Mondoweiss

Mearsheimer Was Frequent Contributor to NYT Op-Ed Page for a Decade. Then He Stepped on Third Rail

After doing an item yesterday on Kenneth Pollack's incredible endurance as an expert in the op-ed pages of the NY Times even after being dead wrong about Iraq, I went on the Times site and typed in the name "John Mearsheimer."

The realist scholar at U of Chicago used to be a Times regular. Starting in the late '80s, the most important newspaper in the world granted him status as a sober expert on foreign relations. Quoted in articles, he was also a frequent contributor to the Op-Ed page, publishing pieces about partition in the Balkans, in favor of India's nuclear power as a deterrent (twice on that subject; here: India Needs the Bomb), and pushing the Gulf War in '91. (I forgot about that). After Sept. 11, he held forth on the Afghan war. (He was also a presence in the letters column, here condemning antisemitic comments by a scholar with a Nazi past.)

Then in '03 Mearsheimer and Harvard prof Stephen Walt published an Op-Ed in the Times against the Iraq war, in which they argued that the war party had only produced "slender threads" of evidence to support preemptive war. The two clairvoyants went on:

In addition to the lives lost, toppling Saddam Hussein would cost at least $50 billion to $100 billion, at a time when our economy is sluggish and huge budget deficits are predicted for years. Because the United States would have to occupy Iraq for years, the actual cost of this war would most likely be much larger. And because most of the world thinks war is a mistake, we would get little help from other countries.

And then: poof, Mearsheimer hasn't been on the Op-Ed page since. By my count, he had about 10 Op-Eds in the decade before that Iraq war piece. (I assume some of these were solicited by the Times.) He has had none since. And this in the prime of his career, doing his most important work.

There are two factors at work here. Being against the Iraq war has hurt a lot of people's careers; we're still waiting for our Debacle Dividend, a payoff for having good judgment, but it hasn't come, maybe because all the powerful folks who supported the war don't want to be reminded of their error (and cause dweebs like me like to rub it in). And of course Mearsheimer wrote The Israel Lobby. Is the Times part of the lobby? Yes and no. The lobby must be understood as a Mississippi River of pro-Israel orthodoxy which pervades political culture-- from the Clintonites to every elected official in New York to the neocon financiers of thinktanks. Taking on the lobby is the equivalent right now in media culture of throwing in with the Roswell crowd; the Times finds you dangerous, even as it supplies straw and ale and stables for Iraq war supporters Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and Bill Kristol.

I'm not crying for Mearsheimer. He's a big boy and knew what he was doing. But it is interesting to consider that the Israel lobby works in part through the destruction of status. Mearsheimer had elite status prior to his Iraq argument and Israel lobby book; he has been deprived of (some of) it since. Again I point to his being censored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, in its lineup of important speakers on an uncertain world.

The damage here isn't so much to an honest man, it's to the political discourse. Consider Mearsheimer's argument for India getting the bomb. I'd never seen that before, and I'm probably against him on this one. But the vehemence of his belief in Indian nukes makes his argument in The Israel Lobby that Iranian nukes won't be the end of the world both personally consistent and more compelling intellectually--he sure is a realist. Think about it: He was allowed to hold forth from the most prestigious soapbox in the land when India wanted nukes, but not now, when Iran wants them. Our journalism is broken.

Next Year in Jerusalem, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Too--Nakba Recognition Group Tours U.S.

The American Friends Service Committee has helped organize a tour in the U.S. of a Nakba recognition group from Israel/Palestine. Many Jews are involved in this effort, for instance Jewish Voice for Peace. So are many Palestinians.

We all know that material and geographical issues are not enough to make peace in the Middle East--water issues, right of return, land-swaps, etc. This is a spiritual problem; and the recognition of ethnic cleansing is all important in that process.

The group is speaking at DePaul in an hour or so, in Chicago tonight. Then to the west coast, then to New York this weekend. Then on to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the guests of a Mennonite church.

Oh my god, America is a great country. Blacks were once three-fifths of a man; next year a black man may be our president. And day by day my country's heart is opening to the humanity of Palestinians.

Did Jewish Identity Stand in the Way of the Peace Process at Camp David?

