John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

August 3rd, 2008

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:17 PM

Packer, George, 239, 253; The Assassins'Gate:

America in Iraq, 229, 240 Pahlavi, Reza (former crown prince of Iran), 293 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah, 280 Pais, El, 211

Pakistan, 26, 65, 68, 71, 73, 87, 191 Palestine, 6, 92, 346, 383-84; British policy on, 6-7, 82, 87, 93-95, 104, 391wl24; late-nineteenth-century, 92, 383nw54-56; 1948 war, 81-84, 95-96, 98-99, 351, 379w8, 385, 387w94; and two-state solution, 204-12, 220, 227, 345-47; and UN partition plan, 24, 51, 82, 93-95, 121; see also Arab-Israeli peace

process; Israeli-Palestinian conflict;

Palestinians Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act (2006), 159 Palestinian Authority, 127, 159, 206, 207, 208,

212, 223, 257, 259 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO),

39, 44, 45, 61, 63-64, 205, 284, 367n90,

371wl2

Palestinians, 7-8, 17, 19, 39-40, 54, 60;

anti-Americanism and, 64-70; birthrates of, 87-89; as exiles, 95-96; Iraq war and, 260; Israel lobby vs., 204-28; persecution of, 45, 92-103; and refugee problem, 86, 218; and strategies for ending conflict with Israel, 342-48; and terrorism, 62-70, 102-103, 204-28, 382w46; see also Arab-Israeli peace process; Israeli-Palestinian conflict; settlements

Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, 59

Pappe, Ilan, 19, 82

Paris Peace Conference, 7

Parsi, Trita, 283, 287, 288

Pascrell, Bill, 160

Peace Now, 91

peace process, see Arab-Israeli peace process

Peel Commission, 93-95

Peled, Jonathan, 41

Pelletreau, Robert, 286-87

Pelosi, Nancy, 160, 243, 264, 271, 279, 326

Pentagon, 33-34, 56, 76, 167, 208, 251; 2001

terrorist attack on, 61, 229 Percy, Charles, 158-59 Perelman, Marc, 236 Peres, Shimon, 29, 37, 126, 177, 205,

234-36, 267, 271, 286, 292, 386n85 Peretz, Amir, 316

Peretz, Martin, 98, 142, 167, 169, 172, 176,

188, 244, 249 Perle, Richard, 62, 129, 130, 166, 176, 206,

239, 249, 273, 274, 276, 300; Iraq war

and, 239, 244, 251, 253 Perlmutter, Nathan, 137, 190; The Real

Anti-Semitism in America, 190 Perlmutter, Ruth Ann, 190 persecution of Jews, 12-13, 92-98, 116;

compensation for, 92-98; history of, 92;

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:22 PM

Hungary, 30

Hussein, King, 31, 43, 371nl2

Hussein, Saddam, 17, 62, 71, 73, 86, 87, 143, 281, 283, 287, 431w76; end of regime of, 55, 146, 238, 257, 273, 333; Gulf War and, 58, 229, 230, 235, 254, 258, 339; U.S. decision to overthrow, 229-62; WMD program of, 55, 229, 230, 233-37, 245, 262, 433n94

immigration, 3, 11; Arab, 141 Independent, 312

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), 354 India, 73, 359«20 Indian Americans, 8, 11 industry, 30

Indyk, Martin, 114, 152, 165, 166, 175, 176-77, 249, 258, 284, 286, 290, 410n27, 424«101

Inhofe, James, 132, 135

Inouye, Daniel, 162

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, 176 intelligence, 34-36, 55, 76, 202, 341; faulty,

55, 235-36, 250-53; on Iraq, 235-36,

247, 250-53; Israeli, 55, 235-36;

neoconservative, 247; Syrian, 265, 274,

276-77, 278; theft, 76 International Christian Embassy Jerusalem

(ICEJ), 134, 136 International Fellowship of Christians and

Jews (IFCJ), 134 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 30 International Studies in Higher Education

Act, 180-81 Internet, 68, 80

Iran, 3, 36, 59, 61, 62, 75, 86, 136, 143, 200, 202, 204, 205, 207, 280-305, 307, 316, 336, 340, 343, 445w3, 447w48, 448«56, 451nnl00-101, 452wl08, 462w9; dual containment strategy, 286-91; engagement strategy, 284-86; influence in Iraq, 294; Israel and, 296, 298-302; Israel lobby and, 17-18, 282, 287-305; Lebanon war (2006) and, 317-19; negotiated settlement option, 302-305; 1979 revolution, 17, 56, 236, 280, 283; nuclear ambitions, 3, 4, 8, 59, 60, 70, 72-75, 221, 226, 280-305, 333, 340, 445w7, 451wl00; oil, 281, 288-89; population, 445w3; regional transformation strategy, 291-94; sanctions against, 145, 289, 297-99; UN and, 297-98; U.S. policy toward, 8, 10, 17, 59-60, 72, 145,280-305

Iran-Contra arms scandal, 377w90

Iran Democracy Act, 293-94

Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), 57, 71, 75, 143, 258, 281

Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, 289

Iraq, 25, 34, 35, 52, 55, 59, 61, 143, 200, 202; Gulf War, 58, 229, 230, 235, 254, 258, 266, 339; insurgency, 265, 278; Lebanon war (2006) and, 318; 9/11 linked to, 229, 240, 248, 251, 252-53, 254; post-Saddam, 146, 212, 257; postwar reconstruction, 212; sanctions against, 143, 229; Shia, 254, 298, 318; Sunnis, 74, 254; UN embargo against, 59; UN inspections, 233, 236, 249, 266; U.S. decision to

invade, 229-62, 429w47; WMD programs, 55, 59, 70, 72, 229, 230, 233-37, 245, 262, 433w94; see also Iraq war

Iraqi National Congress (INC), 244, 252

Iraq Liberation Act, 244, 259

Iraq Study Group, 75, 136, 260, 264, 279, 282, 304, 305, 437«163

Iraq war, 3, 6, 10, 16, 17, 26, 129, 203, 212, 213, 221, 229-62, 263, 274, 374w36, 430w66, 431ww76, 83, 432w84, 436wl40; case made for, 229-62, 429n47; failure of, 259-62; Israel and, 231, 233-38, 248-49, 260-62; Israel lobby and, 230-62; media and, 232, 235, 237, 239, 241, 245, 248, 250, 251; neoconservative role in encouraging, 231, 233, 234, 238-62, 436wl40; oil and, 230, 253-55; public opinion on, 243-50; regional transformation strategy and, 255-59

Irgun, 102

Irish Americans, 8

Irving, David, 193

Isaac, Rael Jean, 114

Isaacs, Stephen, jews and American Politics, 161 Islam, 54

Islamic Jihad, 40, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66-68, 103, 223, 257, 265, 267, 269, 272, 279, 280, 284, 303, 340, 343

Israel, 3; Basic Laws, 88, 380w32; birthrates and demographics, 87-89, 380n35, 381w36, 385w69; Cold War role, 50-58; creation of, 7, 24, 51, 79, 87, 92, 95-96, 98-99, 116, 118, 133, 355; critics of charged with anti-Semitism, 16, 188-96, 232-33, 328-30, 353; defense industry, 27; as democracy, 86-91; as dubious ally, 77-79; economy, 24-31, 379nl6; "Gods will" claim, 107-108; Gulf War and, 58; as industrial power, 30; Iran and, 286, 287-302; Iraq war and, 231, 233-38, 248-49, 260-62; and Lebanon war, 8, 9, 18, 34, 80, 101, 109, 110, 136, 203, 269, 452-61; media in, 20, 100, 171, 188; military supremacy, 31-40, 82-86; moral conduct of, 78-110; new "history" on, 19; 1948 War of Independence, 81-84, 95-96, 98-99, 351, 379w8, 385, 387w94; 1982 invasion of Lebanon by, 33, 39, 45, 148, 257, 264, 308, 322; as normal state, 341-42; nuclear ambitions, 25, 35-36, 41, 74, 148, 343; public opinion and discourse on, 10, 108-10, 120-26,

141, 168-96, 226-28, 462w9; reluctance to criticize policies of, 120-26, 188-96; security fence, 215-16, 342; settlement policy, 7, 9, 39-40, 54, 60-61, 64, 74, 77, 80,91,96-101, 104-106, 114, 120, 178, 190, 204-28, 267-71, 336, 342-47, 367n81, 462w8; Syria and, 264-79, 438w3; tourism, 136, 138, 400wlll;and two-state solution, 204-12, 220, 227, 345-47; underdog image, 58, 81-86; unilateral disengagement policy, 215-20; and victim myth, 78-110; see also Arab-Israeli peace process; Israeli-Palestinian conflict; settlements; U.S. Israel policy Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 25, 45, 58, 80, 82-86, 98, 147, 205, 206, 207, 264, 269, 284, 388wl01; atrocities committed by, 98-103, 218-19; in Lebanon war, 306-34, 455w48, 458n71, 460nl04; and Operation Defensive Shield, 208, 210 Israel Democracy Institute, 90 Israeli Air Force, 32, 76, 314, 321 Israeli Arabs, discrimination against, 88-91 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 53, 54, 59, 60, 69, 74-75, 79, 143, 201, 260, 299, 336, 367n90; anti-Americanism and, 64-70; First Intifada, 68, 97, 100, 391nl29; human rights issues in, 96-101; and Israeli victim myth, 78-100; and Jerusalem issue, 105, 221, 347; moral rationale for U.S. support of Israel in, 78-110; 1948 war, 81-84, 95-96, 98-99, 351, 379n8, 385, 387^94; after 9/11, 201-203, 204-28; Second Intifada, 28-29, 68, 100-101, 103, 105, 106, 178, 204, 211, 249, 379nl6, 389wl09, 400nl11;and settlement policy, 39-40, 54, 60-61, 64, 74, 77, 80,91,96-101, 104-106, 114, 120, 178, 190, 204-28, 267-71, 336, 342-47, 367n81, 462w8; Six-Day War, 7, 26,37,46,51,52,55, 84-86, 118, 121, 126, 133, 267, 368ww94-100, 390wll5, 395w22; strategies for ending, 342-48; terrorism and, 62-70, 102-103, 109, 204-28; and two-state solution, 204-12, 220, 227, 345-47; and UN partition plan, 24, 51, 82, 93-95, 121; "virtuous Israelis" vs. "evil Arabs" myth and, 98-103; Yom Kippur War, 26, 34, 43-44, 47, 52, 53, 54, 82-83, 85-86, 118, 143, 369nl07; see also Arab-Israeli peace process; specific wars

Israel lobby, 5-20, 111-50; academia and, 168, 178-85; agenda of, 200-201; George W Bush humiliated by, 208-11, 228; campaign finance reform and, 349-50; Christian Zionists in, 132-39, 152; Congress and, 10-11, 117, 139, 140, 144, 152-62, 163, 199, 207, 225, 242, 301, 329; conservatism of, 126-32; and counterlobby, 350; critics of charged with anti-Semitism, 188-96, 232-33, 328-30, 353; definition of, 5, 111-50; diversity and differences on policy issues within, 120-26; and "dual loyalty" issue, 146-50; groups in, 113, 116-20, 141; as guiding policy process, 151-67; Iran and, 17-18, 282, 287-305; Iraq war and, 230-62; Lebanon and, 18, 309-10, 326-34; legitimacy of, 185; literature on, 19; media and, 129-32, 154, 169-75; modus operandi of, 9-11; more open debate within, 350-52; neoconservative role in, 128-32, 238-43; objectionable tactics of, 185-87; oil and, 142-46; vs. Palestinians, 204-28; political power of, 5-6, 10-11, 16, 18, 118, 140-41, 151-67, 226; public discourse and, 10, 120-26, 141, 168—96; regional transformation and, 258-59, 291-94, 338-39; role of American Jews in, 115-28, 140-41; strategies to address power of, 349-55; sources of power of, 140-42; Syria and, 17, 264, 271, 273-79; defined, 112-14; think tanks and, 175-78; U.S. Middle East policy and, 6-9, 16-17; see also specific groups, organizations, and think tanks "The Israel Lobby" (article), 184, 193-94 Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), 125-26 Israel Policy Forum (IPF), 107, 116, 120, 124, 125, 128, 152, 160, 214, 352, 354, 396«33, 398w66 Israel Project, 238

Jabotinsky, Ze'ev (Vladimir), 96, 384n60

Jackson-Vanik amendment (1974), 126

Jacobs, Barry, 232

Jacoby, Jeff, 108, 188

Japan, 33,41,344

Jentleson, Bruce, 114

Jepson, Roger, 157-58

Jerusalem, 5, 39, 102, 133, 240, 287, 387w88, 399w81; as peace process issue, 105, 221, 347; Temple Mount in, 67, 105, 347

Jerusalem Embassy Act (1995), 127 Jerusalem Post, 20, 89, 164, 174, 221, 237,

239, 242, 293, 295, 301, 326, 329, 330 Jewish Agency for Israel, 30, 363w35, 414w80 Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), 119,

178, 241

Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), 50, 117, 130, 131, 139, 176, 239, 244, 248, 252, 293

Jewish Journal, 252

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 156, 274, 276 Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), 120, 121, 125, 243

Jewish Week, 4, 20, 183,241 Joffe, Joseph, 412w56 Johns Hopkins University, 246 Johnson, Hank, 157

Johnson, Lyndon B., 36, 368ww95-98; Middle East policy of, 36, 41-42, 55, 118, 121

Joint Security Assistance Planning Group (JSAP), 33

Jordan, 24-25, 83, 86, 94, 144, 316, 318, 343;

U.S. aid to, 31 Jordan, Hamilton, 163 Jordan River, 24-25, 96, 104, 347, 391wl25 Judt, Tony, 174, 185-86, 194, 353

Kagan, Robert, 129, 170, 206, 208, 239, 244,

246, 248, 249 Kalman, Matthew, 309 Kaplan, Lawrence, 275, 293 KarineA incident, 207-208, 418w23 Karpin, Michael, 29 Kashmir, 71 Katz, Haim, 165 Katznelson, Berl, 96 Kazakhstan, 226 Keller, Bill, 232 Kellogg Brown & Root, 245 Kelly, Michael, 171 Kenen, I. L. "Si," 118, 119 Kennan, George, 51

Kennedy, John E, 25, 33, 163, 262, 361w8, 362ww9-10, 366w67; Middle East policy of, 25, 35-36, 51, 118

Kenya, 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in, 59

Kerry, John, 404wl2

Kessler, Jonathan, 179

Khalidi, Rashid, 113, 182, 184-85

Khalq, Mojahedin-e, 291, 293

Khatami, Mohammad, 289-91, 303, 304

Khobar Towers attacks (1996), 59

Khomeini, Ayatollah, 283 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 52, 72 Kimmerling, Baruch, 19 King, Henry Churchill, 7 Kinsley, Michael, 232 Kirk, Russell, 131

Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 129, 131, 132, 206 Kissinger, Henry, 31, 38, 42-44, 46-47,

51-54, 148, 369wl07; Cold War strategy

of, 51-54, 57 Klein, Joe, 231

Klein, Morton, 114, 124, 125, 152, 210, 225 Klose, Kevin, 173

Knesset, 25, 88, 89, 234, 256, 439wl4

Koch, Ed, 328

Koch, Noel, 76

Kohr, Howard, 160, 242

Kohut, Andrew, 110

Komer, Robert, 366w67

Kosovo, 226

Kramer, Martin, 50, 55-56, 64, 179-81, 261,

371«7, 438wl73 Krauthammer, Charles, 73, 114, 129, 130,

170-71, 193, 206, 214, 239, 240, 248,

250, 256, 315, 330, 416n99, 456w49 Kristof, Nicholas D., 170, 408w4 Kristol, William, 62, 129, 130, 136, 171, 177,

194, 195-96, 206, 208, 239, 244, 248,

249, 292, 330, 375w51 Kucinich, Dennis, 301 Ku KluxKlan, 12 Kurds, 296, 298 Kurtz, Stanley, 179-81 Kushner, Tony, 194, 353 Kuwait, 58, 74, 143, 238, 254, 281, 287, 339

Labor party, 126

Lafer, Fred, 181

LaHaye, Timothy, 133

Lamont, Ned, 156

Landau, David, 211

Lantos,Tom, 153, 173, 177, 264

Lavi aircraft, 32

Lavon affair (1954), 75

Law of Return, 380w32, 396w47

Lawrence, Bruce, 66

laws of war, violation of, 323-24

Lebanon, 17, 18, 25, 37, 39, 68, 71-72, 75, 101, 200, 201, 220, 247, 257, 272, 278, 279, 306-34, 369wl0, 370wl12; civil war (1976-86), 266; -Hezbollah war (2006), 8, 9, 34, 80, 101, 109, 110, 136, 203,

269, 306-34, 452-61; Israel lobby and, 18, 309-10, 326-34; 1982 Israeli invasion of, 33, 39, 45, 148, 257, 264, 308, 322; 1983 U.S. embassy and marine barracks bombings in, 45, 56; U.S. hostages in, 377w90; U.S. policy toward, 71-72, 306-34; see also Lebanon war (2006)

Lebanon war (2006), 8, 9, 18, 34, 80, 101, 109, 110, 136, 203, 269, 306-34, 336, 375w51, 452-61; abduction of Israeli soldiers in, 306, 308; casualties, 306, 312, 314, 320-25, 452nl, 454n30; damage to U.S. interests, 316-19; end of, 315; human rights issues, 320-25, 328-29; Israel lobby and, 309-10, 326-34; Israels strategic mistakes in, 313-16; laws of war violations in, 323-24; moral arguments, 319-26; neoconservatives and, 309-10, 317-18; prewar planning by Israel for, 308-10; public opinion on, 316-17, 330—32; as punishment campaign, 313-15; Winograd report on, 306, 307, 308, 313, 315

Ledeen, Michael, 129, 131, 244, 292, 293, 294, 448w56

Lelyveld, Arthur, 123

Lerner, Michael, 194

Leverett, Flynt, 177, 266, 276, 410w27, 439nl3

Levy, Daniel, 223-24

Levy, Gideon, 171, 238

Lewis, Anthony, 170

Lewis, Bernard, 58, 114, 129, 244, 246, 252, 293

Libby, I. Lewis "Scooter," 129, 166, 433nl05;

Iraq war and, 239, 240, 246-47, 250-51 liberalism, 126 Liberia, 30

Liberty, USS, 368wl00, 369nl00 Libya, 59, 61, 143, 226, 289 Lieberman, Avigdor, 90, 177, 300, 345 Lieberman, Joseph, 153, 156, 164 Liebler, Isi, 124

Likud party, 120, 126, 135, 171

Lindsey, Hal, 133, 136

Lipstadt, Deborah, 193

Livni, Tzipi, 177, 224, 260

Lobe, Jim, 223

London Review of Books, 193

Lonsdale, Harry, 155, 157

Los Angeles Times, 171, 172, 187, 236, 275, 329

Lott, Trent, 209

Lowey, Nita, 225

Lubrani, Uri, 293 Luti, William, 166 Luttwak, Edward, 176

Ma'aleh Adumim, 223

Macmillan, Margaret, 7

Madison, James, Federalist No. 10, 111

Makdisi, Ussama, 68

Makovsky, David, 152, 251, 435^128

Malley, Robert, 47

Maloof, Michael, 251

Mann, Theodore, 147-48

Maoz, Moshe, 63

Mao Zedong, 73, 377w85

Marius, Richard, 167

Mark, Clyde, 26, 28, 362wl7

Marshall, George, 51

Massing, Michael, 10, 127, 154, 172

Matthews, Chris, 232

McAteer, Ed, 134

McCain, John, 4, 164, 295, 312

McCloskey, Pete, 157, 183

McCollum, Betty, 159-60

McConnell, Mitch, 160

McGovern, George, 163

McKinney, Cynthia, 157, 160, 405n28

McNamara, Robert, 36

media, 12-13, 80, 169-75, 351; on Iran, 292-93, 299-301; Iraq war and, 232, 235, 237, 239, 241, 245, 248, 250, 251; on Israel, 169-75; Israel lobby and, 129-32, 154, 169-75; Jewish, 14, 20, 100, 173; and "Jewish control" issue, 12-13, 169; on Lebanon war, 312-13, 315, 326, 330-31; neoconservative, 129-32, 208-209, 239, 240; pro-Israel bias of, 169-75; radio, 173, 174-75; on Syria, 275; terrorism and, 68; see also specific publications and programs

Meir, Golda, 25, 33, 96

Menendez, Robert, 156

Mercaz-USA, 116

Meretz-USA, 120, 125

Merkava tank, 32

Meshal, Khaled, 265

Mexico, 142

Miami Herald, 172, 187

Middle East Forum (MEF), 30, 117, 130, 152

Middle East Institute, 177

military aid, 15, 23, 24, 31-40, 42-43, 46, 76, 210, 361w3, 362tml0-ll, 364w49, 366n74, 467w79

Miller, Aaron David, 47-48, 319 Mitchell, George, 105 Mitchell, Mayer "Bubba," 157 Mitchell Commission, 105 Mitnick, Joshua, 4 Mofaz, Shaul, 272, 273 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 67 Moody, Dwight, 133 Moore, Michael, 253

moral arguments, 5, 15, 78-110; Camp David myths in, 103-107; compensation for past crimes in, 92-98; "Gods will" claim, 107-108; and Israel as underdog, 81-86; Lebanon war and, 319-26; "shared democracy" rationale in, 86-91; "virtuous Israelis" vs. "evil Arabs" in, 98-103

Moran, James P., 232, 431w83

Morocco, 68, 316

Morris, Benny, 19, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 95, 96,

99, 100, 102, 379w8, 382w46, 450w83 Mort, Jo-Ann, 137 Moscow, 72 Mossad, 251 Muallem, Walid, 270 Mubarak, Hosni, 69, 87 Muravchik, Joshua, 129, 131, 249, 300 Musharraf, Pervez, 87 My Name Is Rachel Corrie (play), 186-87

Nadler, Jerrold, 153

Nasrallah, Hassan, 257, 316, 317, 320, 332, 458w72

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 41, 53, 85, 372wl5 National Association of Arab Americans, 113 National Christian Leadership Conference for

Israel, 134 National Jewish Community Relations

Advisory Council (NJCRAC), 119,

121, 123, 124 National Public Radio, 173 National Review, 180, 275, 292 National Rifle Association (NRA), 13,111,115 NATO, 3, 7, 34, 57 natural gas, 49, 142

Nazism, 9, 12, 116, 148, 184, 236, 358wl0,

408w70 NBC News, 331

Near East Report, 161, 173,259, 431w76 Negroponte, John, 40

neoconservatives, 62, 126, 128-32, 166, 223, 348, 398w76, 416n99; American Jews as, 240; and "Clean Break" study, 130, 239,

255, 259, 273, 309; Iran and, 287-94, 298, 300-301, 303; Iraq war encouraged by, 231, 233, 234, 238-62, 436wl40; Lebanon war and, 309-10, 317-18, 453w8; in media, 129-32, 208-209, 239, 240; role in Israel lobby of, 128-32, 238-43; Syria and, 273-79

neo-Nazis, 12, 187, 353, 414w80

Netanyahu, Benjamin, 23, 38, 39, 47, 61, 89, 97, 124, 130, 136, 209, 210, 211, 234, 239, 267, 268, 273, 290, 309, 313, 406w40, 440wl7; Iraq war and, 237, 239

Neumann, Thomas, 319

New America Foundation, 177

New Israel Fund, 125

New Jewish Agenda, 125

New Republic, 98, 167, 172, 192, 194, 255, 275, 293

NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 209

Newsom, David, 156

Newsweek, 299

NewYork, 29, 65, 184-85, 186

New York Daily News, 275, 300

New Yorker, 10, 153, 242

New York Observer, 192

New York Post, 301

New York Review of Books, 310

New York Sun, 130, 171, 173, 182, 184-85, 194, 242, 329

NewYorkTimes, 97, 124, 128, 145, 154, 174, 176, 186, 192, 204, 205, 207, 214, 218, 222, 224, 232, 237, 245, 250, 256, 257, 267, 288, 292, 309, 312, 331, 454n22; on Israel, 170-72

New York Times Magazine, 174, 177

New York University, 181

Nicaragua, 63

Nidal,Abu, 369wll0

Niger, 30

9/11, see September 11 terrorist attacks 9/11 Commission, 67, 69, 231 Nir, Ori, 121,272

Nixon, Richard, 37; Cold War strategy of,

51-54, 57; Middle East policy of, 37-38, 42-44, 51-54

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 35, 36, 37, 74

Northern Alliance, 302

North Korea, 35, 36, 61

Norton, Gale, 165

Novak, Robert, 171, 232

Novick, Peter,The Holocaust in American Life, 192

nuclear weapons, 34-36, 337; Iranian

ambitions for, 3, 4, 8, 59, 60, 70, 72-75, 221, 226, 280-305, 333, 340, 445n7, 451«100; Iraqi ambitions for, 233-37; Israeli ambitions for, 25, 35-36, 41, 74, 148, 343; rogue states and, 70-75; see also specific countries; weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)

Obama, Barack, 4, 295

Occupied Territories, see settlements

October War, see Yom Kippur War (1973)

Office of Special Plans (OSP), 251

offshore balancing, 338-41, 344

oil, 7, 16, 31, 43, 49, 56-57, 65, 142-46, 165, 199, 337-38, 372w23, 402wl27; and Conoco deal, 288-89; embargo, 43, 54; Iranian, 281, 288-89; Iraq war and, 230, 253-55; Israel lobby and, 142-46; lobby, 16, 142-45, 289; Saudi, 142, 143-44, 254; strategic interests and, 56-57, 71

Olmert, Ehud, 61, 89, 98, 136, 162, 220-25, 260, 261, 266, 424wl05, 438wl73, 456w49; Iran and, 295-96, 299-300; Lebanon war and, 308, 309, 310, 313-16, 330; Syria and, 268-71

Operation Accountability, 315

Operation Dani, 82

Operation Defensive Shield, 208, 210

Operation Grapes of Wrath, 315

Oren, Michael B., 357n5, 358w5

Organski,A.F.K., 49, 371w7

Orthodox Jews, 126

Oslo peace process, 38, 39, 47-48, 59, 103, 104, 106, 107, 120, 127, 130, 166, 178, 190, 284, 287-88,336

Ottoman Empire, 7, 53, 92

Packer

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:23 PM

Cairo, 31

Callil, Carmen, 413w65; Bad Faith, 186

campaign finance reform, 349-50

Camp David Accords (1978), 23-24, 38, 39, 267, 367w81

Camp David Summit (2000), 39, 47, 79, 97, 103-107, 138, 166, 370wll7, 391wl25, 408w66; myths about, 103-107

Campus Watch, 179

Canada, 48, 142, 187

Capuano, Michael, 301

Caravan for Democracy, 178

Carroll, Andrew, 173

Carter, Jimmy, 9, 156, 160, 163, 167, 353, 358wlO; Middle East policy of, 38-39, 176, 201, 267, 346; Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, 9, 173, 193-94, 195

Caterpillar Inc., 189

Cato Institute, 177

CBS News, 66, 137, 235,331

"Cedar Revolution" (2005), 306-307, 317

Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), 117, 156

Center for Security Policy (CSP), 130, 176, 275

Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), 394w9

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 36, 247, 250-51, 252, 271, 275, 276, 285, 294

Chafets, Zev, 275

Chaffee, Lincoln, 156, 160

Chait, Jonathan, 171

Chalabi, Ahmed, 244, 251-52, 293

Chamberlain, Neville, 205, 237, 249

Chavez, Hugo, 87

chemical weapons, 36, 265

Cheney, Dick, 144, 160, 208, 224, 431w79; Iran and, 289, 296, 297, 303; Iraq war and, 234-35, 240, 242, 245-47, 252, 433ww97, 105; Israel and, 218; Lebanon war and, 309-10; oil and, 145-46; regional transformation strategy of, 255-56

Chernin, Albert, 119, 121

Chicago Jewish Star, 164

Chicago Sun-Times, 171

Chicago Tribune, 172

China, 3, 34, 41, 73, 75, 220, 285, 297; Israeli arms sales to, 75-76, 120; Israeli transfer of American technology to, 75-76; nuclear ambitions of, 73, 377w85

Chirac, Jacques, 189, 445w7

Chomsky, Noam, 142, 253

Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFIC), 134, 330

Christian Right, 132-39, 209

Christian Science Monitor, 256

Christians United for Israel (CUFI), 113, 134, 150, 178-79, 301, 330, 336

Christian Zionism, 16, 107, 108, 115, 132-39, 141, 245, 330, 353-54, 401nnl 15-16; Israel lobby and, 132-39, 152; origins of, 132-33; on settlements, 134-35

Church of England, 89, 415n85

Clark, Wesley, 231,302

Clarke, Richard, Against All Enemies, 245

Clawson, Patrick, 293

"Clean Break" study (1996), 130, 239, 255, 259, 273, 309

Clinton, Bill, 7, 153, 177, 226, 370wll7,

374w38, 407w65, 440w20; at 2000 Camp David Summit, 103-107, 138; dual containment strategy of, 258-59, 286-91; Iran policy of, 282, 286-91, 303; Iraq policy of, 237, 244-46, 250, 256; Middle East policy of, 38, 39, 47-48, 103-107, 127, 138, 165-66, 206, 256, 266-68, 344, 347; 1996 reelection of, 289; Syria policy of, 266, 267-68, 274

Clinton, Hillary, 4, 97, 159, 177, 301, 312; Israel and, 159

cluster bombs, 322-23, 325, 329

CNN, 66, 172, 234, 235, 289, 328, 331

Coalition for Democracy in Iran, 293

Cohen, Eliot, 62, 129, 194, 206, 224, 249, 274

Cohen, Naomi, 137

Cohen, Richard, 171, 194,353

Cohler, Larry, 173

Cold War, 5, 49, 72, 77, 119, 230, 258, 284, 294, 344; end of, 68, 75, 77; Israel's role in, 50-58; Nixon-Kissinger strategy, 51-54, 57

Cole, Juan, 183

Coll, Steve, Ghost Wars, 66

Collins, Susan, 160

Columbia University, 182-83, 184

Commentary, 130, 136, 172

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East

Reporting in America (CAMERA), 173, 193

Community Security Trust (CST), 189

Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 139, 145, 147, 150, 165, 170, 174, 188, 206, 210, 219, 228, 241, 291, 336, 352

Congress, U.S., 5, 10, 26, 48, 69, 152-62; Gulf War and, 432w84; Iran and, 289, 294, 298, 301; Iraq war and, 242, 244; Israel lobby and, 10-11, 117, 139, 140, 144, 152-62, 163, 199, 207, 225, 242, 301, 329; Jews in, 153, 403w4; Lebanon and, 307, 311-12, 326-27; support for Israel in, 26-29, 33, 46, 210, 216, 311-12; Syria and, 274-76, 277

Conoco case, 288-89

conservatism, 126-32; see also neoconservatives Council for the National Interest, 350 Council on Foreign Relations, 177-78 Crane, Charles, 7 Cuba, 36, 191, 366w71 Cuban Americans, 8, 11 Culver, John, 162 Czech Republic, 30

Daily Telegraph, 222

Damascus, 17, 257, 263-66, 272, 273, 279, 317 D'Amato, Alfonse, 288-89 Darby, John Nelson, 132, 133 Darfur, 3

Darquier, Louis, 186

Daschle, Tom, 157

David Project, 178-79, 182

Davis, Artur, 160

Davitt, John, 76

Dayan, Moshe, 54, 96, 333

Dean, Howard, 164, 311

Declaration of the Establishment of the State

of Israel, 87 Defense Department, U.S., 32, 362w23 Defense Policy Board, 231, 239, 274 Defense Security Cooperation Agency

(DSCA), 32 de Gaulle, Charles, 218 DeirYassin massacre, 385w73 DeLay, Tom, 132, 135, 152, 161,209,215 democracy, 11, 12, 15, 129, 140, 231, 255, 344

Israel as, 86-91; regional transformation

strategy of, 255-59, 291-94, 338-39 Democratic party, 6, 10, 126, 163, 230, 311,

407w55, 408w4; AIPAC and, 153-62;

presidential candidates, 163-64

Derfner, Larry, 89-90

Dershowitz, Alan, 14, 64, 66, 98, 184, 328

Dershowitz, Toby, 173

Diaspora Jews, 13, 29, 123, 125, 146-47, 353,

355, 385w72 Dimona, 35

Dine, Tom, 119, 127, 144, 147, 158, 162,

166-67, 397w58, 404wl4 Dinitz, Simcha, 44, 123-24 diplomatic protection, 7, 40-48, 226 dispensationalism, 132-33 Dotan, Rami, and "Dotan affair," 32, 76 Dowd, Maureen, 170, 232 Downie, Leonard, Jr., 328 dual containment strategy, 59, 258-59, 286-91 "dual loyalty," 13, 118, 146-50; as anti-Semitic

slander, 146-47 Duke, David, 12, 193, 194 Dulles, John Foster, 24 Durbin, Richard, 157 Dymally, Mervyn, 117

Eagleburger, Lawrence, 162

Eastern Europe, 12

East Jerusalem, 221, 347

Eban, Abba, 41, 43, 103, 368ww95-96

Eckstein, Yechiel, 134, 139

economic aid, 7, 15, 23, 24-31, 121, 199, 216, 226, 227, 361w2, 363wn27-28

Economist, 67, 156, 353

Edelman, Eric, 246

Editor & Publisher, 312

Edwards, John, 4, 160, 164

Egeland, Jan, 91, 323, 329

Egypt, 24, 26, 27, 31, 33, 37-38, 51-54, 74, 75, 82-86, 87, 257, 316, 318, 343; Gaza raid (1955), 52-53, 372wl5; peace process with Israel, 38-39; Six-Day War, 7, 26, 37, 46, 51, 52, 55, 84-86, 118, 121, 126, 133, 267, 368w*94-100, 390wll5, 395n22; Suez War, 24-25, 41, 82, 344; U.S. aid to, 31; War of Attrition, 37, 41-42, 46, 118;Yom Kippur War, 26, 34, 43-44, 47, 52, 53, 54, 82-83, 85-86, 118, 143, 369wl07

Eisenhower, Dwight D., Middle East policy of, 24,25,37,41,87

Eisenhower Doctrine, 361n8

Eitan, Rafael, 89

Eizenstat, Stuart, 118, 416w92

Eldar, Akiva, 171, 239

Ellsworth, Brad, 156

Enderlin, Charles, 105

energy companies, 144-45

engagement strategy, 284-86

Engel, Eliot, 273, 274, 275-76, 277, 301

Entebbe hostage rescue (1976), 34

environment, 111, 144

Epstein, Benjamin, The New Anti-Semitism,

190 Erbil, 296

Eshkol, Levi, 35, 36, 102 espionage, 76-77 European Union, 212, 297, 342 EU-3, 297

Evans, John V, 155, 157

Fadlallah, Sayyid Muhammed Husayn, 65 Fahrenheit 9/11 (documentary), 253, 402wl27 Falwell, Jerry, 132, 135-36, 138, 139, 209 Fatah, 225

Feinberg, Abraham, 29

Feith, Douglas, 76, 129, 130, 131, 166, 239,

252, 273, 296, 430w57; Iraq war and,

239-40, 244,250,251 Feldman, Shai, 33, 57-58, 261, 311, 365w57,

373w34 F-15 aircraft, 31 Financial Times, 214 Findley, Paul, 157

Finkelstein, Norman, 184; Beyond Chutzpah,

184; A Nation on Trial, 184 First Aliyah, 383w54 First Intifada, 68, 97, 100, 391«129 Fisk, Robert, 171 Flapan, Simha, 19 Fleischer, Ari, 205, 209, 215 FMF aid, 26-28

Ford, Gerald, 38; Middle East policy, 38, 158,

162, 165 Foreign Affairs, 245

Foreign Policy Research Institute, 176 Forster, Arnold, The New Anti-Semitism, 190 Fortune magazine, 117

Forward, 14, 20,41, 118, 121, 159, 172, 189, 213, 214, 230, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 243, 257, 259, 272, 292, 295, 298, 305, 315, 328, 333, 354, 441w32, 444n87

Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), 130, 293

Foxman, Abraham, 124, 137, 174, 177, 184, 187, 193, 206, 213, 222, 311, 328, 329

France, 7, 12, 25, 41, 53, 186, 236, 297, 361w3; anti-Semitism, 188-89; arms

sales to Iraq of, 53; arms supplies to

Israel from, 53 Frankel, Glenn, 261 Frankel, Max, 172 Franklin, Larry, 76-77 Freedman, Helen, 159 Freedman, Samuel, 243 French Jews, 186 Freund, Michael, 133 Friedberg, Aaron, 129, 166, 206 Friedman, Howard, 154, 329 Friedman, Murray, The Neoconservative

Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and

the Shaping of Public Policy, 131-32 Friedman, Thomas L., 124, 128, 170, 171,

214,218,253,304, 426w2 Friends of Israel Defense Forces, 29 Frum, David, 129, 131 F-16 aircraft, 31

Fukuyama, Francis, 193, 416w99 Fulbright, J. William, 157

Gaddafi, Muammar, 143, 257 Gaffney, Frank, 275

Gaza, 9, 25, 54, 56, 64, 87, 91, 96-101,

104-106, 133, 134, 135, 186, 207, 217, 220, 225, 259, 343, 344, 347, 389wll2, 391wl24; violence in, 52, 96-101, 207-208

Gaza raid (19 5 5), 5 2-5 3, 3 72n15

Gemayel, Bashir, 45

General Accounting Office (GAO), 28, 76,

362w23, 364w49 Georgetown University, 181-82 Gephardt, Richard, 14, 210 Gerecht, Reuel Marc, 129, 131, 206, 249, 293 Germany, 25, 41, 189, 231, 297, 344, 354; Nazi,

9, 12, 116, 148, 184, 236, 358wl0, 408w70 Gillerman, Dan, 324, 453wl4 Gingrich, Newt, 4, 153, 160, 312 Ginsberg, Benjamin, 130 Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism, 189 global warming, 3,111 Goland, Michael, 158 Golan Heights, 33, 39, 42, 54, 85, 99, 221,

340, 343, 439wl4; Israel/Syria conflict

over, 267-71,279 Golan Heights Law, 439wl4 Gold, Ben-Zion, 353 Goldberg, J. J., 14, 118, 123, 159; Jewish

Power: Inside the American Jewish

Establishment, 14, 126

Goldberg, Jeffrey, 10, 153-54, 157, 242 Goldberg, Jonah, 171 Goldberg, Michelle, 241 Goldhagen, Daniel, Hitler's Willing

Executioners, 184 Goldmann, Nahum, 96 Gore,Al, 167

Gorenberg, Gershom, 29, 137

Great Britain, 7, 12, 25, 30, 41, 74, 132, 133, 186, 189, 297; and anti-Semitism, 189, 415w85; Iraq war and, 238; Palestine policy of, 6-7, 82, 87, 93-95, 104, 391nl24

Griles, J. Steven, 165

Grossman, Steven, 164

Guantanamo, 191

Guardian, 205, 251

Gulf Oil, 145

Gulf War (1991), 34, 58, 71, 229, 230, 235,

244, 254, 258, 266, 339, 432w84 Guttman, Nathan, 167, 232, 242, 252, 326

Ha'aretz, 20, 91, 100, 122, 167, 181, 188, 194, 211, 213, 214, 219, 221, 224, 232, 233, 235, 237, 238, 239, 253, 257, 260, 269, 270, 278, 289, 290, 292

Haass, Richard, 177, 229

Habib, Philip, 45

Hadassah, 116

Hadley, Stephen, 214, 296

Hagee, John, 114, 132, 134, 136, 137, 150, 301, 330, 400wl02

Hagel, Chuck, 249,312

Hahn, Peter L., 358w6

Haig, Alexander, 45, 369nl 10

Haiti, 26

Halevi, Yossi Klein, 275

Halevy, Ephraim, 257, 272

Halliburton, Inc., 145, 230, 289

Halutz, Dan, 306, 316, 320, 323

Hamas, 40, 61, 62, 63, 86, 101, 103, 159, 208, 214, 218, 219, 223-25, 265, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 279, 280, 303, 316, 340,343

Hamilton, Lee, 26-27, 117

Hannah, John, 166, 223, 246

Harkin, Tom, 158

Harman, Avraham, 368w95

Harris, David, 137, 186, 194

Hart, Gary, 232

Hass, Amira, 171

Hastert, Dennis, 160

Hatfield, Mark, 155

Hawk antiaircraft missiles, 25, 362wl0

Hayden, Tom, 154-55, 404^15

Hebron, 205

Hedding, Malcolm, 134

Hellfire missiles, 218

Helmreich, Jeffrey, 163

Helms, Jesse, 159

Helms, Richard, 36

Hentoff, Nat, 192

Heritage Foundation, 176

Hersh, Seymour, 36, 266, 273, 277, 296, 308, 309, 310, 333, 378w96

Herzliya Conference (2007), 4, 164

Hezbollah, 8, 17, 18, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 83, 86, 101, 103, 200, 202, 207, 220, 256-57, 265-67, 269, 270, 271, 272, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 303, 307, 316, 332, 336, 340, 343, 425wl, 454w29; formation of, 56; Iran, Syria, and, 317-18; and Lebanon war, 306-34, 452-61

high schools, 184-85, 412-13w60

Hilliard, Earl, 157

Hilsman, Roger, 146

Hitler, Adolf, 116, 184, 236, 249

Hoagland, Jim, 170, 218

Hoenlein, Malcolm, 113, 122, 126-27, 147, 150, 174, 213, 215, 295, 397n57

Hollings, Ernest, 162, 232

Holocaust, 11, 12, 92, 116, 118, 184, 186, 191, 416w92; American Jews and, 192-93; deniers of, 280-81, 353; guilt about, 50, 58, 149

Horovitz, David, 242, 261

Hudson Institute, 130, 176, 252, 278, 293

Human Rights Watch (HRW), 322, 324, 325, 328-29, 452wl,454w30

Hungary, 30

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:24 PM

INDEX

Abbas, Mahmoud, 64, 212, 216, 219, 222-25

ABC News, 330, 331, 393nl52

Abdelnour, Ziad, 273

Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia, 223, 299

Abdullah, King of Transjordan, 84, 94

Abdullah II, King of Jordan, 70

Abramoff, Jack, 161, 350

Abrams, Elliott, 129, 131, 166, 167, 214, 217, 223-24, 228, 244, 273-74, 309; Iraq war and, 239; Lebanon war and, 309, 310, 318

Abu Ghraib prison, 191

academia, 129, 178-85; anti-Israel bias in, 179-81; Israel lobby and, 168, 178-85; Title VI funding, 180-81, 41 ln44; see also specific colleges and universities

Ackerman, Gary, 153, 261, 301

Adelman, Kenneth, 129, 239, 247, 249, 274

Adelson, Sheldon, 181

Afghanistan, 30, 229, 256, 285, 302-304; Soviet invasion of, 236, 366w71; Taliban in, 61, 62, 230, 248, 302; U.S. invasion of, 207, 246, 247, 248, 303

AFL-CIO, 117

A-4 Skyhawk fighter-bombers, 362wl 1 Africa, 30, 34

Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 18, 73, 98, 177, 280, 283, 299, 301, 304, 340, 386w88

aid to Israel, see economic aid; military aid; U.S. Israel policy

Ajami, Fouad, 129, 246

al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, 40

Albright, Madeleine, 290

Al Jazeerah, 68

Allen, Teddy, 32

al-Maliki, Nuri, 311

Alpher, Yossi, 137, 262, 273

al Qaeda, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66-68, 71, 201, 204, 207, 225, 229, 247, 251, 265, 274, 280, 285, 294, 316, 338, 340; intelligence about, 274, 276-77, 278

al-Sadr, Moqtada, 318

Alterman, Eric, 149, 170

Ameinu, 120

American Association of Retired Persons

(AARP), 11, 13, 115, 117 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 130,

175, 176, 193,252,255,293, 296 American Friends of Likud, 116 American Friends of Peace Now, 432w84 American Israel Education Foundation

(AIEF), 161,327 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 4, 10, 14, 38, 49-50, 62, 78, 113, 116, 117-20, 123, 126, 127, 128, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 145, 146, 150, 153-67, 172, 173, 175, 179, 188, 206, 207, 213-14, 225, 228, 252, 258, 259, 336, 352, 354, 358w5, 397n58, 403nl, 404wwl2-16, 406wn40, 51, 438nl73, 460nl09; academia and, 179, 180; Congress and, 153-62; growth of, 118-19; influence of, 117-20, 153-62; Iran and, 287-91, 293, 298, 301; Iraq war and, 242-43; Lebanon war and, 326-30; Policy Conference, 160, 179; Syria and, 274-76; Zionist roots of, 118

American Jewish Committee, 13, 49, 116,

121, 123, 186, 194,219, 232,352 American Jewish Congress, 116, 180, 219, 241 American Jews, 115-20, 295, 394w7, 396w47, 397ww51, 54, 451wl01, 452wl08, 463wl3; in Congress, 153, 403n4; and "dual loyalty" issue, 147-50; Holocaust and, 192-93; Iraq war and, 243; neoconservative, 240; organizations of, 116-17; philanthropy of, 140, 395w22; role in Israel lobby of, 115-28, 140-41; vote of, 163-64 American Petroleum Institute, 13, 111, 145 Americans for a Safe Israel, 114, 116, 123,

159,397w51 Americans for Middle East Understanding, 350 Americans for Peace Now, 120, 125, 137, 160,

164, 352, 354 American Zionist, 123 American Zionist Council, 118 America's Voices in Israel, 174-75 Amitay, Morris, 119, 145, 153, 160, 161, 293 Amnesty International, 320-25, 328, 352wl Anderson, Perry, 100 Angola, 63

anti-Americanism, 8, 10, 53, 60-70, 199, 200, 204, 215, 316-17, 338; Lebanon war reinforcement of, 316-17, 318; Palestine issue and, 64-70; U.S. support for Israel as cause of, 10, 64-70, 200; see also specific organizations; terrorism

anticommunism, 7

Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 109, 113, 116, 124, 125, 128, 137, 139, 145, 150, 174, 179, 180, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 193, 194, 206, 219, 227, 232, 242, 291, 327, 330, 336, 408n4

anti-Semitism, 9, 12-13, 14, 70, 92, 108, 118, 128, 130, 137, 174, 179, 187, 188-96, 203, 328-29, 348, 350, 351, 354, 398w76, 414-16; in academia, 182, 183; critics of Israel charged with, 16, 188-96, 232-33, 328-30, 353; "dual loyalty" and, 146-47; French, 188-89; Lebanon war and, 328-29; "new," 188-96

apartheid, 9, 187, 193, 346

Arab Americans, 141-42

Arab-Israeli peace process, 9, 23-24, 31, 38-39, 46-48, 53, 79, 152, 282; Arab League initiative, 221-23; Camp David Accords (1978), 23-24, 38, 39, 267, 367w81; Camp David myths, 103-107; Camp David Summit (2000), 39, 47, 79,

97, 103-107, 138, 166, 370nll7, 391wl25, 408n66; Jerusalem issue, 105, 221, 347; 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, 38; Oslo peace process, 38, 39, 47-48, 59, 103, 104, 106, 107, 120, 127, 130, 166, 178, 190, 284, 287-88, 336; post-9/11, 204-28; regional transformation strategy, 255-59, 338-39; Road Map plan, 212-15, 217, 219, 220, 227-28, 342, 347; strategies for ending conflict, 342-48; Syria and, 263-79; two-state solution, 204-12, 220, 227, 345-47; unilateral disengagement policy, 215-20

Arab League, 86, 221, 344; initiative, 221-23

Arab lobby, 112, 141-42, 144

Arafat, Suha, 159

Arafat, Yasser, 39, 61, 62, 63, 64, 128, 158, 159, 204, 227, 248, 257, 369wll0, 374w50, 391^129, 392wl38; corrupt leadership of, 106; death of, 219; post-9/1 1 Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, 205, 206, 208-12, 214, 216-17, 218; at 2000 Camp David Summit, 103-107

Arbour, Louise, 101

Arkin, William, 322

Armenian Americans, 8,11

Armey, Richard, 132, 135, 152, 160, 209, 210, 399w99

Armitage, Richard, 251

Arms Export Control Act (1976), 27, 39

Arnett, Peter, 66

Arrow missile, 32

Art, Robert, 58

Asher, Robert, 157

Assad, Bashar al-, 17, 61, 86, 257, 264-79,

444w87 Atta, Mohammed, 67, 240 Auschwitz, 96, 182, 186 Australia, 33, 41,354 Avineri, Shlomo, 236 AWACS, 37, 144, 158, 190, 366«72 Ayalon, Ami, 105

Babbin, Jed, 275 Badri, Hassan el, 86

Baghdad, 233, 241, 257, 263, 274, 292, 426w2;

2003 UN headquarters attack in, 273 Baghdad Pact, 7 Baker, James, 165, 253 Balfour, Arthur, 133 Balfour Declaration, 6-7, 117 Balkans, 230

Ball, George, 167, 183 Bamford, James, 296 Bangladesh, 30

banks, alleged Jewish control of, 12, 13

Barak, Ehud, 39, 47, 61, 97, 100, 102, 127, 166, 234, 237, 256, 266-68, 347, 370nl 17, 391wl25, 440w20, 458w76; at 2000 Camp David Summit, 103-107

Baram, Amatzia, 259

Bard, Mitchell, 30, 48, 141, 146

Bar-Illan, David, 124

Barone, Michael, 248

Bartley, Robert, 129, 132

Bass, Warren, 35, 120; Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, 19

Bauer, Gary, 132, 138, 139, 209

Bayh, Evan, 160

BBC News, 146

Beckett, Ted, 134

Begin, Menachem, 37, 39, 45, 63, 85, 89, 102,

135, 136, 308, 366w72, 367n81, 439nl4 Beilin, Yossi, 193 Beinart, Peter, 255 Beinin, Joel, 413w60

Beirut, 8, 18, 39, 201, 306, 320, 321, 332 Belarus, 226

Ben-Ami, Shlomo, 19, 84, 85, 105, 106, 346,

386w85 Ben-David, Lenny, 150 Ben-Eliezer, Binyamin, 291 Ben-Eliezer, Uri, 93

Ben-Gurion, David, 25, 35, 36, 87, 93-96, 98, 99, 116, 257, 361w4, 372wl5, 384w60, 385w69

Benjamin, Daniel, 63, 66

Benn, Aluf, 257, 270, 278

Bennett, Richard M., 438w3

Bennett, William, 62, 129, 131, 132, 206, 240, 249

Ben-Zvi, Abraham, 38, 361w8

Berger, Matthew, 252

Berger, Samuel, 407w66

Berkley, Shelley, 160, 301

Berman, Michael, 154

Bernadotte, Folke, 63, 102, 121

Biale, David, 154

Bible, 107-108, 133, 136, 138

Biden, Joe, 312

bin Laden, Osama, 62, 63, 64, 66-68, 109, 201, 205, 206, 229, 247, 248, 358wl4 biological weapons, 36, 265

birthrates, 87-89

Blackhawk helicopters, 31

Blair, Tony, 74, 238, 260, 437wl63

Block, Josh, 108

Bloomfield, Douglas, 146, 161

Blunt, Roy, 160

Boehner, John, 160, 242, 326

Boim, Ze'ev, 382w46

Bolivia, 30

Bolton, John, 129, 131, 132, 160, 166, 274-75, 276; Iraq war and, 239, 240, 244, 247; Lebanon war and, 310-11, 453wnl4, 17

Bookbinder, Hyman, 13, 49, 121, 122

Boot, Max, 129, 130, 171, 177

Boston Globe, 188

Brahimi, Lakhdar, 69

Brandeis, Louis D., 117

Breira, 122-23

Brezhnev, Leonid, 43-44, 72

BritTzedekv'Shalom, 120, 128, 354

Bronfman, Edgar, Sr., 124, 288

Bronfman, Samuel, 29

Brookings Institution, 139, 152, 175, 176-77,

410w27 Brooks, David, 129, 170, 209 Brooks, Rosa, 329 Brownback, Sam, 4, 293, 295 B'Tselem, 89

Buchanan, Patrick, 232, 235, 416w99 Bullock, Roy, 187 Burdick, Quentin, 158 Burma, 30, 191

Burston, Bradley, 171, 214, 219, 260 Buruma, Ian, 173-74

Bush, George H. W, 34; Middle East policy of, 34, 39-40, 165, 201, 254, 346

Bush, George W, 6, 7-8, 17, 124, 160, 166, 374w38, 404wl2, 419w31, 421w73, 428w31; and alleged Iraq-9/11 link, 229, 240, 248, 251, 252-53, 254; "axis of evil" speech of, 303; global opinion on, 68; humiliated by Israel lobby, 208-11, 228; Iran policy of, 282-305; Iraq policy of, 6, 10, 17, 129, 212, 213, 229-62; Lebanon policy of, 306-34; Middle East policy of, 39, 40, 62, 74, 78, 87, 122, 129, 138, 142, 162, 165, 201-203, 204-28, 229-62, 263-79, 280-305, 306-34, 342-48, 353; and "Mission Accomplished" photo op, 212; reaction to 9/11 of, 229-30, 246, 291, 433w97, 436wl40; regional transformation strategy, 255-59, 291-94, 338-39;

Bush, George W. (cont.)

Road Map plan of, 212-15, 217, 219, 220, 227-28, 342, 347; support for Palestinian state of, 204-12, 227; Syria policy of, 263-79; in 2004 election, 212, 218, 219; war on terror of, 62, 205-208

Cairo, 31

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:25 PM

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

1. On this point, see Robert J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 45-46.

2. This statement may seem surprising, given the tendency for Americans simply to assume that Israel's security is vital to our own. In 2000, for example, a self-appointed commission of prominent foreign policy experts reported that preserving Israel as a free state was a "vital" U.S. interest, but the commission never explained why this was so or how Israel's fate would affect U.S. security or well-being. More sensibly, Robert Art asserts that "Israel has little strategic value to the United States and is in many ways a strategic liability. Nonetheless, America's ties with Israel run deep, the U.S. affinity with another democracy is strong, and the moral commitment to its preservation is clear." See Commission on America's National Interests, America's National Interests (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2000); and Art, Grand Strategy for America, 137.

3. The elements of offshore balancing are spelled out in Christopher Layne, "From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America's Future Grand Strategy," International Security 22, no. 1 (Summer 1997); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (NewYork: Norton, 2001), chap. 7; and Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (NewYork: Norton, 2005), 222-23, 235-36.

4. On this point, see Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (NewYork: Random House, 2005).

5. James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs, The Iraq Study Group Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2006), 39.

6. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "The Road from Mecca," New York Review of Books, May 10, 2007, 43. Agha and Malley also write, "Nor is there much ideological enthusiasm remaining for a two-state solution. Israelis accept it and most believe it is inevitable, but gone is the passion or zeal" (44).

7. See, for example, Ali Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (NewYork: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Josef Asevar, "Mideast Solution: A Confederation," Jewish Journal (online), November 3, 2003; Meron Benvenisti, "What Kind of Binational State?" Ha'aretz, November 20, 2003; Richard Boudreaux, "Arabs Say Israel Is Not Just for Jews," Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2007; Tony Judt, "Israel: The Alternative," NewYork Review of Books, October 23, 2003; Isabel Kershner, "Noted Arab Citizens Call on Israel to Shed Jewish Identity," New York Times, February 8, 2007; and Yaakov Lappin, "Academic: Israeli-Arabs Want End of Jewish State," Ynetnews.com, January 22, 2007.

8. A May 2007 World Bank report sharply criticized Israel's system of internal controls and checkpoints in the Occupied Territories, arguing that these impediments "have fragmented the territory into ever smaller and more disconnected cantons" and that "sustainable economic recovery will remain elusive if large areas of the West Bank remain inaccessible for economic purposes and restricted movement remains the norm for the vast majority of Palestinians and expatriate Palestinian investors." See World Bank Technical Team, "Movement and Access Restrictions in the West Bank: Uncertainty and Inefficiency in the Palestinian Economy," May 9, 2007, 1-2, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWESTBANKGAZA/ Resources/WestBankrestrictions9Mayfinal.pdf.

9. In 2007, a BBC World Service poll of twenty-eight thousand people in twenty-seven countries found that Israel had the worst image of the dozen countries listed, with 56 percent of respondents reporting it was a "negative" influence in the world and only 17 percent saying its influence was "positive." Iran's image was second worst: 54 percent negative and 18 percent positive. See Bradley Burston, "The BBC oll: Israel as Satan's Bastard Child," Ha'aretz, March 6, 2007; and "Israel, Iran Top 'Negative List,'" BBC News (online), March 6, 2007. On the occupation's corrupting effects, see Dror Wahrman, "Is Israel Falling Apart?" History News Network, March 5, 2007, www.hnn.us/articles/35958.html.

10. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2006), 167.

11. Yehuda Ben Meir and Dafna Shaked, "The People Speak: Israeli Public Opinion on National Security, 2005-2007," Memorandum no. 90 (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, May 2007), 65-67.

12. See the references in notes 28 and 29 in the Introduction.

13. Rabbi Gold also quoted former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's warning to American Jews that "we cannot afford the luxury of public disagreement, or public criticism that plays right into the hands of our enemies," and responded by saying, "I fail to understand how a prime minister of a democratic nation with an active political opposition would attempt to silence Jewish criticism abroad . . . Wherein the danger of American Jewish criticism? Is it the criticism that is harmful or the policies and actions that are criticized?" Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, "The Diaspora and the Intifada: The Responsibility of American Jews," Boston Review, October/November 2002.

