W. is a superb politician. He learned political lessons from his dad.

Even more important, consider the issue on which George H.W. Bush took on the Israel lobby: the building of settlements. He was holding up $10 billion in loan guarantees Israel desperately need to build housing for Russian emigres till Bush got an assurance that the loans would not fund settlements. Alas, in the end, Bush folded on the issue. As rightwinger (and social drinker) Christopher Hitchens wrote recently on Slate, "Almost everybody... concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe." An important component of that moral and political catastrophe has been the building of hundreds of thousands of (arguably illegal) homes on Palestinian land that some Jews regard as their ancient and present homeland. These settlements—colonies, under any conventional description—now hugely complicate the peace process. Many of them are encircled by Israel's 30-foot wall, which moves in and out of the West Bank from the old green line marking the '67 border. The settlements make a return to the '67 border more difficult and the checkpoints and restricted highways and everything else they necessitate are the reason that leftwingers talk of Bantustans and apartheid when they survey the divisions on the West Bank.

I have two Zionist friends who in kvelling about Israel to me recently added, in a regretful murmur, "I just wish they hadn't built all those settlements."

The point here is that when an American president tried to take a stand against a wave of religious zealotry that almost everybody concedes has created an international moral and political catastrophe, he had to knuckle under, and to this day he believes that the opposition cost him his job. Wow. Maybe he's wrong, but any discussion of the Israel lobby's power must include this case study. As John Mearsheimer, the professor who broke the seal on this forbidden subject (and who's been to Israel many times), pointed out on the Diane Rehm show recently, an independent American stance on the occupation and settlements would have been in the U.S.'s interests, and Israel's too. It would have helped our image in the Arab world, it might have prevented Israel from the inevitable brutalities of occupation, one of which Mearsheimer noted was the killing of the young American writer, Rachel Corrie.

The lobby's hurtful role in this political episode is only magnified by its refusal over the last few months to admit that it has any power at all. As the Israeli ambassador said yesterday on C-Span, It's just like the Italian lobby. Maybe that's why Bush lost Jersey?

Comments

[a citizen]

Why don't you pull that stick out of your ass and see if that smells like Israel too.

[jj mollo]

Citizen, of what country? Raising insult to an art form is not a substitute for exploring the issues. Have Israel's supporters decided that they must emulate their enemies? There is no way to prevail other than stabbing your friends in the back?

[Rowan Berkeley]

I must remind you that a few dogged critics (Jewish, actually) have been making this analysis for years. Blankfort here for instance:
http://www.leftcurve.org/LC27WebPages/IsraelLobby.html

[Rowan Berkeley]

and here is another Blankfort piece on the Lobby, this one bang up to date:
http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/2006/07/jeff-blankfort-influence-of-israel-and.html

[Reb Yudel]

Check out "Jewish Power" by JJ Goldbert (now editor of the Forward) which opens with this very point. Much compressed summary: anti-Bush rage was channeled into the Woford (sp?) special election in PA... which made Health Care the issue... which elected Clinton. But read the actual book.

[POles for Israel]

The Jewish Lobby: Then and Now

The British White Paper of April 1919 contained an intelligence report entitled Russia, No. 1 (1919), A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia. The kernel of the Paper is contained in the following extract from Dutch diplomat, Mr. Oudendyke’s Report: “Bolshevism.is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. The only manner in which this danger can be averted would be collective action on the part of all the Powers.”

The American document inspired by the British White Paper, treating of the financing of the Russian Revolution by the Jewish Bank of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, was drawn by the American Intelligence Service and transmitted by the French High Commissioner to his government. It was published by the Documentation Catholique of Paris on 6th March, 1920, and was preceded by the following remarks: “The authenticity of this document is guaranteed to us. With regard to the exactness of the information it contain, the American State Department must assume responsibility.” This document was quoted in 1920 in a supplement to the paper La Vieille France (The Old France) which added: “All the governments of the Entente were aware of this memorandum, drawn from the data of the American Intelligence Service and sent at the time to the French High Commissioner and his colleagues.”