First an apology. I can be narrow in spirit; and I think I went overboard yesterday with that poem. Jerry Slater has reminded me that words really do matter, words like genocide. He's right. Though I would say that many times in the last 60 years, thoughtful people have recoiled from Israeli actions in Palestine, saying they are reminiscent of Nazi actions. For instance, some Israeli soldiers felt this way during ethnic cleansing operations. I don't think it's genocide against Palestinians; but it's oppression. The Israeli right frequently has likened Palestinians to Nazis; and the resonance of the Holocaust reverberates and confuses.

Today Jerry Haber has a simply brilliant post, reading the books on Camp David 2000. As anyone who has read the literature knows, Clinton's team was almost all Jewish. I think there was one Arab member. I've always found this troubling, but am not sure how to address it. Of course there are (many) Jews who are more universalist in their thinking. So maybe Clinton's team had rays of light in it?

Also, I don't want to blame my people in a blanket way for failure to make any progress on Israel/Palestine. Yes the Israel lobby is to blame, but that is the body of establishment Jewry, not all Jews. And yet as I frequently state on this blog, the construction of Jewish identity in this day and age is so parochial, so particularist, so Is-it-good-for-the-Jews, as Norman Mailer complained, and so wed to the Jewish state as some democratic ideal-- that Jewish identity itself is something of an impediment to progress.

Haber agrees with me; he says that Jewishness itself was a hindrance to the effectiveness of the team. He begins by quoting from negotiator Aaron David Miller's new book:

"Dennis [Ross], like myself, had an inherent tendency to see the world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel's vantage point rather than from that of the Palestinians. Not that he didn't understand Arab or Palestinian sensitivities. But his own strong Jewish identity, and his commitment to Israel's security combined with something else: a deep conviction that if you couldn't gain Israel's confidence, you have zero chance of erecting any kind of peace process. And to Dennis, achieving this goal required a degree of coordination with the Israeli's, sensitivity toward their substantive concerns, and public defense of their positions. [Bush Sec'y of State Jim] Baker's good judgment and toughness  balanced and controlled this inclination, which was not the case under Clinton."

In subsequent posts, I will be citing more from the books by [Dan] Kurtzer and [Scott] Lasensky, and by Aaron Miller. There are must-reads for my readers, especially for American Jewish liberals who cheered the American involvement in the peace process... For when you get down to it, the peace-process team under two US presidents was composed of three talented individuals, all Jews, and all liberal Zionists. Now we know -- from Kurtzer and from Miller, two-thirds of the trio -- that America, Israel, and the Palestinians would have been better served by a more diverse team. [emphasis Haber's]

The genius of Haber's post is that he, a religious intellectual who lives in Israel but is politically shrewd about the U.S., is getting at the Zionist construction of Jewish identity. Even "secular" professional Jews are invested in these structures, and the pity in their case is that it is unconscious; I have heard friends loudly protest about the fairmindedness and evenhandedness in the Clinton team, without examining their investment.

Alas, we are tribal creatures; and as Tony Judt has observed, our age has amplified tribalism, rationalizing a "crippling" degree of identity politics even among intellectuals. That is the promise that so many of us see in Obama. That a mixed-race leader will lift us out of parochialisms. And have a diverse team negotiating in Israel/Palestine....

Kenneth Pollack Misrepresents His Support for Peace Process Prior to Iraq War

Michael Massing (a friend of mine) has a great piece in the Columbia Journalism Review called "The War Expert," marvelling at the fact that Brookings Institution scholar Kenneth M. Pollack still gets called up to opine in editorial pages about what we should be doing in the Middle East after he was so wrong about Iraq.

Massing interviewed Pollack and asked him about his track record as a belligerent.

As for his position on the invasion itself, Pollack maintained that he had not been a strong advocate for the war but rather a “tortured” one. “I know I wrote a number of pieces that were very helpful to the Bush administration in making its case,” he said. “But that’s not why I wrote them.” In The Threatening Storm, he told me, “I said that this wasn’t a war we needed to fight right away, that there were other things we needed to do first, like work on the Middle East peace process…and run down al Qaeda….I don’t like to characterize myself as a supporter of the invasion.” Yet his book contains a whole chapter titled “The Case for an Invasion.” In it, he states flatly that “the only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime, and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.”