14. "Diaspora Blues," Economist editorial, January 13, 2007, 14-15. Also see "Second Thoughts About the Promised Land," ibid., 53-56.

15. On this issue, see the recent column by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, "When We Let John Hagee Speak for Us," Forward, May 18, 2007.

16. Nathan Guttmann, "Dovish Groups Mull Mega-Merger in Bid to Build Peace Powerhouse," Forward, May 30, 2007; Amiram Barkat, "New Pro-Israel Lobby as Alternative to AIPAC," Ha'aretz, November 12, 2006; Bernd Debusmann, "Soros Adds Voice to Debate over Israel Lobby," Washington Post, April 15, 2007; Guy Dinmore, "Jewish Lobby for Peace with Palestinians Gathers Pace in US," Financial Times, October 24, 2006; Gary Kamiya, "Can American Jews Unplug the Israel Lobby?" Salon.com, March 20, 2007; Gregory Levey, "The Other Israel Lobby," Salon.com, December 19, 2006; and Gidon D. Remba, "Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby," Ha'aretz, November 17, 2006.

17. As of April 2007, the IJV declaration had garnered more than four hundred signatures. For the declaration and list of signatories, see the Independent Jewish Voices website, www.ijv.org.uk. Also see Martin Hodgson, "British Jews Break Away from 'Pro-Israeli' Board of Deputies," Independent, February 5, 2007; and Ned Temko, "Furor over Jewish Critics' Challenge to State of Israel," Observer, February 4, 2007.

18. Ben Weinthal, "German Jews Feud over Criticizing Israel," Forward, March 9, 2007. Also see Jason Frenkel, "Dissidents Set for Australia-Wide Media Campaign," Australian Jewish News (online), March 1, 2007; Antony Loewenstein, My Israel Question (Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2007); and "Why the 'Special Relationship' Between Germany and Israel Has to Be Reconsidered," Manifesto of 25 German Peace Researchers, November 15, 2006, www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?lg=en&reference=1569.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Authors rarely work alone, and we are certainly no exception. We are deeply grateful for the help that others gave us, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge their assistance.

This book began life as an article in the London Review of Books, and as recounted in the preface, that article might never have been published were it not for the courage and vision of the LRBs editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers. This book would not exist without her. After our original article was published, Moises Nairn, the editor of Foreign Policy, organized a symposium on the "Israel lobby' in the July/August 2006 issue of that journal. That debate helped turn the discussion away from ad hominem attacks directed at our article and us and toward a more serious consideration of these issues, and we appreciate the fair-minded way in which he managed te exchange.

We have discussed our ideas about the lobby in presentations at Columbia University, Congregation Kam Isaiah Israel, Cornell University, the Council on Foreign Relations, Emerson College, Georgetown University, the Empire Salon, the National Press Club, the Nieman Fellows program at Harvard University, and the University of Montana, Missoula. These sessions helped us refine our arguments further, and we are grateful to the organizers of these events—Richard Betts, Rabbi Arnold Wolf, Jae-Jung Suh, Nigel Gibson, Rania Kiblawi, John Henry, Mohamed Nimer, Callie Cross-ley, and Richard Drake—and to the various participants who attended and offered us criticism and advice.

The following individuals gave us valuable comments on some or all of the manuscript: Kirk J. Beattie, Harvey Cox, Michael Desch, John C. Green, Ian Lustick, Steven E. Miller, Trita Parsi, Jeremy Pressman, William

Quandt, Eugene Rogan, Jerome Slater, Stephen Van Evera, Martin Walt IV, and Sarah Leah Whitson. We offer a special note of thanks to Peter Novick, who provided insightful and very detailed suggestions in near-record time, and sanded many rough edges in our prose. The views expressed in this book are our own, of course, and we are responsible for any errors that remain.

Our efforts were aided by research assistance from Vaidyanatha Gundlu-pet in Chicago and Paul MacDonald in Cambridge, and our other assistants—David Wright at Harvard and Souvik De at the University of Chicago—were, as usual, indispensable. David Enders and especially Max Fraser fact-checked the manuscript with care and dispatch, and we thank them for their efforts and their ability to meet a tight deadline.

Our agent, Bill Clegg, was an energetic and wise supporter from the beginning; his enthusiasm and his able guidance are greatly appreciated. And we are doubly glad that he got us to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Working with FSG has been a delightful experience, and we are grateful to its publisher, Jonathan Galassi, and the rest of the staff for their good spirits and unfailing professionalism. Our editor, Eric Chinski, deserves a special word of appreciation: his perceptiveness, sensitivity to nuance, and consistently high standards drove us to produce a much better book. Cynthia Merman did a superb job of copyediting, and Gena Hamshaw handled logistics smoothly and cheerfully.

Lastly, writing a lengthy book inevitably imposes a toll on an authors family and friends. Neither of us could have written this book alone, or without the love and support from our wives, children, and a number of wonderful friends and colleagues. We apologize for those moments of detachment, distraction, and irritability that we undoubtedly exhibited over the past year, and we thank you all for your patience. We owe you.

INDEX

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Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:26 PM

75. "Day-by-Day: Lebanon Crisis—Week One," BBC News (online), July 19, 2006.

76. Quoted in Chris McGreal, "Capture of Soldiers Was 'Act of War' Says Israel," Guardian, July 13, 2006. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak told CNN just before the war ended, "It's time to do all we can to destroy as much as we can of the infrastructure in the next 12 to 13 hours, and then we'll see what is next." Quoted in Cobban, "The 33-Day War."

77. Quoted in Hassan M. Fattah and Steven Erlanger, "Israel Blockades Lebanon; Wide Strikes by Hezbollah," New York Times, July 14, 2006.

78. Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction."

79. William M. Arkin, "Israel's Failed Strategy of Spite," August 15, 2006, http://blog.wash HYPERLINK "http://ingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/08/did_israel_win.html"ingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/08/did_israel_win.html.

80. David S. Cloud, "Inquiry Opened into Israeli Use of U.S. Bombs," New York Times, August 25, 2006; and Richard Moyes and Thomas Nash, Cluster Munitions in Lebanon (London: Landmine Action, November 2005), 7-12.

81. Richard Ben Cramer, "Israel Criticized for Use of Indiscriminate Bombs," Washington Post, June 30, 1982; Kevin Danaher, "Israels Use of Cluster Bombs in Lebanon," Journal of Palestine Studies 11-12, nos. 4, 1 (Summer-Autumn 1982); Judith Miller, "U.S. Bars Cluster Shells for Israel Indefinitely," New York Times, July 28, 1982; and "U.S. Removes Ban on Bombs to Israel," Washington Post, December 7, 1988.

82. Cloud, "Inquiry Opened into Israeli Use of U.S. Bombs"; Human Rights Watch, "Israeli Cluster Munitions Hit Civilians in Lebanon," press release, July 24, 2006; Greg Myre, "Israel Orders Investigation of Bomb Use in Lebanon," New York Times, November 21, 2006; Meron Rappaport, "IDF Commander: We Fired More Than a Million Cluster Bombs in Lebanon," Ha'aretz, September 12, 2006; "Shooting Without a Target," Ha'aretz editorial, September 14, 2006; and Michael Slackman, "Israeli Bomblets Plague Lebanon," NewYork Times, October 6, 2006.

83. Quoted in Meron Rappaport, "What Lies Beneath," Ha'aretz, September 8, 2006.

84. Quoted in "U.N. Official Denounces Israel Cluster Bomb Use," MSNBC.com, August 30, 2006.

85. Quoted in Rappaport, "IDF Commander."

86. "U.N. Official Denounces Israel Cluster Bomb Use."

87. Associated Press, "UN Envoy: Israel Broke Int'l Law in War," Jerusalem Post, April 13, 2007. Also see Thomas Nash, Foreseeable Harm: The Use and Impact of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon, 2006 (London: Landmine Action, October 2006).

88. The key work on the subject is Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th ed. (NewYork: Basic Books, 2006).

89. Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Out of All Proportion," 26, 28, 45.

90. Human Rights Watch, "Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon," hrw.org, vol. 18, no. 3 (August 2006): 3.

91. Ibid. Also see Peter Bouckaert, "For Israel, Innocent Civilians Are Fair Game," International Herald Tribune, August 3, 2006; Peter Bouckaert, "White Flags, Not a Legitimate Target," Guardian, July 31, 2006; and Kenneth Roth, "Fog of War Is No Cover for Causing Civilian Deaths," Forward, August 4, 2006.

92. The Ramon quotations are in Mark Levine, "Qana Rules," CommonDreams.org, July 31, 2006; and Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Out of All Proportion," 21. Also see Gideon Levy, "Days of Darkness," Ha'aretz, July 30, 2006.

93. Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Out of All Proportion," 21-22, 28-30.

94. Ibid., 64.

95. Human Rights Watch, "Fatal Strikes," 5.

96. Quoted in Shimon Golding, "New Yorkers Rally for Israel," Jewish Press (online), July 19, 2006.

97. Steven Erlanger, "With Israeli Use of Force, Debate over Proportion," New York Times, July 19, 2006; and Lt. Col. Reuven Erlich, "Hezbollah's Use of Lebanese Civilians as Human Shields," Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Center for Special Studies, Israel, November 2006. This study was supported by the IDF and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For a brief critique, see Kenneth Roth, "Violation of Rules of War in Israel's Lebanon Atacks," letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2006.

98. Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Out of All Proportion," 63-64.

99. Mitch Prothero, "The 'Hiding Among Civilians' Myth," Salon.com, July 28, 2006.

100. Human Rights Watch, "Fatal Strikes," 3.

101. Roth, "Violation of Rules of War."

102. Sarah Leah Whitson, "Armchair Sleuths," letter to the editor, Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2006.

103. Human Rights Watch, "Fatal Strikes," 3. Also see Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Out of All Proportion," 59-64, which reaches the same conclusion.

104. The "Fatal Strikes" report (3, 5) notes that HRW researchers found no evidence of military activity around any of the twenty-four areas targeted by the IDF. However, after doing further research, it turned up evidence of military activity at one of the areas. Personal correspondence from HRW to authors, May 30, 2007.

105. Quoted in Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Out of All Proportion," 26.

106. Nathan Guttman, "American Jews Mobilize for Israel," Jerusalem Post, July 16, 2006. Also see Jacob Berkman, "Emergency Drive Tops $320 Million; Shifts Toward Rebuilding Israels North," JTA.org, October 10, 2006; Laurie Goodstein, "As Mideast Churns, U.S. Jews and Arabs Alike Swing into Action," New York Times, July 28, 2006; Avi Krawitz, "Israel Bonds Raises $1.2 Billion in 2006," Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2006; Ori Nir, "Bush Urged to Give Israel More Time for Attacks," Forward, July 21, 2006; and Shmuel Rosner, "Despite Criticism, War Raises Genuine Concern for Israel to the Fore," Ha'aretz, August 20, 2006.

107. Ari Berman, "AIPAC's Hold," Nation, July 29, 2006; and Silverman, "Politicking over Israel."

108. Letter from Congressman Chris Van Hollen to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, July 30, 2006, www.buzzflash.com/articles/releases/6.

109. Shmuel Rosner reported on August 9 that "Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) enraged some pro-Israel lobby groups when he sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, urging her 'to call for an immediate ceasefire' in Lebanon. He'll have a meeting with AIPAC representatives as early as today in which he will hear that this was an unacceptable move." See "Rosner's Mid-Term Diary: On the Mid-Terms, the Mideast, the Jewish Voters and Israel," Ha'aretz, August 10, 2006.

110. Quoted in Eric Fingerhut, "Van Hollen Issues Clarification; Some Critics Still Question Commitment to Israel," Washington Jewish Week (online), August 16, 2006. Also see Eric Fingerhut, "Van Hollen 'Advice' Draws Critics," Washington Jewish Week (online), August 10, 2006; and Eric Fingerhut, "At Odds," Washington Jewish Week (online), August 30, 2006.

111. Both quotations are from Fingerhut, "Van Hollen Issues Clarification."

112. Quoted in Elise Labott, "U.S. Worried Israeli Operations Could Weaken Lebanese Government," CNN.com, July 14, 2006. Also see Peter Baker, "U.S. Urges Restraint by Israel," Washington Post, July 14, 2006; Fattah and Erlanger, "Israel Blockades Lebanon"; and Wright, "Strikes Are Called Part of Broad Strategy."

113. Quoted in "Bush Criticized over Concern for Lebanese Regime," Forward, July 14, 2006.

114. Transcript of "Coverage of War in the Middle East," on CNN's Reliable Sources, August 6, 2006.

115. For the correspondence between Downie and Koch, see Kathryn J. Lopez, "Ed Koch and Len Downie," in "The Corner," National Review Online, August 17, 2006; and Alex Safian, "Updated: Post's Thomas Ricks Charges Israel Intentionally Leaving Hezbollah Rockets Intact," www.camera.org/index.aspr)x_context=2&x_outlet=388cx_article-1174.

116. Quoted in Leora Folk, "Washington Post Editor Rebukes His Reporter for Television Comments on Israel," New York Sun, August 18, 2006.

117. Alan Dershowitz, "What Is 'Human Rights Watch' Watching?" Jerusalem Post, August 25, 2006. Also see Alan Dershowitz, "Amnesty International Redefines 'War Crimes,'" Jerusalem Post, August 31, 2006. The attacks on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have continued in the war's aftermath. See Gerald Steinberg, Scrutinize Amnesty International," New York Sun, May 23, 2007; and Marc Stern, "The Media Was Misled by Amnesty's Legal Advocacy," Forward, March 30, 2007.

118. Ken Silverstein, "AIPAC Points to Legion of Doom in Bekaa Valley," Harper's (online), August 10, 2006; "Israel Taking Significant Steps to Prevent Casualties as Hizballah Hides Behind Civilians," AIPAC memo, August 1, 2006; and "Israel's Defensive Actions in Lebanon and Gaza," AIPAC FAQ, July 24, 2006.

119. Gerald M. Steinberg, "Ken Roth's Blood Libel," Jerusalem Post, August 27, 2006; "Roth's Su-persessionism," New York Sun editorial, July 31, 2006; and Abraham Foxman, "No Accident," New York Sun, August 2, 2006. Also see Avi Bell, "Getting It Straight," New York Sun, July 25, 2006; Joshua Muravchik, "Human Rights Watch vs. Human Rights," Weekly Stan

dard, September 11, 2006; Rabbi Aryeh Spero, "Why Liberals Refuse to Admit the Reality of Islamic Fascism," Human Events (online), August 16, 2006; "Roth's False God," New York Sun editorial, August 8, 2006; and "Sharansky Speaks," New York Sun editorial, September 12, 2006.

120. Rosa Brooks, "Criticize Israel? You're an Anti-Semite!" Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2006. For excellent discussions of the smearing of Human Rights Watch, see Aryeh Neier, "The Attack on Human Rights Watch," New York Review of Books, November 2, 2006, 41-44; and Philip Weiss, "Israel Lobby Watch," Nation, September 18, 2006. Also see Kathleen Peratis, "Diversionary Strike on a Rights Group," Washington Post, August 30, 2006; and Ian Seider-man, "Right of Reply: Biased Against Israel?" Jerusalem Post, September 11, 2006.

121. Quoted in Nathan Guttman and Yaakov Katz, "Israel Condemned for Cluster Bomb Use," Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2006.

122. Nathan Guttman, "US Senate Rejects Bid to Curb Use of Cluster Bombs," Jerusalem Post, September 8, 2006. This account of AIPAC's role in defeating the legislation is based on information from Human Rights Watch. Personal correspondence from HRW to authors, September 13, 2006; September 14, 2006; May 30, 2007.

123. Quoted in John Walsh, "AIPAC Congratulates Itself on the Slaughter in Lebanon," CounterPunch.org, August 16, 2006.

124. Quoted in "To Israel with Love."

125. William Kristol, "It's Our War: Bush Should Go to Jerusalem—and the U.S. Should Confront Iran," Weekly Standard, July 24, 2006. Also see Jim Lobe, "Energized Neocons Say Israel's Fight Is Washington's," Antiwar.com, July 18, 2006; Krauthammer, "Israel's Lost Moment"; and Charles Krauthammer, "Lebanon: The Only Exit Strategy," Washington Post, July 19, 2006.

126. Quoted in Tovah Lazaroff, "'Evangelicals the World Over Are Praying Fervently for Israel,'" Jerusalem Post, August 9, 2006. Also see George Conger, "US Support for Israel Soars After Hizbullah War," Jerusalem Post, August 27, 2006.

127. "To Israel with Love."

128. Quoted in Daphna Berman, "U.S. Jewish, Christian Groups Back Lebanon Operation," Ha'aretz, July 14, 2006. Also see Zev Chafets, "I Want Falwell in My Foxhole," Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2006.

129. Quoted in Flaherty, "House Overwhelmingly Backs Israel." This line of argument is also reflected in "To Israel with Love."

130. Unless otherwise noted, all of the survey data in this section are from "Israel, the Palestinians," PollingReport.com.

131. "Zogby Poll: U.S. Should Be Neutral in Lebanon War," Zogby International press release, August 17, 2006.

132. Uri Avnery, "America's Rottweiler," Gush-Shalom.org, August 26, 2006. Also see Yossi Ben-Ari, "America's Honey Trap," Ynetnews.com, July 24, 2006; Lawrence F. Kaplan, "America's Proxy War: Other Means," New Republic, July 31, 2006; and Shmuel Rosner, "America's Deadly Messenger," Ha'aretz, July 19, 2006.

133. Ali Waked, "Nasrallah: U.S. Pressured Israel into War," Ynetnews.com, May 7, 2007.

134. Quoted in Hersh, "Watching Lebanon." Also see Cobban, "The 33-Day War."

135. Ori Nir, "Jerusalem Urges Bush: Next Target Hezbollah," Forward, April 11, 2003. Also see Daniel Sobelman and Nathan Guttman, "PM Urges U.S. to Keep Heat on Syria, Calls Assad 'Dangerous,'" Ha'aretz, April 15, 2003.

136. Quoted in Hersh, "Watching Lebanon."

137. Quoted in Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (NewYork: Norton, 2001), 316.

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11: THE LOBBY AND THE SECOND LEBANON WAR

1. Human Rights Watch estimates that 1,125 Lebanese were killed in the war, about 300 to 350 of whom were combatants. Personal correspondence with HRW, May 24 and 30, 2007. The one-third figure for children is from Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction or 'Collateral Damage'? Israeli Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure," Report MDE 18/007/2006, August 23, 2006. Regarding the damage to infrastructure, see ibid.; Amnesty International, "Israel/Lebanon: Out of All Proportion—Civilians Bear the Brunt of the War," Report MDE 02/033/2006, November 21, 2006; and "Middle East Crisis: Facts and Figures," BBC News (online), August 31, 2006.

2. On the Winograd Commission's mandate, see Ha'aretz Staff, "The Main Findings of the Winograd Partial Report on the Second Lebanon War," Ha'aretz, May 1, 2007.

3. Quoted in Matthew Kalman, "Israel Set War Plan More than a Year Ago: Strategy Was Put in Motion as Hezbollah Began Increasing Its Military Strength," San Francisco Chronicle (online), July 21, 2006. Also see Martin Fletcher's comments to Tim Russert on Meet the Press shortly after the war began, "Transcript for July 16," MSNBC.com, July 16, 2006; Bernard Gwertzman, "Steinberg: Israel Hoping Attacks on Hezbollah Serve as a Warning to Iran," interview with Gerald M. Steinberg, Council on Foreign Relations, August 1, 2006; Yagil Levy, "A Voluntary 'Putsch,'" Ha'aretz, July 24, 2006; Andrea Mitchell, "U.S. Stands Alone in Defending Israel," MSNBC.com, July 13, 2006; Robert Novak, "No Political Upside in Criticizing Israel," Chicago Sun-Times, August 7, 2006; and Tanya Reinhart, "Israel's 'New Middle East,'" CounterPunch.org, July 27, 2006.

4. Seymour M. Hersh, "Watching Lebanon," New Yorker, August 21, 2006. Similarly, Matthew Kalman writes, "In the years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly." Kalman, "Israel Set War Plan."

5. See "Main Findings of the Winograd Partial Report." Olmert's testimony to the Winograd Commission is reported in Aluf Benn, "PM Says Decided on Response to Abductions Months Before War," Ha'aretz, March 8, 2007. Also see Aluf Benn, "Report: Interim Findings of War Won't Deal with Personal Failures," Ha'aretz, March 8, 2007; Josef Federman, "Reports: Israel Ready Before Lebanon War," Washington Post, March 9, 2007; Amos Harel,

Nir Hasson, Mazal Mualem, and Aluf Benn, "Officers Slam PM for Planning War but Not Preparing IDF," Ha'aretz, March 9, 2007; and Nir Hasson, "Senior IDF Officer to Haaretz: PM Did Not Order Us to Prepare for War," Ha'aretz, March 12, 2007.

6. Hersh, "Watching Lebanon"; and Kalman, "Israel Set War Plan." Also see "Israel: Did Blair Know All Along?" Daily Mail (online), August 14, 2006.

7. Hersh, "Watching Lebanon."

8. The Project for the New American Century sent an open letter signed by a host of prominent neoconservatives to President Bush on September 20, 2001, which said that "any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah." This letter was published in the Weekly Standard, October 1, 2001.

9. Helene Cooper, "Rice's Hurdles on Middle East Begin at Home," New York Times, August 10, 2006. Also see Sidney Blumenthal, "The Neocons' Next War," Salon.com, August 3, 2006; Hersh, "Watching Lebanon"; and Shmuel Rosner and Aluf Benn, "How to Win Friends and Influence Governments," Ha'aretz, July 28, 2006.

10. Marc Perelman, "Cheney Taps Syria Hawk as Adviser on Mideast," Forward, October 31, 2003. Also see Jim Lobe, "New Cheney Adviser Sets Syria in His Sights," Inter Press Service, October 20, 2003. John Hannah is another important neoconservative who was on Cheney's staff before and during the Lebanon conflict. Robert Dreyfuss, "Vice Squad," American Prospect, May 2006; and Janine Zacharia, "Bush Appoints Mideast Advisers," Jerusalem Post, February 7, 2001.

11. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" was prepared for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem and published in June 1996. A copy can be found on the institute's website, www.iasps.org/stratl.htm.

12. Adam Shatz, "In Search of Hezbollah," New York Review of Books, April 29, 2004. Also see Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, "Secret Proposals," Newsweek, August 9, 2004.

13. These are the words the Economist used to describe U.S. support for Israel during the Lebanon war. See "To Israel with Love," Economist, August 5, 2006.

14. Speaking before the war, Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman told a B'nai B'rith meeting in NewYork, "Today the secret is out. We really are not just five diplomats [at Israel's UN mission]. We are at least six including John Bolton." Quoted in Irwin Arieff, "Israel's UN Ambassador Slams Qatar, Praises Bolton," Reuters, May 22, 2006. On Bolton's actions, see Associated Press, "Bolton: US Wanted Hizbullah Eliminated," Jerusalem Post, March 22, 2007; "Bolton Admits Lebanon Truce Block," BBC News (online), March 22, 2007; Robin Wright, "Strikes Are Called Part of Broad Strategy," Washington Post, July 16, 2006; and "U.S. Vetoes Criticism of Israel, New York Times, July 13, 2006.

15. Transcript of "Special Briefing on Travel to the Middle East and Europe," July 21, 2006, www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/69331.htm; and Roula Khalaf, "Rice 'New Middle East' Comments Fuel Arab Fury over U.S. Policy," Financial Times, July 31, 2006.

16. Quoted in Warren Hoge and Steven Erlanger, "U.N. Council Backs Measure to Halt War in Lebanon," New York Times, August 12, 2006.

17. "Remarks by Ambassador John R. Bolton, U.S. Representative to the United Nations, on the Situation in the Middle East, at the Security Council Stakeout, July 17, 2006," USUN Press Release #174 (06). Bolton's unyielding defense of Israel prompted the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to break with its tradition of "not getting involved in personnel appointments" and ask the Senate to make him the permanent ambassador to the UN. Rosner and Benn, "How to Win Friends."

18. Blumenthal, "Neocons' Next War"; and David S. Cloud and Helene Cooper, "U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis," New York Times, July 22, 2006.

19. John Diamond, "Officials: U.S. Blocked Missiles to Hezbollah," USA Today, August 18, 2006.

20. Quoted in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Bush's Embrace of Israel Shows Gap with Father," New York Times, August 2, 2006.

21. Quoted in David J. Silverman, "Politicking over Israel: Jewish State Becomes Fodder in

Congressonal War," JTA.org, August 15, 2006. Also see Jim VandeHei, "Congress Is Giving Israel Vote of Confidence," Washington Post, July 19, 2006.

22. Quoted in Silverman, "Politicking over Israel." At a rally supporting Israel's actions in the

war, the New York Times reported that "the fervor was at such a pitch that President Bush,

who has defended Israel's actions, received praise from a lineup of politicians that was al-

most 100 percent Democratic." Clyde Haberman, "At Israel Rally, a Word Fails," New York

Times, July 18, 2006.

23. James D. Besser, "Scoring Points with the Israel Issue," Jewish Week, July 28, 2006; and "To

Israel with Love."

24. Brian Skoloff, "Dean Calls Iraqi PM an 'Anti-Semite,'" Seattle Post-Intelligencer (online),

July 26, 2006.

25. Rahall quoted in Anne Plummer Flaherty, "House Overwhelmingly Backs Israel in Vote,"

Guardian, July 20, 2006; Zogby quoted in Noam N. Levey, "In Politicians' Pro-Israel Din,

Arab Americans Go Unheard," Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2006.

26. On Clinton, see Gal Beckerman, "New York Jews Rally in Support of Israel," Jerusalem Post, July 18, 2006. On McCain, see Christopher Grimes, "European Criticism of Israel 'Amazes' Senator," Financial Times, July 18, 2006. On Biden and Gingrich, see their comments on Meet the Press with Tim Russert on July 16, 2006. Also see Michael Abramowitz, "Conservative Anger Grows over Bush's Foreign Policy," Washington Post, July 19, 2006.

27. Novak, "No Political Upside."

28. "Editorials Continue to Back Wide Air War Against Lebanon," Editor & Publisher, July 20,

2006. Also see Greg Mitchell, "Few Editorials Find Fault with the Bombing of Beirut," Ed-

itor & Publisher, July 18, 2006. One important exception to this general pattern was

Nicholas D. Kristof, "In Lebanon, Echoes of Iraq?" New York Times, July 25, 2006.

29. Quoted in Marvin Kalb and Carol Saivetz, "The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media

as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict," Faculty Research Working Paper RWP07-012,

John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, February 2007, 15. The Kalb

and Saivetz study, which is written from a pro-Israel perspective, argues that Israel was

treated unfairly by the media because it is an "open society" and Hezbollah is a "closed so-

ciety." Because the study focuses on news coverage of the conflict and largely ignores edito-

rials and commentary, it is able to argue that Israel tended to be portrayed in a more negative

light than Hezbollah. The claim that Israel was at a disadvantage in the media because of its

relative openness is unconvincing, because journalists could clearly see what was happen-

ing in both Israel and Lebanon.

30. The number of civilians killed is based on the figures from Human Rights Watch described

in note 1 above. The number of buildings damaged or destroyed is from "Middle East Cri-

sis: Facts and Figures."

31. Andrew Gumbel, "America's One-Eyed View of War: Stars, Stripes, and the Star of David,"

Independent, August 15, 2006. Also see "Is America Watching a Different War? American,

Lebanese and Israeli Panel on How the US Media Is Covering the Invasion of Lebanon,"

DemocracyNow.org, August 3, 2006.

32. "Main Findings of the Winograd Partial Report." The report also says that "the ability to

achieve military gains having significant political-international weight was limited" and that

"some of the declared goals of the war were ... in part not achievable by the authorized

modes of military action."

33. Quoted in Larry Cohler-Esses, "Israel Seeks to Redefine Victory," Jewish Week, August 4, 2006. Also see Jack Khoury, "Top IDF Officer: We Knew War Would Not Get Our Soldiers Back," Ha'aretz, April 26, 2007; and Ori Nir, "Israel Seeks to Eliminate Iran's Hezbollah Option," Forward, July 14, 2006.

34. Quoted in Wright, "Strikes Are Called."

35. Benjamin Netanyahu, "No Ceasefire in the War on Terror," Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2006.

36. A senior Israeli commander told the New York Times, "The army was planning on 15 days of

air war before any ground forces were onsidered . . . We didn't want to do any ground assault and thought we could create the conditions for a cease-fire without a major ground assault." Quoted in Steven Erlanger, "Israeli Officer Says Army Aims to Kill Nasrallah," New York Times, August 20, 2006.

37. Both Olmert quotations in this paragraph are from "PM Olmert: Lebanon Is Responsible and Will Bear the Consequences," transcript of press conference, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 12, 2006.

38. This basic strategy has a long tradition in Israeli military policy. During the 1950s, for example, Israeli reprisals against Jordanian army and police units were partly intended to convince the Jordanian government to crack down on Palestinian groups that were conducting cross-border raids into Israel. See Jonathan Shimshoni, Israel and Conventional Deterrence: Border Warfare from 1953 to 1970 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), chap. 2.

39. Noam Ophir, "Look Not to the Skies: The IAF vs. Surface-to-Surface Rocket Launchers," Strategic Assessment (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University) 9, no. 3 (November 2006).

40. Uzi Rubin, "Hezbollah's Rocket Campaign Against Northern Israel: A Preliminary Report," Jerusalem Issue Brief (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) 6, no. 10 (August 31, 2006).

41. Jonathan Finer and Edward Cody, "No Cease-Fire Soon, Israeli Leader Says," Washington Post, August 1, 2006; and Yochi J. Dreazen and Marc Champion, "U.S., Israel Start to Diverge as Casualties Mount," Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2006.

42. Amos Harel, "Analysis: Hezbollah Is Still Showing No Signs of Breaking," Ha'aretz, July 20, 2006; John Kifner, "Israel Is Powerful, Yes. But Not So Invincible," New York Times, July 30, 2006; Ze'ev Schiff, "A Strategic Mistake," Ha'aretz, July 20, 2006; Ari Shavit, "An Aerial War," Ha'aretz, July 20, 2006; "What About the Missiles?" Ha'aretz editorial, August 3, 2006; and Martin Van Creveld, "In This War, Too, Victory Is Unlikely," International Herald Tribune, August 2, 2006.

43. John Kifner and Greg Myre, "After U.N. Accord, Israel Expands Push in Lebanon," New York Times, August 13, 2006.

44. The seminal work on this subject is Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Also see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (NewYork: Norton, 2001), 85-110.

45. Amnesty International, "Unlawful Killings During Operation 'Grapes of Wrath,'" July 1996; Warren Christopher, "A Time to Act," Washington Post, July 28, 2006; Human Rights Watch, "Operation Grapes of Wrath: The Civilian Victims," September 1997; Ze'ev Schiff, "Strategic Mistake"; and Avi Shlaim, "Israel's Error, Then and Now," International Herald Tribune, August 4, 2006.

46. Beirut Center for Research and Information, "Poll Finds Support for Hezbollah's Retaliation: Opinions Diverge on Sectarian Lines—But Not Completely," July 29, 2006; Dahr Ja-mail, "Hezbollah Rides a New Popularity," Antiwar.com, August 8, 2006; Nadim Ladki, "US Policy Alienates All the Lebanese," Gulf Times (online), August 1, 2006; Neil MacFarquhar, "Tide of Arab Opinion Turns to Support for Hezbollah," New York Times, July 28, 2006; and Shibley Telhami, "Hezbollah's Popularity Exposes al-Qaeda's Failure to Win the Hearts," San Jose Mercury News (online), July 30, 2006.

47. Cohler-Esses, "Israel Seeks to Redefine Victory"; Steve Erlanger, "Israel Seeks Hint of Victory," New York Times, August 13, 2006; Anshel Pfeffer, "Analysis: The IDF's New Definition of Victory," Jerusalem Post, July 26, 2006; and Zeev Sternhell, "The Most Unsuccessful War," Ha'aretz, August 2, 2006.

48. Charles Krauthammer, "Israel's Lost Moment," Washington Post, August 4, 2006; and Ori Nir, "Conservatives Slam Israeli War Strategy," Forward, August 11, 2006. Also see Bret Stephens, "Israel Is Losing This War," Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2006; and "Olmert and Bush," Wall Street Journal editorial, August 1, 2006. The IDF's performance in Lebanon did not improve between the time these pieces were written and the war ended on August 14, 2006.

49. For claims that Israel won, or at least did not lose, the war, see Nahum Barnea, "Think Again: Israel vs. Hezbollah," Foreign Policy 157 (November-December 2006); Cameron S. Brown, "Iran's Investment Just Went Down the Tubes," Ha'aretz, September 10, 2006; Shai Feldman, "The Hezbollah-Israel War: A Preliminary Assessment," Middle East Brief no. 10 (Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, September 2006); Michael A. Fletcher, "Hezbollah the Loser in Battle, Bush Says," Washington Post, August 15, 2006; Efraim Halevy, "Blind Date," New Republic, August 14 & 21, 2006; Shmuel Rosner, "U.S. Diplomats Begin Viewing Lebanon War as Success," Ha'aretz, September 15, 2006; and Asher Susser, "Lebanon: A Reassessment," Jerusalem Post, September 13, 2006. It was imperative for Israel and the lobby to spin the war as an Israeli victory, even if only barely, so that Americans would continue to view Israel as a reliable ally. Leon Hadar makes that case in "Neocons amid Lebanon's Rubble: A Challenge to Krauthammer's Israel-as-Strategic-Asset Argument," National Interest (online), September 14, 2006. In this regard, it is worth noting that Charles Krauthammer, who saw Israel losing the war on August 4 ("Israel's Lost Moment"), wrote a column on September 1 ("Hezbollah's Victory,'" Washington Post) proclaiming that "Hezbollah may have won the propaganda war, but on the ground it lost. Badly." Nevertheless, most Israeli officers thought otherwise. See Amos Harel, "Chief Education Officer: We Lost Lebanon War," Ha'aretz, September 22, 2006; and Hanan Greenberg, "Officers Slam IDF War Conference," Ynetnews.com, January 2, 2007. Also, the New York Times reported that a poll taken for Ha'aretz just before the war ended found that only 20 percent of Israelis thought Israel was winning, 30 percent thought Israel was losing, and 43 percent thought that neither side was winning. See Hoge and Erlanger, "U.N. Council Backs Measure." Most Israelis concurred with this assessment after the war, as a poll taken in early 2007 found that 51 percent of the respondents believed that neither side had won the war, while 26 percent said that Hezbollah had won and 23 percent said that Israel had won. Ben Meir and Shaked, "The People Speak," 9, 20-21. Furthermore, a poll taken shortly after the war ended found that 63 percent of the respondents believed that Prime Minister Olmert should resign; 74 percent thought that Defense Minister Amir Peretz should resign; and 54 percent believed that General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff, should resign. "Poll: Majority Wants Olmert Out," Ynetnews.com, August 25, 2006.

50. For an excellent assessment of the conflict, which argues that Hezbollah ultimately was the winner, see the three-part series in Asia Times Online by Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry: "Winning the Intelligence War," October 12, 2006; "Winning the Ground War," October 13, 2006; and "The Political War," October 14, 2006. Also see Anthony H. Cordesman, "Preliminary 'Lessons' of the Israeli-Hezbollah War," Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, August 17, 2006; Ron Tira, "Breaking the Amoeba's Bones," Strategic Assessment (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University) 9, no. 3 (November 2006); and Amir Kulick, "Hizbollah vs. the IDF: The Operational Dimension," in ibid.

51. "Main Findings of the Winograd Partial Report." Also see Gregory Levey, "Israel's Surge of Despair," Salon.com, February 15, 2007.

52. "Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah Calls upon Arab Leaders to Promote Cease-Fire in Meetings with the Americans," Middle East Media Research Institute, TV Monitor Project, Clip no. 1219, August 3, 2006, www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?Pl = 1219 on May 17, 2007.

53. See the Information International Poll, August 22-27, 2006, in Gary C. Gambill, ed., "Lebanese Public Opinion," Mideast Monitor 1, no. 3 (September-October 2006).

54. "Poll: 64% of Lebanese Say Opinion of U.S. Worsened After War," Ha'aretz, November 14, 2006. Also see Jim Lobe, "Backing for Irael Stymies Larger U.S. Aims in the Region," Antiwar.com, July 22, 2006; Jim Lobe, "Losing Arab Allies' Hearts and Minds," Inter Press Service, December 14, 2006; Shmuel Rosner, "They Know You Know They're Winning," Slate.com, December 4, 2006; and Shibley Telhami, "Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey" (with Zogby International), results from Lebanon poll taken November 11-16, 2006.

55. Zogby International, "Five Nation Survey of the Middle East," poll conducted for Arab

American Institute, December 2006. Also see Zogby International, "AAI Poll: Continuing Conflict in Iraq and Palestine Deepens U.S.-Arab Rift with Growing Costs to Both Sides," December 14, 2006.

56. Thanassis Cambanis, "Travel Industry Suffers Another Blow in Lebanon," Boston Globe, September 4, 2006.

57. Information International Poll, August 22-27, 2006; and Telhami, "Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey." It is also worth noting that most Lebanese apparently do not blame Hezbollah for starting the war, as one poll found that 84 percent of the respondents "agree that the Israel-Lebanon war was a consequence of a joint Israel-US attempt to impose a Middle East order." See the Center for Strategic Studies poll published in Gambill, "Lebanese Public Opinion."

58. "Another Killing in Lebanon," New York Times editorial, November 23, 2006; "Beirut Rally Attracts Huge Crowd," BBC News (online), December 10, 2006; Akiva Eldar, "Israel Fears Siniora Government May Fall," Ha'aretz, December 3, 2006; "Fleeting Gains from Lebanon War?" Jewish Week, December 8, 2006; Michael Slackman, "Anti-Syrian Minister Is Assassinated in Lebanon," New York Times, November 21, 2006; "Lebanon on the Brink," Chicago Tribune editorial, November 23, 2006; Tim McGirk, "Losing Lebanon," Time, December 3, 2006; Jim Quilty, "Winter of Lebanon's Discontent," Middle East Report Online, January 26, 2007; and Anthony Shadid, "As Crises Build, Lebanese Fearful of a Failed State," Washington Post, June 5, 2007.

59. Michael Slackman, "Iran's Strong Ties with Syria Complicate U.S. Overtures," New York Times, December 28, 2006.

60. Rafael D. Frankel, "Israel Troubled That War in Lebanon Drove Its Enemies Closer," Christian Science Monitor, September 22, 2006.

61. Blumenthal, "Neocons' Next War"; Max Boot, "Israel Should Hit Syria First," Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2006; Daniel J. Goldhagen, "Israel's Way Out," Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2006; William Kristol, "It's Our War," Weekly Standard, July 24, 2006; Michael Ledeen, "The Thirties All Over Again?" National Review Online, July 31, 2006; Ori Nir, "U.S. Ripped for Inaction on Israeli, Syrian Front," Forward, August 4, 2006; Michael B. Oren, "Necessary Steps for Israel," Washington Post, July 14, 2006; Michael B. Oren, "Why Israel Should Bomb Syria: Attack Add," New Republic Online, July 17, 2006; Tom Regan, "US Neocons Hoped Israel Would Attack Syria," Christian Science Monitor, August 9, 2006; and George F. Will, "Transformation's Toll," Washington Post, July 18, 2006.

62. Yitzhak Benhorin, "Neocons: We Expected Israel to Attack Syria," Ynetnews.com, December 16, 2006. Also see Jim Lobe, "Neo-Cons Wanted Israel to Attack Syria," Inter Press Service, December 18, 2006.

63. Robin Hughes, "Iran Replenishes Hizbullah's Arms Inventory," Jane's Defence Weekly, January 3, 2007; Yaakov Katz, "Syria Resupplying Hizbullah with Long-Range Missiles," Jerusalem Post, December 4, 2006; David R. Sands, "Iran, Syria Rebuild Hezbollah," Washington Times, October 25, 2006; Elaine Shannon and Tim McGirk, "Iran and Syria Helping Hizballah Rearm," Time, November 24, 2006; and Ronny Sofer, "Ashkenazi: Hizbullah Trying to Move South of Litani," Ynetnews.com, April 29, 2007.

64. Damien Cave, "Protestors in Baghdad Denounce U.S. and Israel," New York Times, August 4, 2006; Andy Mosher, "In Baghdad, Shiites Rally for Hezbollah," Washington Post, August 5, 2006; and "Tens of Thousands Rally in Baghdad to Show Support for Hezbollah," USA Today, August 4, 2006.

65. Michael R. Gordon and Dexter Filkins, "Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq," New Yor Times, November 28, 2006.

66. MacFarquhar, "Tide of Arab Opinion." Also see Scott MacLeod, "Egypt's Mubarak: 'No Light at the End of the Tunnel,'" Time, July 27, 2006; "Saudi Arabia Harshly Criticizes Hezbollah for Escalating Mideast Crisis," Associated Press, July 14, 2006; and Andy Mosher, "From Arab Leaders, Sympathy for Civilians but Not Hezbollah," Washington Post, July 18, 2006.

67. Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, "US Has Emerged as a Loser in the Middle East," Financial Times, August 20, 2006; Richard Holbrooke, "The Guns of August," Washington Post, August 10, 2006; Howard LaFranchi, "Why Europe, US Differ on Mideast," Christian Science Monitor, August 4, 2006; Neil MacFarquhar, "Anti-U.S. Feeling Leaves Arab Reformers Isolated," New York Times, August 9, 2006; Tyler Marshall, "On Cease-Fire, U.S. Diplomacy Again Takes a Go-It-Alone Path," Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2006; Tyler Marshall and Alissa J. Rubin, "U.S. Clout a Missing Ingredient in Mideast," Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2006; Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, "The Loser in Lebanon: The Atlantic Alliance," Asia Times Online, August 8, 2006; "The US and Israel Stand Alone," interview with Jimmy Carter, Spiegel Online, August 15, 2006; and Robin Wright and Colum Lynch, "US at Odds with Allies on Mideast Conflict," Washington Post, July 20, 2006.

68. Peter Kiernan, "Middle East Opinion: Iran Fears Aren't Hitting the Arab Street," WorldPoliticsWatch.com, March 1, 2007. Also see Jim Lobe, "Arabs Less Worried About Iran," Inter Press Service, February 8, 2007.

69. Quoted in Stolberg, "Bush's Embrace." Also see John B. Judis, "Bush's Failed Israel Strategy: Apocalypse Now," New Republic Online, August 2, 2006.

70. Quoted in Nir, "Conservatives Slam Israeli War Strategy." Also see Eliot Cohen, "Nasrallah's War: Observations upon Returning from Israel," Berlin Journal 13 (Fall 2006): 23-25.

71. Three IDF soldiers died in the initial Hezbollah raid, and five more perished in the IDF's initial attempt to rescue the captured personnel. Helena Cobban, "The 33-Day War," Boston Review, November/December 2006; Amos Harel, "Hezbollah Kills 8 Soldiers, Kidnaps Two in Offensive on Northern Border," Ha'aretz, July 13, 2006; "Hezbollah Warns Israel over Raids," BBC News (online), July 12, 2006; Greg Myre and Steven Erlanger, "Clashes Spread to Lebanon as Hezbollah Raids Israel," NewYork Times, July 13, 2006; and Anthony Shadid and Scott Wilson, "Hezbollah Raid Opens 2nd Front for Israel," Washington Post, July 13, 2006.

72. Quoted in Shadid and Wilson, "Hezbollah Raid." Nasrallah made it clear again after the war that he was not interested in a war with Israel when he said that he would not have ordered the raid had he known that it would lead to war. Zvi Bar'el, "Analysis: Nasrallah Is Still in Charge," Ha'aretz, August 28, 2006; and Rory McCarthy, "Hizbullah Leader: We Regret the Two Kidnappings That Led to War with Israel," Guardian, August 28, 2006.

73. Shlomo Brom, "The Confrontation with Hezbollah," Tel-Aviv Note no. 177, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, July 13, 2006; Margot Dudkevitch, "UN-Brokered Cease-Fire Holds after Hizbullah Shells Mount Dov," Jerusalem Post, February 3, 2006; "Israeli Army Targets Hezbollah," Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2006; Herb Keinon, "Security Council Condemns Hizbullah," Jerusalem Post, November 24, 2005; Greg Myre, "Israel Strikes Northern Gaza and Lebanon with Planes," New York Times, December 28, 2005; Anders Strindberg, "Hizbullah's Attacks Stem from Israeli Incursions into Lebanon," Christian Science Monitor, August 1, 2006; Scott Wilson, "Hezbollah Shelling Kills 1; Ends Calm on Israeli Border," Washington Post, June 30, 2005; Scott Wilson, "Hezbollah, Israeli Forces Clash on Lebanese Border," Washington Post, November 22, 2005; and Scott Wilson, "Violence Flares Across Israel-Lebanon Border," Washington Post, May 29, 2006.

74. Margot Dudkevitch, "Nasrallah Vows More Kidnapping Attempts," Jerusalem Post, November 27, 2005.

75. "Day-by-Day: Lebanon Crisis—Week One," BBC News (online), July 19, 2006.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

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61. Lobe, "Neo-Cons Move Quickly."

62. Michael Ledeen, "The Iranian Hand," Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2004.

63. "President Discusses War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom," talk in Cleveland, Ohio (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 20, 2006).

64. Quoted in Ori Nir, "Groups to Bush: Drop Iran-Israel Linkage," Forward, May 12, 2006.

65. Associated Press, "John McCain Jokes About Bombing Iran at U.S. Campaign Stop," International Herald Tribune, April 19, 2007.

66. "The Road to the White House: Israel-U.S. Ties," Jerusalem Post, May 24, 2007.

67. Nir, "Groups to Bush." Also see James D. Besser and Larry Cohler-Esses, "Iran-Israel Linkage by Bush Seen as Threat," Jewish Week, April 21, 2006; James D. Besser, "JCPA Delegates Spurn Israel Demands," Jewish Week, March 2, 2007; "Groups Fear Public Backlash over Iran," Forward, February 2, 2007; Ron Kampeas, "As Jewish Groups Huddle, Quagmire in Iraq Undermines Resolve on Iran," JTA.org, February 28, 2007; and Jim Lobe, "Jewish Community Worried About Iran Backlash," Inter Press Service, May 10, 2006.

68. Quoted in Besser and Cohler-Esses, "Iran-Israel Linkage."

69. Quoted in Ori Nir, "Bush Overture to Iran Splits Israel, Neocons," Forward, June 9, 2006.

70. Gareth Porter, "Strategy Paper Reveals Bush Won't Attack Iran," Inter Press Service, June 20, 2006.

71. James Bamford, "Iran: The Next War," Rolling Stone, July 24, 2006; Seymour M. Hersh, "The Coming Wars," New Yorker, January 24/31, 2005; Seymour M. Hersh, "The Iran Plans," New Yorker, April 17, 2006; Seymour M. Hersh, "Last Stand," New Yorker, July 10, 2006; Seymour M. Hersh, "The Redirection," New Yorker, March 5, 2007; and "Iran: The Next Strategic Target," Seymour Hersh interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, AlterNet.org, January 19, 2005. Also see Peter Baker, Dafna Linzer, and Thomas E. Ricks, "U.S. Is Studying Military Strike Options on Iran," Washington Post, April 9, 2006; Perelman, "Pentagon Team on Iran"; and Craig Unger, "From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq," Vanity Fair (online), March 2007. All of the quotations in this paragraph are from Hersh, "Coming Wars."

72. The information in this paragraph is drawn from Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti, "To Counter Iran's Role in Iraq, Bush Moves Beyond Diplomacy," New York Times, January 11, 2007; Tony Karon, "The Problem with Confronting Iran," Time, January 16, 2007; Eli Lake, "GIs Raid Iranian Building in Irbil," New York Sun, January 12, 2007; David E. Sanger,

"Opening a New Front in the War, against Iranians in Iraq," New York Times, January 15, 2007; David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon, "Rice Says Bush Authorized Iranians'Arrest in Iraq," New York Times, January 13, 2007; and Trita Parsi, "Bush's Iraq Plan: Goading Iran into War," Inter Press Service, January 17, 2007.

73. Helene Cooper, "U.S. No Pushing for Attack on Iran, Rice Says," New York Times, June 1, 2007. Also see Arnaud de Borchgrave, "Guns of August?" United Press International, June 4, 2007; Steven C. Clemons, "Cheney Attempting to Constrain Bush's Choices on Iran Conflict: Staff Engaged in Insubordination Against President Bush," Washington Note weblog, May 24, 2007, www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/002145.php; Michael Hirsh and Mark Hosenball, "Cheney vs. Rice: A Foreign-Policy Showdown," MSNBC.com, June 11, 2007; and Glenn Kessler, "Cheney Backs Diplomacy on Iran Program, Rice Affirms," Washington Post, June 2, 2007.

74. These quotations are from the "Agreed Statement" of October 21, 2003, a copy of which can be found in International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes, 19. For the details of the negotiations between Iran and the EU-3, see ibid., chap. 1; International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey, 2004/5 (NewYork: Routledge, May 2005), 196-200; and International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey, 2006 (NewYork: Routledge, 2006), 210-22.

75. Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, "The Myth of the EU Olive Branch," Asia Times Online, August 13, 2005; Ansari, Confronting Iran, chap. 7; British American Security Information Council, "EU3 Negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran: Not Out of the Woods Yet and Time Is Short, Very Short," BASIC Notes: Occasional Paper on International Security Policy, July 2005; and Hersh, "Last Stand."

76. Elissa Gootman, "Security Council Approves Sanctions Against Iran over Nuclear Program," NewYork Times, December 24, 2006; Colum Lynch, "Sanctions on Iran Approved by U.N.," Washington Post, December 24, 2006. Also see Nazila Fathi, "Iran Is Defiant, Vowing to U.N. It Will Continue Nuclear Efforts," New York Times, December 25, 2006; Ron Kampeas, "The Iran Sanctions Package: Some Assembly Required, Teeth Not Included," JTA.org, December 25, 2006; Nasser Karimi, "Iran Rebuffs U.N., Vows to Speed Up Uranium Enrichment," Washington Post, December 25, 2006; and Neil King, "U.S. Bid to Limit Iran Gets Wary Response," Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2006.

77. Daniel Bilefsky, "Europe Approves More Sanctions Against Iran," New York Times, April 24, 2007; Daniel Dombey and Gareth Smyth, "New EU Sanctions Raise Pressure on Iran," Financial Times, April 23, 2007; Warren Hoge, "U.N. Council Gets New Draft Decree on Iran Nuclear Sanctions," NewYork Times, March 16, 2007; Colum Lynch, "U.N. Backs Broader Sanctions on Tehran," Washington Post, March 26, 2007; Colum Lynch, "U.S., Allies Agree to Drop Proposed Iran Travel Ban," Washington Post, March 10, 2007; and Thorn Shanker, "Security Council Votes to Tighten Iran Sanctions," New York Times, March 25, 2007.

78. Hersh, "The Redirection."

79. Nathan Guttman, "Activists Set to Push New Sanctions against Iran," Forward, March 9, 2007. Also see Eli Lake, "AIPAC Will Press for Hard Line on Iran Regime," New York Sun, March 7, 2007; Ian Swanson, "Chairmen Try to Tighten Screws on Iran," The Hill (online), March 14, 2007; and Steven R. Weisman, "U.S. Tightens Financial Squeeze on Iran," International Herald Tribune, March 20, 2007.

80. Richard Beeston and James Bone, "Hostage Fears over Troops Seized by Iran," Times (London), March 24, 2007; Sarah Lyall, "Iran Seizes 15 Britons on Patrol in Persian Gulf," New York Times, March 24, 2007; Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh, "What We Can Learn from Britain About Iran," New York Times, April 5, 2007; and Kevin Sullivan, "15 Britons Taken to Tehran as Iran Dispute Intensifies," Washington Post, March 25, 2007.

81. Guttman, "Activists Set to Push"; Lake, "AIPAC Will Press"; and Weisman, "U.S. Tightens Financial Squeeze." On Europe's reluctance to reduce its economic dealings with Iran, see Steven R. Weisman, "Europe Resists U.S. Push to Curb Iran Ties," New York Times, January 30, 2007.

82. All of the quotations in this paragraph are from Hassan M. Fattah, "Saudi King Condemns U.S. Occupation of Iraq/' New York Times, March 28, 2007. Also see William J. Broad and David E. Sanger,"With Eye on Iran, Rivals Also Want Nuclear Power," New York Times, April 15, 2007; Rachel Bronson, "Good Neighbors: What Saudi Arabia Wants," New Republic Online, April 3, 2007; Helene Cooper, "U.S. Feels Sting of Winning Saudi Help with Other Arabs," New York Times, March 30, 2007; Helene Cooper and Jim Rutenberg, "A Saudi Prince Tied to Bush Is Sounding Off-Key," New York Times, April 29, 2007; Hassan M. Fattah, "Bickering Saudis Struggle for an Answer to Iran's Rising Influence in Middle East," New York Times, December 22, 2006; and Jonathan Steele, "As US Power Fades, It Can't Find Friends to Take on Iran," Guardian, February 2, 2007.

83. "Israeli PM Olmert Addresses Congress," Washington Post, May 24, 2006. Olmert also visited the White House and made his views on Iran clear to President Bush. See "President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel Participate in Joint Press Availability," White House, Office of the Press Secretary, May 23, 2006. The Israeli scholar Benny Morris has also laid out an apocalyptic vision of what will happen to Israel if Iran acquires nuclear weapons. See Benny Morris, "Essay: This Holocaust Will Be Different," Jerusalem Post, January 18, 2007; and Benny Morris, "The Second Holocaust Is Looming," israelinsider .com, January 15, 2007.

84. Lally Weymouth, "Israel's P.M. on Iran, Lebanon, Palestinian State," Newsweek interview, MSNBC.com, November 11, 2006. Also see Uzi Benziman, "Trigger-Happy (On the Button)," Ha'aretz, December 17, 2006; "Iran Complains to UN Security Council over Sneh Comments," Ha'aretz, November 11, 2006; and Ronny Sofer, "IDF: Only US Operation Can Stop Iran," Ynetnews.com, October 12, 2006.

85. Quoted in Gil Yaron, "Missile Raid Would Hit Iran Nuclear Plants—Olmert," Ynetnews.com, April 28, 2007.

86. Oded Tira, "What to Do with Iran?" Ynetnews.com, December 30, 2006.

87. The Sharon quotation is from Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter, "Israel Readies Forces for Strikes on Nuclear Iran," Sunday Times (London), December 11, 2005. The more recent report (and the Israel denial) is from Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter, "Revealed: Israel Plans Nuclear Strike on Iran," Sunday Times, January 7, 2007; and Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter, "Israel Denies Planning Iran Nuke Attack," Associated Press, January 7, 2007. Also see Richard Boudreaux, "Israel Sounds Alarm on Iran's Nuclear Efforts," Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2007; and Ilene Prusher, "Israel Buzzes over Notion of Attacking Iran," Christian Science Monitor, January 16, 2007.

88. "'Israel May Have to Act Alone,'" Spiegel interview with Avigdor Lieberman, Spiegel Online, February 12,2007.

89. For a sample of the voluminous literature on this matter, see Stewart Ain, "Israel Urging U.S. to Stop Iran Nukes," Jewish Week, October 7, 2005; Martin S. Indyk, "Iran's Bluster Isn't a Bluff," Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2005; Ron Kampeas, "With Time Short on Iran Nukes, AIPAC Criticizes Bush Approach," JTA.org, December 2, 2005; Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren, "Israel's Worst Nightmare: Contra Iran," New Republic, February 5, 2007; Frederick Kempe, "Elie Wiesel Sounds the Alarm Regarding Iran," Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2006; Dafna Linzer, "Pro-Israel Group Criticizes White House Policy on Iran," Washington Post, December 25, 2005; Ori Nir, "Israeli Aides Warn U.S. Not to Drop Ball on Iran," Forward, December 9, 2005; Ori Nir, "Jewish Groups Press for Iran Sanctions," Forward, September 23, 2005; Ori Nir, "Groups Push for Sanctions, Fear U.S. Will Falter on Iran," Forward, September 1, 2006; Marc Perelman, "Groups Head to Emirates, as Worries Grow over Iran," Forward, January 19, 2007; and Brad Sherman, "The Unmet Threat of a Nuclear Iran," Forward, October 27, 2006.

90. Joshua Muravchik, "Operation Comeback," Foreign Policy 157 (November/December 2006): 68.

91. Quoted in Yossi Melman, "To Attack or Not to Attack?" Ha'aretz, January 24, 2007.

92. Shmuel Rosner, "AIPAC Conference Focuses on Hamas and Iran," Ha'aretz, March 7,2006; and

Guttman, "Activists Set to Push." Also see "Iran's Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons," www.aipac.org/ Publications/AIPACAnalysesIssueBriefs/Irans_Pursuit_of_Nuclear_Weapons( 1) .pdf.