Ren Fülőp-Miller in his book Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus (Amalthea-Verlag, Zűrich-Leipzig-Vienna. 1926) saw differently the sources of inspiration for Bolshevik revolution. “Dostoevski,” he wrote, “grasped and developed the identity between the peculiar variety of socialism long cherished and the idea of the Jesuits. Berdaiev has shown in an excellent analysis of Dostoevski’s Weltanschauung, that this writer found in the nihilistic and terrorist socialism of his time an idea which was identical with that at the root of the Catholic inquisition. He regarded the communist state established by force as nothing but the logical consequence and ultimate emanation of medieval Catholicism.

And here is another example of how the U.S. State Department propaganda machine works. Jane Mayer in her article The Manipulator. Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation? (The New Yorker, June 7, 2004) wrote: “After the attacks of September 11th, many in the Administration began to consider a preemptive strike against Saddam’s regime, and they eagerly received Chalabi’s intelligence briefings. When Scott Ritter a member of the U.N. team searching for Iraqi W.M.D. told Chalabi of his suspicion that Saddam may have had mobile chemical – or biological – weapons laboratories, which would explain why investigators hadn’t been able to find them, Chalabi fabricated a source for the mobile labs.”

In the months before the invasion of Iraq, Bush and Cheney both referred in public addresses to Saddam’s mobile weapons laboratories. Six months before the U.S. invasion, in a February 5, 2003, address, to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powel – who had initially found the intelligence on W.M.D inconclusive – spoke of unnamed eyewitnesses, one of whom has supplied “firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails.” It was, he testified, “one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq.”

And here is how the investigative reporter Jack Fairweather in his article Heroes in Error. How a fake general , a pliant media, and a master manipulator helped lead the U.S. into War for Mother Jones (March-April, 2006) described another shameful case of sexed-up intelligence.
Eight week after September 11, New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges and Christopher Buchanan, an associate producer of PBS’s Frontline – went to Lebanon to meet a mysterious Iraqi defector with information about Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program. He was, they were said, Jamal al-Ghurairy, an Iraqi lieutenant general who had fled Iraq. The interview was arranged by Nabeel Musawi, the political liaison of the Iraqi National Congress.
Two days later the story that spun out on the front page of the New York Times was as shocking as it was convincing. Ghuriary claimed that as a senior intelligence official, he had witnessed foreign Arab fighters training to hijack airplanes at the Salman Pak military facility south of Baghdad. Ghurairy also claimed a German scientist was working in a section of the base that produced biological agents.
The White House included the story of Salman Pak in its Decade of Deception and Defiance background paper prepared for President Bush’s September 12, 2002, speech to the United Nations General Assembly. Along with the tale of Mohammad Atta meeting Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague – another INC-hyped story – Ghurairy’s account helped establish the connection between Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers, making Iraq, like Afghanistan, a legitimate target for Bush’s war on terror.
The story of Saddam training foreign fighters to hijack airplanes was instrumental in building the case to invade Iraq. But it turns out that the Iraqi “general” who told the story to the New York Times and Frontline was a complete fake – a low-ranking former soldier who Ahmad Chalabi’s aides had coached to deceive the media.
J. Fairweather tracked down through tribal records and interviewed in a modest coffeehouse in Fallujah, the real Lt. General Ghurairy who insisted he never left Iraq and never talked to U.S. intelligence agents, the New York Times, or PBS. “I never met these people!” He insists. “The people who say this were trying to use my name to make war!”
Was it so difficult for the New York Times war correspondent to find a picture of the true general Ghureiry and compare it with a picture of the fake General?

[americangoy]

Rowan Berkeley,

thank you for the Jeff Blankfort links.

I will blog about those post haste.

Interestingly, he has come to the same conclusions about "the lobby" as I have.

[aaaa]

you are stupid

[seasonal jobs]

this is so crazy to think about.

apply for seasonal jobs