I leafed through the book today and Massing is right. There is nothing tortured about
a book that compares Saddam to Hitler and says that the "conservative" course is to "invade as soon as possible."

I am chiefly irritated by Pollack's claim that "work on the Middle East peace process" had a higher priority to him in that book than invading Iraq. Pardon my Arabic, this is bullsh-t.

It is true that Pollack called for the U.S. to take a more active role in Israel/Palestine issues prior to invading Iraq. But he did so almost reluctantly, stating that in the fervid mind of "the Arab street," there was alas "linkage" between the U.S. role in Israel/Palestine and its activities elsewhere in the region. And so it was necessary to reduce "bedlam" or "violence" in Israel/Palestine before the U.S. invades Iraq. This policy objective doesn't have a high priority to Pollack. In his "Conclusions," where he bangs the war drum over and over, I see only one line mentioning the peace process, when he states, "it is reasonable for them [Arab states and Turkey] to expect us to take a more active role in attempting to mollify the problems of the region, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian violence."

Let's be clear. This is never Pollack's concern; it is always the strange concern of Arab states. Thus Emirates citizens "would have a more favorable view of the United States if it were to apply pressure to ensure the creation of an independent Palestinian state." Similarly, the Saudis would cooperate with the war only if there were "negotiations and a sense of progress" in Israel/Palestine. Though here Pollack reassures us that "a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace" is not necessary before we invade. He emphasizes that we should invade "only during a period of relative calm between Israelis and Palestinians" lest natives elsewhere grow restless.

Months ago in this blog I noted that Pollack never used the word "occupation" in his book, never described the hateful treatment of the Palestinians, which as Mohamed ElBaradei has said is a "red flag" of injustice across the Arab world. I have suggested that he was blinded by the fact that he is supported by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American who supports the center at which Pollack works. In that sense, Pollack was like many other war-drum-bangers: he completely overlooked the Israel/Palestine issue, and deluded himself about how much the Arab world hates us for that injustice, even as he said that the Arab world would come to love us for building a democratic Iraq.

Being wrong is one thing, misrepresenting your record another. His book is full of moral assertions about the necessity of toppling Saddam. There is no moral imperative at all to his statements about working on peace in Israel/Palestine. No, doing so is merely an instrument of making war in Iraq. Now he claims that this had moral priority for him.

Pollack's misrepresentation is, happily, a reflection of the turn in the conventional wisdom in this country. Now that Condi Rice is putting all her efforts into the peace process with the blessing of President Bush (and godspeed their efforts), Pollack wants to say that he was for this a long time ago. Next he'll be telling us he  wrote The Israel Lobby.

It's Sunday. Read a Poem for a Change

I generally don't mention Joachim Martillo's stuff because it's too out there for me, too crazily brilliant,  too much racialism. True, I am constantly dipping into the racial bucket in my analysis here, but Joachim's too pure in his thinking on these questions, and besides I feel a need to love elite Ashkenazi Jews, my folks, while I criticize them.

Anyway, today Joachim has a poem written a month ago by a Robert Green that is beautiful. This poem is possibly completely wrong and inaccurate or possibly entirely accurate, I have no idea and don't care; I don't read poems for facts. I read them for the emotion and deeper truth. The emotions of this poem are the emotions I feel as an American contemplating the Nakba and the abuse of the Palestinians in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Says it all.

And guess what, young kids are feeling this way too. Jewish kids, non-Jewish kids, Palestinian kids, white kids, black kids, green kids.

      Poem by Robert Green, former Board member of Deir Yassin Remembered and distant relative of David Ben Gurion

 

You Want to Quibble Over Whether or Not It's Genocide?