93. Quoted in James D. Besser, "Hardline Pastor Gets Prime AIPAC Spot," Jewish Week, March 9, 2007.

94. Quoted in "Christians for Israel," Jerusalem Post editorial, March 14, 2007.

95. Maggie Haberman, "Israel Fans Groan over Hill Speech," New York Post (online), February 2, 2007.

96. Jonathan Allen, "Iran Language Draws Opposition as Democrats Near Agreement on Supplemental," CQ Today, March 8, 2007; "Dems Abandon War Authority Provision," Associated Press, March 13, 2007; Eli Lake, "Democrats Retreat on War Funds," New York Sun, March 14, 2007; "Engel's Finest Hour," New York Sun editorial, March 14, 2007; and John Walsh, "Why Is the Peace Movement Silent About AIPAC?" CounterPunch.org, April 17, 2007.

97. Capuano is quoted in Walsh, "Peace Movement Silent," which also discusses Kucinich's response.

98. Leon Hadar, "Osirak Redux?" American Conservative, January 15, 2007; Gideon Rachman, "Talk of Another Preventive War in the Middle East Is Folly," Financial Times, November 21, 2006; and Scott Ritter, Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change (NewYork: Nation Books, 2006), 203-206.

99. Quoted in Jim Lobe, "Pressure Grows on Bush to Engage Iran Directly," Antiwar.com, May 26, 2006.

100. The survey was conducted by Bar-Ilan University and the Anti-Defamation League, and found that "fully 71 percent of Israelis believe that the United States should launch a military attack on Iran if diplomatic efforts fail to halt Tehran's nuclear program." See Aluf Benn, "Poll: 71% of Israelis Want U.S. to Strike Iran if Talks Fail," Ha'aretz, May 18, 2007.

101. The original Clark quote was in "The Huffington Post" on January 4, 2007, www .huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/dc-notes-wes-clark-is-_b_37837.html. The Yglesias quote is from Matthew Yglesias, "Smears for Fears," American Prospect (online), January 23, 2007. Also see James D. Besser, "Gen. Clark's Controversy," Jewish Week, January 12, 2007; Nathan Guttman, "Top Dem Wesley Clark Says 'N.Y. Money People' Pushing War with Iran," Forward, January 12, 2007; and Shmuel Rosner, "The General and the 'Money People,'" Ha'aretz, January 9, 2007. An article in the Forward discussing fears in the American Jewish community of being blamed for an American war against Iran nevertheless conceded that "Jewish groups are indeed playing a lead role in pressing for a hard line on Iran." The article also noted that "many advocacy efforts, even when not linked to Israel, carry indelibly Jewish fingerprints." See "Groups Fear Public Backlash."

102. Ritter, Target Iran, 211.

103. For an excellent discussion of what a grand bargain with Iran would look like, see Flynt Leverett, Dealing with Tehran: Assessing U.S. Diplomatic Options Toward Iran (NewYork: Century Foundation, 2006), 19-25.

104. The following discussion of Iran's failed attempts to reach out to the Bush administration is based on Gregory Beals, "A Missed Opportunity with Iran," Newsday (online), February 19, 2006; Bruck, "Exiles"; Leverett, Dealing with Tehran, 11-16; Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, "What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran," New York Times, December 22, 2006; Glenn Kessler, "In 2003, U.S. Spurned Iran's Offer of Dialogue," Washington Post, June 18, 2006; Nicholas D. Kristof, "Diplomacy at Its Worst," New York Times, April 29, 2007; Jim Lobe, "Bush Administration Divided over Road to Tehran," Foreign Policy in Focus, August 11, 2003; Jim Lobe, "Bush Administration Paralyzed over Iran," Asia Times Online, August 9, 2003; Gareth Porter, "How Neocons Sabotaged Iran's Help on al-Qaeda," Antiwar.com, February 23, 2006; Gareth Porter, "Burnt Offering," American Prospect, June 6, 2006; Gareth Porter, "Neocons Blocked 2003 Nuclear Talks with Iran," Antiwar.com, March 29, 2006; and Gareth Porter, "Iran Proposal to US Offered Peace with Israel," Antiwar.com, May 25, 2006.

105. The 2003 proposal described in this paragraph was spelled out in an Iranian document that

was transitted to the State Department and the White House. A copy can be found on the New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof s website, http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/.

106. James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs, The Iraq Study Group Report (NewYork: Vintage Books, 2006), 50-52.

107. On Afghanistan, see David Rohde, "Iran Is Seeking More Influence in Afghanistan," New York Times, December 27, 2006.

108. Jim Lobe, "Pressure Grows on Bush," Antiwar.com, May 26, 2006; and Steven R. Weisman, "U.S. Is Debating Talks with Iran on Nuclear Issue," New York Times, May 27, 2006. It is also worth noting that support among American Jews for a U.S. attack against Iran has sharply declined. In the fall of 2005, 49 percent supported military action; only 38 percent supported it in the fall of 2006. "Poll: U.S. Jews Back Strike against Iran—by Israel," Forward, October 27, 2006.

109. Steven Kull, "Americans Assess US International Strategy," WorldPublicOpinion.org poll, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, December 7, 2006. Also see "Baker-Hamilton Redux: The U.S. Public Remains Enthusiastic About the Bipartisan Proposals," Pew Research Center, May 29, 2007.

110. Thomas L. Friedman, "Not-So-Strange Bedfellow," New York Times, January 31, 2007.

111. Marc Perelman, "As Washington Studies Iraq Report, Jerusalem Frets over Tehran Talk," Forward, December 15, 2006. Also see Nathan Guttman, "Groups Mute Criticism of Iraq Report," Forward, December 15, 2006.

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Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:29 PM

10: IRAN IN THE CROSSHAIRS

1. For details of Iran's WMD and ballistic missile capabilities, see the "Iran Profile" of the Nuclear Threat Initiative at www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Iran/index.html; International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment (New

York: Routledge, 2005); and Uzi Rubin, "The Global Reach of Iran's Ballistic Missiles," Memorandum no. 86 (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, November 2006).

2. "Iranian President at Tehran Conference: Very Soon, This Stain of Disgrace [i.e., Israel] Will Be Purged from the Center of the Islamic World—and This Is Attainable." Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch Series no. 1013, October 28, 2005. For a more detailed discussion of the translation of Ahmadinejad's speech, see note 88 in Chapter 3.

3. The two best indicators of potential military power are population size and wealth, though a country's actual military capability depends on how efficiently it translates these assets into skilled and well-equipped military forces. Iran has a substantially larger population and considerably more wealth than Iraq, its nearest competitor in the Persian Gulf region. For example, Iran had about a 3:1 advantage in population over Iraq in 1989 (54.5 versus 17.6 million), and about a 2.4:1 advantage in 2006 (65 versus 26.8 million). U.S. Census Bureau, "International Data Base," Updated August 24, 2006. Using GDP as an indicator of wealth, Iran had a 4:1 advantage in 1985 (179.8 versus US$44.2 billion) and a 3.9:1 advantage in 2000 (101 versus US$25.9 billion). World Bank, "Country at a Glance" (Iran and Iraq), August 13, 2006; and World Bank Group, "World Development Indicators Database," Iran Data Profile and Iraq Data Profile, April 2006.

4. This is the title of an article byAlissa J. Rubin in the Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2006. Also see Geoffrey Kemp, "Iran and Iraq: The Shia Connection, Soft Power, and the Nuclear Factor," Special Report 156 (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, November 2005); "Iran Grows Strong, the World Yawns," Ha'aretz editorial, December 13, 2006; Liz Sly, "Iranian Influence Soaring in Iraq," Chicago Tribune, March 8, 2007; Megan K. Stack and Bor-zou Daragahi, "Iran Was on Edge; Now It's on Top," Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2006; and Edward Wong, "Iran Is in Strong Position to Steer Iraq's Political Future," New York Times, July 3, 2004.

5. Quoted in Trita Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations 1970-2001: Ideological Calculus or Strategic Rivalry?" (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, April 2006), 413, also 159-62, 262-63, 275-76, 300-301, 392-93, 406-11. Also see Trita Parsi, "Israel and the Origins of Iran's Arab Option: Dissection of a Strategy Misunderstood," Middle East Journal 60, no. 3 (Summer 2006); and Trita Parsi, "The Geo-Strategic Roots of the Israeli-Iranian Enmity," Heartland-Eurasian Review of Geopolitics 4 (Summer 2005).

6. Bernard Lewis, "August 22: Does Iran Have Something in Store?" Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2006.

7. For a careful and convincing analysis that deterrence would work against a nuclear Iran, see Barry R. Posen, "A Nuclear Armed Iran: A Difficult but Not Impossible Policy Problem" (Washington, DC: Century Foundation, 2006); and Barry R. Posen, "We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran," New York Times, February 27, 2006. French President Jacques Chirac made this point in January 2007 but had to quickly retract his remarks because it is politically incorrect in the West to say that a nuclear Iran could be deterred. See Elaine Sciolino and Katrin Bennhold, "Chirac Strays from Assailing a Nuclear Iran," NewYork Times, February 1, 2007.

8. Ray Takeyh, "Iran's Nuclear Calculations," World Policy Journal 20, no. 2 (Summer 2003).

9. After all, this is what Iraq did after the Israelis eliminated its nascent nuclear capability in 1981. See Dan Reiter, "Preventive Attacks Against Nuclear Programs and the 'Success' at Osiraq," Nonproliferation Review 12, no. 2 (July 2005).

10. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Do Not Attack Iran," International Herald Tribune, April 26, 2006; James Fallows, "Will Iran Be Next?" Atlantic, December 2004; and Michael J. Mazarr, "Strike Out: Attacking Iran Is a Bad Idea," New Republic, August 15, 2005.

11. Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter, "US Generals 'Will Quit' if Bush Orders Iran Attack," Sunday Times (London), February 25, 2007.

12. Parsi, "Israel-Iranian Relations," 285-97, 354-61, 400-401; and Gary Sick, "The Clouded Mirror: The United States and Iran, 1979-1999," in ed. John L. Esposito and R. K. Ra-mazani, Iran at the Crossroads (NewYork: Palgrave, 2001), 204.

13. David Hoffman, "Israel Seeking to Convince U.S. That West Is Threatened by Iran," Wash-

ington Post, March 13, 1993.

14. Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relatons," 402. For elaboration on Israels influence on the formula-

tion of dual containment, see ibid., 297-99; and Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle:

The Conflict Between Iran and America (NewYork: Random House, 2004), 261-65.

15. Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 269.

16. For the official line on dual containment, see Martin Indyk, "The Clinton Administration's

Approach to the Middle East," speech to Soref Symposium, Washington Institute for Near

East Policy, May 18, 1993. Also see Sick, "Clouded Mirror," 198-99, 209nl3.

17. Regarding Rafsanjani's efforts to reach out to the United States, see Ali M. Ansari, Con-

fronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle

East (NewYork: Perseus Books, 2006), 115-46; Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 257-66;

Pollack, Persian Puzzle, chaps. 9-10; and R. K. Ramazani, "Reflections on Iran's Foreign Pol-

icy: Defining the 'National Interests,'" in Esposito and Ramazani, Iran at the Crossroads,

217-22.

18. Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 298-99. Useful critiques of dual containment include F.

Gregory Gause III, "The Illogic of Dual Containment," Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/

April 1994); and Barbara Conry, "America's Misguided Policy of Dual Containment in the

Persian Gulf," Foreign Policy Briefing no. 33 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, November

10, 1994).

19. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, Differentiated Containment: U.S. Policy Toward Iran and Iraq, report of an Independent Study Group on Gulf Stability and Security (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997), 5-32; and Gary Sick, "Rethinking Dual Containment," Survival 40, no. 1 (Spring 1998).

20. Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 304-305; and Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 269-70.

21. Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 305.

22. Pollack quoted in ibid., 308. Pollack reportedly added that the Clinton administration "only saw Iran through the prism of Tehran's attitude towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Quoted in ibid., 309.

23. AIPAC, "Comprehensive U.S. Sanctions Against Iran: A Plan for Action," Washington, DC, April 2, 1995.

24. Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 270-71.

25. The following discussion of the Conoco case and the various sanctions imposed on Iran by the Clinton administration is based on Sasan Fayazmanesh, "The Politics of the U.S. Economic Sanctions Against Iran," Review of Radical Political Economics 35, no. 3 (Summer 2003); Herman Franssen and Elaine Morton, "A Review of US Unilateral Sanctions Against Iran," Middle East Economic Survey 45, no. 34 (August 26, 2002); Dilip Hiro, Neighbors Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After the Gulf Wars (NewYork: Routledge, 2001), chap. 9; Kenneth Katzman, "The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA)," CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, October 11, 2006; Laurie Lande, "Second Thoughts," International Economy 11, no. 3 (May/June 1997); Pollack, Persian Puzzle, chaps. 9-10; and Sick, "Clouded Mirror," 198-207.

26. "Remarks at the World Jewish Congress Dinner in New York City—President Bill Clinton Speech—Transcript," April 30, 1995, www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2889/is_nl8_ v31/ai_17157196. Also see Agis Salpukas, "Conoco's Deal in Iran Faces Board Hurdle," NewYork Times, March 14, 1995; and Daniel Southerland and Ann Devroy, "Clinton Bars U.S. Oil Pacts with Iran," Washington Post, March 15, 1995.

27. Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 310.

28. Executive Order 12959, White House, Office of the Press Secretary, May 8, 1995.

29. Todd Purdum, "Clinton to Order a Trade Embargo Against Tehran," New York Times, May 1, 1995; and "Remarks at the World Jewish Congress."

30. Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 273.

31. Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 308, 311, 329-30.

32. A. M. Rosenthal, "Plugging the Leak," New York Times, March 14, 1995.

33. Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 312. An AIPAC official, according to another source, claimed that Congress wrote the legislation "with us sentence by sentence." Franssen and Morton, "Review of US Unilateral Sanctions." Also see George Moffett, "Push to Widen Libya Sanctions Riles US Allies," Christian Science Monitor, January 24, 1996.

34. Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 287.

35. Quoted in Brzezinski and Scowcroft, Differentiated Containment, 6.

36. James Schlesinger, "Fragmentation and Hubris: A Shaky Basis for American Leadership," National Interest 49 (Fall 1997): 5.

37. Fayazmanesh, "Politics of the U.S. Economic Sanctions," 231-35.

38. Reuters, "Call for 'Detente' as Tehran Swears in a Moderate President," Australian, August 5, 1997; Douglas Jehl, "Iranian President Calls for Opening Dialogue with U.S.," New York Times, December 15, 1997; and "Transcript of Interview with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami," CNN.com, January 7, 1998.

39. "Interview with Khatami"; and Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 330-36.

40. On the Clinton administration checking with the Israelis, see Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 319. For a more general discussion of the steps the Clinton administration took in response to Khatami's overtures, see Hiro, Neighbors, chap. 10; Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 331-45; Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 319-42; and Sick, "Clouded Mirror," 200-206.

41. Quoted in Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 329.

42. Ansari, Confronting Iran, chap. 5; Hiro, Neighbors, 235-40; Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 325-42; and Ray Takeyh, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 44-54, 110-16.

43. Yerah Tal, "U.S., Iran in Secret Talks," Ha'aretz, December 15, 1997.

44. Sick, "Clouded Mirror," 210n32.

45. Eli Lake, "Israel, U.S. Jewish Lobby Disagree on Iran Sanctions," United Press International, September 23, 2000.

46. Quoted in Parsi, "Israeli-Iranian Relations," 298.

47. Quoted in ibid., 403. During the early 1990s, Sneh played a key role in making the case that Iran was a deadly threat to Israel. See ibid., 286.

48. Quoted in Alan Sipress, "Israel Emphasizes Iranian Threat," Washington Post, February 7, 2002. This article, which was written as Sharon was arriving in Washington, makes clear that Jerusalem was "redoubling efforts to warn the Bush administration that Iran poses a greater threat than the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein." Also see Seymour M. Hersh, "The Iran Game," New Yorker, December 3, 2001; Peter Hirschberg, "Background: Peres Raises Iranian Threat," Ha'aretz, February 5, 2002; David Hirst, "Israel Thrusts Iran in Line of US Fire," Guardian, February 2, 2002; "Israel Once Again Sees Iran as a Cause for Concern," Ha'aretz, May 7, 2001; Dana Priest, "Iran's Emerging Nuclear Plant Poses Test for U.S.," Washington Post, July 29, 2002; and Ze'ev Schiff, "Iran: Clear and Present Danger," Ha'aretz, May 31, 2002.

49. Stephen Farrell, Robert Thomson, and Danielle Haas, "Attack Iran the Day Iraq War Ends, Demands Israel," Times (London), November 5, 2002; and Stephen Farrell and Robert Thomson, "The Times Interview with Ariel Sharon," ibid.

50. Quoted in "Ambassador to U.S. Calls for 'Regime Change' in Iran, Syria," Ha'aretz, April 28, 2003.

51. Steven R. Weisman, "New U.S. Concerns on Iran's Pursuit of Nuclear Arms," New York Times, May 8, 2003.

52. Shimon Peres, "We Must Unite to Prevent an Ayatollah Nuke," Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2003.

53. Jim Lobe, "US Neo-Cons Move Quickly on Iran," Inter Press Service, May 27, 2003.

54. Marc Perelman, "Pentagon Team on Iran Comes Under Fire," Forward, June 6, 2003. Also see Marc Perelman, "White House Is Aiming to Raise Iranian Nukes at U.N. Security Council," Forward, May 9, 2003; and Marc Perelman, "New Front Sets Sights on Toppling Iran Regime," Forward, May 16, 2003.

55. William Kristol, "The End of the Beginning," Weekly Standard, May 12, 2003.

56. Michael Ledeen, "The Others," National Review Online, April 4, 2003. Ledeen also wrote

in mid-April 2003 that "it is impossible to win the war on terrorism so long as the regimes

in Syria and Iran remain in power." He went on to say that "the good news is that both are

vulnerable to political attack." Quoted in Ronald Brownstein, "Those Who Sought War Are

Now Pushing Peace," Los Angeles Times, April17, 2003. Also see Alex Koppelman, "Iranian

Regime Change: 'Faster, Please!'" Salon.com, January 15, 2007.

57. Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson, "Turn Up the Pressure on Iran," Jerusalem Post, May 21,

2003; and Lawrence Kaplan, "Iranamok," New Republic, June 9, 2003.

58. A copy of the flyer advertising the conference, which was titled "The Future of Iran: Mul-lahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," can be found at www.aei.org/events/eventID .300/event_detail.asp. Also see Jordan Green, "Neocons Dream of Lebanon," ZNet (online), July 23, 2003; and Lobe, "Neo-Cons Move Quickly."

59. Connie Bruck, "Exiles: How Iran's Expatriates Are Gaming the Nuclear Threat," New Yorker, March 6, 2006; Lobe, "Neo-Cons Move Quickly"; Ron Perelman, "New Front Sets Sights on Toppling Iran Regime," Forward, May 17, 2003; and "Shah of Iran's Heir Plans Overthrow of Regime," Human Events (online), May 1, 2006.

60. All information is from "Senator Brownback Announces Iran Democracy Act with Iranian Exiles," press release from the National Iranian American Council, May 20, 2003; and "Iran Democracy Act Passed, but No Money to Opposition and Satellite TVs," press release from the National Iranian American Council, July 24, 2003.

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Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:30 PM

9: TAKING AIM AT SYRIA

1. James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs, The Iraq Study Group Report (NewYork: Random House, 2006), 50.

2. Ferry Biedermann and Roula Khalaf, "Western Politicians Take the Road to Damascus," Financial Times, December 22, 2006; Nathan Guttman, "Senators Visit Damascus, Push for Syrian Talks," Forward, December 29, 2006; Hassan M. Fattah and Graham Bowley, "Pelosi Meets with Syrian Leader," New York Times, April 4, 2007; and Anthony Shadid, "Pelosi Meets Syrian President," Washington Post, April 4, 2007. Another U.S. congressman, Dar-rell Issa (R-CA), visited Assad the day after Pelosi's visit. Yoav Stern, Amiram Barkat, and Barak Ravid, "U.S. Republican Meets Assad Day after Contentious Pelosi Visit," Ha'aretz, April 5, 2007.

3. Richard M. Bennett, a well-regarded military analyst, succinctly describes the Syrian threat to Israel: "While it is still largely true that the Syrian military remains one of the largest and best-trained forces in the Arab world, it has significantly lost every major conflict with Israel since 1948. Its combat strength has deteriorated dramatically over the past 15 years as its equipment has become increasingly obsolescent, poorly maintained and short of spare parts." "Syria's Military Flatters to Deceive," Asia Times Online, July 28, 2006. Similarly, Arieh O'Sullivan writes, "The Syrian army does not pose a significant tactical threat to Israel and has no viable tactical war option ... To put it bluntly, the Syrian army has not just stood still for the past two decades, but has gone backwards." "How Big a Threat?" Jerusalem Post, October 10, 2003. Also see Arieh O'Sullivan, "Jaffee Center: Syrian Military Weakening," Jerusalem Post, November 23, 2005; Susan Taylor Martin, "Experts Disagree on Dangers of Syria," St. Petersburg Times (online), November 3, 2002; Martin Sieff, "Eye on Iraq: Enter the Saudis," United Press International, November 27, 2006; and Stephen Zunes, "Bush Has Clear Run at Syria," Asia Times Online, March 2, 2005. For a description of Syria's mil

itary capabilities, and comparative defense budget figures, see The Military Balance, 2007 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, January 2007), 243-45.

4. Karen DeYoung, "U.S. Toughens Warnings to Syria on Iraq, Other Issues," Washington Post, April 15, 2003; Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashars Trial by Fire (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 13-14; and Alfred B. Prados, "Syria: U.S. Relations and Bilateral Issues," Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, June 22, 2006, 11-12. For the details of Syria's WMD and ballistic missile capabilities, see the "Syria Profile" of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) at vvww.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Syria/index.html.

5. Mainstream thinking in Israe about Syria's chemical weapons is summarized by Reuven Pedatzur: "The IDF reckoned the Syrians would not dare launch ballistic missiles topped with chemical warheads at Israel because it was clear to them that the price they'd pay would be so high, with painful IDF attacks on the Syrian rear, that it would not justify the first strike at Israel." "Update the Gas Masks, There's a Syrian Threat," Ha'aretz, August 5, 2003.

6. Quoted in Martin, "Experts Disagree."

7. Seymour M. Hersh, "The Syrian Bet," New Yorker, July 28, 2003. Also see Richard Spring, "This Is Not Another Iran," Guardian, October 27, 2006.

8. The generally good relations that existed between Syria and the United States during the 1990s are reflected in the following memoirs of key figures in the Clinton administration: Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward, Madame Secretary: A Memoir (NewYork: Miramax Books, 2003); Bill Clinton, My Life (NewYork: Vintage Books, 2004); Warren Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime: A Memoir (NewYork: Scribner, 2001); and Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). Also see Helena Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks: 1991-96 and Beyond (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1999), which provides a detailed account of the negotiations among Israel, Syria, and the United States during the years Rabin and Peres were prime minister; and Itamar Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

9. Quoted in Douglas Jehl, "Clinton in the Middle East: The Overview; Clinton Reports Progress in Talks in Syrian Capital," New York Times, October 28, 1994. Also see "Clinton in the Middle East; Assad and Clinton Speak: Shared Quest for Peace," New York Times, October 28, 1994.

10. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), chap. 33; and William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993), 250-54.

11. Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 134. Also see Jim Lobe, "The Damascus Dance," Antiwar.com, October 28, 2006; "Syrian Ambassador Calls for Comprehensive Peace Settlement in the Middle East," Imad Moustapha address at Burkle Center, UCLA, June 2, 2005, www. international.ucla.edu/bcir/article.asp?parentid=25567; and Volker Perthes, "The Syrian Solution," Foreign Affairs 85, no. 6 (November/December 2006).

12. Hersh, "Syrian Bet."

13. Flynt Leverett notes that "U.S. policy toward Syria . . . has fluctuated between efforts to facilitate Israeli-Syrian agreements and attempts to isolate and pressure Damascus to change its terms and tactics for achieving a peaceful settlement" (Inheriting Syria, 7). While Leverett is certainly correct, he never explains what accounts for that fluctuation, although his book provides much evidence that Israel and the lobby are the main forces behind those policy shifts.

14. The Golan Heights Law was passed by the Israeli Knesset in December 1981 and extended Israeli law to the territory of the Golan. It does not contain the word "annexation," however, or refer to Israeli "sovereignty" over the heights. During the Knesset debate on the legislation, Prime Minister Menachem Begin responded to a critic by saying, "You use the word annexation, but I am not using it." Ian S. Lustick, "Has Israel Annexed East Jerusalem?" Middle East Policy 5, no. 1 (January 1997); and "The Golan Heights Law," www.mfa.gov.il/ MFA/Peace+Process/Guide-t-to-r-the-r-Peace-r-Process/Golan+Heights+Law.htm.

15. "Golan Statistics," wvvwjewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/golanstats.html; "Settlements in the Golan Heights," Foundation for Middle East Peace, Settlement Report 17, no. 1 (January-February 2007); and "Regions and Territories: The Golan Heights," BBC News (online), April 26, 2007.

16. Clinton, My Life, 883-84; Cobban, Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, chap. 3; Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 47; and Ross, Missing Peace, 111. The "Rabin deposit" is sometimes refered to as the "pocket commitment" or the "Rabin pocket."

17. Although Netanyahu has denied that he was willing to return to the June 4, 1967, Syria-Israel border ("I Never Agreed to Full Golan Withdrawal," IsraelNationalNews.com, June 23, 2004), there is considerable evidence that he did agree to that position when he was prime minister (1996-99). See Akiva Eldar, "Ex-MI Chief: 'Netanyahu Was Ready to Give up All of the Golan,'" Ha'aretz, June 24, 2004; Clinton, My Life, 883; Ross, Missing Peace, 527-28, 577; and Daniel Pipes, "The Road to Damascus: What Netanyahu Almost Gave Away," New Republic, July 5, 1999. On Barak, see Clinton, My Life, 883-88, 903; Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 47-48; and Ross, Missing Peace, chaps. 20-22. Ross notes that "Barak's position on peace with Syria was less forthcoming than Netanyahu's." Ibid., 528.

18. Clyde Haberman, "Israelis Look to Clinton Trip for Progress with Syrians," New York Times, October 25, 1994.

19. Ross, Missing Peace, 589.

20. Clinton, My Life, 883-88, 903. According to Ofer Shelah, "Most of the top brass [in Israel] agrees with the view put forward by Bill Clinton in his book, 'My Life': that Barak got cold feet because of opinion polls showing the Israeli public opposed the territorial price demanded by the Syrians." See "The Situation: Syrian Offer of Talks Throws a Wrench into Sharon's Plans," Forward, September 17, 2004. Also see Jerome Slater, "Lost Opportunities for Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Israel and Syria, 1948-2001," International Security 27, no. 1 (Summer 2002): esp. 97-100; and Akiva Eldar, "Between Katzrin and Nahariya," Ha'aretz, July 24, 2006. Barak, however, denied Clinton's charge. See Yifat Zohar, "Barak Rejects Clinton's Charges of Missed Syria Deal," Maariv International (online), June 29, 2004.

21. Quoted in "Sharon Suggests Future Attacks on Syria," New York Times, October 17, 2003. Also see Aluf Benn, "U.S. Officials Eyeing Possible Assad Successors," Ha'aretz, October 3, 2005; Ori Nir, "Bush Seeks to Pressure Iran, Syria on Weapons," Forward, January 2, 2004; and Ofer Shelah, "Pressured, Assad Offers Charm Campaign," Forward, January 9, 2004.

22. Quoted in Harry de Quetteville, "Syria Threat over Golan Puts Israel on War Alert," Daily Telegraph (London), September 30, 2006. Also see Larry Derfner, "Why Israel Must Talk to Syria," Jerusalem Post, November 9, 2006; Tovah Lazaroff, "Peretz Open to Syrian Talks,"Jerusalem Post, September 27, 2006; and Gideon Samet, "O.K. from a Declining America?" Ha'aretz, December 20, 2006.

23. Quoted in Amnon Meranda, '"Israel Will Never Return Golan Heights,'" Ynetnews.com, March 14, 2007. Also see "EU Backs Syria's Aim to Regain Golan Heights—Solana," Ynetnews .com, March 14, 2007.

24. Yoav Stern and Aluf Benn, "PM Associates: Syria Will Support Terror, Even with Golan," Ha'aretz, December 17, 2006.

25. "Israeli Opinion Regarding Peace with Syria and Lebanon," www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/Politics/golanpo.html.

26. Shelah, "The Situation." Also see Aluf Benn, "United States Leaving Syrian Track to Israel's Discretion," Ha'aretz, January 9, 2004; Aluf Benn and Amos Harel, "IDF Presses Sharon for Talks with Syria," Ha'aretz, January 8, 2004; Shlomo Brom, "Israel-Syria Negotiations: A Real Possibility?" Strategic Assessment (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University) 7, no. 1 (May 2004); "Israel 'Can Give Up Golan to Syria,'" Straits Times, August 14, 2006; "Jerusalem's Rejectionists," Ha'aretz editorial, January 9, 2004; Ilan Marciano, "Foreign Ministry Official: Syria Ready to Negotiate," Ynetnews.com, December 26, 2006; and Ori Nir, "As Israel Debates Syrian Overture, Washington Presses to Stop Talks," Forward, December 17, 2004.

27. Yaakov Lappin, "New Forum Pushes for Syria Talks," Ynetnews.com, January 28, 2007; and Roi Mandel, "Former Shin Bet Chief Calls for Dialogue with Syria," Ynetnews.com, January 29, 2007.

28. "Don't Turn Syria Away," Ha'aretz editorial, December 18, 2006; and "Respond to Assad, Convince Bush," Ha'aretz editorial, December 21, 2006. On Peretz, see Gideon Alon, Aluf Benn, and Yoav Stern, "Olmert: Now Is Not Time to Start Talks with Syria, Bush Opposed," Ha'aretz, December 17, 2006; and Gideon Alon, "Olmert, Peretz Spar over Syrian Overtures," Ha'aretz, December 18, 2006.

29. Moshe Maoz put the point well: "Regardless of what the administration's position is, Sharon doesn't want to negotiate because he doesn't want to give up the Golan Heights." Quoted in Nir, "As Israel Debates."

30. Quoted in Ori Nir, "U.S. Advice to Israelis: Don't Start Syria Talks," Forward, January 23, 2004.

31. "A Serious Proposal," Ha'aretz editorial, December 30, 2003; Aluf Benn, "UN Envoy Urges Israel to Exploit Syrian Peace Moves," Ha'aretz, January 9, 2004; de Quetteville, "Syria Threat"; and Marc Perelman, "Syria Makes Overture over Negotiations," Forward, July 11, 2003.

32. Ze'ev Schiff, "The Peace Threat from Damascus," Ha'aretz, December 8, 2003. In the late summer of 2004, after Syria made another peace offer, an article in the Forward began with the following playful paragraph: "As if he didn't have enough problems, what with the mounting right-wing opposition to his disengagement plan, Palestinian terrorism stirring anew and his governing coalition in turmoil, Prime Minister Sharon now has trouble on his northern front. Syria, Israel's most intractable foe, is offering to make peace." Shelah, "The Situation."

33. Quoted in Stern and Benn, "PM Associates."

34. Ibid.; and "Syria Expert: Assad's Overtures Serious," Jerusalem Post, December 31, 2006. Also see "You Can't Bring Peace to Iraq Without Working with Syria," interview with Syria's deputy prime minister, Spiegel Online, February 21, 2007.

35. Alon, Benn, and Stern, "Olmert: Now Is Not Time"; Aluf Benn, "Bush vs. Olmert," Ha'aretz, February 8, 2007; Akiva Eldar, "Closed-Door Policy," Ha'aretz, February 26, 2007; Akiva Eldar, Mazal Mualem, Shmuel Rosner, and Yoav Stern, "PM: Conditions Not Ripe for Talks with Syria," Ha'aretz, December 8, 2006; "Israel, Syria and Bush's Veto," Forward editorial, December 22, 2006; Shmuel Rosner, Akiva Eldar, and Yoav Stem, "Olmert Rejects Talks with Syria, Says Conditions Are 'Not Ripe,'" Ha'aretz, December 7, 2006; Samet, "O.K. from a Declining America"; and Ze'ev Schiff, Amos Harel, and Yoav Stern, "U.S. Takes Harder Line on Talks Between Jerusalem, Damascus," Ha'aretz, February 24, 2007.

36. Aluf Benn, "Israel, U.S. Sources Say Views on Israel-Syria Talks Unchanged," Ha'aretz, May 25, 2007; Akiva Eldar, "U.S. Ambassador: We Won't Stop Israel from Talking to Syria," Ha'aretz, March 14, 2007; and Ze'ev Schiff, "U.S. Envoy Denies Pressure on Israel Not to Engage in Talks with Syria," Ha'aretz, May 23, 2007. Also see Hilary Leila Krieger, "'No New Overture to Syria in the Works,'" Jerusalem Post, March 7, 2007.

37. Benn, "Israel, U.S. Sources Say."

38. Peretz quoted in Alon, Benn, and Stern, "Olmert: Now Is Not Time"; Samet, "O.K. from a Declining America?" Also see Uzi Benziman, "Help, They Want Peace," Ha'aretz, January 17, 2007.

39. Akiva Eldar, "Secret Understandings Reached Between Representatives from Israel and Syria," Ha'aretz, January 16, 2007. The next two quotations in this paragraph are from ibid. Also see Akiva Eldar, "Exclusive: Full Text of Document Drafted During Secret Talks," Ha'aretz, January 16, 2007; Akiva Eldar, "Background: From Turkey, Via Europe, to Damascus," Ha'aretz, January 16, 2007; "Olmert: No Government Officials Involved in Secret Syria Talks," Ha'aretz, January 17, 2007; and M. J. Rosenberg, "When Uncritical Support Leads to Disaster," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #307, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, January 19, 2007.

40. Quoted in Fattah and Bowley, "Pelosi Meets with Syrian Leader." Also see Hassan M. Fattah, "Pelosi, Warmly Greeted in Syria, Is Criticized by White House," New York Times, April 4, 2007; and Shadid, "Pelosi Meets Syrian President."

41. Quoted in Fattah and Bowley, "Pelosi Meets with Syrian Leader." Also see Ron Kampeas,

"Rhetorical Battle over Pelosi Trip," JTA.org, April 8, 2007; and Yoav Stern and Amiram Barka,

"PMO: Pelosi Did Not Carry Any Message from Israel to Assad," Ha'aretz, April 5, 2007.

42. "Olmert to Assad: Israel Willing to Withdraw from Golan Heights," Ynetnews.com, June 8,

2007; Aluf Benn and Yoav Stem, "MK Orlev: PM Willing to Sell Golan Heights in Order to

Stay in Power," Ha'aretz, June 8, 2007; and Aluf Benn and Yoav Stern, "Peres Downplays

Chances of New Syria Talks, Says Damascus Not Ready," Ha'aretz, June 10, 2007. Accord-

ing to these reports, Bush was consulted and "said the United States would not stand in Is-

rael's way." See "Olmert to Assad." Also see Sever Plocker, "Suddenly Syria," Ynetnews.com,

June 10, 2007, which explains why Olmert's call for talks is an "empty political gesture."

43. See, for example, "Sharon Wants U.S. Action Against Syria," NewsMax.com, April 16, 2001.

44. Hersh, "Syrian Bet"; Molly Moore, "Sharon Asks U.S. to Pressure Syria on Militants," Washington Post, April 17, 2003; Ori Nir, "Jerusalem Urges Bush: Next Target Hezbollah," Forward, April 11, 2003; Ori Nir, "Sharon Aide Makes the Case for U.S. Action Against Syria," Forward, April 18, 2003; Marc Perelman, "Behind Warnings to Damascus: Reassessment of Younger Assad," Forward, April 18, 2003; and Daniel Sobelman and Nathan Guttman, "PM Urges U.S. to Keep Heat on Syria, Calls Assad 'Dangerous,'" Ha'aretz, April 15, 2003.

45. The Sharon quotations and his list of demands are from Sobelman and Guttman, "PM

Urges U.S. to Keep Heat on Syria." Also see Moore, "Sharon Asks U.S."

46. Herb Keinon, "Sharon Criticized for Public Statements on Syria-US Tension," Jerusalem Post, April 16, 2003.

47. Quoted in Nir, "Sharon Aide Makes the Case." Also see DeYoung, "U.S. Toughens Warnings"; and Moore, "Sharon Asks U.S."

48. Nir, "Sharon Aide Makes the Case." Also see DeYoung, "U.S. Toughens Warnings"; and Perelman, "Behind Warnings."

49. Ephraim Halevy, "The Post-Saddam Middle East: A View from Israel," address at the Soref Symposium 2003, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, www.washingtoninstitute.org/ templateC07.php>CID= 147.

50. Moore, "Sharon Asks U.S." The Alpher quotation is from ibid. Also see Marc Perelman, "Syria Makes Overture over Negotiations," Forward, July 11, 2003.

51. Perelman, "Behind Warnings"; Laurie Copans, "Israeli Military Boss Claims Iraq Had Chemical Weapons," Associated Press, April 26, 2004; Dany Shoham, "An Antithesis on the Fate of Iraq's Chemical and Biological Weapons," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 19, no. 1 (Spring 2006); Ira Stoll, "Saddam's WMD Moved to Syria, an Israeli Says," New York Sun, December 15, 2005; and Ira Stoll, "Iraq's WMD Secreted in Syria, Sada Says," New York Sun, January 26, 2006.

52. Michael Casey, "Israeli Ambassador Believes Truck Used in Bombing of UN Headquarters Came from Syria," Associated Press, August 21, 2003; and "Israeli Envoy Links Syria to UN Blast, Stirs Flap," Reuters, August 21, 2003.

53. Hersh, "Syrian Bet." Rabinovich also made it clear to Hersh that "Israel has urged Washington not to open the back channel to Assad." Instead, Israel wanted the United States to play hardball with the Syrian leader.

54. Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role, report of the Middle East Study Group (Philadelphia: Middle East Forum, May 2000).

55. Jordan Green, "Neocons Dream of Lebanon," ZNet (online), July 23, 2003; David R. Sands, "Hawks Recycle Arguments for Iraq War Against Syria," Washington Times, April 16, 2003; and United States Committee for a Free Lebanon home page, www.freelebanon.org.

56. Matthew E. Berger, "AIPAC Mounts New Offensive to Display Support of Congress," JTA.org, April 22, 2002. The full title of the proposed legislation was the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act.

57. Regarding the proposed legislation, see Zvi Bar'el, "Deciphering the Syrians," Ha'aretz, July 9, 2003; "The Return of the Syria Accountability Act," NewsMax.com, April 19, 2003; and

Claude Salhani, "The Syria Accountability Act: Taking the Wrong Road to Damascus," Policy Analysis 512 (Washington, C: Cato Institute, March 18, 2004).

58. Ron Kampeas, "Bush, Once Reluctant on Sanctions, Prepares to Take Tough Line with Syria," JTA.org, March 16, 2004.

59. Wolfowitz quoted in Nathan Guttman, "Some Senior U.S. Figures Say Syria Has Crossed the Red Line," Ha'aretz, April 14, 2004; Perle quoted in Michael Flynn, "The War Hawks: The Right Flexes Muscle with New U.S. Agenda," Chicago Tribune, April 13, 2003. On Wolfowitz, also see Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 151-52.

60. Perelman, "Behind Warnings." James Woolsey, a prominent hawk on the Defense Policy Board, was arguing right after Baghdad fell that the United States was involved in World War IV and its main adversaries included "fascists" in states like Syria. Barbara Slavin, "Some See Victory Extending Beyond Iraq," USA Today, April 11, 2003.

61. Flynn, "The Right Flexes Muscle." Also see John R. Bolton, "Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction," remarks to the Heritage Foundation, Office of the Press Secretary, U.S. Department of State, May 6, 2002.

62. Douglas Jehl, "New Warning Was Put Off on Weapons Syria Plans," New York Times, July 18, 2003; Marc Perelman, "State Department Hawk Under Fire in Intelligence Flap over Syria," Forward, July 25, 2003; and Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, "Intelligence Data on Syria Now Disputed," Philadelphia Inquirer (online), July 17, 2003.

63. Nathan Guttman, "US: Syria Supporting Terror Groups Developing WMD," Ha'aretz, September 16, 2003.

64. Quoted in Robin Wright, "U.S. Insists Syria Alter Its Course," Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2003. Also see Martin Indyk's and Dennis Ross's tough-minded rhetoric about Syria in Hersh, "Syrian Bet."

65. Frank Gaffney Jr., "Who's Next in Line?" Washington Times, April 15, 2003.

66. Lawrence F. Kaplan, "White Lie," New Republic, April 21 & 28, 2003. Also see William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan, The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003).

67. Jed Babbin, "Regime Change, Again," National Review Online, November 12, 2003.

68. Marc Ginsberg, "Bashing Bashar," Weekly Standard, April 28, 2003.

69. Quoted in Robert Fisk, "Western 'Intelligence' Services," Independent, September 29, 2003. Also see Babbin, "Regime Change"; and Prados, "Syria," 10.

70. DeYoung, "U.S. Toughens Warnings"; and Melissa Radler, "Bill to Impose Sanctions on Syria Brought to Congress," Jerusalem Post, April 13, 2003.

71. Sands, "Hawks Recycle Arguments."

72. "Engel Meets with Sharon in Jerusalem," press release from Office of Congressman Eliot Engel, August 18, 2003; "NY Congressman Says Will Push Bill to Pressure Syria," Ha'aretz, August 19, 2003; and Janine Zacharia and Arieh O'Sullivan, "Sharon Tells Congressmen US Must Pressure Assad More," Jerusalem Post, August 19, 2003.

73. Bar'el, "Deciphering the Syrians." Also see Matthew E. Berger, "Struggle over Syria Looms," Jewish News of Greater Phoenix (online), September 27, 2002; Barbara Slavin, "White House Stops Blocking Syria Bill," USA Today, October 8, 2003; and Janine Zacharia, "US Probes Syria Policy," Jerusalem Post, September 18, 2002.

74. Salhani, "Syria Accountability Act," 5.

75. Hersh, "Syrian Bet"; and Salhani, "Syria Accountability Act," 6. Also see Leverett, Inheriting Syria, which reveals much evidence of the deep split within the Bush administration over how to deal with Syria.

76. Kampeas, "Bush, Once Reluctant."

77. "Statement by the President on H.R. 1828," White House, Office of the Press Secretary, December 12, 2003; and Janine Zacharia, "Bush Signs Syria Accountability Act," Jerusalem Post, December 14, 2003.

78. Hersh, "Syrian Bet." Other pieces discussing the advantages for the United States of coop-

erating with Syria include Clifford Krauss, "U.S. Welcomes Thaw in Relations with 'Pragmatic' Syria," New York Times, January 2, 2003; Martin, "Experts Disagree"; James Risen and Tim Weiner, "C.I.A. Is Said to Have Sought Help from Syria," New York Times, October 30, 2001; Salhani, "The Syria Accountability Act"; and Zunes, "Bsh Has Clear Run."

79. Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 142.

80. Hersh, "Syrian Bet"; and Perelman, "Syria Makes Overture."

81. Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 142. Also see Hersh, "Syrian Bet."

82. Julian Borger, "Bush Vetoes Syria War Plan," Guardian, April 15, 2003. Also see Hersh, "Syrian Bet"; and Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott, "Bush Advisers Debating Syria's Role in Terrorism," Miami Herald (online), January 11, 2004.

83. Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, "Some on the Hill Seek to Punish Syria for Broken Promises on Iraq," Washington Post, April 30, 2004. Also see Glenn Kessler, "President Imposes Sanctions on Syria," Washington Post, May 12, 2004; Marc Perelman, "Israel Blames Attacks on Syria-Iran Axis," Forward, July 14, 2006; Barbara Slavin, "U.S. Warns Syria; Next Steps Uncertain," USA Today, September 17, 2003; and Janine Zacharia, "U.S. May Postpone Syria Sanctions," Jerusalem Post, March 19, 2004.

84. Schiff, "The Peace Threat."

85. Benn, "United States Leaving Syrian Track."

86. Nir, "As Israel Debates"; and Nir, "U.S. Advice." After Baghdad fell in 2003, two articles published in the Forward hinted at how Israel and the lobby have influenced U.S. policy toward Syria. In a piece from mid-April, the author wrote: "A sudden flurry of U.S. warnings to Syria in recent days indicates that Washington has undertaken what Israel and its supporters here have been urging for months: a comprehensive reassessment of Syrian ruler Bashar Assad." Perelman, "Behind Warnings." A few-months later, in mid-July, the same author wrote: "During the past several months, top Israeli officials have warned their American counterparts and audiences about Assad's unreliability. American officials have echoed the stance, and press reports have speculated about possible American military intervention in Syria." Perelman, "Syria Makes Overture."

88. Jim Lobe, "Are They Serious About Syria?" Antiwar.com, December 17, 2004; Eric S. Mar-golis, "Syria in the Sights?" American Conservative, March 28, 2005; and "Serious About Syria?" Wall Street Journal editorial, December 15, 2004.

89. Quoted in Yitzhak Benhorin, "Neocons: We Expected Israel to Attack Syria," Ynetnews.com, December 16, 2006.

90. Richard Boucher, Daily Press Briefing, U.S. State Department, May 24, 2005; Douglas Jehl and Thorn Shanker, "Syria Stops Cooperating with U.S. Forces and C..1. A.," NewYork Times, May 24, 2005; Michael Hirsh and Kevin Peraino, "Dangers in Damascus," Newsweek, October 17, 2005; and "Syria Halts Cooperation with U.S.," CNN.com, May 24, 2005.

91. Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 134-42; and Prados, "Syria," 8-11.

92. Jim Lobe, "Bush Under Growing Pressure to Engage Syria," Inter Press Service, October 27, 2006. Also see Jim Lobe, "Damascus Now Seen as Pivotal in Mideast Crisis," Inter Press Service, July 25, 2006.

93. There have been scattered reports in the media that Israeli leaders might have lost their enthusiasm for regime change in Syria, given what has happened in Iraq since Saddam was toppled from power. See Stewart Ain, "Israel Getting Dragged into Syrian Mess," Jewish Week, October 28, 2005; and Ori Nir, "America, Israel Bracing for Violence from Syria," Forward, December 2, 2005. While this may be true, Israel remains deeply committed to making sure that Washington pursues a confrontational policy toward Damascus.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:31 PM

90. Packer, Assassins' Gate, 41.

91. Jane Perlez, "Capitol Hawks Seek Tougher Line on Iraq," New York Times, March 7, 2001; and "Have Hawks Become Doves?" Washington Times editorial, March 8, 2001. Also see Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129-31.

92. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004); and Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

93. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 12. Also see Lemann,

"Iraq Factor"; and Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Meyers, "Bush Administration Warns Iraq on Weapons Programs," New York Times, January 23, 2001.

94. She also noted that if Iraq did get WMD, the appropriate U.S. response would be a "clear and classical statement of deterrence—if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration." Condoleezza Rice, "Promoting the National Interest," Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (January/February 2000): 60-62.

95. Timothy Noah, "Dick Cheney, Dove," Slate.com, October 16, 2002; Adam Meyerson, "Calm After Desert Storm," interview with Dick Cheney, Policy Review 65 (Summer 1993).

96. Quoted in Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past." Elliott and Carney ("First Stop, Iraq") report that neoconservatives like William Kristol were upset when Cheney was chosen as Bush's running mate, because of Cheney's position on ending the first Gulf War. But after 9/11, says Kristol, "neoconservatives happily consider him a fellow-traveler.'"

97. Elliott and Carney, "First Stop, Iraq"; Glenn Kessler and Peter Slavin, "Cheney Is Fulcrum of Foreign Policy," Washington Post, October 13, 2002; Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past"; and "Vice President Dick Cheney Talks About Bush's Energy Plan," interview with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press, May 20, 2001. Although Cheney's views on conquering Iraq fundamentally changed after 9/11, this apparently did not happen overnight. See "The Vice President Appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert," Camp David, Maryland, Office of the White House Press Secretary, September 16, 2001. Cheney's response to specific questions about Iraq does not indicate that he had changed his thinking about the need to topple Saddam five days after the Twin Towers fell.

98. Both Kagan quotations are from Packer, Assassins' Gate, 38. Also see similar comments by Packer himself in ibid., 32.

99. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 25-26.

100. Page, "Showdown with Saddam."

101. Elliott and Carney, "First Stop, Iraq." Woodward describes Wolfowitz as "like a drum that would not stop." Plan of Attack, 22.

102. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 1-44.

103. Regarding the neoconservatives' influence on Cheney, see Elliott and Carney, "First Stop, Iraq"; Page, "Showdown with Saddam"; Michael Hirsh, "Bernard Lewis Revisited," Washington Monthly, November 2004; Frederick Kempe, "Lewis's 'Liberation' Doctrine for Mideast Faces New Tests," Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2005; and Carla Anne Robbins and Jeanne Cummings, "How Bush Decided That Hussein Must Be Ousted from Atop Iraq," Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2002. On Ajami in particular, see Adam Shatz, "The Native Informant," Nation, April 28, 2003.

104. Jacob Weisberg, "Are Neo-cons History?" Financial Times, March 14, 2007. This article makes clear that Cheney and Lewis have a close relationship.

105. Woodward succinctly describes Libby's influence in Plan of Attack (48-49): "Libby had three formal titles. He was chief of staff to Vice President Cheney; he was also national security adviser to the vice president; and he was finally an assistant to President Bush. It was a trifecta of positions probably never held before by a single person. Scooter was a power center unto himself . . . Libby was one of only two people who were not principals to attend the National Security Council meetings with the president and the separate principals meetings chaired by Rice." Also see ibid., 50-51, 288-92, 300-301, 409-10; Bumiller and Schmitt, "On the Job and at Home"; Karen Kwiatkowski, "The New Pentagon Papers," Salon.com, March 10, 2004; and Tyler and Sciolino, "Bush Advisers Split."

106. Tyler and Sciolino, "Bush Advisers Split." Also see Bumiller and Schmitt, "On the Job and at Home"; and William Safire, "Phony War II," New York Times, November 28, 2002.

107. On Cheney's significant influence in the Bush administration, see Jeanne Cummings and Greg Hitt, "In Iraq Drama, Cheney Emerges as President's War Counselor," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2003; Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff, and Evan Thomas, "Cheney's Long Path to War," Newsweek, November 17, 2003; Kessler and Slavin, "Cheney Is Ful

crum"; Barbara Slavin and Susan Page, "Cheney Rewrites Roles in Foreign Policy," USA Today, July 29, 2002; and Woodward, Plan of Attack, 27-30.

108. Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past"; and Woodward, Plan of Attack, 410. Also see ibid., 164-65,409.

109. Quoted in Eric Schmitt, "Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force's Size," New York Times, February 28, 2003.

110. "This Goes Beyond Bin Laden," jinsa.org, September 13 2001. Also see Vest, "The Men from JINSA and CSP."

111. This letter was published in the Weekly Standard, October 1, 2001. Among the signatories were William Bennett, Eliot Cohen, Aaron Friedberg, Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Stephen Solarz, and Leon Wieseltier.

112. Charles Krauthammer, "The War: A Road Map," Washington Post, September 28, 2001; and Robert Kagan and William Kristol, "The Right War," Weekly Standard, October 1, 2001. Also see "War Aims," Wall Street Journal editorial, September 20, 2001.

113. Michael Barone, "War by Ultimatum," U.S. News & World Report, October 1, 2001. Also see Bill Gertz, "Iraq Suspected of Sponsoring Terrorist Attacks," Washington Times, September 21, 2001; "Drain the Ponds of Terror," Jerusalem Post editorial, September 25, 2001; William Safire, "The Ultimate Enemy," NewYork Times, September 24, 2001; and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "A Question of Priorities," U.S. News & World Report, October 8, 2001.

114. The April 3, 2002, letter can be found at www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter-040302.htm.

115. Daniel Byman, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Gideon Rose, "The Rollback Fantasy," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 1 (January/February 1999).

116. Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (NewYork: Random House, 2002); Kenneth M. Pollack, "Why Iraq Can't Be Deterred," New York Times, September 26, 2002; Kenneth M. Pollack, "A Last Chance to Stop Iraq," New York Times, February 21, 2003; Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack, "How Bush Can Avoid the Inspections Trap," New York Times, January 27, 2003; and Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack, "Lock and Load," Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2002.

117. William Kristol, "The Axis of Appeasement," Weekly Standard, August 26/September 2, 2002; Robert Bartley, "Thinking Things Over: What We Learned," Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2002; Michael Ledeen, "Scowcroft Strikes Out," National Review Online, August 6, 2002; George Melloan, "Who Really Doubts That Saddam's Got to Go," Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2002; John O'Sullivan, "Chamberlain Deserves an Apology: Scowcroft, Hagel, and Raines Are No Chamberlains," National Review Online, September 3, 2002; "This Is Opposition? There Is No Revolt in the GOP Against Bush's Iraq Policy," Wall Street Journal editorial, August 19, 2002; and "Who Is Brent Scowcroft?" New York Sun editorial, August 19, 2002. None of the targets of the neoconservatives' ire were advocating appeasement of Iraq but instead favored containment over war.

118. William Safire, "Our 'Relentless' Liberation," New York Times, October 8, 2001. Also see William Safire, "Saddam and Terror," New York Times, August 22, 2002; and William Safire, "Big Mo," New York Times, November 19, 2001.

119. Robert Kagan, "On to Phase II," Washington Post, November 27, 2001; Robert Kagan and William Kristol, "What to Do About Iraq," Weekly Standard, January 21, 2002; and Safire, "Saddam and Terror."

120. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, "The U.N. Trap?" Weekly Standard, November 18, 2002; Charles Krauthammer, "A Costly Charade at the U.N.," Washington Post, February 28, 2003; George F. Will, "Stuck to the U.N. Tar Baby," Washington Post, September 19, 2002; and William Safire, "The French Connection," New York Times, March 14, 2003.

121. Krauthammer, "Our First Move." Also see Reuel Marc Gerecht, "A Necessary War," Weekly Standard, October 21, 2002; and Charles Krauthammer, "Where Power Talks," Washington Post, January 4, 2002.

122. An excellent account of the administration's campaign to sell the war is Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2006).

123. James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (NewYork: Doubleday, 2004), chaps. 13-14; Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell (NewYork: Knopf, 2006), 440-46; and Woodward, Plan of Attack, 288-92, 297-301. Also see ibid., 72, 163.

124. Wodward, Plan of Attack, 290.

125. "Powell Regrets UN Speech on Iraq WMDs," ABC News Online, September 9, 2005.

126. Bamford, Pretext for War, 287-91, 307-31; Julian Borger, "The Spies Who Pushed for War," Guardian, July 17, 2003; David S. Cloud, "Prewar Intelligence Inquiry Zeroes in on Pentagon Office," Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2004; Seymour M. Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," New Yorker, May 12, 2003; Kwiatkowski, "New Pentagon Papers"; W. Patrick Lang, "Drinking the Kool-Aid," Middle East Policy 11, no. 2 (Summer 2004); Jim Lobe, "Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network," Inter Press Service, August 7, 2003; Greg Miller, "Spy Unit Skirted CIA on Iraq," Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2004; Paul R. Pillar, "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq," Foreign Affairs 85, no. 2 (March-April 2006); James Risen, "How Pair's Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence," New York Times, April 28, 2004; and Eric Schmitt and Thorn Shanker, "Threats and Responses: A C.I.A. Rival; Pentagon Sets Up Intelligence Unit," New York Times, October 24, 2002.

127. Risen, State of War, 72-73.

128. Lobe, "Pentagon Office." On Makovsky, see Jack Herman, "A Whole New Ballgame Overseas," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 20, 1989. This article was written when Makovsky was about to leave the United States and move to Israel. "I have strong feelings about helping to build a Jewish state," he told Herman. He then added, "It's like returning to your roots."

129. Borger, "The Spies."

130. Inspector General, Department of Defense, "Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy," Report no. 07-INTEL-04, February 9, 2007.

131. Franklin Foer, "Founding Fakers," New Republic, August 18, 2003.

132. Robert Dreyfuss, "Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy," American Prospect, November 18, 2002. Also see "Who Will Lead a Free Iraq?" jinsa.org, May 9, 2003; and "Creating a Post-Saddam Iraq," jinsa.org, Report no. 481, April 6, 2005.

133. Quoted in Dreyfuss, "Tinker, Banker." Also see Matthew E. Berger, "Iraqi Exiles and Jews Form Unlikely Alliance," Jewish News Weekly (online), October 18, 2002; Juan Cole, "All the Vice-President's Men," Salon.com, October 28, 2005; and Michelle Goldberg, "The War over the Peace," Salon.com, April 14, 2003.

134. Quoted in Robert Dreyfuss, "Chalabi and AEI: The Sequel," TomPaine.com, November 10, 2005. Also see Laurie Mylroie, "Unusually Effective," New York Sun, November 8, 2005; and Michael Rubin, "Iraq's Comeback Kid," National Review Online, December 5, 2005.

135. Bernard Lewis, "Put the Iraqis in Charge," Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2003. Also see Ian Buruma, "Lost in Translation," New Yorker, June 14, 2004; and Michael Hirsh, "Bernard Lewis Revisited," Washington Monthly, November 2004.