 

Then let's forget the word entirely

it's a made up modern word

for what's been done by tribes since before before

made up by Raphael Lemkin

1943

to name what was happening to us

which until then

was known as the crime of barbarity

now genocide

which I know

I agreed not to mention

but it was done to us

and now we're doing it to the next guy

the Palestinians

if we are allowed that word

like the word 'Jew' or really, "Juden"

a word that was supposed to be wiped out

with us

but wasn't

but our lives

one thousand years in Europe

our home

cleansed of us

and they said we were not a true people

"a people class" said Lenin

"a disease" said others

and now we're doing it to the next guy

OK, no gas ovens

that we know of

yet

but poison gas aplenty

torture rooms

a special hanging called "a Palestinian hanging"

that now the Americans use

hang a human

by the wrists

tied together

back behind

till they crush their own lungs

over hours

maybe a few days

and die in horror

done so much

it's called "a Palestinian hanging"

and steal the land

and wall them in

and starve their babies

beat the pregnant women in front of their children

their mothers

their husbands

and the land, stealing it, walling it, pissing on it,

wiping out the place names.

I can't find my grandmother's village

on a map of Belarus, what she called "White Russia."

It was called "Kapulya," "near Minsk,"

but it's not there.

as isn't Palestine.

More Pussyfootin' in the Media. Jews Qua Jews

Tim Russert has a politics show on MSNBC after Meet the Press and just now I heard him and guests Tucker Carlson and Ryan Lizza analyze the living hell out of Rev. Wright in Chicago and his black church and the political strains in the black community. Then touch-on/avoid the subject of Jews in politics.

Carlson was the most creditable of the speakers. He said that Obama's refusal to meet with Hamas when he will meet with Iranian and North Korean leaders is a contradiction only explicable by "political considerations." The three of them then avoided where that was going by changin the subjeck to the Cuba Lobby and our immigration policy. Lizza offered the possibility that Democrats may soon stop "pandering" to the Cuban bloc vote, which he said was dominated by older conservative Cubans, because Florida was more and more safely Republican.

I don't think immigration is as important an issue as whether the Arabs/the world hates us. Lizza was saying--and maybe reflecting his New Republic indoctrination on this score--that North Korea is a state and so is Iran; since when is Hamas at that level!

The issue of statelessness is of course key. At the same time that India and Pakistan became independent states, Palestinian Partition in '47 called for two states, Arab and Jewish, on roughly equal portions of the land. The most distant observer--and this is what U.S. politics needs now, more and more detached observers--understands that for 60 years there has been a Jewish one on far more of that land than the U.N. apportioned to it, but no Arab one. The reasons for this are manifold, and no doubt the Arab world has played its part.  But certainly for the last 40 years the Israeli occupation has been the largest factor in Palestinian statelessness. And for the last 6 the Arab world has called for Partition along newer lines. Still no state.

Conservative American Jewry has obviously been one of the most important obstacles to the formation of that state. But our politics can't deal with this. And neither can our journalism. Just ask Russert.

I have a Jewish journalist friend who meets my statement that Jews are members of the American establishment always with the condescending comment, "Yes but are they acting as Jews qua Jews. No." He means with that qua that we are simply Americans like other diverse Americans, we're not behaving Jewish. As I've said here before, I find this attitude highly incurious for a journalist. I am fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of my people (and other tribes too), never moreso than now that we have a seat in the cockpit, funding the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Steve Walt's seat at Harvard and Freedom's Watch, too.

Which would be chiefly of sociological interest were it not for the issue of the Israel lobby. Per Lizza's analysis of the Cubans, the Israel lobby is dominated by the older conservative component of Jewish life; and that group needs to be scrutinized and understood by journalists. But it's not. I feel for myself that it still has a hold on the body of the Jewish community. So good journalists are simply afraid to talk about central facts in our political life. Though maybe Carlson is intrigued/titillated because his daddy done got largessed by the Israel lobby.

Oh--but let us talk about Obama's "very radical" (I think those were Lizza's words) black preacher all day and night. Qua qua qua. Quack quack quack.

Jewish Press Is Honest About Hillary's Jewish Money 'Cadre'. MSM Isn't.

The Jewish Daily Forward has openly identified "some of" Hillary Clinton's biggest donors as a "cadre" of Jews with the power to "influence" the Democratic Party's decision to prolong the fight between her and Obama until the convention, or not. Cadre and influence--aren't those canards?

I welcome the honesty. The recent threatening letter to Nancy Pelosi on the subject of the super-delegates sticking by Hillary was signed by 20 giant donors, by my count about half of them Jews, including Haim Saban, the Zionist supporter of the Brookings Institution who gives millions in soft money to the Dems. Wait--here I see that the JTA reported that 12 of them are Jewish. And JTA has also been a leader in openly describing Freedom's Watch, Bush's angels, as an organ of rich Jewish Republicans.

The fascination here is that the Jewish press is being honest and helpful about something that all Jews and all people who follow politics know: wealth-generating Jews are major players, perhaps THE major players, in Democratic politics. They call the shots, or certainly help to. And Jewish issues have become a central wedge issue in the Obama/Hillary divide, in ways highly reminiscent of the Lamont/Lieberman fight of '06. Look at the bubbling Merrill McPeak controversy, in which the retired general, an Obama adviser, has bravely stood by his comments about Jewish voters even as the Hillary campaign calls his views "troubling."

Meantime, the mainstream press tiptoes around the issue. Chris Matthews, scared of nothing when it comes to ethnic politics, is scared to bring this one up. The other day Linda Douglass of ABC spoke of all the "gender" and "racial" issues that are playing out between Obama and Hillary--true, but also something of an evasion. On MSNBC, discussing the donors' threat earlier this week, Jonathan Alter said that Obama's donations average about $110-odd each ($193 million collected from 165,000 people--wait, isn't that $1,100 per, compared to about $1200 per for Hillary--actually not that big a difference), and offered it as evidence of Obama's insurgent populist appeal against the "backbone" of the party. True and insightful; but again, not a word about the Jewish angle, which Alter, an old friend and associate of mine from Harvard days, knows as well as I do. The only guy I've heard talking about Jews and Hillary on MSNBC is the rebarbative Joe Scarborough.

This grand elision might be excusable if we were talking merely of sociology, the march of my people into the establishment through the Clinton years on--a great uncovered story. But we're not talking just sociology. We're talking about Middle East policy. A lot is at stake. Hearts and minds, heads and extremities, too. Let's have the conversation.

P.S. Thanks to commenter Jim Haygood for pointing out the transparent role of money in the Chicago Global Affairs Council's blacklisting of Walt and Mearsheimer.

Still Blacklisted After All These Years (Walt & Mearsheimer in Chicago)

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is staging an endless series of talks by "leading foreign policy experts" under the title, "Road to 2008: American Leadership in an Uncertain World." The series includes neoconservative Joshua Muravchik, the American Enterprise Institute scholar who has called for striking Iran. Muravchik also supported the Iraq war, which he has admitted looked better on paper than on the ground:   

I think it's fair for people to be critical of neocons about Iraq. Iraq is a mess and we bear a share of responsibility for that. At the very least there was some glibness about Iraq – mostly on the part of Donald Rumsfeld, but some neocons were party to that. We should be chastened by Iraq.

Glib: 100,000s dead, half a world away.

Walt and Mearsheimer , who opposed the war in Iraq, were scheduled to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last September. Then its director informed Mearsheimer that his subject, the Israel lobby, was too "hot." The speech was cancelled. Censorship, plain and simple. You'd think the Chicago Council might reinvite the bestselling authors, one of whom lives and teaches in Chicago, during this year-long series on an "uncertain world." No. Still blacklisted. It really does pay to have been glib about Iraq.

Nakba Commemoration Builds; Barenboim to Shun Israel's 60th Birthday Party

When I began collecting string on Jews calling for Nakba commemoration, I thought it was statistically aberrant behavior. Wrong. There is a real groundswell upon us. Ynet reports that Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim will shun festivities surrounding Israel's 60th birthday because it commemorates a period of terrible suffering for the Palestinian people. Add this to the No Time to Celebrate petition among Jews, Hannah Mermelstein writing "It was their land first" in the Jewish Advocate, Australian Jews signing on to a giant Nakba ad--well, it's a real trend. And it's only going to get bigger.

Again I say, this shows the power of ideas. The Palestinian people have known about the Nakba for 60 years. It took intellectuals, the New Historians, to bring these ideas to the west...

Executions in '08. Executions in '48

Today's a sad day. Per Haaretz, B'tselem has concluded that four wanted Palestinians who the Israeli army had said died in a firefight in Bethlehem last month were killed execution-style in a car.