136. Dizard, "How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons." In mid-June 2003, Benjamin Netanyahu announced, "It won't be long when you will see Iraqi oil flowing to Haifa." Reuters, "Netanyahu Says Iraq-Israel Oil Line Not Pipe-Dream," Ha'aretz, June 20, 2003. Of course, this did not happen and it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. Also see Douglas Davis, "Peace with Israel Said to Top New Iraq's Agenda," Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2003.

137. Matthew E. Berger, "New Chance to Build Israel-Iraq Ties," Jewish Journal (online), April 28, 2003. Also see Bamford, Pretext to War, 293; and Ed Blanche, "Securing Iraqi Oil for Israel: The Plot Thickens," Lebanonwire.com, April 25, 2003.

138. Nathan Guttman, "Mutual Wariness: AIPAC and the Iraqi Opposition," Ha'aretz, April 27, 2003.

139. Quoted in Packer, Assassins' Gate, 41.

140. Friedman qualifed this remark by adding, "In the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11." We agree; it was a combination of the neoconservatives' active promotion of the war, the support from key groups in the lobby, and a particular set of international and domestic circumstances that led the United States into the Iraqi quagmire. See Shavit, "White Man's Burden."

141. Noam Chomsky, "The Isrel Lobby"?" Znet (online), March 28, 2006. Also see Stephen Zunes, "The Israel Lobby: How Powerful Is It Really?" Znet (online), May 25, 2006.

142. One pundit notes that the "preferred slogan" of the antiwar forces in the run-up to the Iraq war was "no blood for oil." John B. Judis, "Over a Barrel," New Republic, January 20, 2003, 20. Also see William R. Clark, Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2005); Michael Elliott, "The Selling of the President's War: Bush Should Take Israel and Oil Out of the Iraq Equation," Time, November 18, 2002; Michael Meacher, "This War on Terrorism Is Bogus," Guardian, September 6, 2003; Kevin Phillips, "American Petrocacy," American Conservative, July 17, 2006; and Sandy Tolan, "Beyond Regime Change," Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2002.

143. Judis, "Jews and the Gulf," 16-17.

144. Stephen J. Hedges, "Allies Not Swayed on Iraq Strike," Chicago Tribune, August 28, 2002; "Saudi Arabia Says It Won't Join a War," New York Times, March 19, 2003; "Saudis Warn US over Iraq War," BBC News (online), February 17, 2003; Jon Sawyer, "Saudi Arabia Won't Back War on Iraq without U.N. Authority, Prince Warns," St. Louis Post-Dispatch (online), January 23, 2003; "Scorecard: For or Against Military Action," New York Times, August 27, 2002; and Brian Whitaker and John Hooper, "Saudis Will Not Aid US War Effort," Guardian, August 8, 2002.

145. Peter Beinart, "Crude," New Republic, October 7, 2002; Michael Moran and Alex Johnson, "The Rush for Iraq's Oil," MSNBC.com, November 7, 2002; Anthony Sampson, "Oilmen Don't Want Another Suez," Observer, December 22, 2002; John W. Schoen, "Iraqi Oil, American Bonanza?" MSNBC.com, November 11, 2002; and Daniel Yergin, "A Crude View of the Crisis in Iraq," Washington Post, December 8, 2002.

146. Remarks by the Vice President to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention, Nashville, Tennessee (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, August 26, 2002). Also see Remarks by the Vice President to the Veterans of the Korean War, San Antonio, Texas (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, August 29, 2002).

147. For a copy of the speech, see "In the President's Words: Tree People Will Keep the Peace of the World,'" New York Times, February 27, 2003. Also see Remarks by the President to the United Nations General Assembly, New York (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, September 12, 2002); Remarks by the President to the Graduating Class, West Point (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, June 1, 2002); President's Inaugural Speech, Washington, DC (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, January 20, 2005); and National Security Strategy of the United States (2002).

148. Robert S. Greenberger and Karby Leggett, "President's Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-U.S., Democratic Area Is a Goal That Has Israeli and Neoconservative Roots," Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2003. Also see George Packer, "Dreaming of Democracy," New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2003; Paul Sperry, "Bush the Nation-Builder: So Much for Campaign Promises," Antiwar.com, October 6, 2006; and Wayne Washington, "Once Against Nation-Building, Bush Now Involved," Boston Globe, March 2, 2004.

149. Charles Krauthammer, "Peace Through Democracy," Washington Post, June 28, 2002.

150. Barak, "Taking Apart."

151. Quoted in Lynfield, "Israel Sees Opportunity in Possible U.S. Strike on Iraq."

152. Benn, "Background."

153. Bennet, "Israel Says."

154. Shalev, "Jerusalem Frets."

155. See, for example, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, Report of the Project for the New American Century (Washington, DC, September 2000), 14, 17-18.

156. Martin Indyk, "The Clinton Administration 's Approach to the Middle East," speech to Soref Symposium, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 18, 1993. Also see Anthony Lake, "Confronting Backlash States," Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994).

157. Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conlict Between Iran and America (NewYork: Random House, 2004), 261-65.

158. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000); Charles Krauthammer, "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," National Interest 18 (Winter 1989/90); Michael A. Ledeen, Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1996); Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1991); Marina Ottaway et al., "Democratic Mirage in the Middle East," Policy Brief 20 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2002); Norman Podhoretz, "Strange Bedfellows: A Guide to the New Foreign-Policy Debates," Commentary, December 1999; "Statement of Principles," Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997; and Albert Wohlstetter, "A Vote in Cuba? Why Not in Iraq?" Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1991.

159. On the neoconservatives' thinking about regional transformation, see Robert Blecher, "Free People Will Set the Course of History," Middle East Report Online, March 2003; Jack Donnelly and Anthony Shadid, "Iraq War Hawks Have Plans to Reshape Entire Mideast," Boston Globe, September 10, 2002; Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 76-90; Nicholas Le-mann, "After Iraq: The Plan to Remake the Middle East," New Yorker, February 17, 2003; and Klein, "How Israel."

160. Quoted in Roula Khalaf, "Rice 'New Middle East' Comments Fuel Arab Fury over US Policy," Financial Times, July 31, 2006.

161. Orly Halpern, "Israeli Experts Say Middle East Was Safer with Saddam in Iraq," Forward, January 5, 2007. Also see Leslie Susser, "Iraq War: Good or Bad for Israel? Saddam's Execution Revives Debate," JTA.org, January 2, 2007.

162. Quoted in Chris McGreal, "Israelis May Regret Saddam Ousting, Says Security Chief," Guardian, February 9, 2006.

163. James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs, The Iraq Study Group Report (NewYork: Random House, 2006), xv, 28-29, 43-45, 50-58. Tony Blair, who repeatedly called for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and who favors negotiating with Iran and Syria, said that the Iraq Study Group "offers a strong way forward." Quoted in Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Kate Zernike, "Bush Expresses Caution on Key Points in Iraq Panel's Report," New York Times, December 7, 2006. Also see Kirk Semple, "Syrian Official, in Iraq, Offers Assistance," New York Times, November 19, 2006.

164. Akiva Eldar, "The Gewalt Agenda," Ha'aretz, November 20, 2006.

165. Michael Abramowitz and Glenn Kessler, "Hawks Bolster Skeptical President," Washington Post, December 10, 2006; Associated Press, "Israel Experts Doubt Focusing on Israel-Arab Conflict Will Help in Iraq," International Herald Tribune, December 6, 2006; "Gates's Shocking Thinking on Iran," Jerusalem Post editorial, December 6, 2006; Nathan Guttman, "Baker Group Advisers 'Surprised,' 'Upset' at Report's Israel-Iraq Link," Forward, January 30, 2007; Jeff Jacoby, "Fighting to Win in Iraq," Boston Globe, December 3, 2006; Robert Kagan and William Kristol, "A Perfect Failure," Weekly Standard, December 11, 2006; Ron Kampeas, "ISG Fallout Continues with Query: Is Israeli-Arab Peace the Linchpin?" JTA.org, December 10, 2006; Jim Lobe, "Neocons Move to Preempt Baker Report," Antiwar.com, December 6, 2006; Marc Perelman, "As Washington Studies Iraq Report, Jerusalem Frets over Tehran

Talk," Forward, December 15, 2006; Shmuel Rosner, "Baker's Brew," Ha'aretz, December 8, 2006; and "The Iraq Muddle Group," Wall Street Journal editorial, December 7, 2006.

166. Quoted in Shmuel Rosner, "FM Livni: U.S. Must Stand Firm on Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 13, 2007. Also see Shmuel Rosner, "Livni to AIPAC: U.S. Can't Show Weakness on Iraq, Iran," Ha'aretz, March 12, 2007.

167. The Olmert quotations are from Bradley Burston, "Israel Must Stay the Hell Out of U.S. Debate on Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 13, 2007; and Hilary L. Krieger, "PM's AIPAC Talk Surprises Delegate," Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2007.

168. Burston, "Israel Must Stay." Also see Krieger, "PM's AIPAC Talk"; and Shmuel Rosner, "No Easy Answers on Israel and the Iraq Debate," Ha'aretz, March 13, 2007.

169. "President Bush Welcomes Prime Minister Olmert of Israel to the White House," White House, Office of the Press Secretary, November 13, 2006.

170. Quoted in James D. Besser, "Olmert Support for Iraq War Stirs Anger," Jewish Week, November 17, 2006.

171. David Horovitz, "Editor's Notes: Wading into the Great Debate," Jerusalem Post, March 15, 2007.

172. Quoted in Glenn Frankel, "A Beautiful Friendship?" Washington Post Sunday Magazine, July 16, 2006.

173. Martin Kramer, "The American Interest," Azure 5767, no. 26 (Fall 2006): 29. Kramer also claims that "the assertion that the Iraq war is being waged on behalf of Israel is pure fiction," a remark at odds with Prime Minister Olmert's statement to the 2007 AIPAC Policy Conference, where he explicitly linked Israel's security to victory in Iraq. See note 167 above. Also see Yossi Alpher, "Sharon Warned Bush," Forward, January 12, 2007.

174. Alpher, "Sharon Warned Bush." Also see Herb Keinon, "Sharon Warned Bush of Saddam Threat," Jerusalem Post, January 11, 2007.

175. See notes 21 and 25 above.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 PM

8: IRAQ AND DREAMS OF TRANSFORMING THE MIDDLE EAST

1. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 46. Former CIA director George Tenet offers a similar view, writing in his memoirs that "one of the great mysteries to me is when the war in Iraq became inevitable." George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (NewYork: Harper, 2007), 301.

2. As the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman reportedly observed in May 2003, "It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris." See Ari Shavit, "White Man's Burden," Ha'aretz, May 4, 2003.

3. Quoted in Emad Mekay, "Iraq Was Invaded 'to Protect Israel'—US Official," Asia Times Online, March 31, 2004. We used these quotations in our original article in the London Review of Books, and Zelikow challenged our interpretation of them. We based our discussion on a full and unimpeachable record of his remarks, and his challenge has no basis in fact. For a more detailed discussion of Zelikow's charge and our response, see "Letters," London Review of Books, May 25, 2006. Zelikow also served with Rice on the National Security Council during the first Bush administration and later coauthored a book with her on German reunification. He was one of the principal authors of the document that is probably the most comprehensive statement of the Bush Doctrine: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, September 2002).

4. Quoted in "US Assumes UK Help in Iraq, Says General," Guardian, August 20, 2002.

5. Quoted in an interview with Sascha Lehnartz, "Dann helfen uns eben die Osteuropaer," Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, January 26, 2003. On the influence of the Defense Policy Board in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, see Stephen J. Hedges, "Iraq Hawks Have Bush's Ear," Chicago Tribune, August 18, 2002.

6. Joe Klein, "How Israel Is Wrapped Up in Iraq," Time, February 10, 2003.

7. Senator Ernest F. Hollings, "Bush's Failed Mideast Policy Is Creating More Terrorism," Charleston Post and Courier (online), May 6, 2004; and "Sen. Hollings Floor Statement Setting the Record Straight on His Mideast Newspaper Column," May 20, 2004, originally posted on the former senator's website (now defunct) but still available at www.shalomctr.org/node/620.

8. "ADL Urges Senator Hollings to Disavow Statements on Jews and the Iraq War," Anti-Defamation League press release, May 14, 2004.

9. Matthew E. Berger, "Not So Gentle Rhetoric from the Gentleman from South Carolina," JTA.org, May 23, 2004; "Sen. Hollings Floor Statement"; and "Senator Lautenberg's Floor Statement in Support of Senator Hollings," June 3, 2004, http://lautenberg.senate.gov/news room/video.cfm.

10. Aluf Benn, "Scapegoat for Israel," Ha'aretz, May 13, 2004; Matthew Berger, "Will Some Jews' Backing for War in Iraq Have Repercussions for All?" JTA.org, June 10, 2004; Patrick J. Buchanan, "Whose War?" American Conservative, March 24, 2003; Arnaud de Borchgrave, "A Bush-Sharon Doctrine?" Washington Times, February 14, 2003; Ami Eden, "Israel's Role: The 'Elephant'They're Talking About," Forward, February 28, 2003; "The Ground Shifts," Forward, May 28, 2004; Nathan Guttman, "Prominent U.S. Jews, Israel Blamed for Start of Iraq War," Ha'aretz, May 31, 2004; Spencer S. Hsu, "Moran Said Jews Are Pushing War," Washington Post, March 11, 2003; Lawrence F. Kaplan, "Toxic Talk on War," Washington

Post, February 18, 2003; E. J. Kessler, "Gary Hart Says 'Dual Loyalty Barb Was Not Aimed at Jews," Forward, February 21, 2003; Ori Nir and Ami Eden, "Ex-Mideast Envoy Zinni Charges Neocons Pushed Iraq War to Benefit Israel," Forward, May 28, 2004; and Robert Novak, "Sharon's War?" CNN.com, December 26, 2002.

11. Quoted in Akiva Eldar, "Sharp Pen, Cruel Tongue," Ha'aretz, April 13, 2007.

12. Michael Kinsley, "What Bush Isn't Saying About Iraq," Slate.com, October 24, 2002. Also see Michael Kinsley, "J'Accuse, Sort Of," Slate.com, March 12, 2003.

13. Nathan Guttman, "Some Blame Israel for U.S. War in Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 5, 2003.

14. Bill Keller, "Is It Good for the Jews?" New York Times, March 8, 2003.

15. Ori Nir, "FBI Probe: More Questions Than Answers," Forward, May 13, 2005.

16. Shai Feldman, "The Bombing of Osiraq—Revisited," International Security 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1982); and Dan Reiter, "Preventive Attacks Against Nuclear Programs and the 'Success' at Osiraq," Nonproliferation Review 12, no. 2 (July 2005).

17. Joel Brinkley, "Confrontation in the Gulf: Israelis Worried by U.S. Restraint," New York Times, August 30, 1990; Joel Brinkley, "Top Israelis Warn of Deep Worry over Diplomatic Accord in Gulf," New York Times, December 4, 1990; Hugh Carnegy, "Pullout Not Enough, Says Israel," Financial Times, January 10, 1991; Sabra Chartrand, "Israel Warns Against a Gulf Retreat," New York Times, December 6, 1990; Jackson Diehl, "Israelis Fear Iraqi Threat Will Endure," Washington Post, August 29, 1990; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "Israel's Call for Action," Washington Post, August 24, 1990; Michael Massing, "The Way to War," New York Review of Books, March 28, 1991; Martin Merzer, "Israel Hopes Diplomacy Won't Let Iraqi Stay in Power," Miami Herald, August 29, 1990; and "Sharon to Americans: Blast Iraqis Immediately," Jerusalem Post, August 12, 1990.

18. Aluf Benn, "Sharon Shows Powell His Practical Side," Ha'aretz, February 26, 2001.

19. Seymour Hersh, "The Iran Game," New Yorker, December 3, 2001; Peter Hirschberg, "Background: Peres Raises Iranian Threat," Ha'aretz, February 5, 2002; David Hirst, "Israel Thrusts Iran in Line of US Fire," Guardian, February 2, 2002; "Israel Once Again Sees Iran as a Cause for Concern," Ha'aretz, May 7, 2001; and Alan Sipress, "Israel Emphasizes Iranian Threat," Washington Post, February 7, 2002.

20. Robert Novak, "Netanyahu's Nuke Warning," Chicago Sun-Times, April 14, 2002; Robert Novak, "War on Iraq Won't Be 'Cakewalk,'" Chicago Sun-Times, April 25, 2002; and William Raspberry, "To Solve the Crisis," Washington Post, April 15, 2002.

21. Elizabeth Sullivan, "Sharon Aide Expects United States to Attack Iraq; He Says Saddam Must Be Stopped from Making Nuclear Arms," Cleveland Plain Dealer (online), May 3, 2002.

22. Quoted in Joyce Howard Price, "Peres Encourages U.S. Action on Iraq," Washington Times, May 12, 2002.

23. Ehud Barak, "No Quick Fix," Washington Post, June 8, 2002.

24. Quoted in Gideon Alon, "Sharon to Panel: Iraq Is Our Biggest Danger," Ha'aretz, August 13, 2002. Also see Nina Gilbert, "Iraq Poses Greatest Threat," Jerusalem Post, August 13, 2002.

25. "Israel to US: Don't Delay Iraq Attack," CBSNews.com, August 16, 2002. The Sharon and Peres quotations are from Aluf Benn, "PM Urging U.S. Not to Delay Strike Against Iraq," Ha'aretz, August 16, 2002. The Gissen quotation is from Jason Keyser, "Israel Urges U.S. to Attack," Washington Post, August 16, 2002. The Shiry quotation is from Ben Lynfield, "Israel Sees Opportunity in Possible US Strike on Iraq," Christian Science Monitor, August 30, 2002. Also see Anton La Guardia, "Sharon Urges America to Bring Down Saddam," Daily Telegraph (London), August 17, 2002; Reuven Pedhatzur, "Israel's Interest in the War on Saddam," Ha'aretz, August 4, 2002; Jonathan Steele, "Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq," Guardian, August 17, 2002; Walter Rodgers, "Rice and Peres Warn of Iraqi Threat," CNN.com, August 16, 2002; Tony Snow et al., interview with Ra'anan Gissen, "Fox Special Report with Brit Hume," August 16, 2002; and Ze'ev Schiff, "Into the Rough," Ha'aretz, August 16, 2002.

26. Benn, "PM Urging U.S." For additional evidence that "Israel and its supporters" were deeply concerned in 2002 "that critics would claim that the United States was going to war on

Israels behalf—or even, as some have suggested, at Israel's behest," see Marc Perelman, "Iraqi Move Puts Israel in Lonely U.S. Corner," Forward, September 20, 2002.

27. On the lobby's concerns in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, see John B. Judis, "Jews and the Gulf. Fallout from the Six-Week War," Tikkun, May/June 1991; Allison Kaplan, "Saddam Splits Jewish Lobby," Jerusalem Post, January 14, 1991; and David Rogers, "Pro-Israel Lobbyists Quietly Backed Resolution Allowing Bush to Commit U.S. Troops to Combat," Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1991. On Israel's concerns at the same time, see Brinkley, "Top Israelis Warn of Deep Worry"; Carnegy, "Pullout Not Enough"; Chartrand, "Israel Warns"; Diehl, "Israelis Fear Iraqi Threat"; and Merzer, "Israel Hopes." The Buchanan quotation is from Chris Reidy, "The War Between the Columnists Gets Nasty," Boston Globe, September 22, 1990.

28. Benn, "PM Aide"; and Keyser, "Israel Urges U.S. to Attack."

29. Quoted in Rodgers, "Rice and Peres Warn."

30. Benn, "PM Aide."

31. Alon, "Sharon to Panel." At a White House press conference with President Bush on October 16, 2002, Sharon said, "I would like to thank you, Mr. President, for the friendship and cooperation. And as far as I remember, as we look back towards many years now, I think that we never had such relations with any President of the United States as we have with you, and we never had such cooperation in everything as we have with the current administration." "President Bush Welcomes Prime Minister Sharon to White House; Question and Answer Session with the Press," transcript of press conference, U.S. Department of State, October 16, 2002. Also see Robert G. Kaiser, "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy," Washington Post, February 9, 2003.

32. Shlomo Brom, "An Intelligence Failure," Strategic Assessment (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University) 6, no. 3 (November 2003): 9. Also see "Intelligence Assessment: Selections from the Media, 1998-2003," ibid., 17-19; Gideon Alon, "Report Slams Assessment of Dangers Posed by Libya, Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 28, 2004; Dan Baron, "Israeli Report Blasts Intelligence for Exaggerating the Iraqi Threat," JTA.org, March 29, 2004; Molly Moore, "Israel Shares Blame on Iraq Intelligence, Report Says," Washington Post, December 5, 2003; Greg Myre, "Israeli Report Faults Intelligence on Iraq," New York Times, March 28, 2004; Ori Nir, "Senate Report on Iraq Intel Points to Role of Jerusalem," Forward, July 16, 2004; and James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 72-73.

33. On the general phenomenon of buck-passing, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (NewYork: Norton, 2001), 157-62.

34. Quoted in Perelman, "Iraqi Move."

35. Herb Keinon, "Sharon to Putin: Too Late for Iraq Arms Inspection, "Jerusalem Post, October 1, 2002.

36. "Peres Questions France Permanent Status on Security Council," Ha'aretz, February 20, 2003.

37. Perelman, "Iraqi Move."

38. Shlomo Avineri, "A Haunting Echo," Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2002. Also see Benjamin Netanyahu, "The Case for Toppling Saddam," Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2002; and Nathan Guttman, "Shimon Peres Warns Against Repeat of 1930s Appeasement," Ha'aretz, September 15, 2002.

39. For some representative editorials, see "Next Stop, Baghdad," Jerusalem Post editorial, November 15, 2001; "Don't Wait for Saddam," Jerusalem Post editorial, August 18, 2002; "Making the Case for War," Jerusalem Post editorial, September 9, 2002. For some representative op-eds, see Ron Dermer, "The March to Baghdad," Jerusalem Post, December 21, 2001; Efraim Inbar, "Ousting Saddam, Instilling Stability," Jerusalem Post, October 8, 2002; and Gerald M. Steinberg, "Imagining the Liberation of Iraq," Jerusalem Post, November 18, 2001.

40. "Don't Wait for Saddam."

41. Ehud Barak, "Taking Apart Iraq's Nuclear Threat," New York Times, September 4, 2002.

42. Netanyahu, "The Case for Toppling Saddam." Also see Benjamin Netanyahu, "U.S. Must Beat Saddam to the Punch," Chicago Sun-Times, September 17, 2002.

43. See, for example, "Benjamin Netanyahu Testifies About Iraq to Congress," CNN Live Event, CNN.com, September 12, 2002; Jim Lobe, "Hawks Justify Iraq Strike as War for Democracy," Inter Press Service, September 27, 2002; and Janine Zacharia, "Netanyahu: US Must Guarantee Israel's Safety from Iraqi Attack," Jerusalem Post, September 13, 2002.

44. Aluf Benn, "Background: Enthusiastic IDF Awaits War in Iraq," Ha'aretz, February 17, 2003; James Bennet, "Israel Says War on Iraq Would Benefit the Region," New York Times, February 27, 2003; and Chemi Shalev, "Jerusalem Frets as U.S. Battles Iraq War Delays," Forward, March 7, 2003.

45. Quoted in James Bennet, "Clinton Redux," The Atlantic@Aspen weblog, July 8, 2006.

46. Asher Arian, "Israeli Public Opinion on National Security 2002," Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University, Memorandum no. 61, July 2002, 10, 34.

47. Ephraim Yaar and Tamar Hermann, "Peace Index: Most Israelis Support the Attack on Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 6, 2003. Regarding Kuwait, a public opinion poll released in March 2003 found that 89.6 percent of Kuwaitis favored the impending war against Iraq. Jame Morrison, "Kuwaitis Support War," Washington Times, March 18, 2003. In a poll taken in Israel in early May 2007, 59 percent of the respondents said that the U.S. decision to invade Iraq was correct. "Poll Shows That Israel Is a Staunch American Ally," Anti-Defamation League press release, May 18, 2007. By that time, most Americans had concluded that the war was a tragic mistake.

48. "America's Image Further Erodes, Europeans Want Weaker Ties: a Nine-Country Survey," Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, March 18, 2003. Also see Alan Travis and Ian Black, "Blair's Popularity Plummets," Guardian, February 18, 2003.

49. Gideon Levy, "A Deafening Silence," Ha'aretz, October 6, 2002.

50. See Dan Izenberg, "Foreign Ministry Warns Israeli War Talk Fuels US Anti-Semitism," Jerusalem Post, March 10, 2003, which makes clear that "the Foreign Ministry has received reports from the US" telling Israelis to be more circumspect because the U.S. media is portraying Israel as "trying to goad the administration into war."

51. Quoted in Dana Milbank, "Group Urges Pro-Israel Leaders Silence on Iraq," Washington Post, November 27, 2002.

52. David Horovitz, "Sharon Warns Colleagues Not to Discuss Iraq Conflict," Irish Times, March 12, 2003. Also see James Bennet, "Threats and Responses: Israel's Role; Not Urging War, Sharon Says," New York Times, March 11, 2003; and Aluf Benn, "Sharon Says U.S. Should Also Disarm Iran, Libya and Syria," Ha'aretz, February 18, 2003.

53. The influence of the neoconservatives and their allies was widely reflected before the war and is clearly reflected in the following articles, all written before or just after the war began: Joel Beinin, "Pro-Israel Hawks and the Second Gulf War," Middle East Report Online, April 6, 2003; Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt, "On the Job and at Home, Influential Hawks' 30-Year Friendship Evolves," New York Times, September 11, 2002; Kathleen and Bill Christison, "A Rose by Another Name: The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties," CounterPunch.org, December 13, 2002; Robert Dreyfuss, "The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA," American Prospect, December 16, 2002; Michael Elliott and James Carney, "First Stop, Iraq," Time, March 31, 2003; Seymour Hersh, "The Iraq Hawks," New Yorker, December 24-31, 2001; Michael Hirsh, "Hawks, Doves and Dubya," Newsweek, September 2, 2002; Glenn Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past," Washington Post, January 12, 2003; Joshua M. Marshall, "Bomb Saddam?" Washington Monthly, June 2002; Dana Milbank, "White House Push for Iraqi Strike Is on Hold," Washington Post, August 18, 2002; Susan Page, "Showdown with Saddam: The Decision to Act," USA Today, September 11, 2002; Sam Tanenhaus, "Bush's Brain Trust," Vanity Fair (online), July 2003; Patrick E. Tyler and Elaine Sciolino, "Bush Advisers Split on Scope of Retaliation," New York Times, September 20, 2001; and Jason A. Vest, "The Men from JINSA and CSP," Nation, September 2/9, 2002.

54. Janine Zacharia, "All the President's Middle East Men," Jerusalem Post, January 19, 2001.

55. "Rally Unites Anguished Factions Under Flag of 'Stand with Israel,'" Forward, April 19, 2002; and "Forward 50," Forward, November 15, 2002.

56. John McCaslin, "Israeli-Trained Cops," Washington Times, November 5, 2002; Bret Stephens, "Man of the Year," Jerusalem Post (Rosh Hashana Supplement), September 26, 2003; and Janine Zacharia, "Invasive Treatment," ibid. Other useful pieces on Wolfowitz include Peter J. Boyer, "The Believer," New Yorker, November 1, 2004; Michael Dobbs, "For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized," Washington Post, April 7, 2003; James Fallows, "The Unilateralist," Atlantic, March 2002; Bill Keller, "The Sunshine Warrior," New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002; and "Paul Wolfowitz, Velociraptor," Economist, February 7, 2002.

57. See, for example, Douglas J. Feith, "The Inner Logic of Israel's Negotiations: Withdrawal Process, Not Peace Process," Middle East Quarterly 3, no. 1 (March 1996); and Douglas Feith, "A Strategy for Israel," Commentary, September 1997.For useful discussions of Feith's views, see Jeffrey Goldberg, "A Little Learning: What Douglas Feith Knew and When He Knew It," New Yorker, May 9, 2005; Jim Lobe, "Losing Feith, or Is the Bush Team Shedding Its Sharper Edges?" Daily Star (online), January 31, 2005; James J. Zogby, "A Dangerous Appointment: Profile of Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense Under Bush," Middle East Information Center, April 18, 2001; and "Israeli Settlements: Legitimate, Democratically Mandated, Vital to Israel's Security and, Therefore, in U.S. Interest," Center for Security Policy, Transition Brief no. 96-T 130, December 17, 1996. Note that the title of the latter piece, which was published by an organization in the lobby, says that what is in Israel's interest is in America's national interest. In "Losing Feith," Lobe writes, "In 2003, when Feith, who was standing in for Rumsfeld at an interagency 'Principals' Meeting' on the Middle East, concluded his remarks on behalf of the Pentagon, according to the Washington insider newsletter, The Nelson Report, [National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice said, 'Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador.'"

58. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" was prepared for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem and published in June 1996. A copy can be found at www.iasps.org/stratl.htm.

59. Akiva Eldar, "Pedes of Wisdom for the Feithful," Ha'aretz, October 1, 2002.

60. Packer, Assassins' Gate, 32.

61. "Israel's UN Ambassador Slams Qatar, Praises U.S. Envoy Bolton," Ha'aretz, May 23, 2006. Also see "Bolton Is Israel's Secret Weapon, Says Gillerman," BigNewsNetwork.com, November 18, 2006; and Ori Nir, "Senate Probes Bolton's Pro-Israel Efforts," Forward, May 6, 2005.

62. Marc Perelman, "Siding with White House, Groups Back Bolton," Forward, November 17, 2006; and "Dear John," Forward editorial, December 8, 2006.

63. Ori Nir, "Libby Played Leading Role on Foreign Policy Decisions," Forward, November 4, 2005.

64. "He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace," Rennert Lecture for 2002. Krauthammer fiercely defends Israel at every turn in his columns.

65. Asia Aydintasbas, "The Midnight Ride of James Woolsey," Salon.com, December 20, 2001; Anne E. Kornblut and Bryan Bender, "Cheney Link of Iraq, 9/11 Dismissed," Boston Globe, September 16, 2003; David E. Sanger and Robin Toner, "Bush and Cheney Talk Strongly of Qaeda Links with Hussein," New York Times, June 18, 2004; and R. James Woolsey, "The Iraq Connection," Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2001.

66. Goldberg added that "among Jewish lobbyists in the Beltway, support for the impending war is almost taken for granted—several are puzzled by the very suggestion that any kind of strenuous opposition to an Iraq invasion might emerge." Michelle Goldberg, "Why American Jewish Groups Support War with Iraq," Salon.com, September 14, 2002.

67. "An Unseemly Silence," Forward editorial, May 7, 2004.

68. Nacha Cattan, "Resolutions on Invasion Divide Jewish Leadership," Forward, October 11, 2002; Laurie Goodstein, "Threats and Responses: American Jews; Divide Among Jews Leads to Silence on Iraq War," New York Times, March 15, 2003; and Milbank, "Group Urges."

69. Matthew E. Berger, "Jewish Groups Back U.S. Stand on Iraq," Jewish Journal (online), October 18, 2002; and Jewish Council for Public Affairs, "Statement on Iraq," adopted by the JCPA Board of Directors, October 2002.

70. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "No Time for Equivocation," U.S. News & World Report, August 26/ September 2, 2002. Also see Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "No More Cat and Mouse," U.S. News &• World Report, October 28, 2002; Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "Clear and Compelling Proof," U.S. News & World Report, February 10, 2003; and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "The High Price of Waiting," U.S. News & World Report, March 10, 2003.

71. Both quotes are from Goldberg, "Why American Jewish Groups."

72. Gary Rosenblatt, "The Case for War Against Saddam," Jewish Week, December 13, 2002. Also see Gary Rosenblatt, "Hussein Asylum," Jewish Week, August 23, 2002.

73. Ron Kampeas, "Cheney: Iran, Iraq a Package Deal," JTA.org, March 13, 2007.

74. Nathan Guttman, "Background: AIPAC and the Iraqi Opposition," Ha'aretz, April 7, 2003. Also see Dana Milbank, "For Israel Lobby Group, War Is Topic A, Quietly," Washington Post, April 1,2003.

75. David Twersky, "A Bittersweet Affair for AIPAC," New York Sun, January 23, 2003. On the ADL, see Cattan, "Resolutions on Invasion"; Nacha Cattan, "Jewish Groups Pressed to Line Up on Iraq," Forward, August 23, 2002; and Nathan Guttman, "Groups Mum on Iraq, Despite Antiwar Tide," Forward, March 2, 2007.

76. Jeffrey Goldberg, "Real Insiders: A Pro-Israel Lobby and an FBI Sting," New Yorker, July 4, 2005. Near East Report (NER), AIPAC's biweekly publication dealing with Middle East issues, is filled with articles dealing with Iraq in the months before the war began. Although none explicitly calls for invading Iraq, they all portray Saddam as an especially dangerous threat, leaving the reader with little doubt that both Israel and the United States will be in serious trouble if he is not toppled from power. See, for example, "Saddam's Diversion," NER, October 7, 2002; interview with Ze'ev Schiff, NER, October 21, 2002; interview with Amatzia Baram, NER, February 25, 2002; interview with Amatzia Baram, NER, October 7, 2002; interview with Kenneth M. Pollack, NER, September 23, 2002; "Arming Iraq," NER, July 1, 2002; and "Backing Saddam," NER, February 3, 2003.

77. John Bresnahan, "GOP Turns to Israeli Lobby to Boost Iraq Support," Roll Call (online), October 6, 2003.

78. Matthew E. Berger, "Bush Makes Iraq Case in AIPAC Appearance," Deep South Jewish Voice (online), May 11, 2004.

79. David Horovitz, "Editor's Notes: Wading into the Great Debate," Jerusalem Post, March 15, 2007. According to Ron Kampeas, Cheney's "message was not received enthusiastically. Only about one-third to one-half of the audience . . . applauded politely." See "Cheney: Iran, Iraq a Package Deal." Similarly, Nathan Guttman wrote that Cheney's speech "received a lukewarm welcome." See "Cheney Links Action on Iran to Winning Iraq," Forward, March 16, 2007. However, writing in Salon, Gregory Levey noted that "Cheney got a warm reception and forceful applause." See "Inside America's Powerful Israel Lobby," Salon.com, March 16, 2007.

80. On the reception Boehner and Pelosi received, see Guttman, "Cheney Links Action"; Levey, "Inside"; and Ian Swanson, "Pelosi Hears Boos at AIPAC," The Hill (online), March 13, 2007.

81. Guttman, "Groups Mum on Iraq."

82. Ibid.; and Jeffrey M. Jones, "Among Religious Groups, Jewish Americans Most Strongly Oppose War," Gallup News Service, February 23, 2007.

83. Shortly before the United States invaded Iraq, Congressman James P. Moran created a stir when he said, "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this." Quoted in Hsu, "Moran Said." However, Moran misspoke, because there was not widespread support for the war in the Jewish community. He should have said, "If it were not for the strong support of the neoconservatives and the leadership of the Israel lobby for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this."

84. Samuel G. Freedman, "Don't Blame Jews for This War," USA Today, April 2, 2003. Also see

James D. Besser, "Jews Souring on Iraq War," Jewish Week, September 24, 2004; Goodstein, "Threats and Responses"; and Ori Nir, "Poll Finds Jewish Political Gap," Forward, February 4, 2005. The same situation obtained before the 1991 Gulf War. By the time Congress voted to endorse the war on January 12, 1991, "the only significant Washington Jewish organization not on record in favor of the administrations position was American Friends of Peace Now, which favored the continuation of sanctions." Judis, "Jews and the Gulf," 13. Despite the lobby's efforts to make the 1991 war happen, however, a large portion of the American Jewish community opposed the war, as was the case in 2003. For example, Jewish members of the House of Represetatives voted 17-16 against the resolution authorizing war, while Jewish senators voted 5-3 against it. Ibid., 14. This outcome reflects the fact that in contrast to what happened in 2002-03, there was a serious debate in 1990-91 about whether to go to war against Iraq, as well as the fact that the lobby sometimes takes positions that are at odds with a substantial portion of the American Jewish community.

85. The January 26, 1998, letter can be found on the website of the Project for the New American Century, www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm; the February 19, 1998, letter can be found on the Iraq Watch website, www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/rumsfeld-openletter.htm. For background on the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, see Judis, "Jews and the Gulf," 12. Also see the May 29, 1998, letter to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott written under the auspices of PNAC, www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletterl998.htm. The neoconservatives, it should be emphasized, advocated invading Iraq to topple Saddam. See "The End of Containment," Weekly Standard, December 1, 1997; Zalmay M. Khalilzad and Paul Wolfowitz, "Overthrow Him," ibid.; Frederick W Kagan, "Not by Air Alone," ibid.; and Robert Kagan, "A Way to Oust Saddam," Weekly Standard, September 28, 1998.

86. A copy of the Iraq Liberation Act can be found at www.iraqwatch.org/government/US/ Legislation/ILA.htm.

87. John Dizard, "How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons," Salon.com, May 4, 2004; "Iraqi Myths," Jerusalem Post editorial, October 7, 1998; Seth Gitell, "Neocons Meet Israeli to Gain U.S. Backing," Forward, July 31, 1998; Kagan, "Way to Oust Saddam"; Martin Kettle, "Pentagon Balks at Idiotic' Law Urging Bay of Pigs-type Invasion of Iraq," Guardian, October 21, 1998; and Vernon Loeb, "Congress Stokes Visions of War to Oust Saddam; White House Fears Fiasco in Aid to Rebels," Washington Post, October 20, 1998. On JINSA, see "Concrete Responses to Saddam," jinsa.org, Report no. 79, August 10, 1998; "To Overthrow Saddam," jinsa.org, Report no. 82, October 2, 1998; "Spring 1998 Board Resolution—Iraq," jinsa.org, March 22, 1998; and "Resolution in Support of the Iraqi Opposition," jinsa.org, October 19, 1998.

88. See Clinton's comments after he signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Statement by the President, White House Press Office, October 31, 1998. Also see Kettle, "Pentagon Balks"; and Loeb, "Congress Stokes."

89. Vernon Loeb, "Saddam's Iraqi Foes Heartened by Clinton," Washington Post, November 16, 1998; Nicholas Lemann, "The Iraq Factor: Will the New Bush Team's Old Memories Shape Its Foreign Policies?" New Yorker, January 22, 2001; and Robert Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), chap. 4.

90. Packer, Assassins' Gate, 41.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:33 PM

83. Aluf Benn, "Sharon Met Secretly with U.S. Emissary," Ha'aretz, November 24, 2003; and

Peter Slevin, "Delicate Maneuvers Led to U.S.-Israeli Stance," Washington Post, April 16,

2004. Also see Chris McGreal, "U.S. to Endorse Israeli Plans for Gaza," Guardian, Febru-

ary 18, 2004.

84. Yossi Alpher, "Middle East: Beware of Ariel Sharon Bearing Gifts," International Herald Tribune, April 13, 2004; Aluf Benn, "Israel's Identity Crisis," Salon.com, May 1, 2005; Meron Benvenisti, "Sharon's Second 'Big Plan,'" Ha'aretz, January 12, 2006; and "Indyk: Sharon's Plan to Pull Out of Gaza and Part of West Bank Could Lead to Increased Violence," interview with Martin Indyk conducted by Bernard Gwertzman, March 19, 2004, Council on Foreign Relations, www.cfr.org/publication/6882/.

85. Quoted in Shavit, "Big Freeze." Also see John Ward Anderson, "Sharon Aide Says Goal of Gaza Plan Is to Halt Road Map," Washington Post, October 7, 2004; Aluf Benn, "Analysis: The Adviser That Roared," Ha'aretz, October 8, 2004; and Terence Neilan, "Israeli Causes Uproar over Status of Road Map," New York Times, October 6, 2004.

86. "Rice: Israel Must Fulfill Its Responsibilities for Peace," Ha'aretz, August 25, 2003.

87. "Bush Says World Owes Sharon a 'Thank You,'" Ha'aretz, April 21, 2004; and George W. Bush, "Our Nation Is Stronger and Safer with Israel as an Ally," speech to the AIPAC Annual Conference, May 18, 2004. Also see "President Bush Commends Israeli Prime Minister Sharon's Plan," transcript of remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon, White House, Office of the Press Secretary, April 14, 2004.

88. Regarding the views of previous presidents, see Clyde R. Mark, "Israeli-United States Relations," Issue Brief for Congress, Congressional Research Service, August 29, 2002, 7. For Bush's comments, see "Statement by the President Regarding Israel-Arab Peace Process," April 14, 2004; and "President Bush's Letter to Prime Minister Sharon," April 14, 2004, both available at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/. Also see Slevin, "Delicate Maneuvers."

89. On the Arab reaction, see "Bush Says World Owes Sharon." Regarding the consequences for Bush's reelection, see E.J. Kessler, "Hardliners Knock Bush for Endorsing Sharon Initiative," Forward, April 23, 2004; Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, "Move Could Help Bush Among Jewish Voters," Washington Post, April 15, 2004; and Maura Reynolds and Peter Wallsten, "Bush Gains in Efforts to Win Over Jewish Vote," Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2004.

90. Thomas L. Friedman, "A Rude Awakening," New York Times, February 5, 2004.

91. "A Performance-Based Roadmap." Regarding the ongoing differences between Israel and

the Bush administration over the settlements, the following articles are a sample of many that have been written on the subject: "Bush Condemns Settlement Policy; UN Adopts Road Map," Ha'aretz, November 20, 2003; "Israel Has Stepped Up the Pace of Settlement Building," Guardian, March 3, 2004; Donald Macintyre, "Sharon Vows to Defy Bush over Expansion of Israeli Settlements," Independent, April 22, 2005; Greg Myre and Steven R. Weisman, "Israel to Build 600 Homes in 3 Settlements; U.S. Officials Are Critical," New York Times, October 3, 2003; Ze'ev Schiff, "U.S.: Israel Shirking Its Promises on Settlement Boundaries," Ha'aretz, March 15, 2005; Peter Slevin, "Bush Won't Press End to Israeli Settlements," Washington Post, July 28, 2002; and Amy Teibel, "U.S. to Israel: Stop Expanding Settlements," Washington Post, June 26, 2005.

92. Quoted in Karen DeYoung, "U.S. Decries Israeli Missile Strike, Ponders Effect on Peace Bid," Washington Post, July 24, 2002. Also see John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore, "Palestinians Vow Revenge after Gaza Missile Strike," Washington Post, July 24, 2002; James Bennet and John Kifner, "Palestinian Cease-Fire Was in Works Before Israeli Strike," New York Times, July 25, 2002; and James Bennet, "Stalemate in Mideast After Deadly Bombing," New York Times, July 28, 2002.

93. Jim Hoagland, "Sharon and the Big Picture," Washington Post, March 25, 2004. Also see Roane Carey and Adam Shatz, "Israel Plays with Fire," Nation, April 12, 2004; H.D.S. Greenway, "Assassination Fallout Bodes 111 for US," Boston Globe, March 26, 2004; Tony Karon, "How Israel's Hamas Killing Affects the U.S.," Time, March 23, 2004; Bill Nichols, "U.S. Objectives at Risk in Anti-Israel Backlash," USA Today, March 22, 2004; David R. Sands, "Israel's Killing of Yassin Puts U.S. in Line of Fire," Washington Times, March 23, 2004; and Brian Whitaker, "Assasination Method: Surveillance Drone and a Hellfire Missile," Guardian, March 23, 2004.

94. John Ward Anderson, "Top Hamas Leader in Gaza City Killed," Washington Post, April 17, 2004.

95. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "The Last Palestinian," New York Review of Books, February 10, 2005; Steven Erlanger, "Abbas Declares War with Israel Effectively Over," New York Times, February 14, 2005; Donald Macintyre, "Abbas Pledges to Seek Peace with Israel," Independent, January 16, 2005; and Arnon Regular and Amos Harel, "Report: Abbas to Declare Not All Refugees to Return to Israel," Ha'aretz, March 15, 2005.

96. "No Time for Dithering," Forward editorial, October 22, 2004; Ori Nir, "Influential American Jewish Coalition Balks at Endorsing Sharon's Gaza Plan," Forward, October 22, 2004; and Shlomo Shamir, "U.S. Jewish Leaders Split over Public Support for Pullout," Ha'aretz, October 17, 2004. Also see James D. Besser, "The Real Coalition: U.S. and Israel," Jewish News Weekly (online), May 5, 2006; and James D. Besser, "Olmert Capitalizes on Uncertainties in Washington," Jewish News Weekly (online), June 2, 2006.

97. Bradley Burston, "Hamas 'R' Us," Ha'aretz, January 18, 2006. Also see Akiva Eldar, "Kadima to a New Middle East," Ha'aretz, December 19, 2005; Akiva Eldar, "Who Needs Abu Mazen?" Ha'aretz, November 7, 2005; Ran HaCohen, "Hamas and Israel: Rival Twins," Antiwar.com, February 6, 2006; M. J. Rosenberg, "No Partner—As Always," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #260, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, February 3, 2006; Danny Rubenstein, "All We Did Was Switch the Non-Partner," Ha'aretz, February 5, 2006; and "Disarray Among the Palestinians," New York Times editorial, January 17, 2006.

98. Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler, "Israel Has 'Bold Ideas,' Bush Says," Washington Post, May 24, 2006; and Aluf Benn, "Analysis: George Bush Wants the Convergence Plan Too," Ha'aretz, May 24, 2006.

99. Ian Fisher and Steven Erlanger, "Israel: Troops Move into Gaza," New York Times, June 28, 2006.

100. Quoted in Aluf Benn, "PM: Unilateralism Has Been a Failure," Ha'aretz, January 9, 2007. Also see Yehuda Ben Meir and Dafna Shaked, "The People Speak: Israeli Public Opinion on National Security, 2005-2007," Memorandum no. 90 (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, May 2007), 10, 20, 59-63; Akiva Eldar, "A Post-Zionist Agenda," Ha'aretz, Oc

tober 8, 2006; Yoav Peled, "Illusions of Unilateralism Dispelled in Israel," Middle East Report Online, October 11, 2006; and Jeremy Pressman, "Israeli Unilateralism and Israeli-Palestinian Relations, 2001-2006," International Studies Perspective 7, no. 4 (November 2006).

101. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was trying to move the peace process forward in

2007, Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution said that "there are others in the adminis-

tration who want to 'Powellize' her." Those "others" were surely the neoconservatives, and he

meant that they wanted to markedly reduce her influence on U.S. Middle East policy, as

they had done with Powell when he was secretary of state before her. Indyk is quoted in Jim

Lobe, "Rice Faces Formidable White House Foe," Inter Press Service, February 21, 2007.

102. Aluf Benn and Avi Issacharoff, "Jordan: US Must 'Actively Push' to Revive Mideast Peace Efforts," Ha'aretz, January 14, 2007; Glenn Kessler, "Abbas Rejects 'Temporary Borders' for Palestinian State," Washington Post, January 15, 2007; and Associated Press, "Rice Restates US Road Map Commitment," Jerusalem Post, January 14, 2007.

103. The 2002 and 2007 Arab league proposals can be found on the website of the Israeli Regional Peace Movement, www.rpm.org.il/initiative.html.

104. Helene Cooper, "After the Mecca Accord, Clouded Horizons," New York Times, February 21, 2007.

105. Olmert also said, "I'll never accept a solution that is based on their return to Israel, any number," and "I don't think we should accept any kind of responsibility for the creation of this problem. Full stop." Quoted in Steven Erlanger, "Olmert Rejects Right of Return for Palestinians," New York Times, March 31, 2007.

106. "A Welcome Summit in Riyadh," Ha'aretz editorial, March 29, 2007. Also see Yossi Alpher, "Respond to Riyadh by Convening 'Consultations,'" Forward, April 13, 2007; Alon Ben-Meir, "Israel Must Choose Peace, Not Occupation," Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2007; Akiva Eldar, "The Lost Five Years of the Peace Process," Ha'aretz, March 15, 2007; Jonathan Freedland, "Now Is the Time to Call the Bluff of the Land of Missed Opportunities," Guardian, March 28, 2007; M. J. Rosenberg, "Go for the Saudi Plan," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #316, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, March 30, 2007; Ze'ev Tsahor, "Our Leaders' Blindness," Ynetnews.com, April 1, 2007; and "U.S. Should Insist Israel Engages with Arab Peace Plan," Financial Times editorial, March 20, 2007.

107. Orly Halpern, "Foxman, Wiesel Upbraid Israel for Pace of Peace Effort," Forward, May 18, 2007; Aluf Benn, "PM: I'm Ready to Negotiate Saudi Peace Plan with Arab Leaders," Ha'aretz, May 15, 2006; "PM Invites Arab Leaders to Talk Peace," Jerusalem Post, May 15, 2007; Akiva Eldar, "Headlines Instead of Initiatives," Ha'aretz, April 5, 2007; and Herb Keinon, "Israel to Brand Arabs as Peace Spoilers," Jerusalem Post, March 23, 2007.

108. Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, "Egypt: Israel Seen as Fighting Peace," Inter Press Service, April 12, 2007.

109. Nathan Guttman, "Rice Briefs Jewish Groups as Palestinians Make Deal," Forward, February 9, 2007. There was little need for Jewish groups to worry, as Rice had given no indication in the previous month that she would put forward her own ideas on what a final settlement might look like or put pressure on Israel. See Anne Gearan, "Rice Has Loose Agenda for Mideast Talks," Chicago Tribune, January 18, 2007; Glenn Kessler, "Rice Highlights Opportunities After Setbacks on Mideast Trip," Washington Post, January 19, 2007; and Thorn Shanker and Greg Myre, "Rice Backs Mideast Moderates, but Offers No Plan," New York Times, January 14, 2007.

110. "Charade in Jerusalem," New York Times editorial, February 21, 2007. Also see Glenn Kessler, "Rice's Mideast Talks Yield Little Except a Promise to Meet Again," Washington Post, February 20, 2007; and Glenn Kessler, "Rice Looks Back for a Way Forward on Mideast Peace," Washington Post, February 21, 2007.

111. Tim Butcher, "Israel Snubs Condoleezza Rice," Daily Telegraph (London), March 28, 2007. Also see Helene Cooper, "Mideast Leaders to Hold Talks Twice a Month," New York Times, March 28, 2007; Glenn Kessler, "On Mideast Trip, Rice to Try a New Formula," Washing

ton Post, March 23, 2007; and Donald Macintyre, "Israel Resists Rice Plan for Talks on Peace Settlement," Independent, March 27, 2007.

112. Associated Press, "Israel Breaks Settlement Promise to U.S.," MSNBC.com, December 26, 2006; Associated Press, "U.S. Challenges Israel on Settlement," MSNBC.com, December 27, 2006; Steven Erlanger, "First Settlement in 10 Years Fuels Mideast Tension," New York Times, December 27, 2006; Mark Lavie, "Israel Approves New Housing in West Bank," San Diego Union-Tribune (online), January 15, 2007.

113. Uri Avnery, "Next to Israel, Not in Place of It," London Review of Books, March 8, 2007; Glenn Kessler, "Rice Cautions Israel on Syria," Washington Post, May 30, 2007; and Gideon Levy, "Israel Doesn't Want Peace," Ha'aretz, April 8, 2007.

114. Khalil Shikaki, "With Hamas in Power: Impact of Palestinian Domestic Developments on Options for the Peace Process," Working Paper #1, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, February 2007.

115. Lobe, "Rice Faces Formidable White House Foe."

116. Daniel Levy, "Time to Change the Tune," Ha'aretz, March 24, 2007.

117. Quoted in Lobe, "Rice Faces Formidable White House Foe."

118. Aluf Benn and Shmuel Rosner, "Olmert Reminds Rice: Bush Is Still Her Boss," Ha'aretz, April 2, 2007. The "eye-to-eye" quotation is in this article.

119. Philip Zelikow, "Strategies for the Multifront War Against Radical Islamists," keynote address to the Weinberg Founders Conference at the Washington Institute for Near East olicy, September 15, 2006. Also see Nathan Guttman, "US Sees Link Between Iran, Peace," Jerusalem Post, September 18, 2006; and Shmuel Rosner, "State Dept. Adviser: U.S. Tying Iran Policy to Palestinian Issue," Ha'aretz, September 18, 2006.

120. Helene Cooper and David Sanger, "Rice's Counselor Gives Advice Others May Not Want to Hear,"NewYork Times, October 28, 2006. Also see Helene Cooper, "Senior Aide to Rice Resigns from Post," NewYork Times, November 28, 2006; Yochi J. Dreazen, Cam Simpson, and Mariam Fam, "Mideast Turmoil Pressures Bush to Revise Tactics," Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2006; and Glenn Kessler, "Close Advisor to Rice Plans to Resign," Washington Post, November 28, 2006.

121. Glenn Kessler, "Rice Names Critic of Iraq Policy to Counselor's Post," Washington Post, March 2, 2007; Eli Lake, "Trouble Looming for Rice," New York Sun, March 5, 2007; and Jim Lobe, "Rice Picks Neocon Champion of Iraq War as Counselor," Antiwar.com, March 3, 2007.

122. James D. Besser, "New Fight Brewing on PA Aid, Contacts," Jewish Week, April 6, 2007; Helene Cooper, "Splits Emerge Between U.S. and Europe over Aid for Palestinians," New York Times, February 22, 2007; Nathan Guttman, "U.S., Israel at Odds over Palestinian Coalition," Forward, March 23, 2007; and Eli Lake, "N.Y Lawmaker Freezes $86M Meant for Abbas," New York Sun, February 14, 2007.

123. Nathan Guttman, "As Capitals Cautiously Greet Palestinian Deal, Israel's Allies in D.C. Push for Pressuring Hamas," Forward, February 16, 2007.

124. Quoted in Besser, "New Fight Brewing."

125. Guttman, "As Capitals Cautiously Greet Palestinian Deal."

126. Besser, "New Fight Brewing"; Nathan Guttman, "Lawmakers Sign Protest on Palestinian Aid," Forward, March 30, 2007; Guttman, "U.S., Israel at Odds"; Rosenberg, "Go for the Saudi Plan"; and Shmuel Rosner, "Battles Lost and Won," Ha'aretz, March 22, 2007.

127. "Lowey Will Not Place Hold on Revised PA Security Assistance Proposal," press release from the Office of Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey, March 30, 2007.

128. "Poll: Americans Support Cutting Aid to Israel," Reuters, April 12, 2002; and Jean-Michel Stoullig, "Americans Want Cutback in Aid to Israel, If It Refuses to Withdraw: Poll," Agence France Presse, April 13, 2002. Also see Israel and the Palestinians (Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, last updated August 15, 2002).

129. Steven Kull (principal investigator), Americans on the Middle East Road Map (Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, May 30, 2003), 9-11, 18-19. Also

see Steven Kull et al., Americans on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, May 6, 2002).

130. "American Attitudes Toward Israel and the Middle East," survey conducted on March 18-25, 2005, and June 19-23, 2005, by the Marttila Communications Group for the Anti-Defamation League.

131. "US Scowcroft Criticizes Bush Admin's Foreign Policy," Financial Times, October 13, 2004. Also see Glenn Kessler, "Scowcroft Is Critical of Bush," Washington Post, October 16, 2004.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 PM

7: THE LOBBY VERSUS THE PALESTINIANS

1. Thomas Oliphant, "A Delicate Balance," Boston Globe, September 18, 2001; and Jane Per-lez and Patrick E. Tyler, "Before Attacks, U.S. Was Ready to Say It Backed Palestinian State," New York Times, October 2, 2001.

2. Robert G. Kaiser, "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy," Washington Post, February 9, 2003.

3. Jane Perlez and and Katharine Q. Seelye, "U.S. Strongly Rebukes Sharon for Criticism of Bush, Calling It 'Unacceptable,'" New York Times, October 6, 2001. Also John Donnelly, "Nation Set to Push Sharon on Agreement," Boston Globe, October 10, 2001; Lee Hock-stader, "Sharon Apologetic over Row with U.S.," Washington Post, October 7, 2001; Lee Hockstader and Daniel Williams, "Israel Says It Won't 'Pay Price' of Coalition," Washington Post, September 18, 2001; "Israel's Opportunity," Los Angeles Times editorial, September 18, 2001; and Jonathan Karp, "Sharon Cancels Peace Talks in Rebuff to U.S. Concerns," Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2001.

4. Julian Borger, "US Backs State for Palestine," Guardian, October 3, 2001; Kurt Eichenwald, "U.S. Jews Split on Washington's Shift on Palestinian State," New York Times, October 5, 2001; and Glenn Kessler, "Talking Points Aside, Bush Stance on Palestinian State Is Not a First," Washington Post, October 5, 2001. At the same time, Prime Minister Tony Blair made "Britain's strongest endorsement yet of Palestinian statehood." Michael Dobbs, "Blair Backs Creation of Palestinian State," Washington Post, October 16, 2001.

5. Hockstader, "Sharon Apologetic."

6. James Bennet, "Sharon Invokes Munich in Warning U.S. on 'Appeasement,'" New York Times, October 5, 2001; Perlez and Seelye, "U.S. Strongly Rebukes Sharon"; and Alan

Sipress and Lee Hockstader, "Sharon Speech Riles U.S.," Washington Post, October 6, 2001. For evidence that other Israelis shared Sharon's fears, see Israel Harel, "Lessons from the Next War," Ha'aretz, October 6, 2001.

7. Sipress and Hockstader, "Sharon Speech."

8. Donnelly, "Nation Set to Push Sharon"; Perlez and Seelye, "U.S. Strongly Rebukes Sharon"; and Sipress and Hockstader, "Sharon Speech."

9. Hockstader, "Sharon Apologetic"; and Serge Schmemann, "Raising Munich, Sharon Reveals Israeli Qualms," New York Times, October 6, 2001.

10. Quoted in Tim Weiner, "Israel Rebuffs Demands to End West Bank Raids," New York Times, October 24, 2001.

11. Suzanne Goldenberg, "Sharon Defies US Demand to Retreat," Guardian, October 24, 2001. Also see Peter Beaumont, "Defiant Israelis Abandon Pull-out," Observer, October 28, 2001; Suzanne Goldenberg, "Israel Lays Down Tough New Conditions for Withdrawal," Guardian, October 27, 2001; Dana Milbank and Lee Hockstader, "Israeli Incursion Strains Relations," Washington Post, October 24, 2001; and Staff and Agencies, "US Criticizes Israeli Offensive," Guardian, October 22, 2001.

12. William Safire, "'Israel or Arafat,'" New York Times, December 3, 2001. Also see Aluf Benn, "Analysis: Clutching at Straws," Ha'aretz, September 18, 2001; and "Excerpts from Talk by Sharon," New York Times, December 4, 2001.

13. Shlomo Shamir, "U.S. Jews: Sharon Is 'Worried' by Terrorism Distinction," Ha'aretz, September 18, 2001.

14. This letter was published in the Weekly Standard, October 1, 2001.

15. Quoted in James D. Besser, "Terror Clouds Bush Plan to Back Palestinian State," Jewish News Weekly (online), October 5, 2001.

16. Quoted in Kurt Eichenwald, "U.S. Jews Split on Washington's Shift on Palestinian State," New York Times, October 5, 2001. Also see Michael J. Jordan, "Bush Backed—Finally," Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (online), October 12, 2001.

17. ADL press release, "ADL 'Extremely Troubled' by Comments from State Department Official," October 23, 2001. Also see Milbank and Hockstader, "Israeli Incursion."

18. Quoted in Kenneth R. Bazinet, "Israel Rejects Call for Pullout; Bush, Powell Demand Troops Leave Six Towns," New York Daily News (online), October 24, 2001.

19. Elaine Sciolino, "Senators Urge Bush Not to Hamper Israel," New York Times, November 17, 2001.

20. Quoted in Dana Milbank, "Bush Spokesman Gentle on Israeli Assault," Washington Post, December 3, 2001; and David Sanger, "U.S. Walks a Tightrope on Terrorism in Israel," New York Times, December 4, 2001. Also see Safire, '"Israel or Arafat.'"

21. Articles that raise doubts about the link between the Palestinians and the Karine A include Charles D. Smith, "The 'Do More' Chorus in Washington," Middle East Report Online, April 15, 2002; Brian Whitaker, "Voyage of the Arms Ship," Guardian, January 14, 2002; and Brian Whitaker, "The Strange Affair of Karine A," Guardian, January 21, 2002.

22. James Bennet, "Skipper Ties Cargo to Arafat's Group," New York Times, January 8, 2002; Lawrence F. Kaplan, "Torpedo Boat," New Republic, February 18, 2002; Ion Mihai Pacepa, "The Arafat I Know," Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2002; Tom Rose, "Arafat's Naval Adventure: It's Time for Him to Go," Weekly Standard, January 21, 2002; Robert Satloff, uKarine-A: The Strategic Implications of Iranian-Palestinian Collusion," Policy Watch #593, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 15, 2002; and Gerald M. Steinberg, "The Demilitarization Scam," Jerusalem Post, January 11, 2002. Also see Robert Satloff, "The Peace Process at Sea: The Karine-A Affair and the War on Terrorism," National Interest 67 (Spring 2002).

23. Powell said one week after the Karine A was seized, "The information we are receiving . . . makes it clear that there are linkages to the Palestinian Authority. I have not seen any information that yet links it directly to Chairman Arafat." "Powell Comments on Arms Shipment Seized by Israel," January 10, 2002, CNN.com./Transcripts. Arafat, who was under pressure from the Bush administration to take responsibility for the incident, eventually did so, al

though he denied that he had prior knowledge of it. "Arafat Takes Blame for Arms Shipment," BBC News (online), February 14, 2002; Lee Hockstader, "Arafat Arrests 3 in Arms Incident," Washington Post, January 12, 2002; and "Powell Says Arafat Takes Responsibility," New York Times, February 14, 2002.

24. "Remarks by President George Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Photo Opportunity," White House, February 7, 2002, a copy of which can be found on the Israeli Foreign Ministry website, www.mfa.gov.il/.

25. Keith B. Richburg and Molly Moore, "Israel Rejects Demands to Withdraw Troops," Washington Post, April 11, 2002. All quotes in this paragraph are from Fareed Zakaria, "Colin Powell's Humiliation: Bush Should Clearly Support His Secretary of State—Otherwise He Should Get a New One," Newsweek, April 29, 2002. Also see Mike Allen and John Lancaster, "Defiant Sharon Losing Support in White House," Washington Post, April 11, 2002, which describes the Bush administration's anger with Sharon.

26. Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell (New York: Knopf, 2006), 383.

27. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, "'Senior White House Aides': Speak Up!" Weekly Standard, April 11, 2002.

28. Transcript of "Shields and Brooks," NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, April 12, 2002, www.pbs .org/newshour/bb/political_wrap/jan-june02/sb_4-12.html.

29. Elaine Sciolino, "Netanyahu Says Powell Mission 'Won't Amount to Anything' and Urges Arafat's Exile," New York Times, April 11, 2002.

30. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 323-26.

31. Quoted in DeYoung, Soldier, 383. Bush had told Powell before he left for the Middle East, "I know how hard it's going to be. It's going to be very bad. But you've got enough standing . . . you'll get burned, but you can handle it. There'll be enough of you left when it's over." Ibid., 379.

32. John Simpson, "Israeli Leader Has More Power in Washington than Powell," Sunday Telegraph (London), April 14, 2002.

33. James D. Besser, "No Tennessee Waltz," Jewish Week, December 27, 2002; and Romesh Ratnesar, "The Right's New Crusade," Time, May 6, 2002. Also see Mike Allen and Juliet Eilperin, "White House and DeLay at Odds," Washington Post, April 26, 2002; and Judith Eilperin and Helen Dewar, "Lawmakers Endorse Israel's Offensive," Washington Post, May 3, 2002. Bush was feeling intense pressure not just from lawmakers but also from Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. See Allen and Lancaster, "Defiant Sharon"; Dan Balz, "Bush Statement on Mideast Reflects Tension in GOP," Washington Post, April 7, 2002; Elisabeth Bumiller, "Seeking to Stem Growing Political Fury, Bush Sends Conservative to Pro-Israel Rally," New York Times, April 16, 2002; Bradley Burston, "Background: Can Bush Afford to Press Sharon for Peace?" Ha'aretz, May 6, 2002; Alison Mitchell, "U.S. Political Leaders Seek Unity on Mideast, for Now," New York Times, April 12, 2002; William Safire, "On Being an Ally," New York Times, April 11, 2002; Diana Jean Schemo, "Over 100,000 Rally in Washington to Support Israel," New York Times, April 16, 2002; Alan Sipress, "Policy Divide Thwarts Powell in Mideast Effort," Washington Post, April 26, 2002; and Alan Sipress and Karen DeYoung, "U.S. Presses Ahead with Peace Efforts," Washington Post, May 9, 2002.

34. Ratnesar, "The Right's New Crusade."

35. Randall Mikkelsen, "White House Calls Sharon 'Man of Peace,'" Reuters, April 11, 2002; and Bill Sammon, "White House Softens Tone with Israel," Washington Times, April 12, 2002. Bush later told Sharon that he "took immense crap" for calling him a "man of peace." Glenn Kessler, "Bush Sticks to the Broad Strokes," Washington Post, June 3, 2003.

36. David Sanger, "President Praises Effort by Powell in the Middle East," New York Times, April 19, 2002; and Peter Slevin and Mike Allen, "Bush: Sharon a 'Man of Peace,'" Washington Post, April 19, 2002. For a transcript of the press conference, see "President Bush, Secretary Powell Discuss Middle East," White House, Office of the Press Secretary, April 18, 2002.

37. All quotes in this paragraph are from Matthew E. Berger, "D.C. Rally Is Large and Loud— but Will Bush Listen?" JTA.org, April 19, 2002. Also see Sharon Samber and Matthew E.

Berger, "Speakers Stick to Consensus Theme at National Solidarity Rally for Israel," JTA.org, April 15, 2002.

38. John Diamond, "Netanyahu Tells U.S. That Arafat 'Has to Go/" Chicago Tribune, April 11, 2002; and Nathan Guttman, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Benjamin Netanyahu," Ha'aretz, April 15, 2002. Also see Benjamin Netanyahu, "The Root Cause of Terrorism," Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2002.

39. Eilperin and Dewar, "Lawmakers Endorse Israel's Offensive"; Juliet Eilperin and Mike Allen, "Hill Leaders Plan Votes on Pro-Israel Resolutions," Washington Post, May 2, 2002; and Alison Mitchell, "House and Senate Support Israel in Strong Resolutions," New York Times, May 3, 2002. See "2 Resolutions 'Expressing Solidarity with Israel,'" New York Times, May 3, 2002; and Matthew E. Berger, "Bills in Congress Boost Israel, Treat Arafat as Terrorist," Jewish Bulletin (online), April 26, 2002.

40. Arieh O'Sullivan, "Visiting Congressmen Advise Israel to Resist Administration Pressure to Deal with Arafat," Jerusalem Post, May 6, 2002.

41. Eli Lake, "Israeli Lobby Wins $200 Million Fight," United Press International, May 11, 2002.

42. Both quotes in this paragraph are from Jefferson Morley, "Who's in Charge?" Washington Post, April 26, 2002. Akiva Eldar noted just before Sharon steamrolled Bush, "Sharon has a lot of experience sticking it to the Americans . . . Ultimately, whether it was Palestinian terror, Arafat's mistakes, or domestic politics, the Americans were sent to the peanut gallery." See "Words Are Not Enough," Ha'aretz, April 8, 2002.

43. "President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership," transcript of June 24, 2002, speech, White House, Office of the Press Secretary.

44. Quoted in Tracy Wilkinson, "In Mideast, Sharon Looks Like a Winner After Speech," Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2002.

45. Uzi Benziman, "Right-hand Man," Ha'aretz, June 28, 2002.

46. Aluf Benn, "Analysis: Ariel Sharon Agrees to His Own Ideas," Ha'aretz, July 5, 2002. Also see Elisabeth Bumiller and David E. Sanger, "Bush Demands Arafat's Ouster Before U.S. Backs a New State; Israelis Welcome Tough Line," New York Times, June 25, 2002; Glenn Kessler, "Framework for Peace Tough on Palestinians," Washington Post, June 25, 2002; and Don Wycliff, "Sharon Dictates and Bush Follows," Chicago Tribune, June 27, 2002.

47. "An Uncertain Road Map," Washington Post editorial, June 25, 2002; "A Plan Without a Map," NewYork Times editorial, June 25, 2002; Richard Cohen, "Answers on an Empty Page," Washington Post, June 27, 2002; Jonathan Freedland, "George W's Bloody Folly," Guardian, June 26, 2002; Jim Hoagland, "Thorny Details to Come," Washington Post, June 26, 2002; Gideon Samet, "Another Step Toward Nowhere," Ha'aretz, June 26, 2002; and Patrick E. Tyler, "Clear Terms, Murky Future," New York Times, June 25, 2002.

48. James Bennet, "Arafat Wants No. 2 Man in the P.L.O. as the Premier," New York Times, March 7, 2003.

49. "A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," press statement, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, April 30, 2003.

50. Quoted in Ami Eden, "Bush's Maneuvers Bewilder Jerusalem and Activists," Forward, June 6, 2003. Also see Ronald Brownstein, "Push for Peace Poses Domestic Political Risk for Bush," Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2003; and David E. Sanger, "Middle East Mediator: Big New Test for Bush," New York Times, June 5, 2003.

51. "Mr. Sharon's Promise," Washington Post editorial, December 16, 2002. Also see Akiva Eldar, "Truth or Consequences," Ha'aretz, December 12, 2002.

52. Ori Nir, "U.S. Groups Seek to Cast Peace 'Map' as a Threat," Forward, May 2, 2003; and Chemi Shalev, "Sharon Government Scrambles as Bush Prepares 'Road Map,'" Forward, March 21, 2003.

53. Shalev, "Sharon Government." Also see Glenn Kessler and Molly Moore, "Sharon's Refusal to Accept Plan Vexes Powell Trip," Washington Post, May 13, 2003; and Gideon Samet, "From Determination to Wimpiness," Ha'aretz, May 14, 2003.

54. "No New Sharon," Ha'aretz editorial, April 14, 2003.

55. Quoted in Nir, "U.S. Groups."

56. All subsequent quotes and information in this paragraph are from Nathan Guttman, "American Jews Tread Softly on 'Road Map' During War in Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 26, 2003.

57. Nir, "U.S. Groups." Also see Nathan Guttman, "Senators, Congressmen Put Pro-Israel Stance in Writing," Ha'aretz, April 18, 2003.

58. Ori Nir, "Right Slams Plan, Center Remains Quiet," Forward, June 6, 2003.

59. Charles Krauthammer, "The Roadblock on the Road Map," Washington Post, May 9, 2003.

60. Nir, "Right Slams Plan."

61. Bradley Burston, "Background: Betting on Abu Mazen—to Lose," Ha'aretz, May 1, 2003. Also see Dan Izenberg, "Bush Statehood Call Doesn't Faze Israel," Jerusalem Post, March 16, 2003.

62. Aluf Benn, "Analysis: The U.S. Is Now Micro-managing the Process," Ha'aretz, June 22, 2003; Uzi Benziman, "Corridors of Power: On the Road to Nowhere," Ha'aretz, June 13, 2003; Burston, "Background: Betting"; and Ori Nir, "No Discussion of Settlements, Diplomats Say," Forward, May 9, 2003.

63. Guy Dinmore and Harvey Morris, "'Road Map' Drivers Reluctant to Embark on First Leg of Journey," Financial Times, May 9, 2003.

64. Bradley Burston, "Background: Has Sharon's Hamas Hitlist Converted Bush?" Ha'aretz, June 17, 2003.

65. Ze'ev Schiff, "Focus: Americans Fear Abu Mazen Is Further Weakened," Ha'aretz, June 12, 2003.

66. Arnon Regular, "Hamas Says It Will Consider Renewing Cease-fire Dialogue," Ha'aretz, June 10, 2003.

67. "Sad, but Not Surprising," Forward editorial, June 13, 2003.

68. Burston, "Background: Sharon's Hamas Hitlist." Also see Uzi Benziman, "The Cock's Arrogance," Ha'aretz, June 15, 2003.

69. The information and quotations in this paragraph are from Dana Milbank, "Bush's Shift on Israel Was Swift," Washington Post, June 21, 2003. Also see Ori Nir, "American-Israeli Relations Strained Following Attack," Forward, June 13, 2003; and Steven R. Weisman and James Dao, "Bush Under Fire in Congress for Criticizing Israel," New York Times, June 12, 2003.

70. Glenn Kessler, "White House Backs Latest Israeli Attacks," Washington Post, June 13, 2003. Also see Burston, "Background: Sharon's Hamas Hitlist."

71. Quoted in Kessler, "White House Backs Latest Israeli Attacks."

72. "U.S. Congress Backs Israel's Response to Terrorist Attacks," Ha'aretz, June 26, 2003.

73. Edward S. Walker, the head of the Middle East Institute and a former U.S. diplomat, noted at the time that Bush "makes a statement and it rolls off Sharon's back. He has a credibility problem." Quoted in Kessler, "White House Backs Latest Israeli Attacks."

74. For a detailed map showing the proposed route of the "separation barrier," see the website of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, www.btselem.org/Download/Separation_ Barrier_Map_Eng.pdf.

75. "President Bush Welcomes Prime Minister Abbas to White House," transcript of remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Abbas, White House, Office of the Press Secretary, July 25, 2003.

76. Rupert Cornwell, "Sharon Rejects Bush's Call to Take Down 'Security' Fence," Independent, July 30, 2003; Herb Keinon, "Israel-US Rift Emerges over Security Fence Issue," Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2003; "PM: We Will Build Fence; Bush: PA Must Dismantle Terror Groups," Ha'aretz, July 30, 2003; and David Stout, "Israel to Continue Building Security Fence Criticized by Bush," New York Times, July 29, 2003.

77. Israel would receive $3 billion annually for three years. Ze'ev Schiff, "U.S. Warns of Finan-

cial Sanctions over Security Fence," Ha'aretz, August 3, 2003; "U.S. Officials Confirm Aid

to Israel May Be Cut over Fence," Ha'aretz, August 5, 2003; Steven R. Weisman, "U.S. May

Reduce Aid to Get Israel to Halt Barrier," New York Times, August 5, 2003; and Robin

Wright, "U.S. May Punish Israel for Building Fence in W. Bank," Los Angeles Times, August 5, 2003.

78. Quoted in Ori Nir, "Bush Eases Pressure on Both Sides over Peace Plan," Forward, August 8, 2003. Also see Stewart Ain, "Bush Rapped for Mulling Sanctions over Fence," Jewish Week, August 8, 2003; and Eric Marx, "Dems Blast Bush over Threats to Israel," Forward, August 15, 2003.

79. Quoted in James Bennet, "Israel Reportedly Willing to Delay Portions of Barrier," New York Times, August 8, 2003.

80. Nathan Guttman, "U.S. Confirms Fence Prompted Loan Cuts," Ha'aretz, November 27, 2003. Also see Guy Dinmore, "US 'to Withhold Funds' over Israeli Actions," Financial Times, September 15, 2003; and Richard W. Stevenson, "U.S. Cutting Loan Guarantees to Oppose Israeli Settlements," New York Times, September 17, 2003.

81. Douglas Jehl, "U.S. Wary of Steps by Israelis on Arafat," New York Times, September 12, 2003; "Powell Says U.S. Opposes Expulsion of Arafat," New York Times, September 12, 2003; and Steven R. Weisman, "Bush Administration Warns Israel Not to Expel Arafat," New York Times, September 8, 2003.

82. Dov Weisglass, a key Sharon adviser, later recounted that "at the end of the summer of

2003, we reached the sad conclusion that there is no one to talk to, no one to negotiate with.

Hence the disengagement plan. Because when you're playing solitaire, when there is no one

sitting across from you at the table, you have no choice but to deal the cards yourself."

Quoted in Avi Shavit, "The Big Freeze," Ha'aretz, October 8, 2004.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:35 PM

50. Cole, "The Patriot Act on Campus."

51. Robert Gaines, "The Battle at Columbia University," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (online), April 2005; Caroline Glick, "Our World: The Columbia Disaster," Jerusalem Post, April 4, 2005; Joseph Massad, "Witch Hunt at Columbia: Targeting the University," CounterPunch.org, June 3, 2005; Nathaniel Popper, "Columbia Students Say Firestorm Blurs Campus Reality," Forward, February 11, 2005; Scott Sherman, "The Mideast Comes to Columbia," Nation, April 4, 2005; and Chanan Weissman, "Film on 'Bias' at Columbia U. Sparks Fury Among Israeli Alumni," Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2005.

52. "Columbia University Ad Hoc Grievance Committee, Final Report, NewYork, 28 March 2005 (excerpts)," Journal of Palestine Studies 34, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 90-100.

53. Scott Jaschik, "Blackballed at Yale," Inside Higher Ed (online), June 5, 2006; Liel Liebovitz, "Middle East Wars Flare Up at Yale, "Jewish Week, June 2, 2006; Steve Lipman, "Opening the Ivy Doors," Jewish Week, December 22, 2006; Philip Weiss, "Burning Cole," Nation, July 3, 2006; and the symposium "Posting Mortem," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006.

54. Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2003), 50-58; and "Stanford Apologizes to Ex-Representative McCloskey," Washington Post, July 28, 1983.

55. Peter Dombrowski, a faculty member at the Naval War College, reported this story to us on June 13, 2006, and confirmed it in e-mail correspondence on April 5, 2007.

56. "UM Deserves to Hear Both Sides on Israel Lobby," letter, Montana Kaimin, September 7, 2006; Trevor Kilgore, "Profs Off-Base in Labeling Lecturer as Anti-Semitic," letter, Montana Kaimin, September 8, 2006; Brenna Moore, "U.S. Foreign Policy Mistakes, Consequences Discussed by International Relations Expert," Montana Kaimin, September 12, 2006; Rob Chaney, "Professor Questions U.S.-Israeli Relationship," Missoulian, September 12, 2006; "Anti-Semitic Lecturer Bad for UM," letter, Montana Kaimin, September 13, 2006; and "Presidential Lecturer Starts Debate, Not Hatred," letter, Montana Kaimin, September 12, 2006. In October, the same lecture series featured Joseph Joffe, a well-known European foreign policy expert and a harsh critic of our original article. His presence did not appease the critics of the invitation to Walt, who continued their ultimately unsuccessful campaign to oust the coordinator of the lecture series. Hannah Heimbuch, "Lectre Series Not Skirting Foreign Policy," Montana Kaimin, October 26, 2006.

57. Ralph Blumenthal, "Cries to Halt Publication of Holocaust Book," New York Times, January 10, 1998; and Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 55-56.

58. Jon Weiner, "Giving Chutzpah New Meaning," Nation, July 11, 2005; and the subsequent correspondence ibid., August 29, 2005. Also see "Dershowitz, Prof Spar over Plagiarism," New York Times, July 14, 2005; Neve Gordon, "The Real Case for Israel," In These Times (online), October 12, 2005; Jennifer Howard, "Calif. Press Will Publish Controversial Book on Israel," Chronicle of Higher Education (online), July 22, 2005; and Jon Wiener, "Chutzpah and Free Speech," Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2005.

59. Andy Humm, "Academic Freedom, Intimidation, and Mayoral Politics: The Case of Rashid Khalidi," Gotham Gazette (online), April 7, 2005; Julia Levy, "Khalidi Is Tapped to Teach Teachers About Middle East," New York Sun, February 15, 2005; Julia Levy, "Education Dept. Drops Columbia Prof, from Teaching Program for Teachers," New York Sun, February 16, 2005; and Alisa Solomon, "When Academic Freedom Is Kicked Out of Class," Forward, March 4, 2005.

60. Yaniv Halili, "New Yorkers to Study About Israel," Ynetnews.com, September 8, 2006; and David Andreatta, "Schools Back Israeli Teacher Course," NewYork Post (online), September 28, 2006. Pressure can even be exerted on private high schools. In January 2007, protests from concerned parents and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley led to the

cancellation of a talk by the Stanford University Professor Joel Beinin at the Harker School, a private school in San Jose. Beinin is Jewish and an avowed Zionist, but because he is also a critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, it was apparently unacceptable for him to speak to a high school group. Joel Beinin, "Silencing Critics Not Way to Middle East Peace," San Francisco Chronicle (online), February 4, 2007.

61. Max Gross, "Israel Advocacy Coalition Targeting High Schools," Forward, January 23, 2004; Rachel Pomerance, "With Israel Issue Hot on Campus, Groups Train High School Advocates," JTA.org, January 22, 2004; and "New Pro-Israel Campaign Targets High School Students," JTA.org, June 2, 2004.

62. Jonathan Kessler, "Pro-Israel Activism Makes Comeback on Campus," Forward, December 26, 2003; Popper, "Pro-Israel Groups: Campuses Improving"; Barry Silverman and Randall Kaplan, "Pro-Israel College Activists Quietly Successful on Campus,"JTA.org, May 9, 2005; and Chanan Tigay, "As Students Return to Campus, Activists Prepare a New Approach," JTA.org, September 1, 2005. Nevertheless, there are limits to the lobby's effectiveness on campuses. See Joe Eskenazi, "Book: College Campuses Quiet, but Anti-Israel Feeling Is Growing," JTA.org, November 29, 2005; and Gary Rosenblatt, "U.S. Grad Students Seen Hostile to Israel," Jewish Week, June 17, 2005.

63. Harris and Polish Consul General Krzystof Kasprzyk are quoted in Michael Powell, "In N.Y., Sparks Fly over Israel Criticism," Washington Post, October 9, 2006. Also see J.J. Goldberg, "A 'Lobby' Prof Asks: Can We Talk?" Forward, October 13, 2006; Larry Cohler-Esses, "Off Limits? Talk by Israel Critic Canceled," Jewish Week, October 6, 2006; and Ira Stoll, "Poland Abruptly Cancels a Speech by Local Critic of the Jewish State," New York Sun, October 4, 2006. A copy of the open letter can be found in "The Case of Tony Judt: An Open Letter to the ADL," New York Review of Books, November 16, 2006. For the ADL's response and a follow-up response by the two main authors of the original letter, see "The ADL & Tony Judt: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, November 30, 2006.

64. Graham Bowley, "Lunch with the FT: Tony Judt," Financial Times, March 16, 2007.

65. Quoted in "French Embassy Cancels N.Y. Book Launch over Author's Israel Views," Ha'aretz, October 10, 2006. Also Ed Pilkington, "US Free Speech Row Grows as Author Says Jewish Coplaints Stopped Party," Guardian, October 11, 2006; and Henry Porter, "The Enemies of Free Speech Are Everywhere," Observer, October 15, 2006. The relevant passage in Callil's book reads as follows: "The French forget Vichy, Australians forget the Aborigines, the English forget the Irish, Unionists forget the Catholics of Northern Ireland, the United States forgot Chile and forgets Guantanamo. Everyone forgets East Timor and Rwanda. As I wrote this book, people constantly asked me how I could bear to write about such a villain and about such terrible things. In fact, horrors from the past did not deter me. What caused me anguish . . . was to live so closely to the helpless terror of the Jews of France, and to see what the Jews of Israel were passing on to the Palestinian people. Like the rest of humanity, the Jews of Israel 'forget' the Palestinians. Everyone forgets; every nation forgets." Carmen Callil, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland, and Vichy France (New York: Random House, 2006), 437.

66. Jesse McKinley, "Play About Demonstrator's Death Is Delayed," New York Times, February 28, 2006; and Katharine Viner, "A Message Crushed Again," Los Angeles Times, March 1, 2006. Also see Rachel Irwin, "Censoring Rachel's Words?" Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2006; Edward Rothstein, "Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle," New York Times, March 6, 2006; and Philip Weiss, "Too Hot for New York," Nation, April 3, 2006.

67. Richard Ouzounian, "'Corrie' Cancelled in Canada," Variety (online), December 22, 2006.

68. Christine Dolen, "Theater Won't Stage Controversial Drama," Miami Herald (online), April 3, 2007. Dolen also reports that a successful Seattle production of the play elicited protests from three Jewish groups, which handed out leaflets to those attending.

69. Foxman is quoted in Jim McGee, "Jewish Group's Tactics Investigated," Washington Post, October 19, 1993. On the ADL case, see Chip Berlet and Dennis King, "ADL-Gate," Tikkun, July/August 1993; Jeffrey Blankfort, Anne Poirier, and Steve Zeltser, "The ADL Spy

ing Case Is Over, but the Struggle Continues," CounterPunch.org, February 25, 2002; Phil Bronstein, "Suspect in Cop Spy Case Tells His Story," San Francisco Examiner, January 22, 1993; Lynne Duke, "Anti-Defamation League Sued: Rights Violations Alleged in Spying," Washington Post, October 22, 1993; Bob Egelko, "Jewish Defense Group Settles S.F. Spying Suit," San Francisco Chronicle (online), February 23, 2002; Robert I. Friedman, "The Enemy Within," Village Voice, May 11, 1993; "Inquiry Is Dropped over Spy Charges," NewYork Times, November 17, 1993; and "The ADL Snoops," CounterPunch.org, November 11, 1998.

70. As discussed in Chapter 4, we regard the term "Jewish lobby" as both misleading and inappropriate, as it implies that all Jews support the lobby's positions and ignores the non-Jewish individuals and groups that are also part of this loose coalition.

71. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "A Shameful Contagion of Anti-Semitism in Europe," U.S. News &■ World Report, October 7, 2002; and Jeff Jacoby, "The Cancer of Anti-Semitism in Europe," Boston Globe, March 21, 2004.

72. Quoted in Tony Judt, "Goodbye to All That?" Nation, January 3, 2005.

73. Anti-Defamation League, "Attitudes Toward Jews, Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in Ten European Countries," April 2004; and Pew Global Attitudes Project, A Year After Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Even Higher, Muslim Anger Persists (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, March 16, 2004), 4-5, 26. On the ADL survey, see "ADL Survey Finds Some Decrease in Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Ten European Countries," ADL press release, April 26, 2004; and Shlomo Shamir, "Poll Shows Decrease in Anti-Semitic Views in Europe," Ha'aretz, April 27, 2004. These findings had virtually no effect on pro-Israel pundits, who continued to argue that anti-Semitism was rampant in Europe. See, for example, Daniel J. Goldhagen, "Europe's Toothless Reply to Anti-Semitism: Conference Fails to Build Tools to Fight a Rising Sickness," Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2004; and Charles Krauthammer, "The Real Mideast 'Poison,'" Washington Post, April 30, 2004.

74. Martin Peretz, "Cambridge Diarist: Regrets," New Republic, April 22, 2002, 50.

75. The data in this paragraph are from "Anti-Semitism in Europe: Is It Really Rising?" Economist, May 4, 2002.

76. Quoted in Marc Perelman, "Community Head: France No More Antisemitic Than U.S.," Forward, August 1, 2003. Also see Francois Bujon de l'Estang, "A Slander on France," Washington Post, June 22, 2002; and "French President Accuses Israel of Conducting Anti-French Campaign," Ha'aretz, May 12, 2002.

77. "French Police: Anti-Semitism in France Sharply Decreased in 2005," Ha'aretz, January 19, 2006.

78. "French Protest for Murdered Jew," BBC News (online), February 26, 2006; and Michel Zlotowski, "Large Memorial Held for Parisian Jew," Jerusalem Post, February 23, 2006.

79. Avi Beker, "The Eternally Open Gate," Ha'aretz, January 11, 2005; Josef Joffe, "A Boom, if Not a Renaissance, in Modern-Day Germany," Forward, July 25, 2003; Nathaniel Popper, "Immigrant Policy Eyed as German Community Swells," Forward, July 25, 2003; and Eliahu Salpeter, "Jews from the CIS Prefer Germany to the Jewish State," Ha'aretz, May 28, 2003. Also, the Times of London reported in the spring of 2005 that "an estimated 100,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past few years, sparking a dramatic renaissance of Jewish life in a country with a long history of anti-Semitism." Jeremy Page, "Once Desperate to Leave, Now Jews Are Returning to Russia, Land of Opportunity," Times (London), April 28, 2005. Also see Lev Krichevsky, "Poll: Russians Don't Dislike Jews, and More Are Against Anti-Semitism," JTA.org, February 2, 2006.

80. The chairman of the Education Department of the Jewish Agency for Israel has been described as saying that "present day violent anti-Semitism originates from two separate sources: radical Islamists in the Middle East and Western Europe as well as the neo-Nazi youth element in Eastern Europe and Latin America." Jonathan Schneider, "Anti-Semitism Still a World Problem," Jerusalem Post, January 26, 2006.

81. "Study: Anti-Semitic Attacks Hit Record Level in Britain in 2006," Ha'aretz, February 1, 2007; and Community Security Trust, "Antisemitic Incidents Report 2006," www.thecst .org.uk.

82. Specifically, the London police reported that anti-Semitic attacks had dropped 25 percent over five years and that "racist attacks on black, Asian, and Arab people in London are significantly higher." The Global Forum figures showed a slight (3 percent) decrease in anti-Semitic incidents from 2005 to 2006. Jonny Paul, "Sharp Rise in U.K. anti-Semitism? Numbers Don't Add Up for Everyone," JTA.org, February 22, 2007.

83. For examples of this argument, Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003); Hillel Halkin, "The Return of Anti-Semitism: To Be Against Israel Is to Be Against the Jews," Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2002; Barry Kosmin and Paul Iganski, "Judeophobia—Not Your Parents'Anti-Semitism," Ha'aretz, June 3, 2003; Amnon Rubinstein, "Fighting the New Anti-Semitism," Ha'aretz, December 2, 2003; Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003); Natan Sharansky, "Anti-Semitism Is Our Problem," Ha'aretz, August 10, 2003; Yair Sheleg, "A World Cleansed of the Jewish State," Ha'aretz, April 18, 2002; and Yair Sheleg, "Enemies, a Post-National Story," Ha'aretz, March 8, 2003. For criticism of this perspective, see Akiva Eldar, "Anti-Semitism Can Be Self-Serving," Ha'aretz, May 3, 2002; Brian Klug, "The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism," Nation, February 2, 2004; Ralph Nader, "Criticizing Israel Is Not Anti-Semitism," CounterPunch.org, October 16/17, 2004; Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives, ed. Henri Picciotto and Mitchell Plitnick (Oakland, CA: Jewish Voice for Peace, 2004); and Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, chaps. 1-3.

84. Helen Nugent, "Chief Rabbi Flays Church over Vote on Israel Assets," Times (London), February 17, 2006. Also see Bill Bowder, "Sacks Seeks Talks after Synod Vote on Disinvestment," Church Times (online), February 17, 2006; "Bulldozer Motion 'Based on Ignorance,'" Church Times (online), February 10, 2006; Ruth Gledhill, "Church Urged to Reconsider Investments with Israel," Times (London), May 28, 2005; and Irene Lancaster, "Anglicans Have Betrayed the Jews," Moriel Ministries (UK) website, www.moriel.org/articles/israel/ anglicans_have_betrayed_thejews.htm. Also "U.K. Chief Rabbi Attacks Anglicans over Israel Divestment Vote," Ha'aretz, February 17, 2006.

85. That the Church of England was merely criticizing Israeli policy and not engaging in anti-Semitism is clearly reflected in the February 10, 2006, letter from the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, to the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, explaining the church's decision on divestment. "Archbishop: Synod Call Was Expression of Concern," Church of England website, www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr2006.html.

86. Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). In their words, the "heart of the new anti-Semitism" was "a large measure of indifference to the most profound apprehensions of the Jewish people, a blandness and apathy in dealing with anti-Jewish behavior, a widespread incapacity or unwillingness to comprehend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival throughout the world" (324).

87. According to the Perlmutters, "It was anti-Semitism's velvet glove that provided the points for the [Reagan] administration's victory [in the AWACS deal]." Nathan Perlmutter and Ruth Ann Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Arbor House, 1982), 236.

88. In the Perlmutters' words, "Today the interest of Jews are not so much threatened by their familiar nemesis, crude anti-Semitism, as by a-Semitic governmental policies, the proponents of which may be free of anti-Semitism." These policies include "thirst of Western economies for recycled petrodollars," neo-isolationism, and compensatory group rights (such as affirmative action), among others. And in their view, "Jews today face greater jeopardy from quarters which though innocent of bigotry, nonetheless pose us greater danger than do our long time, easily recognizable anti-Semitic nemeses. Unchallenged and unchecked, these issues in sur

face appearance Semitically neutral, can hurt Jews and resisted as need be, can loose once again classical anti-Semitism." Real Anti-Semitism, 9, 231-32.

89. Quoted in Hillel Halkin, "The Return of Anti-Semitism," Commentary, February 2002, 30.

90. Natan Sharansky, "Anti-Semitism Is Our Problem," Ha'aretz, August 10, 2003. Also Zucker-man, "Shameful Contagion."

91. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (NewYork: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Jack Wertheimer, "Jewish Organizational Life," in American Jewish Yearbook 1995 (NewYork: American Jewish Committee, 1995), 70; and Frank Rich, "The Booing of Wolfowitz," New York Times, May 11, 2002.

92. Leon Wieseltier, "Hitler Is Dead: The Case Against Jewish Ethnic Panic," New Republic, May 27, 2002 (both Hentoff and Rosenbaum are quoted in this article). Former Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat offered a similar caution in April 2007, writing that "while an-tisemitism has not been extinguished, the gravity of the Holocaust has been imbedded on world opinion. Levels of general antisemitic attitudes have declined sharply. There has been a successful decades-long Catholic-Jewish dialogue, with important statements by the Vatican that diminish religious-based anti-Semitism . . . Most Western European countries have Holocaust remembrance days, and several have Holocaust memorial museums . . . Virtually every major European nation provides police protection for Jewish synagogues and religious schools. Antisemitic actions are met with firm responses, as in France, albeit belatedly." Stuart Eizenstat, "The Dangers Are Great, but It Is Not 1938," Forward, April 20, 2007.

93. Yossi Beilin, "The Case for Carter" Forward, January 16, 2007.

94. Prominent Israelis who have used the term include former Attorney General Michael Ben Yair, deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, peace activist Uri Avnery, former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, and a number of Israeli peace groups. See Joseph Lelyveld, "Jimmy Carter and Apartheid," New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007. On Tutu and Kasrils, see Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina, "Against Israeli Apartheid," Nation, June 27, 2002; and Jonny Paul, "South African Jewish Minister Sends Support to 'Israel Apartheid Week' Organizers," Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2007.

95. As Shmuel Rosner notes, Carter's critics "are almost all Jews," but as the Yossi Beilin quotation in the previous paragraph makes clear, not all Jews were critical of the former president. "The Carter Trap," Ha'aretz, January 15, 2007. On the very different reaction to Carter among non-Jews, see M. J. Rosenberg, "Israel's Increased Isolation," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #308, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, January 19, 2007.

96. Foxman is quoted in James Besser, "Jewish Criticism of Carter Intensifies," Jewish Week, December 15, 2006; and Martin Peretz, "Carter's Legacy," The Spine {New Republic web-log), November 28, 2006.

97. Deborah Lipstadt, "Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem," Washington Post, January 20, 2007.

98. "Carter Defends Book on Israel Conflict," Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2007.

99. Specifically, Krauthammer referred to Fukuyama's argument as a "novel way of Judaizing neoconservatism" and said that "his is not the crude kind [of argument], advanced by Pat Buchanan and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, among others, that American neoconservatives (read: Jews) are simply doing Israel's bidding, hijacking American foreign policy in the service of Israel and the greater Jewish conspiracy. Fukuyama's take is more subtle and implicit." Despite the distinction, Krauthammer was clearly suggesting that Fukuyama was a "subtle" anti-Semite. For the exchange, see Francis Fukuyama, "The Neoconservative Moment," National Interest 76 (Summer 2004); Charles Krauthammer, "In Defense of Democratic Realism," National Interest 77 (Fall 2004); Francis Fukuyama, "Letter," National Interest 78 (Winter 2004/05); and Charles Krauthammer, "Letter," National Interest 79 (Spring 2005).

100. Eliot Cohen, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," Washington Post, April 5, 2006; and Eli Lake, "David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean," New York Sun, March 20, 2006.

101. Anti-Defamation League, "Mearsheimer and Walt's Anti-Israel Screed: A Relentless Assault

in Scholarly Guise," ADL Analysis (online), March 24, 2006; Josef Joffe, "Common Denominator," New Republic Online, April 10, 2006; Benny Morris, "And Now for Some Facts: The Ignorance at the Heart of an Innuendo," New Republic, May 8, 2006; Michael B. Oren, "Quiet Riot: Tinfoil Hats in Harvard Yard," New Republic, April 10, 2006; and Martin Peretz, "Oil and Vinegar: Surveying the Israel Lobby," New Republic, April 10, 2006.

102. William Kristol, "Anti-Judaism," Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2006; Ruth R. Wisse, "Israel Lobby," Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2006; and Shmuel Rosner, "Is Carter an Anti-Semite?" Ha'aretz, December 21, 2006.

103. The quotes are from Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "'Progressive'Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," American Jewish Committee, December 2006, v, 9. Also see Patricia Cohen, "Essay Linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor," New York Times, January 31, 2007; Larry Cohler-Esses, "Anger over Broadside Aimed at Jewish Leftists," Jewish Week, February 9, 2007; Ben Harris, "Suddenly, Little-Noticed Essay Is Focus of Debate on Israel Criticism," JTA.org, February 7, 2007; Alan Wolfe, "Free Speech, Israel, and Jewish Illiber-alism," Chronicle Review (of the Chronicle of Higher Education), November 17, 2006; and Gaby Wood, "The New Jewish Question," Observer, February 11, 2007.

104. Michael Lemer, "There Is No New Anti-Semitism," Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel (online), February 2, 2007.

105. Kristof, "Talking About Israel";George Soros, "Of Israel, America, and AIPAC," New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007; and "Diaspora Blues," Economist editorial, January 13, 2007.

106. Kristol, "Anti-Judaism." Kristol's solution is instead to accuse critics of Israel—including us—of "bigotry" and being "anti-Jewish."

INTRODUCTION TO PART II

1. For a good example of the conventional wisdom, see Nathan Guttman, "A Marriage Cemented by Terror," Salon.com, January 24, 2006.

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1. Robert H. Trice, "Interest Groups and the Foreign Policy Process: U.S. Policy in the Middle East," Sage Professional Papers in International Studies, ed. V. Davis and M. East (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1976), 63-65.

2. Eric Alterman, "Intractable Foes, Warring Narratives," MSNBC.com, March 28, 2002.

3. Cathy Young of Reason magazine protested her inclusion on Alterman's list of "reflexively" pro-Israel pundits and Alterman acknowledged the error.

4. Kristof began by observing there was "no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians" and suggested that this was bad for all parties involved, including Israel itself. This point should have been uncon-troversial, but it earned a letter of protest from the Anti-Defamation League and his views were described as a "one-sided blame-Israel approach" by CAMERA, a pro-Israel media watchdog group. See his "Talking About Israel," New York Times, March 18, 2007; "Letter to the Editor," New York Times, March 19, 2007, www.adl.org/media_watch/newspapers/ 20070319_NYTimes.htm; and CAMERA, "Kristof's Blame-Israel Rant," March 21, 2007, www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet= 139&x_article= 1303.

5. Quoted in Bret Stephens, "Eye on the Media by Bret Stephen: Bartley's Journal," Jerusalem Post, November 22, 2002.

6. Jerome N. Slater, "Muting the Alarm: The New York Times and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 2000-2006," International Security 32, no. 2 (Fall 2007); and Howard Friel and Richard Falk, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (London: Verso, 2007).

7. Max Frankel, The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times (NewYork: Random House, 1999), 401-403.

8. Quoted in Robert I. Friedman, "Selling Israel to America: The Hasbara Project Targets the U.S. Media," Mother Jones, February-March 1987.

9. Peretz's remark about his love for Israel is quoted in Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silver-stein, Washington Babylon (London: Verso Books, 1996), 6. His statement about the "party line" at the New Republic is quoted in J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jew

ish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 299. Time magazine once described the New Republic under Peretz's guidance as "inflexible in its support of Israel." See William A. Henry III, "Breaking the Liberal Pattern," Time, October 1, 1984.

10. Quoted in Michael Massing, "The Israel Lobby," Nation, June 10, 2002.

11. Felicity Barringer, "Some U.S. Backers of Israel Boycott Dailies over Mideast Coverage That They Deplore," New York Times, May 23, 2002; Michael Getler, "Caught in the Crossfire," Washington Post, May 5, 2002; Tim Jones, "Pro-Israel Groups Take Aim at U.S. News Media," Chicago Tribune, May 26, 2002; Massing, "Israel Lobby"; and David Shaw, "From Jewish Outlook, Media Are Another Enemy," Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2002.

12. Quoted in Massing, "Israel Lobby."

13. Quoted in Friedman, "Selling Israel to America."

14. Ifshin is quoted in Lloyd Grove, "On the March for Israel; The Lobbyists from AIPAC, Girding for Battle in the New World Order," Washington Post, June 13, 1991. Also see Daniel Eisenberg, "AIPAC Attack?" Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1993; Robert I. Friedman, "The Israel Lobby's Blacklist," Village Voice, August 4, 1992; Robert I. Friedman, "A PAC with McCarthy," Village Voice, August 25, 1992; Robert I. Friedman, "The Wobbly Israeli Lobby," Washington Post, November 1, 1992; Thomas A. Dine and Mayer Mitchell, "The Truth About AIPAC," Washington Post, November 14, 1992; and Lawrence N. Cohler, "The AIPAC Flap," Washington Post, December 5, 1992.

15. See, for example, "Conflict of Interest Fits NPR Bias," www.camera.org/index.asp?x_ context=4&x_outlet=28&x_article=100; and Joel Berkovsky, "NPR Responds to Claims of Bias with Weeklong Series on Mideast," JTA.org, October 4, 2002.

16. For the actual ad, see www.camera.org/images_user/advertisements/large/CAMERA_ CarterAD.pdf.

17. This discussion of CAMERA and NPR is drawn from Barringer, "Some U.S. Backers"; James D. Besser, "NPR Radio Wars Putting Jewish Groups in a Bind," Jewish Week, May 20, 2005; Samuel Freedman, "From 'Balance' to Censorship: Bush's Cynical Plan for NPR," Forward, May 27, 2005; Nathan Guttman, "Enough Already from Those Pro-Israel Nudniks," Ha'aretz, February 1, 2005; Mark Jurkowitz, "Blaming the Messenger," Boston Globe Magazine, February 9, 2003; E. J. Kessler, "Hot Seat Expected for New Chair of Corporation for Public Broadcasting," Forward, October 28, 2005; Gaby Wenig, "NPR Israel Coverage Sparks Protests," Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (online), May 9, 2003; and Gila Wertheimer, "NPR Dismisses Protest Rallies," Chicago Jewish Star, May 30-June 12, 2003.

18. Bret Stephens, "An Open Letter to Ian Buruma,"Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2003. Buruma's original piece is "How to Talk About Israel," New York Times Magazine, August 31, 2003.

19. Judt revealed this incident in an interview in a 2007 documentary, The Israel Lobby, produced by VPRO International, the Dutch public broadcasting corporation, and in a debate on the Israel lobby sponsored by the London Review of Books, which was held at Cooper Union in New York City on September 28, 2006. Videos of the documentary and the debate are available at www.scribemedi.org/2006/10/11/israel-lobby/ and www.youtube.com/profile ?user=VPROinternational, respectively.

20. James Traub, "Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?" New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2007.

21. wwwconferenceofpresidents.org/content.asp?id=34 and www.americasvoices.net. In this case a key official at an American organization (the Conference of Presidents) is describing the initiative as part of Israel's public relations (hasbara) activities.

22. On the growing role and activities of think tanks, see Donald E. Abelson, American Think-Tanks and Their Role in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Trudy Lieberman, Slanting the Story: The Forces That Shape the News (New York: New Press, 2000); David M. Ricci, The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1991);

and Diane Stone, Capturing the Political Imagination: Think-Tanks and the Policy Process (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1996).

23. Joel Beinin, "Money, Media and Policy Consensus: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy," Middle East Report Online, January-February 1993, 10-15; Goldberg, Jewish Power, 221-22; and Mark H. Milstein, "Washington Institute for Near East Policy: An AIPAC 'Image Problem,'" Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (online), July 1991.

24. Quoted in Milstein, "Washington Institute."

25. Toward Peace in the Middle East: Report of a Study Group (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1975).

26. Andrew Ross Sorkin, "Schlepping to Moguldom," New York Times, September 5, 2004. Saban is also a major supporter of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Matthew Mosk, "Clinton Fundraising Goes Full Force," Washington Post, February 7, 2007.

27. Leverett worked at Brookings's Saban Center from May 2003 to June 2006, where he was initially a visiting fellow and later a senior fellow. He had significant disagreements with his boss, Martin Indyk, over U.S. policy toward Iran and Syria. Leverett maintained that it made little sense to threaten Iran with a military strike if it did not abandon its nuclear program and that it made more sense to pursue a grand bargain with Tehran. Indyk held the opposite view. Leverett also disagreed with Indyk's view that the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri of Lebanon provided an excellent opportunity to undermine Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Leverett was forced out of Brookings, partly because of his disagreements with Indyk and partly because he criticized Saban Center Research Director Kenneth Pollack's advocacy of the Iraq war. Interview with authors, October 17, 2006; correspondence with authors, June 6, 2007, June 12, 2007.

28. The 2005 forum was held in Israel and did feature one session with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Finance Minister Salam Fayad, and Civil Affairs Minister Mohamed Dahlan.

29. Foxman is quoted in David E. Sanger, "Iran's Leader Relishes 2nd Chance to Make Waves," New York Times, September 21, 2006. Also see "Ahmadinejad Talks to U.S. Think Tank," Washington Post, September 21, 2006; and Eli Lake, "N.Y.'s Jewish Leaders Reject Offer to Meet Iran's Leader," New York Sun, September 18, 2006.

30. James D. Besser, "Turning Up Heat in Campus Wars," Jewish Week, July 25, 2003; Ronald S. Lauder and Jay Schottenstein, "Back to School for Israel Advocacy," Forward, November 14, 2003; and Rachel Pomerance, "Israel Forces Winning Campus Battle, Say Students Attending AIPAC Meeting," JTA.org, December 31, 2002.

31. Michal Lando, "Christians to Train in Israel Advocacy," Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2007.

32. Besser, "Turning Up Heat"; and Pomerance, "Israel Forces Winning." In the spring of 2005, AIPAC hosted one hundred student government presidents (eighty of whom were not Jewish) at its annual conference. Nathaniel Popper, "Pro-Israel Groups: Campuses Improving," Forward, June 24, 2005.

33. "Policy Conference Hihlights," www.aipac.org/2841.htm.

34. Jonathan S. Kessler and Jeff Schwaber, The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus, special ed. for the Hillel Foundation (Washington, DC: AIPAC, 1984); and Kristine McNeil, "The War on Academic Freedom," Nation, November 11, 2002.

35. Michael Dobbs, "Middle East Studies Under Scrutiny in U.S.," Washington Post, January 13, 2004; Michele Goldberg, "Osama University?" Salon.com, November 6, 2003; Kristine McNeil, "The War on Academic Freedom," Nation, November 11, 2002; and Zachary Lockman, "Behind the Battle over US Middle East Policy," Middle East Report Online, January 2004.

36. Tanya Schevitz, "'Dossiers' Dropped from Web Blacklist; Mideast Center Says Denouncing Professors Was Counterproductive," San Francisco Chronicle (online), October 3, 2002.

37. "The International Studies in Higher Education Act (HR 3077)," text from www.govtrack .us/congressMltext.xpd?bill=h 108-3077.

38. Stanley Kurtz, "Anti-Americanism in the Classroom," National Review Online, May 16,

2002; Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001).

39. The text of the joint letter is posted on Martin Kramer's website, www.geocities.org/ martinkramerorg/Documents/H R3077/j ointletter.htm.

40. Goldberg, "Osama University?"; Ron Kampeas, "Campus Oversight Passes Senate as Review Effort Scores a Victory," JTA.org, November 22, 2005; Stanley Kurtz, "Reforming the Campus: Congress Targets Title VI," National Review Online, October 14, 2003; McNeil, "War on Academic Freedom"; Ori Nir, "Groups Back Bill to Monitor Universities," Forward, March 12, 2004; Sara Roy, "Short Cuts," London Review of Books, April 1, 2004; and Anders Strindberg, "The New Commissars," American Conservative, February 2, 2004.

41. HR 609 [109th Congress], "College Access and Opportunity Act of 2006," www.govtrack .us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h 109-609.

42. See Martin Kramer, "Title VI Verdict," http://sandbox.blog-city.com/title_vi_verdict.htm; and Stanley Kurtz, "Title Bout: Bipartisan Hope for Middle East Studies Reform," National Review Online, April 2, 2007. Also see Committee to Review the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays International Education Programs, "International Education and Foreign Languages: Keys to Securing America's Future" (Washington, DC: National Research Council, 2007), 3.

43. Quoted in Scott Jaschik, "New Approach to International Education," Inside Higher Ed (online), www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/28/intl. Also see Sierra Millman, "Education Department Should Have High-Ranking Official to Oversee Foreign Language Study," Chronicle of Higher Education Daily Report, March 28, 2007.

44. Draft legislation, "Title VI International Education Programs," April 19, 2007. The draft legislation would require applicants for federal funding to "describe how the applicant will handle disputes regarding whether activities funded under the application reflect diverse perspectives and a wide range of views." A subsequent clause states that "if a complaint regarding activities funded under this title is not resolved under the process outlined in the relevant grantee's application, such complaint shall be filed with the Department [of Education] and reviewed by the Secretary."

45. The number 130 comes from Mitchell G. Bard, "Tenured or Tenuous: Defining the Role of Faculty in Supporting Israel on Campus," report published by the Israel on Campus Coalition and the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, May 2004, 11. Also see Nacha Cattan, "NYU Center: New Addition to Growing Academic Field," Forward, May 2, 2003; Samuel G. Freedman, "Separating the Political Myths from the Facts in Israel Studies," New York Times, February 16, 2005; Jennifer Jacobson, "The Politics of Israel Studies," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005, 10-12; Michael C. Kotzin, "The Jewish Community and the Ivory Tower: An Urgent Need for Israel Studies," Forward, January 30, 2004; and Nathaniel Popper, "Israel Studies Gain on ampus as Disputes Grow," Forward, March 25, 2005.

46. Quoted in Cattan, "NYU Center."

47. Shmuel Rosner, "Donor May Fund Georgetown Jewish Center to Give U.S. Leaders Another Viewpoint," Ha'aretz, June 14, 2006; Shmuel Rosner, "Academic Lies About Israel," Ha'aretz, June 14, 2006; and Stephen Santulli, "Jewish Program May Get Major Gift," Hoya (online), September 1, 2006.

48. For the original complaint, see Chicago Friends of Israel, "Jewish and Pro-Israel Students at the University of Chicago Subject to Intimidation and Hate," July 24, 2002, on the Campus Watch website. Also see Ron Grossman, "Mideast Conflict Boosts Tensions at U.S. Colleges," Chicago Tribune, October 17, 2002; Dave Newbart, "Allegations of Anti-Semitism on Campus," Chicago Sun-Times, November 4, 2002; Joshua Steinman, "University Professors Labeled Anti-Israeli by Campus Watch Site," Chicago Maroon (online), October 29, 2002; "University Responds to Anti-Semitic Incidents," University of Chicago Magazine, October 2002; and Sean Wereley, "Students Debate Presence of Anti-Semitism on Campus," Chicago Weekly News, October 17, 2002.

49. Jonathan R. Cole, "The Patriot Act on Campus: Defending the University Post-9/11," Boston Review, Summer 2003; Chanakya Sethi, "Khalidi Candidacy for New Chair Draws

Fire," Daily Princetonian (online), April 22, 2005; Chanakya Sethi, "Debate Grows over Khalidi Candidacy," Daily Princetonian (online), April 28, 2005; and "Scholarship, Not Politics, Is the Measure of a Professor," Daily Princetonian editorial (online), April 27, 2005.

50. Cole, "The Patriot Act on Campus."

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5: GUIDING THE POLICY PROCESS

1. Twenty years ago, a senior State Department official told David Shipler of the New York Times that the lobby "tends to skew the consideration of issues . . . People don't look very hard at some options." Another former Reagan White House official remarked that while AIPAC was "a factor," he knew of "no case where it was decisive, at least in the analytical phase." But this official acknowledged that, in Shipler's words, "The greater influence seemed to be at the political, decision-making level." See David K. Shipler, "On Middle East Policy, a Major Influence," New York Times, July 6, 1987.

2. M.J. Rosenberg, "Kangaroo Congressional Hearing," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #311, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, February 16, 2007. Also see Michael F. Brown, "Dems' Disdain for Palestine," TomPaine.com, February 20, 2007; and Daniel Levy, "Yikes— Warmonger Daniel Pipes Testifying to Congress—Do They Learn Nothing?" February 12, 2007, www.tpmcafe.com.

3. Armey quoted in Jake Tapper, "Questions for Dick Armey: Retiring, Not Shy," New York Times Magazine, September 1, 2002; Klein quoted in Ron Kampeas, "On Somber Day, De-Lay's Spirits Raised by Pro-Israeli Group's Support," JTA.org, October 2, 2005; and DeLay quoted in James Bennet, "DeLay Says Palestinians Bear Burden for Achieving Peace," New York Times, July 30, 2003.

4. After the 2006 congressional elections, 13 out of 100 senators and 30 out of 435 representatives were Jewish, percentages that are significantly higher than the Jewish proportion of the U.S. population, which is under 3 percent. Amiram Barkat, "Number of Jewish Parliamentarians Worldwide Reaches Record High," Ha'aretz, November 9, 2006.

5. Joseph Lieberman, "Speech to the AIPAC National Policy Conference," March 2007, http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=270526; Charles Schumer, "The Peace Process Has Been One-Sided" (interview), Middle East Quarterly 7, no. 4 (December 2000); Henry Waxman, "Israel Fights for Survival," Beverly Hills Weekly (online), April 19, 2002; and Robert Wexler, "Israel and the Middle East," http://wexler.house.gov/issues.php?ID=19.

6. Quoted in Matthew E. Berger, "US Vote May Alter Stance on Middle East," Jerusalem Post, November 7, 2006.

7. Quoted in Janine Zacharia, "Lantos's List," Jerusalem Post, April 13, 2001. Also see Jeffrey Blankfort, "A Tale of Two Members of Congress and the Capitol Hill Police," CounterPunch.org, April 17, 2006; and Mark Simon, "Middle East Hits Home in House Race," San Francisco Chronicle (online), May 16, 2002.

8. Quoted in Mitchell Bard, "Israeli Lobby Power," Midstream 33, no. 1 (January 1987): 8.

9. For a further analysis of AIPAC's structure and operations, which complements the arguments offered here, see Michael Massing, "The Storm over the Israel Lobby," New York Review of Books, June 8, 2006. Also see Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2003); and Michael Lind, "The Israel Lobby," Prospect 73 (April 2002).

10. The Clinton, Gingrich, Reid, and New York Times quotations were accessed from the AIPAC website, www.aipac.org/documents/whoweare.html#say, on January 14, 2005. The New York Times quotation was still on the site in May 2007; the others have been removed. Jeffrey Goldberg, "Real Insiders," New Yorker, July 4, 2005. Gingrich's statement is also quoted in Michael Kinsley, "J'accuse, Sort of," Slate.com, March 12, 2003.

11. Michael Massing, "Deal Breakers," American Prospect, March 11, 2002; and Massing, "Storm over the Israel Lobby."

12. The same article also noted that one in every five AIPAC board members was a top fundraiser for 2004 presidential candidates John Kerry and George W. Bush. Thomas B. Edsall and Molly Moore, "Pro-Israel Lobby Has Strong Voice," Washington Post, September 5, 2004.

13. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1986), 186-87.

14. Friedman's statement was contained in a letter to AIPAC's members, congratulating them on helping maintain U.S. support for Israel during the 2006 war in Lebanon. It is quoted in John Walsh, "AIPAC Congratulates Itself on the Slaughter in Lebanon," CounterPunch.org, August 16, 2006. This policy has been standard operating procedure for some time. In 1987, AIPAC head Tom Dine told supporters that "in the 1985-86 campaign, AIPAC lay leaders and staff met with every senator up for re-election except one, plus 49 Senate challengers and 205 House challengers, including every new freshman member." Quoted in Robert Pear and Richard L. Berke, "Pro-Israel Group Exerts Quiet Might as It Rallies Supporters in Congress," New York Times, July 7, 1987.

15. Hayden also says his willingness to defend Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was the "mistake of my political career." Tom Hayden, "Things Come 'Round in Mideast," truthdig.com, July 18, 2006.

16. Harry Lonsdale, personal correspondence with authors, May 16, 2006. Lonsdale also notes that "I was still outspent by Senator Hatfield, and I lost the election," which confirms the obvious point that AIPAC does not succeed in every election.

17. Evans is quoted in John J. Fialka, "Linked Donations? Political Contributions fromPro-Israel PACs Suggest Coordination," Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1987.

18. Goldberg, "Real Insiders."

19. Charles R. Babcock, "Papers Link Pro-Israel Lobby to Political Funding Efforts," Washington Post, November 14, 1988; and Fialka, "Political Contributions from Pro-Israel PACs."

20. On the FEC's ruling, see John J. Fialka, "Pro-Israel Lobbying Group Is Accused of Breaking U.S. Campaign-Funds Law," Wall Street Journal, January 13, 1989; and Charles R. Babcock, "FEC Rules Pro-Israel Lobby, PACs Are Not 'Affiliated,'" Washington Post, December 22, 1990.

21. David D. Newsom, The Public Dimension of Foreign Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 187.

22. "Pro-Israel Contributions to Federal Candidates, 2005-2006," www.opensecrets.org/pacs/ industry.asp?txt=Q05&cycle=20006.

23. Lexington, "Taming Leviathan," Economist, March 15, 2007; see also Kelley Beaucar Vla-hos, "Pro-Israel Lobby a Force to Be Reckoned With," FOXnews.com, May 28, 2002; Massing, "Deal Breakers"; and Massing, "Storm over the Israel Lobby."

24. Quoted in Vlahos, "Pro-Israel Lobby."

25. These figures include PAC contributions only, not contributions from individuals. Calculated from the Center for Responsive Politics website, www.opensecrets.org.

26. Ron Kampeas, "Pro-Israel Political Funds in U.S. Target Friendly Incumbents—and Challengers," JTA.org, October 3, 2006.

27. Janet McMahon, "Record Pro-Israel PAC Contributions Failed to Save Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's Seat," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (online), July 2005.

28. Jonathan Allen, "McKinney Opponent Rakes in Pro-Israel Cash," The Hill, August 2, 2006, www.hillnews.com. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, McKinney spent roughly $365,000 on her primary campaign, while victor Hank Johnson spent roughly $800,000 on the primary and general election combined. Also see David Firestone, "A Nation Challenged: The Lawmaker; Call to Study U.S. Stance on Mideast Draws Anger," New York Times, October 18, 2001; Nathan Guttman, "Lobbying for the Pro-Israel Candidates," Ha'aretz, July 7, 2004; "Mideast Fuels 2 Democratic Primaries," Washington Post, June 6, 2002; and Jonathan Weisman, "House Incumbents McKinney, Schwarz Fall in Primaries," Washington Post, August 9, 2006.

29. Goldberg, "Real Insiders."

30. John J. Fialka, "Pro-Israel Politics: Jewish Groups Increase Campaign Donations, Target Them Precisely," Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1983; and Richard H. Curtiss, Stealth PACs: How Israel's American Lobby Seeks to Control U.S. Middle East Policy, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Educational Trust, 1996), 47.

31. Goldberg, "Real Insiders." Also see David M. Halbfinger, "Generational Battle Turns Nasty in Alabama Primary," New York Times, June 3, 2002; Tom Hamburger, "Mideast Haunts Alabama Race," Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2002; "Money from Supporters of Israel Played Role in Alabama Upset," New York Times, June 27, 2002; Juliet Eilperin, "Davis Ousts Rep. Hilliard in Alabama Runoff," Washington Post, June 26, 2002; and Benjamin Soskis, "Pro-Israel Lobby Backing Challenger in Alabama Race," Forward, May 10, 2002.

32. Quoted in Edward Walsh, "Jewish PACs Flex Muscle: On Hill, Being Viewed as Anti-Israel Can Be Risky," Washington Post, May 10, 1986; and Curtiss, Stealth PACs, 65-66. For additional details on these cases, see Findley, They Dare to Speak Out, chap. 3.

33. Adlai Stevenson III, "The Black Book," unpublished book manuscript, undated; and personal correspondence with authors, March 22, 2007.

34. "Californian Spent $1.1 Million on Illinois Race," New York Times, October 10, 1985; Richard L. Berke, "Cranston Backer Guilty in Campaign Finance Case," New York Times, May 8, 1990; and Tom Tugend, "Israel Financial Backer Convicted on U.S. Election Law Charges," Jerusalem Post, May 7, 1990.

35. Quoted in Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 191. The details in this paragraph are from ibid., 189-91. Also see Charles R. Babcock, "Pro-Israel Political Activists Enforce 'Percy Factor,'" Washington Post, August 7, 1986.

36. Quoted in John Diamond and Brianna B. Piec, "Pro-Israel Groups Intensify Political Front in U.S.," Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2002.

37. Lucille Barnes, "Retiring Sen. Jesse Helms Caved to Pro-Israel Lobby Halfway Through His Career," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2002, 34; and Tom Hamburger and Jim VandeHei, "Chosen People: How Israel Became a Favorite Cause of Christian Right," Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2002.

38. Freedman is quoted in Patrick Healy, "Clinton Vows to Back Israel in Latest Mideast Conflict," New York Times, July 18, 2006. Also see Adam Dicker, "Hillary: 'I Had a Lot to Prove,'" Jewish Week, November 18, 2005; Joshua Frank, "Hillary Clinton and the Israel Lobby," Antiwar.com, January 23, 2007; Rachel Z. Friedman, "Senator Israel," National Review Online, May 25, 2005; Ron Kampeas, "Candidates for 2008 Courting Jewish Support," Jerusalem Post, January 24, 2007; E. J. Kessler, "Hillary the Favorite in Race for Jewish Do

nations," Forward, January 26, 2007; and Kristen Lombardi, "Hillary Calls Israel a 'Beacon' of Democracy," Village Voice (online), December 11, 2005.

39. Kessler, "Hillary the Favorite in Race for Jewish Donations"; campaign finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics, www.opensecrets.org.

40. Sometimes AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups just encourage potential foes to keep silent, as they did with John Sununu during the 2002 New Hampshire Senate race. Sununu had two liabilities: he is of Palestinian and Lebanese descent and some groups in the lobby thought his voting record was less than stellar. The National Jewish Democratic Council issued a press release saying his record on Israel-related issues "stands out—in a most unflattering way," and AIPAC made it clear he was a prime target, dispatching former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to campaign for Sununu's primary opponent. According to the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Sununu responded with "an encouraging position paper" that emphasized his commitment to preserving Israel's military superiority. After winning the election, Sununu offered only muted criticisms of Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. See National Jewish Democratic Council, "John Sununu: A Singular Voting Record," press release, October 28, 2002; and Matthew E. Berger, "New Republican Congress Retains Pro-Israel Bent," JTA.org, November 8, 2002. For additional background, see Franklin Foer, "Foreign Aid: A Middle East Proxy War in New Hampshire," New Republic, November 26, 2001; Ralph Z. Hallow, "Pro-Israel Lobby Looks for Deal with Sununu," Washington Times, September 4, 2002; and Ori Nir, "Despite Hype, Israel Lobby Sits Out Tight New Hampshire Race," Forward, November 8, 2002.

41. "A Letter to AIPAC," New York Review of Books, June 8, 2006.

42. Quoted in George D. Moffett III, "Israeli Lobby Virtually Unmatched," Christian Science Monitor, June 28, 1991.

43. Amitay is quoted in Berger, "New Republican Congress"; Carter is quoted in Yitzhak Benhorin, "Balanced Stand on ME Is Political Suicide, Says Carter," Ynetnews.com, February 26, 2007.

44. Richard L. Hall and Alan V. Deardorff, "Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy," American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (February 2006).

45. Quoted in Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy, trans. James A. Cohen (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994), 242.

46. Jonathan Weisman and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "Senate Passes Ethics Package," Washington Post, January 19, 2007; Nathan Guttman, "Jewish Groups to Challenge Ethics Reform," Forward, December 1, 2006; Jim Abourezk, "The Hidden Cost of Free Congressional Trips to Israel," Christian Science Monitor, January 26, 2007; and the AIEF entry at the Center for Public Integrity, www.publicintegrity.org.

47. Stephen Isaacs, Jews and American Politics (NewYork: Doubleday, 1974), 255-57.

48. Quoted in Seth P. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East: Interests and Obstacles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 67.

49. The text of the letter to Rice is from www.aipac.org/Publications/SourceMaterials CongressionalAction/Nelson-Ensign_Letter_FINAL.pdf. Also see Nathan Guttmann, "AIPAC Urges U.S. to End Contacts with Palestinian Authority," Forward, March 14, 2007.

50. Quoted in Lloyd Grove, "On the March for Israel; The Lobbyists from AIPAC, Girding for Battle in the New World Order," Washington Post, June 13, 1991.

51. Although AIPAC has been able to use its political muscle to avoid having to register as a foreign agent for another government, it is especially concerned about that problem today because of the Larry Franklin spy scandal, and thus it is going to considerable lengths to emphasize its "American side." See Ron Kampeas, "New Ruling in AIPAC Case Raises Questions about 'Foreign Agents,'" JTA.org, August 23, 2006; Ori Nir, "Leaders Fear Probe Will Force Pro-Israel Lobby to File as 'Foreign Agent,'" Forward, December 31, 2004; and Ori Nir, "Leaders Stress American Side of AIPAC," Forward, May 27, 2005.

52. "Sen. Hollings Floor Statement Setting the Record Straight on His Mideast Newspaper

Column," May 20, 2004, originally posted on the former senator's website (now defunct) but still available at www.shalomctr.org/node/620.

53. Quoted in Grove, "On the March for Israel."

54. Sharon's remark was published in an AIPAC advertisement in the Chicago Jewish Star, August 29-September 11, 2003; Olmert's statement is quoted in "To Israel with Love," Economist, August 5, 2006.

55. Jordan wrote, "Out of 125 members of the Democratic National Finance Council, over 70 are Jewish; In 1976, over 60% of the large donors to the Democratic Party were Jewish; Over 60% of the monies raised by Nixon in 1972 was from Jewish contributors; Over 75% of the monies raised in Humphrey's 1968 campaign was from Jewish contributors; Over 90% of the monies raised by Scoop Jackson in the Democratic primaries was from Jewish contributors; In spite of the fact that you were a long shot and came from an area of the country where there is a smaller Jewish community, approximately 35% of our primary funds were from Jewish supporters." Hamilton Jordan, Confidential File, Box 34, File "Foreign Policy/Domestic Politics Memo, HJ Memo, 6/77," Atlanta, Carter Library, declassified June 12, 1990.

56. Thomas B. Edsall and Alan Cooperman, "GOP Uses Remarks to Court Jews," Washington Post, March 13, 2003. Also see James D. Besser, "Jews' Primary Role Expanding," Jewish Week, January 23, 2004; Alexander Bolton, "Jewish Defections Irk Democrats," The Hill (online), March 30, 2004; and E. J. Kessler, "Ancient Woes Resurfacing as Dean Eyes Top Dem Post," Forward, January 28, 2005.

57. Isaacs, Jews and American Politics, 115-39; Amy Keller, "Chasing Jewish Dollars: Can GOP Narrow Money Gap in 2004?" Atlanta Jewish Times (online), January 17, 2003; and Kessler, "Hillary the Favorite in Race for Jewish Donations."

58. Jeffrey S. Helmreich, "The Israel Swing Factor: How the American Jewish Vote Influences U.S. Elections,"Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints (online) 446 (January 15, 2001): 1.

59. Kampeas, "Candidates for 2008."

60. E. J. Kessler, "Lieberman and Dean Spar over Israel," Forward, September 12, 2003; and Stephen Zunes, "Attacks on Dean Expose Democrats' Shift to the Right," Tikkun.org, November/December 2003.

61. Zunes, "Attacks on Dean"; and James D. Besser, "Dean's Jewish Problem," Chicago Jewish Star, December 19, 2003-January 8, 2004.

62. E. J. Kessler, "Dean Plans to Visit Israel, Political Baggage in Tow," Forward, July 8, 2005; and Zunes, "Attacks on Dean."

63. A transcript of the Steiner-Katz conversation is available at www.wrmea.com/backissues/ 1292/9212013.html. Also see Thomas L. Friedman, "Pro-Israel Lobbyist Quits over Audio-taped Boasts," New York Times, November 5, 1992; and "Israeli Lobby President Resigns over Promises; Bragged to Contributor About Lies to Clinton," Washington Times, November 4, 1992.

64. John Heilprin, "Ex-Deputy Pleads Guilty in Abramoff Case," Boston Globe, March 23, 2007; and StaceySchultz, "Mr. Outside Moves Inside," U.S. News & World Report, March 16, 2003.

65. Laura Blumenfeld, "Three Peace Suits; For These Passionate American Diplomats, a Middle East Settlement Is the Goal of a Lifetime," Washington Post, February 24, 1997; and Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 35-38, 183-87. In a review of The Missing Peace, Ross's account of the failed Middle East peace process, the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim described the Clinton team as "one of the most ardently pro-Israel" administrations in U.S. history and said that "it is difficult to think of an American official who is more quintessentially Israel-first in his outlook than Dennis Ross." Avi Shlaim, "The Lost Steps," Nation, August 30, 2004. Also see Michael C. Desch, "The Peace That Failed," American Conservative, November 8, 2004; and Jerome Slater, "The Missing Pieces in The Missing Peace," Tikkun.org, May 2005.

66. Samuel Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, reports that at one point dur

ing the negotiations at Camp David (July 2000), Dennis Ross commented, "If Barak offers anything more, I'll be against this agreement." Unedited transcript of "Comments by Sandy Berger at the Launch of How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate (USIP Press, 2005)," U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, June 7, 2005, www.usip.org/events/2005/0607_beberger.pdf.

67. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "The Tragedy of Errors," New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001. The Palestinian complaint is quoted in Blumenfeld, "Three Peace Suits."

68. David K. Shipler, "On Middle East Policy, a Major Influence," New York Times, July 6, 1987.

69. Douglas Brinkley, "The Lives They Lived; Out of the Loop," New York Times Magazine, December 29, 2002.

70. Marius, of course, was not an anti-Semite. He merely wrote in the relevant review: "[The book's] account of the brutality of the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, is eerily similar to the stories of the Gestapo, the Geheimstaatspolitzei in Nazi-occupied territories, in World War II." Lloyd Grove, "The Outspoken Speechwriter; Gore Reverses Hiring Decision After Review Critical of Israel," Washington Post, July 19, 1995; and Richard Marius, "Al Gore and Me, or How Marty Peretz Saved Me from Packing My Bags for Washington," Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 54-59.

71. Lawrence Kaplan, "Torpedo Boat: How Bush Turned on Arafat," New Republic, February 18, 2002.

72. Elliott Abrams, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 181.

73. Nathan Guttmann, "From Clemency to a Senior Post," Ha'aretz, December 16, 2002.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:38 PM

85. The quoted statements are from the IFCJ website, www.ifcj.org.

86. "The Apple of HIS Eye: Why Christians SHOULD Support Israel," John Hagee Ministries website, www.jhm.org/print-Israel.asp; and Andrew Higgins, "A Texas Preacher Leads Campaign to Let Israel Fight," Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2006.

87. "Zion's Christian Soldiers," 60 Minutes, June 8, 2003, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/ 03/60minutes/printable524268/shtml.

88. Quoted in Lampman, "Mixing Prophecy and Politics."

89. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 226-27; Brent Boyer, "Arvada Church Champions Israeli Cause," Denver Post (online), November 22, 2002; and Danielle Haas, "U.S. Christians Find Cause to Aid Israel; Evangelicals Financing Immigrants, Settlements," San Francisco Chronicle (online), July 10, 2002.

90. Donald Wagner, "For Zion's Sake," Middle East Report Online 223 (Summer 2002): 55.

91. Quoted in Shindler, "Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists," 175.

92. "Robertson: God Punished Sharon," Ynetnews.com, January 6, 2006; "Robertson Suggests Stroke Is Divine Rebuke," New York Times, January 6, 2006; and "Robertson Apologizes to Sharon Family," New York Times, January 13, 2006.

93. Quoted in Barbara Slavin, "Don't Give Up 1967 Lands, DeLay Tells Israel Lobby," USA Today, April 23, 2002.

94. Matthews asked Armey to confirm that this was his view and Armey said "yes." Armey later backed away from his statement after being criticized for favoring ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. See Matthew Engel, "Senior Republican Calls on Israel to Expel West Bank Arabs," Guardian, May 4, 2002; and "Richard Armey Supports Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians," Media Monitors Network, May 2, 2002, www.mediamonitors .net/amrl 15.html.

95. "Peace in the Middle East," floor statement of Senator Inhofe, March 4, 2002, http:// inhofe.senate.gov/pressapp/record.cfm"?id=183110.

96. Shindler, "Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists," 156.

97. Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (West-port, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1986), 71-76.

98. "Pat Robertson Forms Alliance with Mayor of Jerusalem," Baptist Standard (online), November 11, 2002; and "Israel Welcomes Christian Support in Battle for Survival, Sharon Aid[e] Says," Christian Examiner (online), September 6, 2002.

99. Quoted in Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 214-18.

100. Quoted in Norton Mezvinsky, "The Impact of Christian Zionism on the Arab-Israeli Conflict," NthPosition.com, March 2005.

101. Jerry Falwell, "On the Threshold of Armageddon," WorldNetDaily.com, July 22, 2006; and Sarah Posner, "Lobbying for Armageddon," AIterNet.org, August 3, 2006.

102. Hal Lindsey, "Mushrooms over the Middle East," WorldNetDaily.com, January 12, 2007; and John Hagee, Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World (Lake Mary, FL: Frontline, 2006), 17. Based on his own interpretation of scattered biblical passages, Hagee says that a strike on Iran will provoke Russia to lead an Arab coalition to war against Israel, which will be abandoned by the United States. God will then intervene to destroy Israel's invaders, but the resulting vacuum will be filled by the Antichrist, "who will be the head of the European Union." Under his command, the armies of the West gather in Israel to wage the battle of Armageddon against the "king of the East" (China), at which point Christ reappears to strike down the Antichrist and restore God's kingdom. Hagee concludes, "The end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching" (113-22).

103. Christians United for Israel, "CUFI Membership Weekly Update," December 11, 2006, www.cufima.com/idlO.html.

104. Shindler, "Likud and the Dispensationalists," 165-66; and Kristol, "The Political Dilemma of American Jews."

105. Perlmutter is quoted in Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 232; Foxman's remarks are from "Jews and Evangelicals: Support for Israel Isn't Everything," Time, January 16, 2007.

106. Quoted in Bill Broadway, "The Evangelical-Israeli Connection: Scripture Inspires Many Christians to Support Zionism Politically, Financially," Washington Post, March 27, 2004.

107. For Hagee's disturbing attitudes toward Jews, see Jerusalem Countdown, 56-57, 109. On his appearance at the AIPAC Policy Conference, see Gregory Levey, "Inside America's Powerful Israel Lobby," Salon.com, Marc 16, 2007; "Christians for Israel," Jerusalem Post editorial, March 14, 2007; and Sarah Posner, "The Goy Who Cried Wolf," American Prospect, March 12, 2007.

108. Quoted in James D. Besser, "Hardline Pastor Gets Prime AIPAC Spot," Jewish Week, March 9, 2007.

109. Naomi M. Cohen, "Dual Loyalties: Zionism and Liberalism," in Gal, Envisioning Israel, 326.

110. Jo-Ann Mort, "An Unholy Alliance in Support of Israel," Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2002. The Alpher and Gorenberg quotations are from "Zion's Christian Soldiers." Also see Ger-shom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (NewYork: Free Press, 2000); and Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 231.

111. Tourism declined after the outbreak of the Second Intifada and September 11 but has rebounded since then. The United Nations Statistical Division estimates that Israel received $2.8 billion in tourism receipts in 2004, and Israeli officials report that approximately 29 percent of these tourists were Christian. See United Nations, World Tourism Organization Statistical Database and Yearbook 2005 (NewYork: United Nations, 2005); Eric Silver, "Return of the Tourist," Jerusalem Report (online), February 21, 2005; Laurie Copans, "Israel: Tourism Surges as Christian Pilgrims Walk in the Footsteps of Jesus," USA Today, December 13, 2004; and William A. Orme, "Fighting in Mideast Blocks Wave of Christian Tourism," New York Times, November 11, 2000.

112. Anderson, Biblical Interpretation, 103, 138. This is also a central theme of Michael B. Oren's Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2007), though he overstates its impact on U.S. policy decisions.

113. Anderson, Biblical Interpretation, 111, 114-15; and Ruth W. Mouly, The Religious Right and Israel: The Politics of Armageddon (Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1985).

114. Zev Chafets, "The Rabbi Who Loved Evangelicals (and Vice Versa)," New York Times Magazine, July 24, 2005.

115. In August 2006, the Vatican's envoy in the Holy Land and the bishops of the Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, and Syrian Orthodox churches in Jerusalem signed a declaration rejecting the teachings of Christian Zionism and accusing the movement of encouraging "racial exclusivity and perpetual war." See Matthew Tostevin, "Holy Land Churches Attack Christian Zionism," Reuters, August 31, 2006. A number of other mainstream Protestant churches have been critical of Israeli policy and have seriously considered "selective divestiture" from companies operating in Israel. The lobby, however, has worked hard to thwart these efforts and has been largely successful. See James D. Besser, "Church Poised to Kill Divestment," Jewish Week, June 23, 2006; Alan Cooperman, "Israel Divestiture Spurs Clash," Washington Post, September 29, 2004; Michael Conlon, "US Presbyterians Consider Divesting over West Bank," Washington Post, February 17, 2005; Laurie Goodstein, "Presbyterians Revise Israel Investing Policy," New York Times, June 22, 2006; Nathan Guttman, "A Warning Signal from the Churches," Ha'aretz, November 26, 2004; Chris Moore, "Mainline Protestants Challenge Israel Lobby," Antiwar.com, December 7, 2004; Marc Perelman, "Effort Eyed to Combat Divestment," Forward, July 15, 2006; and Rachel Pomerance, "Episcopal View on Mideast Conflict an Improvement, Jewish Groups Say," JTA.org, November 9, 2004.

116. The limited financial role of Christian Zionism is illustrated by relative donations to Israel following the 2006 war in Lebanon. According to Ha'aretz, Christian groups donated nearly $20 million to reconstruction and resettlement efforts in Israel; by comparison, the United Jewish Communities collected more than $340 million. See Daphna Berman, "Christians' Wartime Donations of $20m Went Largely Unheralded," Ha'aretz, November 3, 2006.

117. On the role of interest groups in American politics, see Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 198); Richard L. Hall and Frank W. Wayman, "Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees," American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (September 1990); John Mark Hansen, Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919-1981 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ken Kollman, Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion and Interest Group Strategies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Richard A. Smith, "Interest Group Influence in the U.S. Congress," Legislative Studies Quarterly 20, no. 1 (February, 1995); David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Knopf, 1951); and James Q. Wilson, Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

118. Quoted in Mary A. Barberis, "The Arab-Israeli Battle on Capitol Hill," Virginia Quarterly Review 52, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 209.

119. Trice, "Domestic Interest Groups," 125-26.

120. Quoted in Ben Bradlee Jr., "Israel's Lobby," Boston Globe, April 29, 1984.

121. Shai Feldman, The Future of U.S.-Israeli Strategic Cooperation (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1996), 5-6.

122. Quoted in Grove, "On the March for Israel."

123. The Bard and Truman quotations are from Mitchell Bard, "The Israeli and Arab Lobbies," www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Also see Mark N. Katz, "Where Is the Arab Lobby?" Middle East Times (online), July 3, 2006; Noam N. Levey, "In Politicians' Pro Israel Din, Arab Americans Go Unheard," Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2006; Ali A. Mazrui, "Between the Crescent and the Star-Spangled Banner: American Muslims and U.S. Foreign Policy," International

Affairs 72, no. 3 (July 1996); Nabeel A. Khoury, "The Arab Lobby: Problems and Prospects," Middle East journal 41, no. 3 (Summer 1987); and Andrea Barron, "Jewish and Arab Dias-poras in the United States and Their Impact on U.S. Middle East Policy," in The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Two Decades of Change, ed. Yehuda Lukacs and Abdalla M. Battah (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988), 238-59. The weakness of the "Palestinian lobby" in particular is captured in Nora Boustany, "Palestinians' Lone Hand in Washington," Washington Post, April 19, 2002; and George Gedda, "PLO Loses D.C. Office Because of Unpaid Rent," Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2002.

124. Trice, "Domestic Interest Groups," 123.

125. For a typical example, see Harold Siddiqui, "'Oil Lobby Determined to Have Its War' in Iraq," Toronto Star (online), January 19, 2003, www.commondreams.org.

126. Stephen Zunes, "The Israel Lobby: How Powerful Is It Really?" Foreign Policy in Focus Special Report, May 16, 2006; Noam Chomsky, "The Israel Lobby," Znet (online), March 28, 2006; and Martin Peretz, "Oil and Vinegar," New Republic, March 30, 2006.

127. See especially Craig Unger, House of Bush, House ofSaud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (NewYork: Scribner, 2004). This theme was also a key part of Michael Moore's controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

128. In 2006, roughly 40 percent of U.S. crude oil imports came from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela; Saudi Arabia provided only 14 percent. U.S. Department of Energy, Petroleum Supply Monthly (Washington, DC, February 2007), 58.

129. Bernard Gwertzman, "U.S. Said to Drop Jordan Arms Sale," New York Times, March 21,1984.

130. Quoted in Congressional Quarterly, The Middle East, 68.

131. Trice, "Domestic Interest Groups," 137-38.

132. See www.api.org/policy. Foregn policy discussions are equally scarce on the ExxonMobil and British Petroleum websites.

133. Quoted in Tivnan, The Lobby, 194.

134. Trice, "Domestic Interest Groups," 137; and William B. Quandt, "United States Policy in the Middle East: Constraints and Choices," in Political Dynamics in the Middle East, ed. Paul Hammond and Sidney Alexander (NewYork: Elsevier, 1972), 529-30.

135. Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson, and Tim Webb, "Future of Iraq: The Spoils of War," Independent, January 7, 2007.

136. "Cheney Pushed for More Trade with Iran," FOXnews.com, October 9, 2004, www.foxnews .com/story/0,2933,13436,00.html.

137. Trice, "Domestic Interest Groups," 137-38.

138. These quotations are from Roger Hilsman, The Politics of Policy Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs (NewYork: Harper, 1971), 149; Bard, "Israeli and Arab Lobbies"; and "Pro-Israel Lobby on Capitol Hill," BBC Newsnight (online), May 8, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/ programmes/newsnight/3010371 .stm.

139. "In liberal democratic regimes," writes Sheffer, "most notably the United States, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Holland, and Norway, the Jews were able to maintain open and intensive relationships with the Jewish community in Palestine and later with Israel. . . Certain segments in those communities . . . demonstrated total loyalty to their host societies and governments . . . Those who openly identified as supporters of the Zionist movement and of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and later of Israel developed dual loyalties. The most resolute Zionists and other supporters of Israel adopted the divided-loyalties stance; that is, in certain respects they were loyal to their host countries, and other respects to the homeland." Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 232-33.

140. Malcolm Hoenlein, "Crossing the Line of the Acceptable," Ha'aretz, December 31, 2004.

141. Pew Global Attitudes Project, "Muslims in Europe: Economic Worries Top Concerns About Religious and Cultural Identity" (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, July 6, 2006), 3.

142. Quoted in David K. Shipler, "On Middle East Policy, a Major Influence," New York Times, July 6, 1987.

143. Quoted in Kurt Eichenwald, "U.S. Jews Split on Washington's Shift on Palestinian State," New York Times, October 5, 2001.

144. David S. Cloud and Helene Cooper, "Israel's Protests Are Said to Stall Gulf Arms Sale," New York Times, April 5, 2007.

145. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 203.

146. Both quotations are from Goldberg, Jewish Power, 232, 235.

147. Eric Alterman, "Can We Talk?" Nation, April 21, 2003.

148. Stephen Steinlight, "The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy," Backgrounder, Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, DC, October 2001, 10-11. For an earlier and equally revealing expression of this view, see Nathan Glazer, "McGovern and the Jews: A Debate," Commentary, September 1972, 44.

149. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 276-91.

150. Quoted in Massing, "Deal Breakers."

151. Hagee, "The Apple of HIS Eye"; and Wagner, "For Zion's Sake," 56. Also see Lee Underwood, "Israel's Right to the Land," January 4, 2004, http://christianactionforisrael.org .right.html.

152. Information about Lenny Ben-David is from www.israelunitycoalition.org/sbureau/ lbendavid.php.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:39 PM

4: WHAT IS THE "ISRAEL LOBBY"?

1. Andrew C. Revkin, "Bush Aide Edited Climate Reports," New York Times, June 8, 2005; and Andrew C. Revkin and Matthew Wald, "Material Shows Weakening of Climate Reports in Hundreds of Instances," New York Times, March 20, 2007.

2. Important works on ethnic lobbies and their impact on foreign policy include Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ethnicity and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed., ed. A. A. Said (New York: Praeger, 1981); Ethnic Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. M. E. Ahrari (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987); Paul Watanabe, Ethnic Groups, Congress, and American Foreign Policy: The Politics of the Turkish Arms Embargo (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); and R. Hrair Dekmejian and Angelos Themelis, "Ethnic Lobbies in U.S. Foreign Policy: A Comparative Analysis of the Jewish, Greek, Armenian and Turkish Lobbies," Occasional Research Paper no. 13, Institute of International Relations, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece, October 1997.

3. This is a common probem in political analysis. For example, the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" are well understood and uncontroversial, and it is easy to think of exemplars of each type (for instance, Senator Ted Kennedy for "liberal" and former Congressman Newt Gingrich for "conservative"). There are, however, individuals who are harder to classify, such as Senator Joseph Lieberman or the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, both of whom were liberal on domestic issues but conservative on foreign policy issues.

4. Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herd to the Holocaust (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975), 1; and Steven T. Rosenthal, "Long Distance Nationalism: American Jews, Zionism, and Israel," in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Dana Evan Kaplan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 209.

5. Robert H. Trice, "Domestic Interest Groups and the Arab-Israeli Conflict," in Said, Ethnicity and U.S. Foreign Policy, 121-22.

6. Steven M. Cohen, The 2004 National Survey of American Jews, sponsored by the Jewish

Agency for Israel's Department of Jewish-Zionist Education, February 24, 2005. Also see 2006 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, conducted September 25-October 16, 2006, American Jewish Committee, October 18, 2006; Steven M. Cohen, "Poll: Attachment of U.S. Jews to Israel Falls in Past 2 Years," Forward, March 4, 2005; and M. J. Rosenberg, "Letting Israel Sell Itself," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #218, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, March 18, 2005. A recent report prepared for the American Jewish Committee notes that "there is a consensus among several studies that Israel is not central to young people's Jewish identity." Jacob B. Ukeles et al., "Young Jewish Adults in the United States Today," American Jewish Committee, September 2006, 34. Also see Amiram Barkat, "Young American Jews Are More Ambivalent Toward Israel, Study Shows," Ha'aretz, March 7, 2005.

7. As the Joint Program Plan of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC), a major Jewish agency, put it in 1957, "The American public accepted the American Jewish concern about Israel... as a natural, normal manifestation of interest based on sympathies and emotional attachments of a sort that are common to many Americans." Quoted in Jack Wertheimer, "Jewish Organizational Life in the United States Since 1945," American Jewish Yearbook 1995 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1995), 13.

8. Rosenthal, "Long Distance Nationalism," 211; and Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

9. The shift is nicely captured by the evolving position of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the rabbinical body of Reform Judaism. In 1897, CCAR declared that "we totally disapprove of any attempt for the establishment of a Jewish state. Such attempts show a misunderstanding of Israel's mission," and it did not endorse the Balfour Declaration in 1917. In 1967, by contrast, CCAR declared "its solidarity with the State and People of Israel. Their triumphs are our triumphs. Their ordeal is our ordeal. Their fate is our fate." Quoted in Chaim I. Waxman, "All in the Family: American Jewish Attachments to Israel," in A New Jewry? America Since the Second World War, Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, Vol. VIII, ed. Peter Y Medding (NewYork: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, 1992), 140.

10. Rosenthal, "Long Distance Nationalism," 212.

11. Waxman, "All in the Family," 134. To note one example, the first item listed on the American Jewish Congress's statement of its core agenda is the "safety and security of Israel and the world Jewish community," www.ajcongress.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about. The situation is similar today; there are more than ninety separate groups identified as "Israel-related" in the 2005 edition of the yearbook.

12. "Who We Are" and "What We Do," Conference of Presidents website, www.conference HYPERLINK "http://ofpresidents.org/content"ofpreidents.org/content.asp?id=52. The Conference of Presidents was created in 1954 in response to Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade's complaint that it was difficult for him to deal with the many separate Jewish organizations and it would be useful if they would speak with one voice. See Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 40—41.

13. This figure omits personal contributions and thus understates the role of pro-Israel campaign contributions. See www.crp.org/pacs/industiy asp?tat=Q05&cycle=2006. On the general phenomenon of "stealth PACs," see Richard H. Curtiss, Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of U.S. Middle East Policy, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Educational Trust, 1996).

14. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "Washington's Power 25," Fortune, December 8, 1997. AIPAC was ranked number four in a similar study conducted in 2001. See Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Russell Newell, "Fat and Happy in D.C.," Fortune, May 28, 2001.

15. Richard E. Cohen and Peter Bell, "Congressional Insiders Poll," National Journal, March 5, 2005; and James D. Besser, "Most Muscle? It's NRA, Then AIPAC and AARP," Chicago Jewish Star, March 11-24, 2005.

16. Dymally is quoted in Robert Pear with Richard L. Berke, "Pro-Israel Group Exerts Quiet Might as It Rallies Supporters in Congress," New York Times, July 7, 1987; Hamilton is

quoted in George D. Moffett III, "Israeli Lobby Virtually Unmatched," Christian Science Monitor, June 28, 1991.

17. On the role played by Brandeis, Wise, and others, see Irvine Anderson, Biblical Interpretation and Middle East Policy: The Promised Land, America and Israel, 1917-2002 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 61-62; and Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New-York: Knopf, 1983), 67-71. Truman's former business partner Eddie Jacobson convinced him to meet with Chaim Weizmann in 1948, and pro-Zionist advisers such as David Niles and Clark Clifford helped convince Truman to support the 1947 partition plan and to recognize the new state in 1948. For different views on the various influences that shaped Truman's decisions, see Peter L. Hahn, Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 26-31 and chaps. 2-3; Zvi Ganin, Truman, American Jewry, and Israel, 1945-1948 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979); Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israel Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), chap. 2; Kenneth Ray Bain, The March to Zion: United States Policy and the Founding of Israel (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1979); and Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israeli Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23-34.

18. Lloyd Grove, "The Men with Muscle: The AIPAC Leaders, Battling for Israel and Among Themselves," Washington Post, June 14, 1991.

19. J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 158.

20. Stuart Eizenstat, "Loving Israel, Warts and All," Foreign Policy 81 (Winter 1990-91): 92.

21. Ibid.; and Melvin I. Urofsky, We Are One! American Jewry and Israel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978).

22. As Jack Wertheimer puts it, "There is little doubt that the preoccupations and mood of the organized Jewish community underwent profound changes in the wake of the Six Day War . . . American Jewry fully identified with Israel, an identification that galvanized the community to unprecedented amounts of philanthropic giving and volunteering." See "Jewish Organizational Life," 32; and Menahem Kaufman, "Envisaging Israel: The Case of the United Jewish Appeal," in Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, ed. Allon Gal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1996), 232-34.

23. Wertheimer, "Jewish Organizational Life," 32-33.

24. Ibid., 55.

25. Quoted in Wolf Blitzer, "The AIPAC Formula," Moment, November 1981, 23.

26. AIPAC does not disclose its annual budget; the numbers reported here are from Blitzer, "AIPAC Formula," 23; Lloyd Grove, "On the March for Israel; The Lobbyists from AIPAC, Girding for Battle in the New World Order," Washington Post, June 13, 1991; Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "Pro-Israel Lobby Holds Meeting Amid Worries," Washington Post, May 19, 2005; Thomas B. Edsall and Molly Moore, "Pro-Israel Lobby Has Strong Voice," Washington Post, September 5, 2004; and James Petras, "AIPAC on Trial," CounterPunch.org, January 7-8, 2006.

27. Quoted in Goldberg, Jewish Power, 223.

28. Bass, Support Any Friend, 147. Also see Goldberg, Jewish Power, 197-203.

29. Goldberg, "Old Friend, Shattered Dreams," Forward, December 24, 2004; Esther Kaplan, "The Jewish Divide on Israel," Nation, July 12, 2004; Michael Massing, "Conservative Jewish Groups Have Clout," Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2002; Eric Yoffie, "Reform the Conference," Forward, August 2, 2002; and William Fisher, "U.S. Jewish Groups Press Mideast Peace," Antiwar.com, November 25, 2004.

30. Daniel Levy, "Is It Good for the Jews?" American Prospect, July 5, 2006.

31. Quoted in Sharon Samber, "Congress Urged Not to Link Israel Aid to China Arms," JTA.org, June 13, 2000.

32. See, for example, Americans for Peace Now, "Briefing for the 110th Congress: Securing Israel's

Future Through Peace," 8, www.donteverstop.com/files/apn/upl/assets/APNl lOthBBook .pdf.

33. According to the IPF website, "Israel Policy Forum believes that through a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel and its Arab neighbors, as well as the region as a whole, will become more secure, prosperous and stable." See www.ipforum.org/ display.cfm?id=l.

34. Jewish Voice for Peace, "U.S. Military Aid to Israel," www.jewishvoiceforpeace/org/publish/ printer_17.shtml.

35. Quoted in Tivnan, The Lobby, 93.

36. Quoted in Goldberg, Jewish Power, 206.

37. Ori Nir, "FBI Probe: More Questions Than Answers," Forward, May 13, 2005; Bookbinder is quoted in Wolf Blitzer, Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 148.

38. On these incidents, see Hahn, Caught in the Middle East, 39-42, 46-51, 57-59, 79-82.

39. These activities (and the quoted Israeli communications) are described in Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 254, 264-65, 304-305.

40. Quoted in David Landau, "The Battle for Washington," Ha'aretz, March 28, 2003.

41. Jonathan Marcus, "Discordant Voices: The U.S. Jewish Community and Israel During the 1980s," International Affairs 66, no. 3 (July 1990): 546. Also see Sarah Bronson, "Orthodox Leader: U.S. Jews Have No Right to Criticize Israel," Ha'aretz, August 2, 2004; and Daniel Ben Simon, "Storm Warnings," Ha'aretz, November 14, 2003.

42. Rosenthal, "Long Distance Nationalism," 214; Bookbinder is quoted in Blitzer, Between Washington and Jerusalem, 147-48. Writing in the 1980s, the historian David Biale observed, "The ideological hegemony that Zionism achieved in the organized Jewish community in the last two decades has had the effect of stilling debate about many of the specific policies of the Israeli government." Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 189.

43. 2004 Survey of American Jewish Opinion, conducted August 18-September 1, 2004, American Jewish Committee, September 21, 2004, question 16. Earlier surveys produced nearly identical results.

44. This account of Breira's brief history is based on Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2002), chap. 8; Tivnan, The Lobby, 90-96; Wertheimer, "Jewish Organizational Life," 39-43; and Goldberg, Jewish Power, 207-208.

45. Goldberg, Jewish Power, 208.

46. Tivnan, The Lobby, 76. David Biale offered a similar view in 1986, writing, "For the organized Jewish community, lack of support for Israel is tantamount to treason . . . Israel is the on issue over which lack of belief is treated as heresy." Power and Powerlessness, 188.

47. American Jewish leaders were openly upset when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir briefly backed a proposal to amend the Law of Return to require conversions to Judaism be conducted by Orthodox rabbis according to halakha (rabbinical law). As Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the American Reform movement put it, "If Reform rabbis in Israel are not rabbis and their conversions are not conversions, that means our Judaism is not Judaism, and that we are second-class Jews." Quoted in Rosenthal, "Long Distance Nationalism," 218. Also see Goldberg, Jewish Power, 337-42.

48. Lawrence Grossman, "Jewish Communal Affairs," American Jewish Yearbook 1998 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1998), 110-11; Tom Tugend, "Talk by N.Y Times' Friedman Spurs ADL-ZOA Political Fuss," JTA.org, December 6, 1996; and Tom Tugend, "N.Y Times Columnist Applauds ADL for Not Caving in to ZOA," JTA.org, December 13, 1996.

49. Inigo Gilmore, "U.S. Jewish Leader Hit over Letter," Sunday Telegraph (London), August 12, 2003; and Isi Liebler, "An Open Letter to Edgar Bronfman," Jerusalem Post, August 6, 2003.

50. These quotations are from Isi Liebler, "When Seymour Met Condi," Jerusalem Post, November

24, 2005; Ori Nir, "O.U. Chief Decries American Pressure on Israel," Forward, December 2, 2005; Ori Nir, "Rice Trip Raises Concern over U.S. Pressure on Israel," Forward, November 18, 2005; and Seymour D. Reich, "Listen to America," Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2005.

51. The author of the Americans for a Safe Israel pamphlet attacking Breira, Rael Jean Isaac, wrote a similar polemic against New Jewish Agenda, and the head of the ZOAs Washington chapter denounced the same group as "pro-Arab rather than pro-Israel." Hampered by recurring budget deficits and other challenges, New Jewish Agenda folded in 1992, after twelve years of tenuous existence. See Jack Wertheimer, "Breaking the Taboo: Critics of Israel and the American Jewish Establishment," in Gal, Envisioning Israel, 410-11; and Emily Nepon, "New Jewish Agenda: The History of an Organization, 1980-1992" (B.A. thesis, Goddard College, 2006), available at www.newjewishagenda.org.

52. The material in this paragraph is based on Kaplan, "Jewish Divide on Israel." In two other similar incidents, the Hillel program directors at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Ithaca College reportedly resigned after being reprimanded for publishing articles supporting Israeli and Palestinian opposition to the occupation.

53. Ari Paul, "Zionist vs. Zionist," American Prospect, January 4, 2007; Rebecca Spence, "Campus Coalition Split over Progressive Union," Forward, January 19, 2007; Rebecca Spence, "Groups Flip Flop as Controversy over Liberal Zionists Continues," Forward, February 2, 2007; Ben Harris, "Group That Criticized Israel to Stay in Campus Coalition Despite Protests," JTA.org, January 24, 2007; "L.A. Israeli Consul General to Foreign Ministry: UPZ and Breaking the Silence Programs Harm Israel's Image and Must Be Stopped," Zionist Organization of America press release, January 31, 2007, www.zoa.org/2007/01/la_israeli_cons.htm.

54. When asked, "In the current situation, do you favor or oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state?" the percentage of American Jews responding "in favor" was 54 percent in 2006, 56 percent in 2005, and 57 percent in 2004. "Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion," 2006, 2005, and 2004, available at www.ajc.org.

5 5. Goldberg, Jewish Power, 161.

56. Ibid., 217. Also see 159-62, 170-75, 216-23. Also see Eric Alterman, "AIPAC Runs Right," Nation, October 10, 2006; Goldberg, "Old Friends"; Massing, "Conservative Jewish Groups"; Rosenthal, "Long Distance Nationalism," 217; and Mark Seal, "Sitting on the Sidelines," Ha'aretz, December 24, 2004.

57. In particular, Hoenlein served for a number of years as chairman of an annual dinner to raise funds to support Bet El, a militant Israeli settlement near Ramallah. See Michael Massing, "Deal Breakers," American Prospect, March 11, 2002; and Michel Massing, "The Israel Lobby," Nation, June 10, 2002.

58. Massing, "Deal Breakers." J. J. Goldberg offers a similar analysis, writing that "under [Tom] Dine, the ruling executive committee tripled in size. Formerly, the committee had been controlled by the heads of the New York-based national Jewish organizations. Now the Jewish community leaders were a minority, outnumbered by AIPAC's own contributors. Swelling the executive committee . . . removed the lobby from the national Jewish communal structure, such as it was, and placed it firmly in the hands of a few big donors whose only loyalty was to AIPAC." Jewish Power, 201.

59. Michael Massing, "The Storm over the Israel Lobby," New York Review of Books, June 8, 2006; and Matthew Dorf, "After Barak Win, AIPAC Reverses Opposition to a Palestinian State," JTA.org, May 28, 1999.

60. This episode is recounted in Goldberg, Jewish Power, 54-57.

61. Massing, "Deal Breakers"; and Levy, "Is It Good for the Jews?"

62. Peter Beinart and Hanna Rosin, "AIPAC Unpacked," New Republic, September 20, 1993, 20-23; and Goldberg, Jewish Power, 225-26.

63. Waxman, "All in the Family," 143-44.

64. Jonathan Woocher, "The Geo-Politics of the American Jewish Community," Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints (online), Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, January 15, 1992, 3.

65. Thomas L. Friedman, "Foreign Affairs: Mischief Makers," New York Times, April 5, 1995.

66. As Massing points out, the Israel Policy Forum has "managed to forge close ties with many influential members of Congress, but lacking a formal membership and strong fundraising apparatus, it cannot match the influence of AIPAC and the Conference." Massing, "Deal Breakers."

67. Among the best works on neoconservatism are Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004); John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold Wars to the Culture Wars (Lan-ham, MD: Madison Books, 1996); Goldberg, Jewish Power, 159-61; Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (NewYork: Free Press, 1995).

68. For an overview of neoconservative thinking about U.S. foreign policy, see John J. Mearsheimer, "Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq War: Realism Versus Neo-Conservatism," posted May 19, 2005, opendemocracy.com. An illustrative collection of neoconservative writings on foreign policy is Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. William Kristol and Robert Kagan (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000); a perceptive portrait of the neoconservatives and their views on foreign policy is Ian Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), chap. 4.

69. For a typical neoconservative statement about multilateralism and institutions, see Charles Krauthammer, "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World," 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, February 10, 2004, 3. The neoconservative view of Europe is exemplified by Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (NewYork: Knopf, 2003).

70. For a discussion of bandwagoning, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1987).

71. Max Boot, "What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'?" Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2002; and Max Boot, "Think Again: Neocons," Forign Policy 140 (January-February 2004), 22. Also see Don Atapattu, "Interview with Middle East Scholar Avi Shlaim," Nation, June 16, 2004; Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 41, 58-60, 82, 167-68; Irving Kristol, "The Political Dilemma of American Jews," Commentary, July 1984, 23-29; and Jim Lobe, "Energized Neocons Say Israel's Fight Is Washington's," Antiwar.com, July 18, 2006.

72. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 231.

73. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996, www.iasps.org/stratl.htm. The study group that produced this report was chaired by Richard Perle, and its other members were James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, Jonathan Torop, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser.

74. Quoted in Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, 344. Also see ibid., 343-45; Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, 231-36; and John B. Judis, "The Conservative Wars," New Republic, August 11 and 18, 1986.

75. Patrick J. Buchanan, "Whose War?" American Conservative, March 24, 2003; and Paul Craig Roberts, "Neocon Treason," Antiwar.com, August 24, 2004.

76. Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, i. Gal Beckerman noted that "acknowledging the Jew-ishness of neoconservatism has always triggered the red, flashing lights of anti-Semitism . . . But there is some truth to the suspicion. If there is an intellectual movement in America to

whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it." See "The Neoconservative Persuasion," Forward, January 6, 2006.

77. Max Blumenthal, "Born-Agains for Sharon," Salon.com, October 30, 2004; Darrell L. Bock, "Some Christians See a 'Road Map' to End Times," Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2003; Nathan Guttman, "Wiping Out Terror, Bringing on Redemption," Ha'aretz, April 29, 2002; Tom Hamburger and Jim VandeHei, "Chosen People: How Israel Became a Favorite Cause of Christian Right," Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2002; and Paul Nussbaum, "Israel Finds an Ally in American Evangelicals," Philadelphia Inquirer (online), November 13, 2005.

78. On how Christian beliefs influenced Balfour, see Anderson, Biblical Interpretation, 60-62. Some writers suggest that Christian beliefs also influenced Wilson's endorsement of the Balfour Declaration and Truman's support for Israel's creation, although neither was a dis-pensationalist. Ibid., 87-89; and Grose, Israel in the Mind of America, 67-71.

79. Timothy P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 188-96.

80. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 184. As Colin Shindler notes, "The growth of the Christian Right during the 1970s thus paralleled the growth of the Israeli Right—and both phenomena had been catalyzed by the Six Day War." See "Likud and the Christian Dispen-sationalists: A Symbiotic Relationship," Israel Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 163.

81. As L. Nelson Bell wrote in Christianity Today, "That for the first time in more than 2,000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the Jews gives a student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible." Quoted in Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 184.

82. Quoted in Jane Lampman, "Mixing Prophecy and Politics," Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2004.

83. Daniel Pipes, "[Christian Zionism]: Israel's Best Weapon," New York Post (online), July 15, 2003; and Michael Freund, "Christian Zionists Key to Continued U.S. Support for Israel," Jewish Press (online), December 27, 2006.

84. Hagee quoted in Bill Berkowitz, "Pastor John Hagee Spearheads Christians United for Israel," Media Transparency, March 19, 2006, www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=l 16.

85. The quoted statements are from the IFCJ website, www.ifcj.org.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:40 PM

77. Quoted in Khalidi, All That Remains, xxxi.

78. Quoted in Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox, trans. Steve Cox (NewYork: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 99.

79. Quoted in Ian Lustick, "To Build and to Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall," Israel Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 200.

80. Quoted in Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 12.

81. Geoffrey Aronson, Israel, Palestinians, and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank (London: Kegan Paul International, 1990); Amnon Barzilai, "A Brief History of the Missed Opportunity," Ha'aretz, June 5, 2002; Amnon Barzilai, "Some Saw the Refugees as the Key to Peace," Ha'aretz, June 11, 2002; Moshe Behar, "The Peace Process and Israeli Domestic Politics in the 1990s," Socialism and Democracy 16, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 2002); Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2006); Adam Hanieh and Catherine Cook, "A Road Map to the Oslo Cul-de-Sac," Middle East Report Online, May 15, 2003; "Israel's Interests Take Primacy: An Interview with Dore Gold," in hitterlemons.org, "What Constitutes a Viable Palestinian State?" March 15, 2004, edition 10; Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: The Real Legacy of Ariel Sharon (London: Verso, 2003); Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (London: Verso, 2006); Sara Roy, "Erasing the 'Optics' of Gaza," Daily Star (online), February 14, 2004; and "36 Years, and Still Counting," Ha'aretz, September 26, 2003.

82. Quoted in Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1997), 147. Meir also said, "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist." Quoted in Masalha, Imperial Israel, 47.

83. Dayan quoted in Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12. Regarding the views of other IDF generals, see ibid. On Ben-Gurion's thinking, see Morris, Righteous Victims, 261, 290.

84. Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 11.

85. Quoted in Hanieh and Cook, "Road Map." Also see Akiva Eldar, "On the Same Page, Ten Years On," Ha'aretz, November 5, 2005; David Grossman, "The Night Our Hope for Peace Died," Guardian, November 4, 2005; and Michael Jansen, "A Practice That 'Prevents the Emergence of a Palestinian State,'" Jordan Times (online), November 10, 2005. Shlomo Ben-Ami makes it clear that not only Rabin but also his immediate successor, Shimon Peres, was opposed to creating a Palestinian state. Scars of War, 220. Finally, a clear majority of Israelis were opposed to creating a Palestinian state during Rabin's tenure as prime minister (1992-95). It was not until 1997 that at least half of Israeli Jews supported the establishment of a Palestinian state. At the time of the 1993 Oslo Accords, 35 percent favored creating a Palestinian state. Ben Meir and Shaked, "The People Speak," 64-65.

86. Hillary Clinton quoted in Tom Rhodes and Christopher Walker, "Congress Tells Israel to Reject Clinton's Pullout Plan," Times (London), May 8, 1998. On the White House response, see James Bennet, "Aides Disavow Mrs. Clinton on Mideast," New York Times, May 8, 1998. Also see Robin Dorf, "News Analysis: What Motivated Hillary's Call for a Palestinian State?" JTA.org, May 15, 1998; "Hillary's Folly," Jewish Week editorial, May 15, 1998; and Brian Knowlton, "Mrs. Clinton Starts Storm by Backing 'Palestine,'" International Herald Tribune, May 8, 1998.

87. "Ex-PM Shamir Objects to Palestinian State, but Still Supports Sharon," Ha'aretz, November 26, 2002; Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Limited Palestinian State," Washington Post, June 20, 2003. In a 1998 interview, Shamir said that Israel's boundaries ran "from the border of the kingdom of Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea" and said the "greatest danger" facing Israel was "the establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel." See "Yitzhak Shamir: A Lifetime of Activism," Middle East Quarterly 6, no. 2 (June 1999).

88. In a speech in October 2005, President Ahmadinejad reportedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," a statement widely interpreted as threatening the physical destruction

of the Jewish state and its inhabitants. A more accurate translation of Ahmadinejad's statement is "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time" (or alternatively, "be eliminated from the pages of history"). Instead of calling for the physical destruction of Israel, Ahmadinejad was suggesting that Israel's control over Jerusalem and Palestine should be seen as a temporary condition that should be reversed, like Soviet control of Eastern Europe or the shah's regime in Iran. While still provocative and highly objectionable, calling for the political dismantlement of the Jewish state in Palestine is not the same as calling for the physical destruction of Israel or its population. See Ethan Bronner, "Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Agains Israel?" New York Times, June 11, 2006; Jonathan Steele, "Lost in Translation," Guardian, June 14, 2006; and "Iranian President at Tehran Conference: Very Soon, This Stain of Disgrace [i.e., Israel] Will Be Purged from the Center of the Islamic World—and This Is Attainable,'" Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch Series no. 1013, October 28, 2005.

89. "Bombs," New Republic editorial, August 27 & September 3, 2001; Martin Peretz, "Good Fight," New Republic, May 27, 2002; and Martin Peretz, "Blows to Israel Must Never Go Unanswered," Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2003. Regarding Dershowitz, his most relevant work is The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003). For an incisive critique of that book, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Also see Michael Desch, "The Chutzpah of Alan Dershowitz," American Conservative, December 5, 2005; and "Dershowitz v. Desch," American Conservative, January 16, 2006.

90. Yaakov Katz, "IDF the Most Moral Army in the World,'" Jerusalem Post, June 11, 2006; Leslie Susser, "Israelis Question Army Morality," Jewishjournal.com, December 17, 2004; and "Cabinet Communique," Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, December 12, 2004, www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Communiques/2004/Cabinet%20Communique%2012-Dec-2004. Also see Richard Cohen, "Truth Massacred," Washington Post, August 6, 2002; and Neve Gordon, "Israel's Slippery Moral Slope," In These Times (online), January 31, 2003.

91. Meron Benvenisti, "The Model of the Mythological Sabra," Ha'aretz, September 12, 2002.

92. Morris, Righteous Victims, chaps. 2-5.

93. Quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 544.

94. Morris, Birth Revisited. Many Israeli documents concerning the events of 1948 remain classified; Morris anticipates "that with respect to both expulsions and atrocities, we can expect additional revelations as the years pass and more Israeli records become available." Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus," 49. In fact, he maintains that the reported cases of rape he knows about are "just the tip of the iceberg." See Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest."

95. Quoted in Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 69. For background on Ben-Gurion's comment, see ibid., 61-72.

96. Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 432. Also see ibid., 126-53, 178-84.

97. Gabby Bron, "Egyptian POWs Ordered to Dig Graves, Then Shot by Israeli Army," Yedioth Ahronoth, August 17, 1995; Ronal Fisher, "Mass Murder in the 1956 Sinai War," Ma'ariv, August 8, 1995 (copies of these two pieces can be found in Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 3 [Spring 1996]: 148-55); Galal Bana, "Egypt: We Will Turn to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague If Israel Will Not Compensate Murdered Prisoners of War," Ha'aretz, July 24, 2002; Zehavit Friedman, "Personal Reminiscence: Remembering Ami Kronfeld," in Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Peace News (online), September 25, 2005; Katherine M. Metres, "As Evidence Mounts, Toll of Israeli Prisoner of War Massacres Grows," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (online), February/March 1996; Roee Nahmias, "Egypt May Petition Hague over 'Murder of POWs,'" Ynetnews.com, March 6, 2007; Roee Nahmias, "Former Meretz Leader Decries 1967 War Crimes," Ynetnews.com, March 3, 2007; Meron Rapoport, "Into the Valley of Death," Ha'aretz, February 13, 2007; and Segev, 1967, 371-76.

98. Avnery, "Crying Wolf?" CounterPunch.org, March 15, 2003; Robert Blecher, "Living on the

Edge: The Threat of 'Transfer in Israel and Palestine," MERIP, Middle East Report Online 225 (Winter 2002); Kimmerling, Politicide, 28. Also see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 97; Morris, Righteous Victims, 328-29; Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 (NewYork: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 8; Tom Segev, "The Spirit of the King David Hotel," Ha'aretz, July 23, 2006; and Segev, 1967, 400-12, 523-42. Morris reports that 120,000 Palestinians applied to return to their homes right after the 1967 war, but Israel allowed only about 17,000 to come back. Righteous Victims, 329. 99. Avnery, "Crying Wolf?"; Ami Kronfeld, "Avnery on Ethnic Cleansing and a Personal Note," in Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Peace News (online), March 17, 2003; and Metres, "As Evidence Mounts."

100. Danny Rubinstein, "Roads, Fences and Outposts Maintain Control in the Territories,"

Ha'aretz, August 12, 2003.

101. "Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut," February 7, 1983. The report is commonly called "the Kahan Commission Report" after its chairman, Yitzhak Kahan. Also see Morris, Righteous Victims, 542-49; and Shlaim, Iron Wall, 415-17. Israeli soldiers did not do the killing at Sabra and Shatila; it was done by a Lebanese Christian militia (Phalangists) allied with Israel. After the IDF encircled the two Palestinian refugee camps, Sharon "ordered the IDF to allow the Phalangists to enter the . . . camps." The Phalangists and the Palestinians were not only bitter enemies, but the Phalangists were bent on revenge because their leader had just been assassinated. They were almost certain to massacre the Palestinians, a point that Israeli leaders involved in the operation knew or should have known. Once the killing started, Israeli soldiers quickly became aware that a massacre was taking place "but did nothing to stop it." Shlaim, Iron Wall, 416. President Bush has hailed former prime minister Ariel Sharon as a "man of peace," but questions concerning violence against civilians have dogged him for years. For example, in 1953, he commanded a unit that attacked the Jordanian town of Qibya and killed sixty-nine civilians; two-thirds of them were women and children. According to Benny Morris, "Sharon and the IDF subsequently claimed the villagers had hidden in cellars and attics and the troops had been unaware of this when they blew up the buildings. But in truth the troops had moved from house to house, firing through windows and doorways, and Jordanian pathologists reported that most of the dead had been killed by bullets and shrapnel rather than by falling masonry or explosions. In any event, the operational orders, from CO Central Command to the units involved . . . had explicitly ordered 'destruction and maximum killing.'" Righteous Victims, 278. Also see ibid., 276-79, 294-95, 494-560; Benziman, Sharon; Uzi Benziman, "The Cock's Arrogance," Ha'aretz, June 15, 2003; Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (NewYork: Anchor Books, 1990), chaps. 6-7; Kimmerling, Politicide; Ze'ev Schiff and EhudYa'ari, Israel's Lebanon War, trans. Ina Friedman (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 250-85; and Shlaim, Iron Wall, 90-92, 149-50, 384-423.

102. Perry Anderson, "Scurrying Towards Bethlehem," New Left Review 10 (July-August 2001): 5.

103. Morris, Righteous Victims, 341. For a detailed account of how Israel treats the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, see Amira Hass, Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land, ed. and trans. Rachel Leah Jones (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2003). On Israel's use of torture, see B'Tselem and Hamoked (Center for the Defense of the Individual), "Utterly Forbidden: The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees," draft report, Jerusalem, April 2007; Glenn Frankel, "Prison Tactics a Longtime Dilemma for Israel," Washington Post, June 16, 2004; Ron Kampeas, "State Report Claims Israel Tortures Palestinian Detainees," JTA.org, March 8, 2007; Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, '"Ticking Bombs': Testimonies of Torture Victims in Israel," draft report, Jerusalem, May 2007; William F. Schulz, "An Israeli Interrogator, and a Tale of Torture," letter to New York Times, December 27, 2004; and Aviram Zino, "Report: High Court Permits Torture of Palestinians," Ynetnews.com, May 30, 2007. Israel has also been accused by B'Tselem of using Palestinian children as human shields. See "Israeli Soldies Use Palestinian Minors and

an Adult as Human Shields in the Operation in Nablus," B'Tselem news release, Jerusalem, March 8, 2007.

104. The data and the quotes in this paragraph and the next one are from Swedish Save the Children, "The Status of Palestinian Children During the Uprising in the Occupied Territories," Excerpted Summary Material, Jerusalem, January 1990, in Journal of Palestine Studies 19, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 136-46. Also see Joshua Brilliant, "Officer Tells Court Villagers Were Bound, Gagged and Beaten. 'Not Guilty' Plea at 'Break Bones' Trial, "Jerusalem Post, March 30, 1990; Joshua Brilliant, '"Rabin Ordered Beatings,' Meir Tells Military Court," Jerusalem Post, June 22, 1990; Jackson Diehl, "Rights Group Accuses Israel of Violence Against Children in Palestinian Uprising," Washington Post, May 17, 1990; James A. Graff, "Crippling a People: Palestinian Children and Israeli State Violence," Alif 13 (1993); Morris, Righteous Victims, 586-95; and Ronald R. Stockton, "Intifada Deaths," Journal of Palestine Studies 19, no. 4 (Summer 1990).

105. "Unbridled Force," Ha'aretz editorial, March 16, 2003. For other evidence, see Jonathan Cook, "Impunity on Both Sides of the Green Line," MERIP, Middle East Report Online, November 23, 2005; "When Everything Is Permissible," Ha'aretz editorial, June 6, 2005; "It Can Happen Here," Ha'aretz editorial, November 22, 2004; Chris McGreal, "Snipers with Children in Their Sights," Guardian, June 28, 2005; Chris McGreal, "Israel Shocked by Image of Soldiers Forcing Violinist to Play at Roadblock," Guardian, November 29, 2004; Greg Myre, "Former Israeli Soldiers Tell of Harassment of Palestinians," New York Times, June 24, 2004; Reuven Pedatzur, "The Message to the Soldiers Was Clear," Ha'aretz, December 13, 2004; and Conal Urquhart, "Israeli Soldiers Tell of Indiscriminate Killings by Army and a Culture of Impunity," Guardian, September 6, 2005.

106. Reuvan Pedatzur, "More than a Million Bullets," Ha'aretz, June 29, 2004; and Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 387-88.

107. These figures cover the period between September 29, 2000, and December 31, 2005, and are taken from B'Tselem press release, January 4, 2006.

108. Nathan Guttman, '"It's a Terrible Thing, Living with the Knowledge That You Crushed Our Daughter,'" Ha'aretz, April 30, 2004; Joshua Hammer, "The Death of Rachel Corrie," MotherJones.com, September/October 2003; Adam Shapiro, "Remembering Rachel Corrie," Nation, March 18, 2004; and Tsahar Rotem, "British Peace Activist Shot by IDF Troops in Gaza Strip," Ha'aretz, April 11, 2003.

109. Amnesty International reports that since the Second Intifada began in the fall of 2000, "Israeli authorities have routinely failed to investigate allegations of unlawful killings and other abuses of Palestinians by Israeli forces and settlers . . . Israeli forces have killed thousands of Palestinians, many of them unlawfully, yet scarcely any such incidents have been investigated properly and fewer still have resulted in the perpetrator being brought to justice . . . In the very few cases in which the Israeli authorities have conducted serious investigations into killings of Palestinians, resulting prosecutions have generally been unsuccessful or have resulted in the imposition of sentences that were not commensurate with the gravity of the offense." Amnesty International, "Road to Nowhere," December 2006, 27-28.

110. For a detailed discussion of Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians that makes extensive use of reports from different human rights groups, see Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, chaps. 4-9.

111. Quoted in Molly Moore, "Ex-Security Chiefs Turn on Sharon," Washington Post, November 15, 2003; "Ex-Shin Bet Heads Warn of'Catastrophe'Without Peace Deal," Ha'aretz, November 15, 2003. These comments were based on an interview in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on November 14, 2003. A copy of the interview, titled "We Are Seriously Concerned About he Fate of the State of Israel," can be found on the Global Policy Forum website, www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/israel-palestine/2003/1118fate.htm.

112. For example, B'Tselem reported that "in July [2006], the Israeli military killed 163 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 78 of whom (48 percent) were not taking part in the hostilities when

they were killed. Thirty-six of the fatalities were minors, and 20 were women. In the West Bank, 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in July. The number of Palestinian fatalities in July was the highest in any month since April 2002." August 3, 2006, press release, www.btselem.org/english/Press_Releases/20060803.asp. Amnesty International reports that from June 27, 2006, the date the IDF moved back into Gaza, through the end of November 2006, Israeli forces "killed more than 400 Palestinians and injured more than 1500 others in the Gaza Strip, including many unarmed civilians. Some 80 of those killed were children and more than 300 children were injured. In the same period, two Israeli civilians were killed and some 20 were injured in the south of Israel by rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups from Gaza." "Road to Nowhere," 8-9.

113. Quoted in Rory McCarthy, "UN Condemns Massive Human Rights Abuses in Gaza Strip," Guardian, November 21, 2006. For descriptions of the pain that the IDF has inflicted on the Palestinians living in Gaza, see Amnesty International, "Road to Nowhere," 7-13; Gideon Levy, "Gaza's Darkness," Ha'aretz, September 3, 2006; and OCHA, "The Humanitarian Monitor."

114. Quoted in Bill Maxwell, "U.S. Should Reconsider Aid to Israel," St. Petersburg Times (online), December 16, 2001. Also see Ron Pundak, "From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?" Survival 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 37.

115. Indeed, had Israel lost the Six-Day War in 1967 and some Arab ruler kept its population subjugated in the same conditions that the Palestinians have endured, the Israelis would almost certainly have used terrorism against their oppressors, and some Jews in the diaspora almost certainly would have mobilized to aid them, just as Irish Americans and overseas Tamils have backed terrorist groups in their ancestral homelands.

116. Morris, Righteous Victims, 147, 201. Also see Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (London: Zed Books, 1984), 100; and Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, Vol. 2, 1929-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 238. Morris notes that during the 1948 war, the main Jewish terrorist groups "knowingly planted bombs in bus stops with the aim of killing non-combatants, including women and children." Birth Revisited, 80.

117. J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: The Fight for Israeli Independence 1929-1949 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 103-253; Johann Hari, "Israel Should Remember Its Own 'Terrorist' Origins," Independent, July 24, 2006; Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940-1949 (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995); Bruce Hoffmann, The Failure of British Military Strategy Within Palestine, 1939-1947 (Israel: Bar-Ilan University, 1983); Morris, Righteous Victims, 173-80; and Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), chap. 22. According to Haim Levenberg, 210 of the 429 casualties from Jewish terrorism in Palestine during 1946 were civilians. The other 219 were police and soldiers. See Levenberg, Military Preparations, 72.

118. Bell, Terror Out of Zion, 336-40.

119. Quoted in Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, 485-86; and Bell, Terror Out of Zion, 340. On Shamir, see Avishai Margalit, "The Violent Life of Yitzhak Shamir," New York Review of Books, May 14, 1992. Shamir also said that his "proudest achievement" was "when, thanks to our efforts, we were able to fully unite all the underground groups fighting for the liberation of Israel." See "Shamir: Lifetime of Activism."

120. Barzilai, "Brief History."

121. "Palestinian Authority," New Republic editoria, February 18, 2002, 7.

122. The most objective accounts of what happened at Camp David and in the subsequent six months include Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002, trans. Susan Fairfield (NewYork: Other Press, 2003); Jeremy Pressman, "Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba?" International Security 28, no. 2 (Fall 2003); Pundak, "From Oslo to Taba"; Jerome Slater, "What Went

Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process," Political Science Quarterly 116, no. 2 (July 2001); Deborah Sontag, "Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed," New York Times, July 26, 2001; and Swisher, Truth About Camp David.

123. The figures in this paragraph and the next one are drawn from Pressman, "Visions in Collision," 16-18. Baraks offer also included a I percent land swap outside the West Bank, so some commentators describe his offer as being 92 percent rather than 91 percent.

124. The original territory assigned to Britain in the treaties that ended World War I included the east and west banks of the Jordan River. But in 1922, Britain created Transjordan (which later became Jordan) on the east bank. Henceforth, the British Mandate in Palestine included the territory that today comprises Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. When we refer to Mandate Palestine, we mean the post-1922 territories, of which Israel makes up 78 percent and the Occupied Territories 22 percent.

125. Describing a lengthy interview with Ehud Barak about what happened at Camp David, Benny Morris writes: "But in the West Bank, Barak says, the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River." Benny Morris, "Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)," New York Review of Books, June 13, 2002, 44. Also see the map in Pundak, "From Oslo to Taba," 46. For the Palestinian version of what the map looked like, see Orient House (Jerusalem), "Israel's Concessions," Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2000; and the map titled "Palestinian Characterization of the Final Proposal at Camp David," in Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). Contrary to both Barak and the Palestinians, Ross claims that the final map at Camp David gave the Palestinians control over a continuous piece of territory in the West Bank. See "Map Reflecting Actual Proposal at Camp David," ibid. Ross's assertion is not plausible, however, as even Barak admits that an Israeli-controlled road connecting Jerusalem with the Jordan River Valley would have bisected the West Bank. As long as Israel controlled that strategically important valley, it would need to be able to reach it with at least one well-defended connector road. Whereas Barak envisioned one connector road running eastward from Jerusalem, the Palestinians apparently envisioned a second one running eastward from the Ariel settlement to the Jordan River Valley. One might argue that the Israelis would eventually abandon those connector roads when they surrendered the Jordan River Valley. As noted, however, there was no guarantee that the Israelis would ever leave that valley, and even if they did, there was no guarantee that they would abandon the connector roads. The main reason for this continuing confusion about what the final map at Camp David looked like is that no official map was ever drawn up and, "at Barak's insistence, no written records were kept." Jerome Slater, "The Missing Pieces in the Missing Peace," Tikkun.org, May/June 2005.

126. Pressman, "Visions in Collision," 18.

127. Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 243-51; Slater, "What Went Wrong?"; and Sontag, "Quest for Mideast Peace."

128. Quoted in "Norman Finkelstein & Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami Debate: Complete Transcript," Democracy Now! radio and TV broadcast, February 14, 2006.

129. There is no evidence that Arafat stared the First Intifada either. See Morris, Righteous Victims, 561. "The main energizing force of the Intifada," Morris writes, "was the frustration of the national aspirations of the 650,000 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, 900,000 of the West Bank, and 130,000 of East Jerusalem, who wanted to live in a Palestinian state and not as stateless inhabitants under a brutal, foreign military occupation." Ibid., 562.

130. Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 284-85.

131. Quoted in Jeremy Pressman, "The Second Intifada: Background and Causes of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," Journal of Conflict Studies 22, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 116. Also see Yezid Sayigh, "Arafat and the Anatomy of a Revolt," Survival 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2001); Henry Siegman, "Partners for War," New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003, 24; Henry Siegman,

"Sharon and the Future of Palestine," NewYork Review of Books, December 2, 2004, 12; and Slater, "Missing Pieces."

132. Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, Final Report, April 30, 2001, 7.

133. Ibid., 5.

134. Ian S. Lustick, "Through Blood and Fire Shall Peace Arise," Tikkun.org, May/June 2002; Pressman, "The Second Intifada"; Mouin Rabbani, "A Smorgasbord of Failure: Oslo and the Al-Aqsa Intifada," in The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid, ed. Roane Carey (London: Verso, 2001), 69-89; Sara Roy, "Why Peace Failed: An Oslo Autopsy," Current History 101, no. 651 (January 2002); and Sara Roy, "Ending the Palestinian Economy," Middle East Policy 9, no. 4 (December 2002).

135. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 264.

136. Roy, "Why Peace Failed," 9.

137. Ron Dudai, "Trigger Happy: Unjustified Shooting and Violation of the Open-Fire Regulations During the al-Aqsa Intifada," B'Tselem draft report, March 2002.

138. Yasser Arafat, "The Palestinian Vision of Peace," New York Times, February 3, 2002; Yasser Arafat, text of press conference, Geneva, December 14, 1988, in journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 180-81; "Palestinians Affirm Israel's Right to Exist," CNN.com, December 14, 1998; Pressman, "Visions in Collision," 24-27; Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Jerome M. Segal, Creating the Palestinian State: A Strategy for Peace (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1989), chap. 1. One might argue that Arafat's commitment to the right of return for the Palestinians reveals that he was still bent on destroying Israel. But Arafat surely recognized that Israeli leaders would never agree to a peace settlement that would allow large numbers of Palestinians to move back into Israel. At the same time, however, it made good sense for Arafat not to soften his position on right of return before the negotiations, so that he could use this issue as a bargaining chip. Not surprisingly, there is considerable evidence that Palestinian leaders (including Arafat before he died) recognize that they will have to make major concessions on this important issue to get a final agreement. See Akiva Eldar and David Landau, "Arafat: Israel Is Jewish; Won't Cite Figure on Refugees," Ha'aretz, June 18, 2004; Associated Press, "PA Minister Shaath: Palestinian Right of Return Is Negotiable," Ha'aretz, August 20, 2003; Pressman, "Visions in Collision," 28-33; and M. J. Rosenberg, "Intractable Issue?" Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #144, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, July 18, 2003.

139. Akiva Eldar, "Popular Misconceptions," Ha'aretz, June 11, 2004; Akiva Eldar, "While They Were Sleeping," Ha'aretz, September 17, 2001; Danny Rubenstein, "The Stronger Side Creates Reality," Ha'aretz, June 16, 2004; and Emmanuel Sivan, "What the General Is Allowed," Ha'aretz, June 14, 2004.

140. Pressman, "Visions in Collision," 25.

141. "Official Palestinian Response to the Clinton Parameters (and letter to international community)," January 1, 2001, www.robat.scl.net/content/NAD/negotiations/clinton_parameters/ param2.php.

142. "Excerpts: White House Spokesman on Clinton-Arafat Talks," issued by Press Section, U.S. embassy in Israel, Janury 3, 2001; Transcript of "Clinton Speech on Mideast Peace Parameters (January 7, 2001)," Office of the White House Press Secretary, January 8, 2001; and Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 344. Also see Akiva Eldar, "The Battle for Public Opinion," Ha'aretz, June 24, 2002, and Pressman, "Visions in Collision," 20, both of which make clear that Israel also had serious reservations about the Clinton parameters.

143. Sontag, "Quest for Mideast Peace"; and Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 349-50.

144. Jeff Jacoby, "America Takes Side of Israel," Boston Globe, March 26, 2006. Block is quoted in Tony Czuczka, "Under Fire, Israel Lobby Rallies US Backers," EUX.TV: The Europe Channel (online), March 10, 2007. Also see Mart, Eye on Israel; and Martin Peretz, "Oil and Vinegar: Surveying the Israel Lobby," New Republic, April 10, 2006.

145. According to the historian Michelle Mart, during the Cold War "Israelis became 'American

ized,'" and this transformation was due in good part to a sense of "Judeo-Christian unity." "The Cultural Foundations of the US/Israel Alliance," Tikkun.org, November 11, 2006.

146. Jodie T. Allen and Alec Tyson, "The U.S. Publics Pro-Israel History," Pew Research Center, July 19, 2006; "Americans' Support for Israel Unchanged by Recent Hostilities," Pew Research Center press release, July 26, 2006; and Robert Ruby, "A Six-Day War: Its Aftermath in American Public Opinion," Pew Research Center, May 30, 2007.

147. Allen and Tyson, "The U.S. Public's Pro-Israel History"; Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Association with the Council on Foreign Relations, "America's Place in the World 2005: An Investigation of the Attitudes of American Opinion Leaders and the American Public About International Affairs," November 2005, 11-12.

148. "Conspiracy Theories and Criticism of Israel in Aftermath of Sept. 11 Attacks," Anti-Defamation League press release, November 1, 2001.

149. Steven Kull (principal investigator), "Americans on the Middle East Road Map" (Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, May 30, 2003), 9-11, 18-19.

150. "American Attitudes Toward Israel and the Middle East," survey conducted on March 18-25, 2005, and June 19-23, 2005, by the Marttila Communications Group for the Anti-Defamation League.

151. Andrew Kohut, "American Views of the Mideast Conflict," New York Times, May 14, 2002.

152. On Israeli responsibility for the second Lebanon war, see the ABC News-Washington Post poll conducted on August 3-6, 2006, and the CBS News-New York Times poll conducted on July 21-25, 2006, both of which can be found in "Israel, the Palestinians," PollingReport.com. Regarding the United States not taking sides, see the USA Today-GaWup poll, ibid.; and the Zogby poll taken August 11-15, 2006, the results of which are described in "Zogby Poll: U.S. Should Be Neutral in Lebanon War," Zogby International press release, August 17, 2006.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:41 PM

3:A DWINDLING MORAL CASE

1. "President Speaks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee," Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, May 18, 2004).

2. Quoted in Mark Chmiel, "Elie Wiesel and the Question of Palestine," Tikkun.org, November/December 2002.

3. Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 54-59; Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 169-74; Melani McAl-ister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 159-65; Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 50-51; and David Twersky, "Novelist Leon Uris Taught Jewish Readers to Stand Tall," Forward, June 27, 2003.

4. The principal myths are laid out and refuted in Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

5. For a brief but excellent summary of the "new history," see Avi Shlaim, "The New History of 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba," Miftah.org, March 18, 2004.

6. Meron Rappaport, "IDF Commander: We Fired More Than a Million Cluster Bombs in

Lebanon," Ha'aretz, September 12, 2006; and "Shooting Without a Target," Ha'aretz editorial, September 14, 2006.

7. Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 13. Also see Flapan, Birth of Israel, 187-99.

8. Morris, J 948 and After, 14. Morris sharply criticized our original article, "The Israel Lobby," in a lengthy essay ("And Now for Some Facts: The Ignorance at the Heart of an Innuendo," New Republic, May 8, 2006), alleging that we had made numerous historical errors. In particular, he challenged our interpretation of the military balance in the 1948 War of Independence, as well as our interpretation of several other key episodes of Zionist and Israeli history. Morris's critique required him to contradict his own very important early scholarship (and the work of other respected historians) that has done so much to illuminate Israel's founding and relationship with its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians. We believe this scholarship backs up our account of Israel's military superiority and territorial ambitions, as well as its policies on refugees. We have addressed Morris's charges in John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby,'" December 12, 2006, 26-46, available at www.israellobbybook.com.

9. On the military balance in the 1948 war, see Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947-1974 (New York: Harper, 1978), 3-19, 121-25; Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure," in The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, ed. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12-36; Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), chap. 4; Haim Levenberg, Military Preparations of the Arab Community in Palestine, 1945-1948 (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1993); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chaps. 1, 3; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999), 187-89, 191-96, 215-23, 235-36, 241-42; Morris, 1948 and After, 13-16; and Martin Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Forces (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), 77-82.

10. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), 45.

11. Quoted in ibid., 22. For evidence that the Zionists understood that their fighting forces had a decisive advantage over the Palestinians and that this situation allowed them to pursue aggressive policies against the Palestinians, see ibid., esp. 22-3, 26, 41, 44-46, 70, 79, 84.

12. Morris, 1948 and After, 15.

13. Ibid.

14. Morris, Righteous Victims, 393.

15. On the military balances in the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars, see Dupuy, Elusive Victory, 146-47, 212-14, 231-44, 333-40, 388-90, 597-605, 623-33; Morris, Righteous Victims, 286-91, 311-13, 393-95; and Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, 137-38, 179-82, 239-43.

16. Israel's economy suffered a downturn in 2001-02, after the start of the Second Intifada in October 2000. Most experts believe, however, that the global economic meltdown was largely responsible for that downturn. An article in Forbes in late May 2002 summarizes the conventional wisdom: "The Israeli government and private economists estimate that two-thirds of the savage tumble in Israel's GDP growth, from 6.4% in 2000 to a current rate of zero, was due not to terrorism but to the worldwide slump led by high-tech." David Simons, "Cold Calculation of Terror," Forbes, May 28, 2002. The economy rebounded in 2003-05, even though the Palestinian uprising continued. Also see Emma Clark, "Israel's Neglected Economy," BBC News (online), September 2, 2002; Nadav Morag, "The Economic and Social Effects of Intensive Terrorism: Israel, 2000-2004," Middle East Review of International Affairs 10, no. 3 (September 2006); Neal Sandler, "Israel's Economy: As if the Intifada Weren't Enough," BusinessWeek, June 18, 2001; and Linda Sharaby, "Israel's Economic Growth: Success Without Security," Middle East Review of International Affairs 6, no. 3 (September 2002).

17. Amos Harel, "Israel Maintains Its Strategic Advantage, Says Jaffee Center," Ha'aretz, November 23, 2005. Also see Uri Bar-Joseph, "The Paradox of Israeli Power," Survival 46, no. 4 (Winter 2004-05); and Martin Van Creveld, "Opportunity Beckons," Jerusalem Post, May 16, 2003. The Jaffee Center has now been incorporated into a new institution, the Institute for National Strategic Studies.

18. Alan Dershowitz, "Debunking the Newest—and Oldest—Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt 'Working Paper,'" John F. Kennedy School of Government Faculty Research Working Paper, Harvard University, April 2006, 22; and Martin Peretz, "Killer Angels: Murdering Jews, Then and Now," New Republic, April 15, 2002, 17-18.

19. Morris, 1948 and After, 11-12. The subsequent Morris quotation in this paragraph is from ibid., 13.

20. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35-36. Also see Flapan, Birth of Israel, 119-52.

21. This conventional wisdom is reflected in Michael B. Oren, "Did Israel Want the Six-Day War?" Azure 5759, no. 7 (Spring 1999); and Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

22. The best new works on the origins of the 1967 war include Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 96-114; Norman G. Finkelstein, "Abba Eban with Footnotes," Journal of Palestine Studies 32, no. 3 (Spring 2003); Roland Popp, "Stumbling Decidedly into the Six-Day War," Middle East Journal 60, no. 2 (Spring 2006); and Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

23. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2000), 237.

24. Ibid., 235. Also see Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Israel and Syria: Correcting the Record," Washington Post, December 24, 1999.

25. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 100.

26. Segev, 1967, 202-12, 295-96.

27. Quoted in ibid., 300. Also see ibid., 387-88.

28. Quoted in Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 76-77.

29. Morris, Righteous Victims, 387. Also see John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 155-62.

30. Quoted in Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, 159.

31. Yoram Meital, Peace in Tatters: Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 148-52; Charles A. Radin, "Arabs Offer to Accept Israel with Conditions," Boston Globe, March 29, 2002; and Howard Schneider, "Arab Countries Unanimously Endorse Saudi Peace Plan," Washington Post, March 29, 2002.

32. According to the Law of Return, a "Jew" is defined as "a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion." The actual law and the relevant amendments can be found at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1950_1959/Law%20of%20Return%205710-1950. There has recently been discussion in Israel about passing legislation to recognize as Jewish those individuals who have a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother. See Shahar Ilan, "Bill Would Recognize Judaism Through Father," Ha'aretz, March 12, 2006.

33. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel can be found in John Norton Moore, ed., The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Readings and Documents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 934-37.

34. David Ben-Gurion, Israel: A Personal History, trans. Nechemia Meyers and Uzy Nystar (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1971), 839.

35. These numbers are based on Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel, 2006, Table 2.1, www 1 .cbs.gov.il/reader/; and Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, Palestine Facts and Info, "Population," www.passia.org/palestine_facts/ facts_and_figures/0_facts_and_figures.htm. There are about 300,000 individuals living in Israel who are defined as "others" by the CBS. Most of them are family members of Jewish immigrants or are individuals who have Jewish ancestors but not a Jewish mother, and are

therefore not categorized as Jewish by the Israeli government. If one categorizes them as Jewish, then the total number of Jews in Israel would be about 5.6 million, not 5.3 million, which is the number the CBS uses.

36. A public opinion survey of Israeli Jews taken in February-March 2007 concluded that "the demographic challenge is of growing urgency to most of the Jewish population and helps define the collective approach to national security issues." Yehuda Ben Meir and Dafna Shaked, "The People Speak: Israeli Public Opinion on National Security, 2005-2007," Memorandum no. 90 (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, May 2007), 10, 64-65. Also see Aluf Benn, "Israel's Identity Crisis," Salon.com, May 16, 2005; Larry Derfner, "Sounding the Alarm About Israel's Demographic Crisis," Forward, January 9, 2004; Jon E. Dougherty, "Will Israel Become an Arab State?" NewsMax.com, January 12, 2004; Lily Galili, "A Jewish Demographic State," Ha'aretz, June 28, 2002; and Gideon Levy, "Wombs in the Service of the State," Ha'aretz, September 9, 2002.

37. Shulamit Aloni, "A Country for Some of Its Citizens?" Ha'aretz, February 24, 2007. The Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty can be found on the Knesset website, www .knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic3_eng.htm.

38. Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), 17-18. Also see Adalah and the Arab Association for Human Rights, "Equal Rights and Minority Rights for the Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel," a report to the UN Human Rights Committee on Israel's Implementation of Articles 26 and 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, July 1998; As'ad Ghanem, Nadim Rouhana, and Oren Yiftachel, "Questioning 'Ethnic Democracy': A Response to Sammy Smooha," Israel Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 1998); David B. Green, "The Other Israelis," Boston Globe, February 25, 2007; Human Rights Watch, Second Class: Discrimination Against Palestinian Arab Children in Israel's Schools (New York, September 2001), chap. 8; Frances Raday, "Religion, Multiculturalism and Equality: The Israeli Case," in Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Vol. 25 (1995), ed. Yoram Dinstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), 193-241; Ahmad H. Sa'di, "Israel as Ethnic Democracy: What Are the Implications for the Palestinian Minority?" Aral? Studies Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Winter 2000); and Sammy Smooha, "Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype," Israel Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall 1997).

9. "The Official Summation of the Or Commission Report," published in Ha'aretz, September 2, 2003. For evidence of how hostile many Israelis were to the report's findings and recommendations, see "No Avoiding the Commission Recommendations," Ha'aretz editorial, September 4, 2003; and Molly Moore, "Israelis Look Inward After Critical Report," Washington Post, September 3, 2003. Also see Bernard Avishai, "Saving Israel from Itself: A Secular Future for the Jewish State," Harper's, January 2005; Ian Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); and Chris McGreal, "Worlds Apart," Guardian, February 6, 2006.

40. Roee Nahmias, "Marriage to an Arab Is National Treason," Ynetnews.com, March 27, 2007; and Yoav Stern, "Poll: 50% of Israeli Jews Support State-Backed Arab Emigration," Ha'aretz, March 27, 2007. For similar results in a 2006 survey, see Eli Ashkenazi and Jack Khoury, "Poll: 68% of Jews Would Refuse to Live in Same Building as an Arab," Ha'aretz, March 22, 2006; Chris McGreal, "41% of Israel's Jews Favor Segregation," Guardian, March 24, 2006; Sharon Roffe-Ofir, "Poll: Israeli Jews Shun Arabs," Ynetnews.com, March 22, 2006; and Kenneth J. Theisen, "Racism Alive and Well in Israel?" Pittsburgh Independent Media Center (online), June 1, 2006.

41. Israeli Democracy Institute, "The Democracy Index: Major Findings 2003." This summary of the report can be found at www.idi.org.il/english/article.asp?id=1466.

42. According to a 2007 public opinion survey, 63 percent of Israeli Jews oppose including an Arab minister in the cabinet. In 2004, 75 percent opposed the idea, while 60 percent opposed it in 2005 and 2006. Ben Meir and Shaked, "The People Speak," 80. Also see ibid., 22, 79-82; Orly Halpern, "Arab Cabinet Pick Stirs 'Zionism-Racism' Debate," Forward, January 19, 2007; Gil Hoffman, '"Majadleh Slot the End of Zionism,'" Jerusalem Post, January 10,

2007; Ronny Sofer, "Cabinet Approves First Arab Minister," Ynetnews.com, January 28, 2007; and Scott Wilson, "In First, Arab Muslim Joins Israeli Cabinet," Washington Post, January 29, 2007.

43. Quoted in Justin Huggler, "Israel Imposes 'Racist' Marriage Law," Independent, August 1,

2003. Also see James Bennet, "Israel Blocks Palestinians from Marrying into Residency,"

New York Times, July 31, 2003; "Racist Legislation," Ha'aretz editorial, July, 19, 2004;

"Racist Legislation," Ha'aretz editorial, January 18, 2005; and Shahar Ilan, "Law Denying

Family Unification to Israelis and Palestinians Extended," Ha'aretz, March 21, 2007. Even

the Anti-Defamation League criticized the legislation, albeit mildly. Nathan Guttman, Yair

Ettinger, and Sharon Sadeh, "ADL Criticizes Law Denying Citizenship to Palestinians Who

Marry Israelis," Ha'aretz, August 5, 2003.

44. Quoted in Tovah Tzimuki, "Government Supports Revocation of Citizenship," Ynetnews.com, January 8, 2007. Also see Saed Bannoura, "Israeli Knesset Passes Law to Revoke Citizenship of'Unpatriotic' Israelis," International Middle East Media Center (online), January 10, 2007; Sheera Claire Frenkel, "'Disloyalty' Bill Passes First Hurdle," Jerusalem Post, January 10, 2007; Tom Segev, "Conditional Citizenship," Ha'aretz, January 11, 2007; and Yuval Yoaz, "Government to Back Bill Allowing Court to Rescind Traitors' Citizenship," Ha'aretz, January 7, 2007.

45. Quoted in Larry Derfner, "Rattling the Cage: A Bigot Called Bibi," Jerusalem Post, January 3, 2007. Also see Aluf Benn and Gideon Alon, "Netanyahu: Israel's Arabs Are the Real Demographic Threat," Ha'aretz, December 18, 2003; Ron Dermer, "The Nerve of Bibi," Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2007; Karina's Kolumn (Karina Robinson), "Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel's Prime Minister in Waiting," Banker (online), July 1, 2004; and Neta Sela, "Netanyahu: Pensions Cut—Arabs' Birth Rate Declined," Ynetnews.com, January 3, 2007.

46. These statements are not isolated examples. In early 2004, for example, Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim suggested that Palestinian terrorism is due to a "genetic blemish." His views were supported by another member of the Knesset, who said that terrorism is "in their blood," which is why an Arab "will stab you in the back" if you "turn your back" on him. Even Benny Morris, the historian whose earlier scholarship has done so much to reveal Israel's true policies toward the Palestinians, has nonetheless referred to them as "barbarians" who should be treated like "serial killers." Begins comment is from Amnon Kapeliuk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,'" New Statesman, June 25, 1982, 12. Eitan's comments are from David K. Shipler, "Most West Bank Arabs Blaming U.S. for Impasse," NewYork Times, April 14, 1983; and Uzi Benziman, Sharon: An Israeli Caesar (NewYork: Adama Books, 1985), 264. Ya'alon's comment is from Ari Shavit, "The Enemy Within," Ha'aretz, August 27, 2002. Boim's comment and his supporter's comments are from Yuval Yoaz, "AG: Ethics Committee to Probe Racist Comments Made by MKs," Ha'aretz, August 10, 2004. Morris's comment is from Ari Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest," Ha'aretz, January 9, 2004.

47. Larry Derfner, "Rattling the Cage: The Racism of Israeli Youth," Jerusalem Post, January 17, 2007. Also see Ahiya Raved, "Youth Believe Arabs Dirty, Uneducated," Ynetnews.com, January 9, 2007.

48. Quoted in Ben Lynfield, "The Rise of Avigdor Lieberman," Nation, December 14, 2006. Also see Uri Avnery, "The Lovable Man"? Lieberman and the Decline of Israeli Democracy," Antiwar.com, November 3, 2006; Akiva Eldar, "Let's Hear It for the Haiders," Ha'aretz, October 30, 2006; Leonard Fein, "The Fantasies of Avigdor Lieberman," Forward, October 20, 2006; Gershom Gorenberg, "The Minister for National Fears," Atlantic, May 2007; and Henry Siegman, "Hurricane Carter," Nation, January 22, 2007. Effi Eitam, the former head of the National Religious party, and Rehavam Ze'evi, an Israeli general who founded the right-wing Moledet party, were the previous government ministers who spoke out in favor of transfer.

49. "The Democracy Index: Major Findings 2003"; Yulie Khromchenko, "Survey: Most Jewish Israelis Support Transfer of Arabs," Ha'aretz, June 22, 2004; Yoav Stern, "Poll: Most Israeli Jews Say Israeli Arabs Should Emigrate," Ha'aretz, April 4, 2005; McGreal, "41% of Israel's

Jews"; Amiram Barkat and Jack Khoury, "Poll: Gov't Should Help Arab Citizens Emigrate," Ha'aretz, May 10, 2006; and Roffe-Ofir, "Poll." Also see Uzi Arad, "Swap Meet: Trading Land for Peace," New Republic, November 28 and December 5, 2005; Amnon Barzilai, "More Israeli Jews Favor Transfer of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs—Poll Finds," Ha'aretz, October 10, 2005; Arik Carmon, "A Blot on Israeli Democracy," Ha'aretz, December 12, 2005; Evelyn Gordon, "No Longer the Political Fringe," Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2006; Ben Lynfield, "Israeli Expulsion Idea Gains Steam," Christian Science Monitor, February 6, 2002; Stern, "Poll: 50% of Israeli Jews"; Matthew Wagner, "New Proposal: Transfer-for-Cash Plan," Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2007; and Steven I. Weiss, "Israeli Rightist Calls for Transfer of Arabs," Forward, September 15, 2006.

50. BTselem, "The Scope of Israeli Control in the Gaza Strip," www.btselem.org/english/ Gaza_Strip/Gaza_Status.asp; David Sharrock, "Israel's 'Invisible Hand' Still Controls Gaza, Says Report," Times (London), January 15, 2007; and Scott Wilson, "For Gaza, a Question of Responsibility," Washington Post, March 21, 2007.

51. Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, "La catastrophe humaine de Gaza est une bombe a retarde-ment," Figaro (online), September 28, 2006. Also see Steven Erlanger, "As Parents Go Unpaid, Gaza Children Go Hungry," New York Times, September 14, 2006; Steven Erlanger, "Years of Strife and Lost Hope Scar Young Palestinians," New York Times, March 12, 2007; Donald Macintyre, "Gaza in Danger of Turning into a 'Giant Prison,' Says Mideast Envoy," Independent, November 14, 2005; Rory McCarthy, "Occupied Gaza Like Apartheid South Africa, Says UN Report," Guardian, February 23, 2007; Sara Roy, "The Economy of Gaza," Znet (online), October 9, 2006; Mohammed Samhouri, "Looking Beyond the Numbers: The Palestinian Socioeconomic Crisis of 2006," Middle East Brief no. 16, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, February 2007; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), "Statement on Gaza by United Nations Humanitarian Agencies Working in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," August 3, 2006; and OCHA, 'The Humanitarian Monitor: Occupied Palestinian Territory," no. 10, February 2007.

52. "Making the Law a Laughingstock," Ha'aretz editorial, December 31, 2006.

53. Steven Erlanger, "West Bank Sites on Private Land, Data Shows," New York Times, March 14, 2007; Nadav Shragai, "Peace Now: 32% of Land Held for Settlements Is Private Property," Ha'aretz, March 14, 2007. Also see Greg Myre, "For West Bank, It's a Highway to Frustration," New York Times, November 18, 2006; and "Legitimization of Land Theft," Ha'aretz editorial, February 27, 2007.

54. The first wave of European Jews to come to Palestine is known as the First Aliyah, and it covers the years from 1882 to 1903. There were slightly more than fifteen thousand Jews in Palestine in 1882 according to the Ottoman census. Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 10-13, has excellent data for the years from 1850 to 1915. However, McCarthy's numbers, which are based on Ottoman census figures, exclude "an unknown number of Jewish immigrants who had kept their original citizenship." He notes further that "there would have been relatively few non-citizen Jews at that early date" and estimates the number as "perhaps one to two thousand." Thus the upper bound is probably seventeen thousand Jews in Palestine in 1882. Also see Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 124.

55. The total population of Palestine in 1893 was roughly 530,000, of whom about 19,000 (3.6 percent) were Jewish. Arabs comprised the vast majority of the remaining population. McCarthy, Population of Palestine, 10.

56. This issue was revisited in the mid-1980s when Joan Peters published From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine (New York: Harper, 1984). She claimed that when the Jews began arriving in Palestine from Europe, there were far fewer Arabs there than the conventional wisdom maintained, and that the Arabs moved to Palestine in large numbers only after the Jews began to develop the land. Peters's book was en

thusiastically endorsed by a large number of prominent American Jews. However, shortly after its publication, a number of scholars showed that not only was From Time Immemorial based on a "highly tendentious use—or neglect—of the available source material," but its core thesis was dead wrong. Yehoshua Porath, "Mrs. Peters's Palestine," New York Review of Books, January 16, 1986. In a conversation with the New York Times, Porath, a distinguished Israeli historian, said that Peters's book was "a sheer forgery" and that in Israel it "was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon." Colin Campbell, "Dispute Flares over Book on Claims to Palestine," New York Times, November 28, 1985. Also see Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 2001), chap. 2.

57. Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture

(NewYork: Routledge, 1999), 51.

58. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 9.

59. There were about 1.2 million Palestinians in addition to the 650,000 Jews living in Palestine in 1948, which translates into a population that was 65 percent Palestinian and 35 percent Jewish. See Morris, 1948 and After, 14. Flapan uses population figures in which the Jews are 33 percent of the population (Birth of Israel, 44), while Morris uses 37 percent in Righteous Victims (186).

60. Some believe that Ben-Gurion and his followers had less ambitious territorial goals than Revisionists like Vladimir Jabotinsky. But as Avi Shlaim makes clear, "The difference between [Ben-Gurion] and the Revisionists was not that he was a territorial minimalist while they were territorial maximalists, but rather that he pursued a gradualist strategy while they adhered to an all-or-nothing approach." Shlaim, Iron Wall, 21. The Zionists were careful not to say much in public about their ultimate goals in Palestine, for fear it would anger the Arabs and the British and undermine their enterprise. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion laid out his vision of what the borders of Israel would look like in a coauthored book that was written in Yiddish and published in the United States in 1918. In addition to what is today Israel, Ben-Gurion's vision included the Occupied Territories, southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, part of southern Syria, a large part of Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula. Morris, Righteous Victims, 75.

61. Flapan, Birth of Israel, 103-104; and Morris, Birth Revisited, 69.

62. These quotes are from Flapan, Birth of Israel, 22; and Shlaim, Iron Wall, 21. For a more detailed discussion of the early Zionists' thinking about partition, see Mearsheimer and Walt, "Setting the Record Straight," 33-37.

63. Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 150.

64. Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists, and Palestine, 1921-1951 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1998). Also see Morris, 1948 and After, 10; Benny Morris, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1988); and Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

65. Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948," in The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, ed. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 40. Also see Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 33-34; and Shlaim, Iron Wall, 25.

66. Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Morris, Birth Revisited, chap. 2; and Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus," 39-48.

67. Quoted in Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, 128. Also see Morris, Righteous Victims, 140, 142, 168-69. Ben-Gurion's statement is from a memorandum he wrote prior to the Extraordinary Zionist Conference at New York's Biltmore Hotel in May 1942.

68. Quoted in Michael Bar-Zohar, Facing a Cruel Mirror: Israel's Moment of Truth (New York: Scribner, 1990), 16.

69. Quoted in Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest." Also see Benny Morris, "A New Exodus for the Middle East?" Guardian, October 3, 2002. Ben-Gurion told the Central Committee of the Histadrut on December 30, 1947: "In the area allocated to the Jewish state there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350,000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs. Together with the Jews of Jerusalem, the total population of the Jewish state at the time of its establishment, will be about a million, including almost 40 percent non-Jews. Such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish state. This [demographic] fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority . . . There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent." Quoted in Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, 176.

70. Quoted in Morris, Righteous Victims, 169.

71. Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus," 43-44.

72. Morris's Birth Revisited and Pappe's Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine provide detailed accounts of this event. Also see Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), chaps. 3-4; and Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, chp. 5. Morris notes that "the haphazard thinking about transfer before 1937 and the virtual consensus in support of the notion from 1937 on contributed to what happened in 1948 in the sense that they conditioned the Zionist leadership, and below it, the officials and officers who managed the new state's civilian and military agencies, for the transfer that took place. To one degree or another, these men all arrived at 1948, in no small measure owing to the continuous anti-Zionist Arab violence which played out against the growing persecution of Diaspora Jewry in central and eastern Europe, with a mindset which was open to the idea and implementation of transfer and expulsion. And the transfer that occurred—which encountered almost no serious opposition from any part of the Yishuv—transpired smoothly in large measure because of this pre-conditioning." Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus," 48.

73. Erskine Childers, "The Other Exodus," Spectator, May 12, 1961; Flapan, Birth of Israel, 81-118; Walid Khalidi, "Why Did the Palestinians Leave Revisited," Journal of Palestine Studies 34, no. 2 (Winter 2005); Walid Khalidi, "The Fall of Haifa," Middle East Forum 35, no. 10 (December, 1959); Morris, Birth Revisited; and Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 131. To be sure, some Arab commanders did instruct Palestinian civilians to evacuate their homes during the fighting, either to make sure that they did not get caught in a firefight or to ensure that they were not killed by the Zionist forces engaged in ethnically cleansing Palestinians. Fear of death at the hands of the Jews was an especially powerful motive to evacuate villages after the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin, where about 100 to 110 Palestinians were murdered on April 9, 1948. Morris, Righteous Victims, 209. As Morris reports, "The IDF Intelligence Service called Deir Yassin a decisive accelerating factor' in the general Arab exodus." Righteous Victims, 209. Orders to evacuate of this kind are not related to the myth of a voluntary or elite-directed evacuation. See Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 43-44.

74. Quoted in Morris, Birth Revisited, 318. For more detail on the Zionists' opposition to allowing the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, see ibid., chap. 5.

75. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1983), 143.

76. Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, xiii. Also see Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), which identifies the number of villages destroyed as 418, not 531. The difference in the number is a result of varying definitions of what constituted a Palestinian village. Pappe and several other Palestinian historians include some smaller communities in their count of villages, while Khalidi excludes them. Correspondence between authors and Ilan Pappe, May 15, 2007.

77. Quoted in Khalidi, All That Remains, xxxi.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:44 PM

2: ISRAEL: STRATEGIC ASSET OR LIABILITY?

1. A.F.K. Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Steven L. Spiegel, "Israel as a Strategic Asset," Commentary, June 1983; Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Steven L. Spiegel, "U.S.-Israel Relations after the Gulf War," Jerusalem Letter/ Viewpoints 117, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, July 15, 1991. Also see Steven Rosen,

"The Strategic Value of Israel," AIPAC Papers on U.S.-Israel Relations (Washington, DC: American Israel Public Affairs Committee, 1982).

2. Quoted in Ben Bradlee Jr., "Israel's Lobby," Boston Globe, April 29, 1984.

3. See http://aipac.Org/Publications/AIPACAnalysesIssueBriefs/The_U.S.-Israel_Strategic_Part nership.pdf; and http://aipac.Org/Publications/AIPACAnalysesIssueBriefs/The_U.S.Israel_ Relationship.pdf.

4. Project for the New American Century, "Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism," September 20, 2001, www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm; and "Mission Statement," Jewish Institute for National Secuity Affairs, www.jinsa.org/about/agenda/agenda.html.

5. Martin Kramer, "The American Interest," Azure 5767, no. 26 (Fall 2006): 24-25.

6. Efraim Inbar, "Still a Strategic Asset for the US," Jerusalem Post, October 8, 2006.

7. Not surprisingly, scholars like Spiegel, Organski, and Kramer downplay or dismiss the impact of domestic politics or lobbying groups on U.S. support for Israel. Organski claims that "U.S. policy decisions with respect to Israel have, in the main, been made by presidents and foreign policy elites both by themselves and for reasons entirely their own." Kramer suggests that "if the institutions of the [Israel] lobby were to disappear tomorrow, it is quite likely that American and other Western support would continue unabated." Spiegel describes the belief that the pro-Israel lobby has "great leverage" as a "myth." Despite these assertions, Spiegel's study contains numerous examples of the lobby shaping the perceptions and behavior of key decision makers. Kramer's own career suggests that he does not believe his own argument, as he has devoted considerable time and effort to defending U.S. support for Israel and attacking those who question it. See Organski, $36 Billion Bargain, 27; Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 386, 388; and Kramer, "American Interest," 31.

8. Scholars have analyzed Truman's decisions extensively, reaching varied conclusions about the importance of domestic politics and his sensitivities to Jewish opinion. It was clearly not the only factor that influenced his conduct as he sought to navigate the complex situation in Palestine, but virtually all accounts agree that the political preferences of American Jewry (magnified by the upcoming 1948 election) played a nontrivial role in his calculations. See Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 47-48; Kenneth Ray Bain, The March to Zion: United States Policy and the Founding of Israel (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1979), 195-97, 202; Zvi Ganin, Truman, American Jewry, and Israel, 1945-1948 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979); and Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2007), 484, 488-89, 499.

9. Quoted in Jerome Slater, "Ideology vs. the National Interest: Bush, Sharon, and U.S. Policy in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," Security Studies 12, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 167.

10. Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 148-49; and David Schoenbaum, The United States and the State of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 136-37.

11. The Nixon/Kissinger strategy is summarized in William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in 1967, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 69-70, 92-94; Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 1279, 1289-91, chap. 10; and Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 195-205.

12. Israel allowed Western aircraft to overfly Israeli territory during the 1958 Jordan crisis, and agreed to a U.S. request to intervene in support of King Hussein following Syrian intervention in the 1970 clash between Hussein and the PLO. In the end, Jordanian air units attacked the Syrians on their own and the Syrians withdrew wthout Israel having to respond. U.S. officials were grateful for Israeli support in both cases, but as Alan Dowty notes, Israel's contribution to resolving the 1970 crisis was "secondary at best." Nigel Ashton also suggests that Hussein regarded Israel as a potential threat during the crisis and that U.S. officials mistakenly "credited Israel with helping the United States to win a cold war victory in what was, in reality, an inter-Arab struggle." Alan Dowty, Middle East Crisis: Decisionmaking in 1958, 1970, and 1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 177; Nigel J. Ash

ton, "Pulling the Strings: King Hussein's Role During the Crisis of 1970 in Jordan," International History Review 28, no. 1 (March 2006): 109; and Quandt, Peace Process, 79-83.

13. Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Friends in Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 66-68, 114-15.

14. For a sympathetic but skeptical analysis of the "strategic asset" argument by the longtime head of the Military Assistance Branch of the Office of Management and Budget, see Harry Shaw, "Strategic Dissensus," Foreign Policy 61 (Winter 1985-86).

15. Reportedly a response to the killing of an Israel bicyclist by infiltrators from Egypt, the Gaza raid has also been interpreted as Ben-Gurion's way of boosting Israeli morale, dramatizing his return to power, and reducing Nasser's growing prestige. But as Shlomo Ben-Ami observes, "Rather than cutting short Egypt's commitment to a war strategy, [the Gaza operation] enhanced it." Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 77; Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2001), 123-29; Michael Brecher, Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 254-55, esp. note 1; and E.L.M. Burns, Between Arab and Israeli (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 20. Syria had similar motives for seeking Soviet arms during this period, and its desire for aid was intensified by an especially strong Israeli raid in December 1955. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 62, esp. note 36.

16. On the Soviet Union's turbulent relationship with its Arab allies, see Mohamed Heikal, The Sphinx and the Commissar: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in the Middle East (New York: Harper, 1976); Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Red Star on the Nile: The Soviet-Egyptian Influence Relationship Since the June War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Ya'acov Roi, ed., From Encroachment to Involvement: A Documentary Study of Soviet Foreign Policy in the Middle East, 1945-1973 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974).

17. For a persuasive argument to this effect, see Jerome Slater, "The Superpowers and an Arab-Israeli Political Settlement: The Cold War Years," Political Science Quarterly 105, no. 4 (Winter 1990-91).

18. "Kissinger Memorandum: To Isolate the Palestinians,'" MERIP Reports no. 96 (May 1981): 24. This article is a memorandum of a June 1975 conversation between Kissinger and the so-called Klutznick Group, a gathering of Jewish-American leaders organized by Philip Klutznick, a former president of B'nai B'rith International and former U.S. secretary of commerce. Also see Quandt, Peace Process, 103-104.

19. Ussama Makdisi, "'Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World: An Interpretation of a Brief History," Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (September 2002): 538-39. Alfred Prados of the Congressional Research Service agrees, noting, "The United States, a latecomer to the Middle East, enjoyed a more favorable image in the region than did its European counterparts in the 19th and early 20th centuries." "Middle East: Attitudes Toward the United States," Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, December 31, 2001, 2.

20. Shibley Telhami, The Stakes: America and the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002), 50-59; and Makdisi, "'Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World," 548-50.

21. Shaw, "Strategic Dissensus," 137.

22. Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (NewYork: William Morrow, 1976), 512-13.

23. The total cost inflicted by the "oil weapon" was almost certainly larger, as it had long-term effects on inflation, real income, and productivity growth, as well as indirect effects on investment, currency price volatility, and other factors, but there is considerable disagreement among economists regarding the magnitude of these effects. On petroleum imports, see Dominick Salvatore, "Petroleum Prices and Economic Performance in the G-7 Countries," in Siamack Shojai and Bernard S. Katz, eds., The Oil Market in the 1980s: A Decade of Decline (New York: Praeger, 1992), 94; and Mancur Olson, "The Productivity Slowdown, the Oil Shocks and the Real Cycle," Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 43-69. The cost to OECD countries was to push their net oil import bill from $35 billion in 1973 to more than $100 billion in 1974. See Robert J. Lieber, The Oil Decade: Conflict and Co

operation in the West (New York: Praeger, 1983), 21. The GDP estimate is that of the Federal Energy Administration and of many economists. See Edward N. Krapels, Oil Crisis Management: Strategic Stockpiling for International Security (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 34; and Fiona Venn, The Oil Crisis (London: Longman, 2002), 154-55. The calculation for 2000 dollars uses data from Louis D. Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, "The Annual Real and Nominal GDP for the United States, 1790-Present," Economic History Services, October 2005.

24. Quoted in Jeffrey Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1989), 277.

25. Quoted in Roland Popp, "Stumbling Decidedly into the Six Day War," Middle East Journal 60, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 300. Tom Segev has confirmed that Rostow's appraisal was essentially correct. See his 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 256-58.

26. Shlomo Brom, "The War in Iraq: An Intelligence Failure," Strategic Assessment (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University) 6, no. 3 (November 2003); "Selections from the Media, 1998-2003," ibid., 17-19; Gideon Alon, "Report Slams Assessment of Dangers Posed by Libya, Iraq," Ha'aretz, March 28, 2004; Dan Baron, "Israeli Report Blasts Intelligence for Exaggerating the Iraqi Threat," JTA.org, March 28, 2004; Greg Myre, "Lawmakers Rebuke Israeli Intelligence Services over Iraq," New York Times, March 29, 2004; and James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 72-73.

27. Kramer, "American Interest," 24-25.

28. Shaw also notes that "all Israelis are acutely aware of the burden for a country of only 4 million people of lives lost in even short, successful wars. Israel simply lacks the personnel to sacrifice on costly military adventures beyond its immediate neighborhood." "Strategic Dis-sensus," 130.

29. Quoted in Duncan L. Clarke, Daniel B. O'Connor, and Jason D. Ellis, Send Guns and Money: Security Assistance and U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 173. Another DOD official noted that Israel's "proximity to the Gulf is not enough to be of real use as a base for fighting there, except on paper. We need to get much closer in the event of any actual military contingency, and that's why we're going for forward basing in Oman." Israel's contribution would be limited to maintenance and possibly hospital facilities. See Joe Stork, "Israel as a Strategic Asset," in MERIP Reports no. 105, Reagan Targets the Middle East (May 1982), 12.

30. Shaw, "Strategic Dissensus," 133.

31. See the discussion of Operation Earnest Will at www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/ earnest_will.htm; and Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (New York: Routledge, 1991), 129-32, 166, 186-91, 202-204.

32. "Kissinger Memorandum," 25.

33. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan told the American Jewish Press Association that "Israel is a strategic asset for the U.S., [and] I believe we must have policies which giv concrete expression to that position." See Stork, "Israel as a Strategic Asset," 3; and Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 410.

34. With respect to the latter element, Feldman says "the clearest manifestation of this phenomenon is the unique role of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)." See his The Future of U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1996), 5-6.

35. Bernard Lewis, "Rethinking the Middle East," Foreign Affairs 71, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 110-11; Bernard Reich, Securing the Covenant: United States-Israeli Relations After the Cold War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 123; and Robert J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 137.

36. Waldegrave is quoted in David Kimche, The Last Option: After Nasser, Arafat, and Saddam Hussein, the Quest for Peace in the Middle East (New York: Scribner, 1991), 236; Lewis, "Re

thinking the Middle East," 110-11. History repeated itself during the second Gulf War in 2003. The United States needed to assemble a large coalition in order to make its preventive war look legitimate, and it therefore worked overtime to persuade an array of countries to contribute troops to the "coalition of the willing." But Israel was absent from this list, even though its leaders and people strongly supported the war. We address this issue at greater length in Chapter 8.

37. Based on data from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism database, www.tkb.org.

38. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have shown that some members of the Clinton administration placed a high priority on counterterrorism, but they also document how difficult it was to implement that priority during the 1990s. In their words, "The work was difficult because a government that had never viewed terrorism as a first-tier threat had neither the organization nor the laws to deal with it that way. In many agencies offices handling counterterrorism issues were bureaucratic backwaters, their managers carrying none of the heft of colleagues who deal with geographic regions or high-profile issues such as arms control." It is also instructive that the Bush administration did not place a high priority on terrorism upon taking office. See Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), 221, 327-29; and Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 227-36.

39. Put differently, the U.S. defense budget was over half the size of the entire combined economies of these four states (measured on a purchasing parity basis). Figures from The Military Balance 2000-2001 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2001); and Central Intelligence Agency, World Facthook 2000 (online).

40. For an excellent analysis of U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran, and toward rogue states more generally, see Robert Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000). Although the Republican-controlled Congress generally favored more aggressive policies toward Iran and Iraq and occasionally voted to support stiffer sanctions and various antiregime exiles, the Clinton administration never undertook a serious effort at regime change.

41. Bruce W Jentleson and Christopher A. Whytock, "Who 'Won' Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy," International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005-2006); Ronald Bruce St. John, "Libya Is Not Iraq: Preemptive Strikes, WMD, and Diplomacy," Middle East Journal 58, no. 3 (Summer 2004); and Flynt Leverett, "Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb," New York Times, January 23, 2004.

42. Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy, 168-69.

43. Sharon is quoted in William Safire, "Israel or Arafat," New York Times, December 3, 2001; the unnamed official is quoted in Robert G. Kaiser, "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy," Washington Post, February 9, 2003 Also see Nathan Guttman, "A Marriage Cemented by Terror," Salon.com, January 24, 2006.

44. "Netanyahu Speech Before the U.S. Senate," April 10, 2002, www.netanyahu.org/ netspeacinse.html; and Benjamin Netanyahu, "Three Principles Key to Defeat of Terrorism," Chicago Sun-Times, January 7, 2002.

45. Ehud Barak, "Democratic Unity Is the Only Answer to Terrorism," Times (London), September 13, 2001.

46. "Entire Text of Olmert Speech to Congress," Jerusalem Post, May 24, 2006.

47. Robert Satloff, "Israel's Not the Issue, Pass It On," Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2001.

48. "Peace Can Only Come Once the US Gives Israel the Green Light to Eliminate Hamas and the Hezbollah," press release, Office of Charles Schumer, U.S. Senate, December 3, 2001, www.senate.gov/--schumer/l-Senator%20Schumer%20Website%20Files/pressroom/press_ releases/PR00766.html.

49. HR Res. 392 (May 2, 2002); and S Res. 247 (April 22, 2002).

50. According to one account, "Even as speakers singled out [Yasser] Arafat as a problem requiring immediate action, they also portrayed him as but one partner in a much wider 'coalition

of forces' that included Iran, Iraq, and Syria . . . With regard to neutralizing these threats, regime change was the preferred option." See Dana Hearn, "AIPAC Policy Conference, 21-23 April 2002," Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 67-68.

51. "Letter to President Bush on Israel, Arafat, and the War on Terrorism," Project for the New American Century, April 3, 2002, www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter-040302.htm. The principal author of the open letter, William Kristol, offered the same view during Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon, writing that "while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States" and concluding, "This is our war, too." William Kristol, "It's Our War," Weekly Standard, July 24, 2006.

52. Maoz and Seale are quoted in Susan Taylor Martin, "Experts Disagree on Dangers of Syria," St. Petersburg Times (online), November 3, 2002. Also see Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, 194.

53. See, among many other studies, Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, expanded 2nd ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); and Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (London: Verso, 2006).

54. As Robert Pape has convincingly shown, suicide terrorism is a tactic that a diverse array of political movements have adopted, usually when they were weak and trying to defeat a democratic adversary engaged in what the terrorists regard as illegitimate occupation. See Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).

55. Satloff, "Israel's Not the Issue"; Kramer, "American Interest," 29; Norman Podhoretz, "Israel Isn't the Issue," Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2001; Norman Podhoretz, "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win," Commentary, September 2004; Andrea Levin, "Don't Scapegoat Israel," Boston Globe, October 6, 2001; and Dennis Ross, "Bin Laden's Terrorism Isn't About the Palestinians," New York Times, October 12, 2001. Others making this point in response to our original article include Alan Dershowitz, "Debunking the Newest—and Oldest—Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt 'Working Paper,'" John F. Kennedy School of Government Faculty Research Working Paper, Harvard University, April 2006, 29; Marc Landy, "Zealous Realism: Comments on Mearsheimer and Walt," Forum (Berkeley Electronic Press) 4, issue 1, article 6 (2006); and Steven Simon, "Here's Where 'The Israel Lobby' Is Wrong," Daily Star, May 4, 2006.

56. Abdel Mahdi Abdallah, "Causes of Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: A Socio-Political Perspective," Middle East Review of International Affairs 7, no. 4 (December 2003).

57. Qutb formed his impressions of America during a visit here in 1948 and was later executed by the Egyptian government in 1966. See Yvonne Y. Haddad, "Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival," in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 67-98.

58. Quoted in Makdisi, "'Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World," 555.

59. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 250-51, 273; and "Transcript: The Yasin Interview," 60 Minutes, June 2, 2002, www.cbsnews.com/stories/ 2002/06/02/60minutes/printable510847.shtml.

60. Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2002), 87.

61. Quoted in Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 75-76.

62. Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, ed. Bruce Lawrence (London: Verso, 2005), 4.

63. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, 140-41.

64. Osama bin Laden, "From Somalia to Afghanistan" (March 1997), in Lawrence, Messages to the World, 46. For additional pre-9/11 condemnations of the United States for its support of Israel, and for accusations that the United States was colluding with Israel, see the following selections from the same volume: "Declaration of Jihad" (August 23, 1996), 30; "The

World Islamic Front" (February 23, 1998), 60-61; and "A Muslim Bomb" (December 1998), 66-70. Also see "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders" and "New Osama bin Laden Video Contains Anti-Israel and Anti-American Statements," on the Anti-Defamation League website, www.adl.org/terrorism_america/bin_l_print.asp.

65. Max Rodenbeck, "Their Masters Voice," New York Review of Books, March 9, 2006, 8. The books under review were Peter L. Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006), and Lawrence, Messages to the World.

66. "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," Staff Statement no. 16, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, June 16, 2004, 18. Also see Nathan Guttman, "Al-Qaida Planned Attacks during PM's Visit to White House," Ha'aretz, June 17, 2004; and Marc Perelman, "Bin Laden Aimed to Link Plot to Israel," Forward, June 25, 2004.

67. "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," 18.

68. Ibid., 4.

69. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 145, 147.

70. On the First Intifada, see Joost R. Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation, ed. Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (NewYork: Vintage, 2001), chap. 12; and Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising, Israel's Third Front, ed. and trans. Ina Fried-mann (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

71. Quoted in Michael Slackman, "As Crowds Demand Change, Lebanese Premier Is Puzzled," New York Times, December 11, 2006.

72. Pew Global Attitudes Project, A Year After Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Even Higher, Muslim Anger Persists (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, March 16, 2004), 21.

73. Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, December 2002), 54.

74. Shibley Telhami, The Stakes: America and the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 96. Also see Ami Eden, "9/11 Commission Finds Anger at Israel Fueling Islamic Terrorism Wave," Forward, July 30, 2004.

75. Makdisi continues: "No account of anti-Americanism in the Arab world that does not squarely address the Arab understanding of Israel can even begin to convey the nature, the depth, and the sheer intensity of Arab anger at the United States." "'Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World," 552.

76. "Impressions of America 2004: How Arabs View America, How Arabs Learn About America" (Washington, DC: Zogby International, June 2004), 3-5; "Five Nation Survey of th Middle East" (Washington, DC: Arab-American Institute/Zogby International, December 2006), 4; and Prados, "Middle East: Attitudes Toward the United States," 8.

77. Quoted in Peter Ford, "Why Do They Hate Us?" Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 2001.

78. Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, DC: Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, September 2004), 40; and 9/11 Commission Report, 376.

79. "Impressions of America 2004: A Six Nation Survey" (Washington, DC: Zogby International, 2004); Shibley Telhami, "Arab Public Opinion: A Survey in Six Countries," San Jose Mercury (online), March 16, 2003; John Zogby, The Ten Nation Impressions of America Poll (Utica, NY Zogby International, April 11, 2002); and Shibley Telhami, "Arab Attitudes Towards Political and Social Issues, Foreign Policy, and the Media," a public opinion poll by the Anwar Sadat Chair of Peace and Development, University of Maryland, and Zogby International, October 2005, www.bsos.umd.edu/sadat/pub/survey-2005.htm.

80. Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for U.S. Public Diplomacy in the

Arab and Muslim World, Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, submitted to the Committee on Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, October 1, 2003, 18. Also see Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views of a Changing World 2003: War with Iraq Further Divides Global Publics (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 3, 2003).

81. Warren Hoge, "U.N. Distances Itself from an Envoys Rebuke of Israel and the U.S.," New York Times, April 24, 2004; "Brahimi's Israel Comments Draw Annan, Israeli Fire," Ha'aretz, April 23, 2004; and "Egyptian Prez: Arabs Hate US," www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/ 20/world/printable612831 .shtml.

82. David Shelby, "Jordan's King Abdullah Stresses Urgency of Mideast Peace Process," March 7, 2007, www.usinfo.state.gov.

83. "President Discusses War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom," Cleveland, Ohio (White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 20, 2006).

84. Charles Krauthammer, "The Tehran Calculus," Washington Post, September 15, 2006. Also see Bernard Lewis, "August 22," Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2006. For a similar statement by two Israeli scholars, see Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren, "Contra Iran," New Republic, February 5, 2007. For the argument that Saddam Hussein was also irrational and undeterrable, see Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002).

85. Mao Zedong did make some blase remarks about nuclear war before China got the bomb, but these statements were almost certainly intended to discourage other nuclear powers from trying to put pressure on Beijing. See Alice Langly Hsieh, Communist China's Strategy in the Nuclear Era (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962). Rusk's statement is found in The China Reader, Vol. 3: Communist China, ed. Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (New York: Vintage, 1967), 508. On the Soviet Union, a classic statement is Richard Pipes, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Can Fight and Win a Nuclear War," Commentary, July 1977.

86. For the British diplomats' letter, see "Doomed to Failure in the Middle East," Guardian, April 27, 2004. Also see Nicholas Blanford, "US Moves Inflame Arab Moderates," Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2004; Rupert Cornwell, "Allies Warn Bush That Stability in Iraq Demands Arab-Israeli Deal," Independent, June 10, 2004; Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, "Arabs and Europeans Question 'Greater Middle East' Plan," Washington Post, February 22, 2004; and Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, "U.S. Goals for Middle East Falter," Washington Post, April 21, 2004. The American letter can be found at www.wrmea.com/letter_ to_bush.html.

87. Ze'ev Schiff, "Fitting into America's Strategy," Ha'aretz, August 1, 2003.

88. Jay Solomon, "Religious Divide: To Contain Iran, U.S. Seeks Help from Arab Allies," Wall Street Journal, Novmber 24, 2006.

89. James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs, The Iraq Study Group Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, December 2006), 39.

90. On the "Lavon affair," see Schoenbaum, The United States and the State of Israel, 107-108. On Israel's various dealings with Iran, see "Israel-Iran Oil Deal Disclosed and Tied to Captives," New York Times, December 20, 1989; Youssef M. Ibrahim, "Oil Sale Disclosure Upsets Israeli-Iranian Contacts," New York Times, December 21, 1989; Bishara Bahbah, "Arms Sales: Israel's Link to the Khomeini Regime," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (online), January 1987; and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 3-22, 108-75. The Reagan administration did supply arms to Iran as part of the notorious Iran-contra arms scandal, but this covert operation was largely intended to secure the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon and was widely seen as contrary to broader U.S. interests once it was exposed.

91. Quoted in Duncan L. Clarke, "Israel's Unauthorized Arms Transfers," Foreign Policy 99 (Summer 1995): 94.

92. Richard C. Stiener, "Foreign Military Aid to Israel: Diversion of U.S. Funds and Circumvention of U.S. Program Restrictions," testimony before the Subcommittee on Oversight and

Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives (Washington, DC: U.S. General Accounting Office, October 1993), 22. Also see Edward T. Pound, "Israel Is Impeding U.S. Dotan Probe, Documents Show," Wall Street Journal, July 29, 1992; and Edward T. Pound, "U.S. Says Israel Withheld Help in Dotan Probe," Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1992.

93. On this protracted dispute, see Aluf Benn and Amnon Barzilai, "Pentagon Official Wants Yaron Fired," Ha'aretz, December 16, 2004; Caroline B. Glick and Arieh O'Sullivan, "Pentagon Denies It Wants Yaron Dismissed," Jerusalem Post, December 16, 2004; Nina Gilbert, "Yaron Won't Give Info on Arms Sales to China," Jerusalem Post, December 30, 2004; "Israeli, U.S. Talks on Weapons Deals with China End Without Result," Ha'aretz, June 29, 2005; Marc Perelman, "Spat Over Sales of Weapons Chilling Ties Between Jerusalem and Beijing," Forward, December 24, 2004; Marc Perelman, "China Crisis Straining U.S.-Israel Ties," Forward, August 5, 2005; Marc Perelman, "Israel Miffed over Lingering China Flap," Forward, October 7, 2005; Ze'ev Schiff, "U.S.-Israel Crisis Deepens over Defense Exports to China," Ha'aretz, July 27, 2005; and Janine Zacharia, "'Something Wrong' in US-Israeli Military Ties as Split Deepens on China," Jerusalem Post, December 26, 2004.

94. Quoted in Zacharia, "US-Israeli Military Ties."

95. Quoted in Duncan L. Clarke, "Israel's Economic Espionage in the United States," Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 21. Also see Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, "Israel Has Long Spied on U.S. Say Officials," Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2004; "FBI Says Israel a Major Player in Industrial Espionage," Jewish Bulletin (online), January 16, 1998; Mark, "Israeli-United States Relations," November 9, 2004, 14-15; and Joshua Mit-nick, "U.S. Accuses Officials of Spying," Washington Times, December 16, 2004.

96. The journalist Seymour Hersh claims that Israel passed some of the stolen intelligence to the Soviet Union in order to gain exit visas for Soviet Jews. Others have challenged this assertion, but Hersh stands by his story. Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), 285-305; and Seymour M. Hersh, "Why Pollard Should Never Be Released," New Yorker, January 18, 1999.

97. On these incidents, see Edward T. Pound and David Rogers, "Inquiring Eyes: An Israeli Contract with a U.S. Company Leads to Espionage," Wall Street Journal, January 17, 1992.

98. For an overview of the Franklin affair, see Jeffrey Goldberg, "Real Insiders: A Pro-Israel Lobby and an F.B.I. Sting," New Yorker, July 4, 2005. Rosen and Weissman have denied the charges and the case is still pending.

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77. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 603-605.

78. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 478.

79. Ben-Zvi continues: "Strategic ties between Washington and Jerusalem continued to develop during 1996-1999 . . . These included the prepositioning in Israel of weapons and ammunition during wartime, and the development of anti-missile systems including the Arrow, Nautilus and the Boost Phase Intercept. The two countries met regularly in such panels as the Joint Political Military Planning Group, the Joint Security Assistance Planning Group and the Joint Economic Development Group . . . Indeed, the joint American-Israeli committee for strategic planning . . . convened as scheduled on February 21, 1999, despite Israel's decision to suspend the redeployment stipulated in the Wye accords.'' "The United States and Israel: The Netanyahu Era," Strategic Assessment (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University) 2, no. 2 (October 1999).

80. On the fate of Ford's reassessment, see Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 267-71; Edward Tiv-nan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 89; Charles McC. Mathias Jr., "Ethnic Groups and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs 59, no. 5 (Summer 1981): 992-93; and Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 296.

81. Carter later recalled, "I think Begin deliberately sabotaged the whole thing with the damn settlements. He knows he lied. He hadn't left Camp David twelve hours before he was under tremendous [domestic] pressure . . . There was never any equivocation when we left Camp David about the fact that there would be no settlements during the interim period, during which we would be negotiating the final peace agreement. That was absolutely and totally understood." Quoted in Kenneth W Stein, Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin, and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Routledge, 1999), 256.

82. Clinton's outburst is quoted in Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001, 60.

83. William B. Quandt, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1986), 103-104.

84. Sharp, "U.S. Foreign Aid," 4.

85. Itamar Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon, 1970—1985, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 138-43.

86. William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 307-10; and Glenn Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 301-304.

87. The population growth rates for Israel proper in 1991, 1993, and 1994 were 4.9 percent, 2.5 percent, and 2.7 percent, respectively. "Sources of Population Growth: Total Israeli Population and Settler Population, 1991-2003," Foundation for Middle East Peace, Washington, DC, www.fmep.org/settlement_info/stats_data/settler_population_growth/sources_ population_growth_ 1991 _2003 .html.

88. The Soviet Union/Russia used its veto 119 times between 1946 and 1985, but only four times since then. The United States did not issue its first veto until 1970 but had used it 82 times as of March 2007. "Changing Patterns in the Use of the Veto in the Security Council," Global Policy Forum, www.globalpolicy.org/security/data/vetotab.htm.

89. This position became known as the "Negroponte Doctrine." See Michael J. Jordan, "Symbolic Fight for Israel at U.N.," Christian Science Monitor, December 8, 2003.

90. The United States voted in favor of Security Council resolutions condemning Israel's bloody assault on Qibya in 1953 and its attack on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981. It also voted in favor of Resolutions 672 and 681 in 1990, which criticized Israel's deportation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. The United States abstained on Resolution 573 in 1985, which condemned Israel's bombing of the PLO headquarters in Tunis, and voted in favor of Resolution 1073 in 1996, which expressed concern over Israel's construction of a tunnel in the vicinity of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

91. UN voting records obtained from http://unbisnet.un.org:8080. For a list of General Assembly resolutions concerning Israel, along with partial voting records, see www .jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/UN/gatoc.html.

92. Marc Perelman, "International Agency Eyes Israeli Nukes," Forward, September 5, 2003.

93. Michael B. Oren offers an extensively researched but decidedly pro-Israel account of the

war in Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Ox-

ford University Press, 2002); a convincing corrective is Roland Popp, "Stumbling Decidedly

into the Six Day War," Middle East Journal 60, no. 2 (Spring 2006). For a recent and more

balanced treatment by another Israeli historian, see Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and

the Year That Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan

Books, 2007).

94. Wheeler is quoted in Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 141; Johnson's remark to Eban is

from Popp, "Stumbling Decidedly into the Six Day War," 304. Popp also notes that "almost no

one inside the U.S. administration was in any doubt that the Israeli warnings [of an impend-

ing Arab attack] were without foundation" (302), and William Quandt reports that the CIA

and Pentagon told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban they "were convinced that Israel would

easily win if hostilities were to begin, no matter who struck first." Decade of Decisions, 50.

95. The Israeli government sent telegrams to Foreign Minister Eban and Ambassador Avraham

Harman in Washington on May 25, claiming an Arab attack was imminent and asking them

to seek an immediate American commitment to treat an attack on Israel as akin to an attack

on the United States. But as Tom Segev points out, "The Israeli intelligence assessment of

the same evening was fairly different from what had been wired to Washington . . . [Prime

Minister] Eshkol was obviously trying to mislead Eban, and through him President Johnson,

in order to ensure U.S. support. On a copy of the telegram to Harman, Eshkol added in his

own handwriting: 'All to create an alibi.'" 1967, 256-57.

96. Meeting with Eban on the evening of May 26, Johnson gave him an aide-memoire that ended, "I must emphasize the necessity for Israel not to make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities. Israel will not be alone unless it decides to do it alone. We cannot imagine Israel will make this decision." Quoted in Brecher, Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy, 393. Johnson repeated a similar warning in a letter to Eshkol on May 28.

97. In the words of William Quandt, Johnson "had no reason to be surprised when he was awakened on the morning of June 5 with the news that war had begun. After all, he had taken steps to assure the Israelis that the 'red light' of May 26 had turned yellow . . . The yellow light' hinted at in his letter to [Israeli Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol on June 3, and reiterated in remarks from [Abe] Fortas and [Arthur] Goldberg, meant 'be careful,' and 'don't count on the United States if you get into trouble.' But, as for most motorists, the yellow light was tantamount to a green one." Quandt also notes that "Johnson had not quite given the Israelis a green light, but he had removed a veto on their actions." Peace Process, 38, 41-42; and Cheryl Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination (Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 120.

98. In a review of Oren's Six Days of War, Quandt notes that "Johnson [told] the Israelis not to act alone, and for a while he really seemed to mean it. By the end of May, he had apparently changed his mind. The Israelis were quick to sense the change, and it mattered to them as they decided on war. But we still do not know why Johnson initially was so hesitant, then why he took a tough line with Israel, or why he subsequently changed his mind." "Book Review: Six Days of War," Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 147. On the other pressures exerted on Johnson, including the letter-writing campaign, see Segev, 1967, 253-54, 264-65, 304.

99. Quandt, Peace Process, 43-44.

100. On June 8, 1967, while the Six-Day War was under way, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the U.S. Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty, which was in international waters off the Sinai Peninsula. The attack killed thirty-four U.S. sailors and caused extensive damage to the ship. Israel has long claimed that the attack was an accident based on mistaken identification, and it apologized to the United States and paid some $13 million in compensation. Survivors of the attack, other U.S. naval officers, and a number of U.S. officials (including CIA Director Richard Helms and Secretary of State Dean Rusk) believed the at

tack was deliberate, and proponents of this view also claim that the subsequent investigations were cursory and incomplete. Other commentators defend Israel's version of the incident andregard it as a regrettable mishap. For different accounts, see James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security Agency (New York: Random House, 2002); A. Jay Cristol, The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2002); James M. Ennes Jr., Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of an Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship (Gaithersburg, MD: Reintree Press, 2003); Oren, Six Days of War, 263-71; and Segev, 1967, 386.

101. The diplomacy of the War of Attrition is summarized in Lawrence Whetten, The Canal War: Four-Power Conflict in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974). Useful Israeli perspectives include Ya'acov Bar-Siman-Tov, The Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition, 1969-1970 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Jonathan Shimshoni, Israel and Conventional Deterrence: Border Warfare from 1953 to 1970 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), chap. 4.

102. Quandt, Decade of Decisions, 147. Also see Pollock, Politics of Pressure, 112-14, 124, 126-27; and Brecher, Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy, 510.

103. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 468.

104. By helping Israel gain the upper hand on the battlefield, Nixon and Kissinger sought to convince Egypt and Syria to accept a cease-fire and to recognize the limits of Soviet support. See Quandt, Peace Process, 113-15, 118.

105. Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, 78-79.

106. Ibid., 86, 90; William Burr, ed., The October War and U.S. Policy (Washington, DC: National Security Archive, October 7, 2003); and Quandt, Peace Process, 118.

107. "Kissinger Gave Green Light for Israeli Offensive Violating 1973 Cease-Fire," National Security Archive press release, October 7, 2003; and Quandt, Peace Process, 120, 461nn62, 63. Kenneth Stein reports that "Kissinger told Israeli leaders that if it was their intention to starve out the Egyptian Third Army, the United States would 'disassociate itself from it.' But Kissinger did not tell the Israelis not to better their military field advantage. Dayan wanted another seventy-two hours, and Kissinger acquiesced." Stein also notes, "With impunity and Kissinger's sanction, of which Sadat was not aware, Israel violated the cease-fire resolution." Heroic Diplomacy, 92.

108. "U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding, September 1, 1975." The congressional legislation (Section 535, PL. 98-473, October 12, 1984) added the stipulation that the PLO "renounce terrorism." See Clyde Mark, "Palestinians and Middle East Peace: Issues for the United States," Issue Brief for Congress, Congressional Research Service, October 24, 2002, 2.

109. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 337-40. As Steven Spiegel notes, "Here too the United States promised a unified strategy with Israel, thereby restricting America's ability to speak independently with the PLO." Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 302. On the congressional action in 1984, see Clyde Mark, "Israeli-United States Relations," Issue Brief for Congress, Congressional Research Service, April 28, 2005, 9.

110. The pretext for war was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London. This act fell well short of Haig's criterion, insofar as it had nothing to do with the situation along the Israeli-Lebanese border and was not ordered by Yasser Arafat or Fatah but by a dissident Palestinian group led by Abu Nidal. As Shlomo Ben-Ami observes, Haig "should have known that Israeli politicians are not especially sensitive to nuances and understatements when he used unnecessarily ambiguous language in his conversation with Sharon." See Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 179; Quandt, Peace Process, 250-51; Ze'ev Schiff, "The Green Light," Foreign Policy 50 (Spring 1983); Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Israel's Lebanon War, trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 71-73; AvnerYaniv, Dilemmas of Security: Politics, Strategy, and the Israeli Experience in Lebanon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 102-103, 105; and James McCartney, "Officials Say Haig Let Israel Think U.S. Condoned Invsion of Lebanon," Philadelphia Inquirer (online), January 23, 1983.

111. Shlaim, The Iron Wall, 416.

112. By the time the cease-fire went into effect, notes the Israeli historian Itamar Rabinovich, "The IDF had succeeded both in defeating the Syrian army in Lebanon and limiting the scope of the encounter . . . Equally significant, Syria by seeking an early ceasefire left Israel free to focus on Beirut. In the days following the ceasefire, Israeli forces continued their advance toward southern and eastern Beirut and established a territorial link with the forces of the Lebanese Front." War for Lebanon, 138.

113. Rabinovich continues: "Yet it became increasingly difficult to maintain that policy against accumulating criticism, particularly in the murky situation in Beirut in the latter part of June. These difficulties . . . induced the administration to distance itself demonstrably from Israel, but did not change the essence of its policy." Ibid., 146.

114. George R Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993), 112.

115. Quandt, Peace Process, 258-59.

116. Quoted in Edward R. F. Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger: A Secret History of American Diplomacy in the Middle East (Pleasantville, NY Reader's Digest Press, 1976), 199.

117. In his account of the peace process, the U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross offers numerous examples of the Clinton administration accommodating Prime Minister Ehud Barak's preferred negotiating tactics, particularly regarding the unsuccessful effort to reach a peace treaty with Syria. See Ross, Missing Peace, 530-32, 539, 550-51, 578-80. And as Agha and Malley note in their discussion of Camp David, "In the end, though, and on almost all these questionable tactical judgments, the US either gave up or gave in, reluctantly acquiescing in the way Barak did things out of respect for the things he was trying to do." "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," 60.

118. Ron Pundak, "From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?" Survival 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 40-41.

119. Agha and Malley, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," 62-63.

120. "Lessons of Arab-Israeli Negotiating: Four Negotiators Look Back and Ahead," transcript of panel discussion, Middle East Institute, April 25, 2005; Nathan Guttman, "U.S. Accused of Pro-Israel Bias at 2000 Camp David," Ha'aretz, April 29, 2005; and Aaron D. Miller, "Israel's Lawyer," Washington Post, May 23, 2005.

121. "A History of Foreign Leaders and Dignitaries Who Have Addressed the U.S. Congress," http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/art_artifacts/foreignleaders.html. The first Israeli leader to address a joint session of Congress was Yitzhak Rabin in 1976; other states whose leaders have addressed multiple sessions of Congress in the same period include India (four), Ireland (three), Italy (three), and South Korea (three). If one begins counting in 1948 (the year Israel was founded), Israel is tied at six with France and Italy

122. Bard and Pipes, "How Special Is the U.S.-Israel Relationship?" 41.

123. The question asked, "What's your opinion of U.S. policies in the Middle East—would you say they are fair, or do they favor Israel too much, or do they favor the Palestinians too much?" See Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views of a Changing World 2003 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2003), 5; and Pew Global Attitudes Project, "Wave 2 Update Survey; 21 Publics Surveyed, Final Topline (2003)," T-151, http:// HYPERLINK "http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/185topline.pdf"pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/185topline.pdf.

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Unless otherwise noted, references to the following publications and news agencies are to their online versions: American Prospect, Associated Press, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Daily Telegraph (London), Financial Times, Forward, Guardian, Ha'aretz, Independent, International Herald Tribune, Inter Press Service, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Week, Los Angeles Times, Nation, Newsweek, New York Review of Books, New York Sun, New York Times, Observer, Reuters, Sunday Telegraph (London), Sunday Times (London), Time, Times (London), USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, Washington Times, and Weekly Standard. We have also accessed some publications via the Lexis-Nexis, FACTIVA, or JSTOR digital archives.

INTRODUCTION

1. Joshua Mitnick, "Iran Threat Steals Show at Herzliya," Jewish Week, January 26, 2007. Also see Ron Kampeas, "As Candidates Enter 2008 Race, They Begin Courting Jewish Support," JTA.org, January 25, 2007; Ron Kampeas, "AIPAC Conference—The First Primary?" JTA.org, March 6, 2007; Joshua Mitnick, "Candidates Court Israel, Cite Iran Risks," Washington Times, January 24, 2007; and M. J. Rosenberg, "Pandering Not Required," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #310, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, February 9, 2007. Transcripts of the presentations by Edwards, Gingrich, McCain, and Romney can be found at www.herzliyaconference.org/Eng/_Articles/Article.asp?CategoryID=226&ArticleID=1599.

2. "Senator Clintons Remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)," February 1, 2007, http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=268474. See Joshua Frank, "Hillary Clinton and the Israel Lobby," Antiwar.com, January 23, 2007; and E. J. Kessler, "Hillary the Favorite in Race for Jewish Donations," Forward, January 26, 2007.

3. Thomas Beaumont, "Up-Close Obama Urges Compassion in Mideast," Des Moines Register (online), March 12, 2007; James D. Besser, "Obama Set for Big Jewish Push, "Jewish Week, February 16, 2007; Larry Cohler-Esses, "Obama Pivots Away from Dovish Past," Jewish Week, March 9, 2007; and Lynn Sweet, "Obama to Offer Pro-Israel Views at Chicago Gathering," Chicago Sun-Times, March 1, 2007.

4. For pro-Israel statements by McCain, Clinton, Obama, Romney, Richardson, and Brown-back, see "The Road to the White House: Israel-US Ties," Jerusalem Post, May 24, 2007.

5. In his entertaining popular history Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2007), the Israeli-American author Michael B. Oren offers a number of vivid portraits of prior American involvement in the region. Implicit in his

argument, which he has made explicit in public presentations, is the idea that U.S. involvement in the Middle East long predates the creation of Israel and therefore current American support for the Jewish state has little to do with the activities of the Israel lobby. For a characteristic public statement to this effect, see Oren s address to the 2007 AIPAC Policy Conference, where he described AIPAC itself as "an expression of a nearly 400-year-long tradition in which the idea of a United States is virtually indivisible and inseparable from the idea of a re-created Jewish state. It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States." This odd argument ignores how much the U.S. role in the Middle East has changed since 1776, and especially since 1948 and 1967. For the transcript, see www.aipac.org/Publications/ Oren-PC-2007.pdf.

6. As the historian Peter L. Hahn puts it, "Prior to World War II, the United States took relatively little official interest in the Middle East. Although the European empires had long engaged in the so-called Eastern Question—a diplomatic rivalry for dominance in the Middle East (as well as South Asia)—the government in Washington identified no strategic or political interests in the area and thus avoided entanglement in the imperial rivalry there." See his Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 1.

7. Macmillan also writes regarding the disposition of Palestine: "The United States, in contrast to what happened after the Second World War, played a minor role." See Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 422-23.

8. On the origins of Saudi-American security cooperation, see Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 60-68; and Rachel Bronson, Thicker than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chaps. 1-2. On the Baghdad Pact, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 58-59.

9. Wieseltier's comment appears in his review of the memoirs of Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh. See "Sympathy for the Other," New York Times Book Review, April 1, 2007, 13.

10. This charge was based on Carters having written a brief note on a 1987 letter he had received from the daughter of a former Nazi prison guard who was protesting her father s deportation. Carter's one-sentence note expressed no sympathy for the former guard and did not recommend that any action be taken on his behalf but merely said he hoped the Office of Special Investigations (the U.S. agency responsible for prosecuting Nazi-era war crimes) would give "special consideration to affected families for humanitarian reasons." Yet this episode was used to smear Carter as somehow sympathetic to Nazism. See Daniel Freed-man, "President Carter Interceded on Behalf of Former Nazi Guard," New York Sun, January 19, 2007.

11. Jodie T. Allen and Alec Tyson, "The U.S. Public's Pro-Israel History," Pew Research Center, July 19, 2006; and Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in association with the Council on Foreign Relations, "America's Place in the World 2005: An Investigation of the Attitudes of American Opinion Leaders and the American Public about International Affairs," November 2005, 11-12.

12. The poll was conducted by Zogby International between October 10 and October 12, 2006, on behalf of the Council for the National Interest. The results are available at www .cnionline.org/learn/polls/czandlobby/index2.htm.

13. Daniel Maliniak et al., "Inside the Ivory Tower," Foreign Policy 159 (March-April 2007): 66.

14. This is why Osama bin Laden originally wanted to attack the U.S. Capitol on September 11, 2001; he saw it as the leading bastion of support for Israel in the United States. "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," Staff Statement no. 16, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, June 16, 2004, 4.

15. Michael Massing, "The Storm over the Israel Lobby," New York Review of Books, June 8, 2006; and Jeffrey Goldberg, "Real Insiders," New Yorker, July 4, 2005.

16. As Nadav Safran noted in his book on the U.S.-Israel alliance, "Jews are not the first ethnic

or religious group in America that has sought to influence American foreign policy in favor of kinsmen or co-religionists . . . Ethnoreligious politics, like the politics of interest groups in general, have been an inescapable consequence of the pluralism and multiplicity of interests in American life." The United States and Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 276.

17. Useful works in this extensive literature include Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ethnic Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. M. E. Ahrari (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987); Ethnicity and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed., ed. A. A. Said (New York: Praeger, 1981); Charles McC. Mathias Jr., "Ethnic Groups and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs 59, no. 5 (Summer 1981); Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Yossi Shain, "Ethnic Diaspo-ras and U.S. Foreign Policy," Political Science Quarterly 109, no. 5 (1994-95); Paul Wata-nabe, Ethnic Groups, Congress, and American Foreign Policy: The Politics of the Turkish Arms Embargo (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, "The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban-American National Foundation," International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1999); Max J. Castro, "Miami Vise," Nation, May 14, 2007; Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David King and Miles Pomper, "Congress and the Contingent Influence of Diaspora Lobbies: Lessons from U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Azerbaijan and Armenia," Journal of Armenian Studies 8, no. 1 (Summer 2004); and R. Hrair Dekmejian and Angelos Themelis, "Ethnic Lobbies in U.S. Foreign Policy: A Comparative Analysis of the Jewish, Greek, Armenian and Turkish Lobbies," Occasional Research Paper no. 13, Institute of International Relations, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece, October 1997.

18. On the history of anti-Semitism, see James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews; A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 2004); Israel Pocket Library, Anti-Semitism (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974); and Marvin Perry and Frederick Schweitzer, Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). On the status and treatment of Jews in the Arab world, see Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: Norton, 1986) chap. 5; and Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), 8, 10-11.

19. Quoted in The Middle East, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1981), 68.

20. As an official Indian government committee noted in 2002, "Indo-Americans have effectively mobilized on issues ranging from the nuclear test in 1998 to Kargil, have played a crucial role in generating a favourable climate of opinion in the [U.S.] Congress . . . and lobbied effectively on other issues of concern . . . For the first time, India has a constituency in the United States with real influence and status. The Indian community in the United States constitutes an invaluable asset in strengthening India's relationship with the world's only superpower." Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora (New Delhi: Government of India, January 2002), xx-xxi.

21. In addition to Gephardt's statement, quotations about AIPAC's influence by Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and several other prominent figures were previously available at www.aipac .org/documents/whoweare.html#say (accessed January 14, 2005). AIPAC appears to have removed these statements from the current version of its website.

22. Alan M. Dershowitz, Chutzpah (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 16.

23. Quoted in Samuel G. Freedman, "Don't Blame Jews for This War," USA Today, April 2, 2003.

24. On the role of interest groups in American politics, see Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Richard L. Hall and Frank W. Wayman, "Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees,"

American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (September 1990); Richard L. Hall and Alan V. Deardorff, "Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy," American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (February 2006); John Mark Hansen, Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919-1981 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ken Kollman, Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion and Interest Group Strategies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Richard A. Smith, "Interest Group Influence in the U. S. Congress," Legislative Studies Quarterly 20, no. 1 (February 1995); Raymond A. Bauer, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Lewis Anthony Dexter, American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963); David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Knopf, 1951); and James Q. Wilson, Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

25. See note 17 above.

26. George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball, The Passionate Attachment: Americas Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present (New York: Norton, 1992); Mitchell G. Bard, The Water's Edge and Beyond: Defining the Limits to Domestic Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy (New York: Transaction Books, 1991); Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1985); J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (New York: Perseus Books, 1996); Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 6; Michael Lind, "The Israel Lobby," Prospect 73 (April 2002); Massing, "Storm over the Israel Lobby"; Michael Massing, "The Israel Lobby," Nation, June 10, 2002; Michael Massing, "Deal Breakers," American Prospect, March 11, 2002; Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); and James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2006). We do not agree with every assertion made in these works, but each contains useful information about the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

27. Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago ress, 1985); and Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israeli Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Other useful works include Abraham Ben-Zvi, The United States and Israel: Limits of the Special Relationship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Abraham Ben-Zvi, Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Origins of the American-Israeli Relationship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Peter L. Hahn, Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004); David Schoenbaum, The United States and the State of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Knopf, 1983).

28. Among the relevant works are Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003); Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999); Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford, England: Oneworld Publications, 2006); Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watz-man (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2000); and Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

29. See, for example, Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies,

1992); Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 2001); and Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).

1: THE GREAT BENEFACTOR

1. "Address by PM Rabin to the U.S. Congress-26-Jul-94," Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Archive/Speeches; and Benjamin Netanyahu, "Speech to Joint Session of Congress, July 10, 1996," www.netanyahu.org/joinsesofusc.html.

2. According to the "Greenbook" of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which reports "overseas loans and grants," Israel received $153,894,700,000 (in constant 2005 dollars) from the United States through 2005. See http://qesdb.usaid.gov/gbk.

3. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States did not provide Israel with any direct military assistance between 1949 and 1959. See Clyde Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," Issue Brief for Congress, Congressional Research Service, April 26, 2005, 13-14, Table 3. The United States did sell Israel one hundred recoilless antitank rifles in 1958, partly as a reward for Israel's support during the 1958 Jordan crisis. See Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israeli Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 151; and Douglas Little, "The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and Israel, 1957-68," International Journal of Middle East Studies 25, no. 4 (November 1993): 566. William H. Mott IV reports that Israel obtained five hundred surplus U.S. half-tracks covertly during the War of Independence and also received some surplus tanks in 1951-52. Washington also helped subsidize Israels purchase of French combat aircraft in 1954, "as part of U.S. military assistance to France for development of French military industry," and provided a similar subsidy for the purchase of French Mystere aircraft in 1955. Because France was the ostensible beneficiary of these subsidies, the amounts are not included in most descriptions of U.S. aid to Israel. Mott reports a total of $94.5 million in military assistance between 1946 and 1955 and an additional $189.1 million from 1956 to 1965. See William H. Mott IV, United States Military Assistance: An Empirical Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 176-77.

4. See Zach Levey, "Israel's Quest for a Security Guarantee from the United States, 1954-1956," British Journal of Middle East Studies 22, no. 1/2 (1995). Levey describes David Ben-Gurion as ambivalent about the virtues of a U.S. guarantee in this period; while recognizing the value of great-power protection, he also worried it might reduce Israel's autonomy. Levey also notes that some Israeli officials (most notably Moshe Sharett) saw a U.S. guarantee as a way to restrain the more aggressive policies favored by Ben-Gurion and others.

5. Michael Brecher, Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 191-92, 220.

6. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2001), 172-73.

7. Ibid., 178-85; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), 290, 297-300; Brecher, Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy, 282-303; Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 74-82; and David Schoenbaum, The United States and the State of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 115-23.

8. According to Warren Bass, "The Kennedy Administration . . . constitutes the pivotal presidency in U.S.-Israel relations, the hinge that swung decisively away from the chilly association of the 1950s and toward the full-blown alliance we know today." Support Any Friend, 3. Abraham Ben-Zvi dates the beginning of the strategic partnership to the late 1950s, and especially to Israel's acceptance of the Eisenhower Doctrine (which pledged U.S. support for Middle Eastern countries threatened by "international communism") and to its support during various crises in Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan. See Decade of Transition: Eisenhower,

Kennedy and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Little, "Making of a Special Relationship." 9. Kennedy was more circumspect in describing the U.S. commitment at a subsequent press conference. See Bass, Support Any Friend, 3, 183; and Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 106-107.

10. Warren Bass correctly notes that the Israel lobby (which he describes as a "Washington powerhouse by the 1980s") was less powerful in the early 1960s and says that "there is virtually no documentary evidence that the Hawk sale was driven by domestic considerations." The absence of documentary evidence is not surprising, however, insofar as presidents and their advisers are unlikely to admit that important strategic choices are being shaped by domestic considerations. Bass also acknowledges that "while Israels arguments [for the Hawk sale] were couched exclusively in strategic terms, the looming midterm elections—however hushed—could hardly have been a disincentive," observing further that "Kennedy was a political animal, and he knew that the Hawk sale could only help with pro-Israel voters and donors." Bass, Support Any Friend, 145-50. Also see Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 106-10; and Mordechai Gazit, President Kennedy's Policy Toward the Arab States and Israel (Tel Aviv: Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1983), 30-55.

11. An agreement for the sale of A-4 Skyhawk fighter-bombers was also reached at this time, although the planes were not delivered until several years later. See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), The Arms Trade with the Third World (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 532, 535.

12. Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 6, 13.

13. Calculated from USAID, "Greenbook," at http://qesdb.cdie.org/gbk/index.html.

14. Ibid.; and The Military Balance 2006 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2006).

15. Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 2, 10; and Matthew Berger, "Good News—and Bad—for U.S. Aid to Israel," JTA.org, March 28, 2003.

16. Edward T. Pound, "A Close Look at U.S. Aid to Israel Reveals Deals That Push Cost Above Publicly Quoted Figures," Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1991.

17. According to Clyde Mark of the Congressional Research Service's Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division, Israel "receives favorable treatment and special benefits under U.S. assistance programs that may not be available to other countries." Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 8.

18. Jeremy M. Sharp, "U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel," Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, January 5, 2006, 5-6.

19. Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 8-9.

20. "U.S. Assistance to Israel," http://telaviv.usembassy.gov/publish/mission/amb/assistance.html.

21. Duncan L. Clarke, Daniel B. O'Connor, and Jason D. Ellis, Send Guns and Money: Security Assistance and U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 24; Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 10; and Shirl McArthur, "A Conservative Estimate of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: $ 108 Billion," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (online), July 2006, 16-17.

22. Sharp, "U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel," 11.

23. The GAO also discovered that the Department of Defense had waived Israel's termination liability requirements (the amounts that buyers must hold in reserve to cover the costs of terminating a contract) but believes that "because of the likelihood of continued Israeli aid, the waiver represents a minimal risk." U.S. General Accounting Office, "Military Sales Cash Flow Financing," GAO/NSIAD-94-1024, Washington, DC, February 8, 1994, 3.

24. Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 8.

25. The contrast is vividly apparent when one compares the USAID country page for Israel (www.usaid.gov/policy/budget/cbj2007/ane/il.html) with the Web pages for other important U.S. aid recipients.

26. Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 7.

27. The CRS also reports that approximately 4 percent of the guaranteed amount is set aside in a treasury account as a reserve against default. For a loan of $ 10 billion, this appropriation amounts to approximately $400 million. See Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 3; Larry Nowels and Clyde Mark, "Israel's Request for U.S. Loan Guarantees," Issue Brief for Congress, Congressional Research Service, October 8, 1991; and Sheldon L. Richman, "The Economic Impact of the Israeli Loan Guarantees, "Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992).

28. According to the CRS's Mark, "It is estimated that Israel receives about $1 billion annually through philanthropy, an equal amount through short- and long-term commercial loans, and around $1 billion in Israel Bonds proceeds." See Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," summary page. State of Israel Bonds are sold in the United States through the Development Corporation for Israel (DCI). These bonds are nonnegotiable and are seen by the government of Israel as a "stable source of overseas borrowing as well as an important mechanism for maintaining ties with Diaspora Jewry." Interest rates averaged about 4 percent from 1951 to 1989 (which meant a sharp "patriotic discount" as U.S. Treasury rates rose rapidly after 1980), but "the DCI bond offerings have had to move in recent years towards market pricing." Sales of Israel bonds reportedly reached $1.2 billion in 2006, and the cumulative total of funds raised through these bonds now exceeds $25 billion. See Suhas L. Ketkar, "Diaspora Bonds: Track Record and Potential," World Bank Discussion Paper, August 31, 2006; and Avi Krawitz, "Israel Bonds Raises $1.2 billion in 2006," Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2006.

29. Dale Russakoff, "Treasury Finds Bite in Israel Bonds; 1984 Law Places New Tax on Artificially Low Interest Rates," Washington Post, September 12, 1985; "Tax Report," Wall Street Journal, August 20, 1986; and Russell Mokhiber, "Bonds of Affection," Multinational Monitor (1988), http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1988/04/mm0488_10.html.

30. According to the IRS, to qualify for the deduction, a taxpayer's contribution "must be made to an organization created and recognized as a charitable organization under the laws of Israel. The deduction will be allowed in the amount that would be allowed if the organization was created under the laws of the United States, but is limited to 25% of [the taxpayer's] adjusted gross income from Israeli sources." "Charitable Contributions," Publication 526, U.S. Internal Revenue Service, 3, www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p526.pdf. Mexico and Canada appear to be the only other countries with similar provisions.

31. The clandestine effort to obtain arms for the Zionist military forces prior to independence is recounted in Leonard Slater, The Pledge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).

32. Shimon Peres, Battling for Peace: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1995), 119; Michael Karpin, The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What That Means for the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 135-37; and Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 67, 70.

33. Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, "Mission Statement," www.israelsoldiers.org; and Aimee Rhodes, "New York Dinner Raises $18m for IDF," Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2007.

34. As a Bank of Jerusalem guide for Israeli charities recently advised, "While laws governing American contributions to foreign charities have always existed, they were vague and consequently, rarely enforced. Contributions from individuals and American 501c(3) corporations to Israeli charities were unsupervised and their ultimate use was difficult to trace and determine." The guide warns that this situation has changed significantly since September 11, 2001. Bank of Jerusalem, "Help Them Help You: A Recommendation for the Israeli Charity," www.bankjerusalem.co.il/indexE.php?page=588 (accessed March 28, 2007).

35. Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (NewYork: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2006), 218-19. Similarly, the Israeli political scientist David Newman has reportedly described the Jewish Agency and the WZO as operating "under one umbrella, with the same officials, departments and administrators overseeing the activities." See Amy Teibel and Ramit Plushnick-Masti, "As Israel Leaves Gaza, Bill for Its Settlement Ambitions Is Shrouded in Mystery," Associated Press, August 10, 2005.

36. Nathaniel Popper, "Jewish Officials Profess Shock over Report on Zionist Body," Forward, March 18, 2005; and "Summary of the Opinion Concerning Unauthorized Outposts" (the Sasson Report), www.fmep.org/documents/sassonreport.html.

37. "U.S. Tax-Exempt Charitable Contributions to Israel: Donations, Illegal Settlements, and Terror Attacks Against the US," Middle East Foreign Policy Research Note, October 5, 2005, www.irmep.org/tec.htm.

38. International Monetary Fund, "World Economic Outlook Database for September 2006," www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2006/02/data/index.aspx.

39. Human Development Report 2006 (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2006), http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics; and Economist Intelligence Unit, "2005 Quality of Life Rankings," www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf.

40. Mitchell G. Bard and Daniel Pipes, "How Special Is the U.S.-Israel Relationship?" Middle East Quarterly 4, no. 2 (June 1997): 43.

41. Bishara A. Bahbah, "The United States and Israel's Energy Security," Journal of Palestine Studies 11, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 118-30. For the text of the original agreement, see "Israel-United States Memorandum of Understanding, September 1, 1975" and "Memorandum of Agreement between the Governmentsof the United States of America and Israel—Oil," www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/mou 1975.html and www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/Peace/cdoilmou.html. Also see "Oil from Iraq: An Israeli Pipedream," Jane's Middle East/Africa Report, April 16, 2003, www.janes.com/regional_news/africa_middle_east/news /fr/fr030416_l_n.shtml.

42. William B. Quandt, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1986), 313; Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 371-72; Moshe Dayan, Breakthrough: A Personal Account of the Egypt-Israeli Peace Negotiations (New York: Knopf, 1981), 274-76; "Israel: Oil Supply Arrangement," Memoranda of Agreement, United States Treaties and Other International Acts Series 9533, 30 UST 5994 (Washington, DC, March 1979), 5989-96; Judith Miller, "Israel Pressing U.S. on Oil Sales Accord," New York Times, August 17, 1980; and Steven Rattner, "U.S. and Israel Reach Agreement on Oil," New York Times, October 16, 1980.

43. USAID, "Greenbook."

44. Alfred Prados, "Jordan: U.S. Relations and Bilateral Issues," Issue Brief for Congress, Congressional Research Service, January 9, 2002; and USAID, "Greenbook."

45. The 1975 Israel-U.S. Memorandum of Understanding committed Washington to "make every effort to be fully responsive ... to Israel's military equipment and other defense requirements" and "to continue to maintain Israel's defensive strength through the supply of advanced types of equipment."

46. Sharp, "U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel," 1.

47. David Rogers and Edward T. Pound, "How Israel Spends $1.8 Billion a Year at Its Purchasing Mission in New York," Wall Street Journal, January 20, 1992.

48. The Defense Security Assistance Agency (DSAA) was renamed the Defense Security Cooperation Agency in 1998.

49. According to the GAO, "Whereas other countries primarily use the government-to-government process, Israel uses commercial contracts for about 99 percent of its purchases ... By using the commercial process, Israel can avoid the Defense Department's 3-percent administrative charge for FMS sales." There are also looser governmental oversight and approval guidelines for commercial sales to Israel. "DSAA is not required to review contracts and purchase orders from $50,000 to $500,000 until after Israel receives the FMS funds" and "DSAA does not review contracts and purchase orders below $50,000." Moreover, "the unusual way DSAA administers the Israeli program and staffing limitations complicate full implementation of the agreement to report. . . sensitive items." U.S. General Accounting Office, "Security Assistance: Reporting of Program Content Changes," GAO/NSIAD-90-115, Washington, DC, May 1990, 8-9, 14.

50. Quoted in Steven Pearlstein, "U.S. Military Office Defends Israeli Aid; Closer Scrutiny of

Program Described as Unnecessary," Washington Post, July 30, 1992. Also see David Rogers and Edward Pound, "The Money Trail: U.S. Firms Are Linked to an Israeli General at the Heart of a Scandal," Wall Street Journal, January 20, 1992; Rogers and Pound, "How Israel Spends $1.8 Billion"; Joel Brinkley, "Israeli General Pleads Guilty in Bribery Case," New York Times, March 28, 1991; Hillel Kuttler, "U.S. Defense Procurement Faults Led to Dotan Affair," Jerusalem Post, August 12, 1993; and U.S. General Accounting Office, "Foreign Military Aid to Israel: Diversion of U.S. Funds and Circumvention of U.S. Program Restrictions," GAO/T-OSI-94-9, Washington, DC, October 1993.

51. As of 2004, expenditures on the Lavi, Merkava, Arrow, and other programs amounted to $2.68 billion. See "U.S. Assistance to Israel."

52. Dov S. Zakheim, Flight of the Lavi: Inside a U.S.-Israeli Crisis (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1996). Zakheim was deputy undersecretary of defense in the Reagan administration and an experienced defense analyst. He was also an Orthodox Jew and a strong supporter of Israel, yet his determined efforts to assess the true costs of the Lavi project and eventually to cancel it earned him repeated attacks on his character. Indeed, he reports that Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens once called him a "traitor to the family." See xv, 256-57. Also see Duncan L. Clarke and Alan S. Cohen, "The United States, Israel and the Lavi Fighter," Middle East Journal 40, no. 1 (Winter 1986); and James P. DeLoughry, "The United States and the LAVI," Airpower Journal 4, no. 3 (Fall 1990).

53. Mark, "Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance," 8; Carol Migdalovitz, "Israel: Background and Relations with the United States," Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, August 31, 2006, 19; and Duncan L. Clarke, "The Arrow Missile: The United States, Israel, and Strategic Cooperation," Middle East Journal 48, no. 3 (Summer 1994).

54. "Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States and the Government of Israel on Strategic Cooperation," November 30, 1981, posted on the website of the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/ pal03.htm.

55. Congress established the designation "Major Non-NATO Ally" in 1988, as part of U.S. Code Title 10 (Armed Forces). See Subtitle A, Part IV, Chapter 138, Subchapter II, Section 2350a. On Israel's designation, see Migdalovitz, "Israel: Background and Relations," 19.

56. Yitzhak Benhorin, "US to Double Emergency Equipment Stored in Israel," Ynetnews.com, December 12, 2006.

57. Feldman also notes that it would be difficult and costly for the United States to transport this materiel from Israel to its most likely area of deployment, the Persian Gulf. See Shai Feldman, The Future ofU.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1996), 45-46. Also see Clarke et al., Send Guns and Money, 162-63.

58. Benhorin, "US to Double Emergency Equipment."

59. These developments are documented in Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 410-11; Migdalovitz, "Israel: Background and Relations," 18-19; Bard and Pipes, "How Special Is the U.S.-Israel Relationship?"; Clyde Mark, "Israeli-United States Relations," Issue Brief for Congress, Congressional Research Service, November 9, 2004, 9-10; and Schoenbaum, The United States and the State of Israel, 280-81.

60. Jeffrey T. Richelson and Desmond Ball, The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Cooperation Between the UKUSA Countries (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 173, 304; Jeffrey T. Richelson, "The Calculus of Intelligence Cooperation," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 4, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 314; and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 40-41.

61. Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1989), 275-77; and Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), 3-8.

62. Ephraim Kahana, "Mossad-CIA Cooperation," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 14, no. 3 (July 2001): 416.

63. Robert Norris et al., "Israeli Nuclear Forces, 2002," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 58, no.

5 (September/October 2002): 73-75; and "Israel Profile: Nuclear," Nuclear Threat Initiative, www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Israel/Nuclear/index.htrnl.

64. Bass, Support Any Friend, 198, 206.

65. Ibid., 216, 219, 222.

66. Quoted in Karpin, Bomb in the Basement, 237.

67. Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 193. The White House aide Robert Komer later claimed that Kennedys decision to provide U.S. arms to Israel in the 1960s was part of a deliberate effort to convince Jerusalem not to go nuclear, but if this was in fact the objective, it clearly failed. As Michael Karpin notes, "Israel wanted both the product' of Dimona [i.e., nuclear weapons] as well as offensive weaponry from the United States. And this, ultimately, is what it got." Bomb in the Basement, 238.

68. Bass, Support Any Friend, 252.

69. Hersh, Samson Option, 188-89. Bass describes Johnson's approach to Dimona as being "willing to settle for a mutually tolerable level of duplicity." Support Any Friend, 252.

70. Avner Cohen, "Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Ams Control," Nonproliferation Review 8, no. 3 (Fall-Winter 2001).

71. Total Soviet aid to Cuba may have been as large as U.S. aid to Israel in some years (roughly $3 billion per annum), but these estimates use the official dollar-peso exchange rate and thus overstate the total amount of Soviet support. Cuba's population is also roughly twice that of Israel's, so Soviet aid per capita was substantially smaller than U.S. aid to Israel, and the United States has backed Israel for a longer period than Moscow subsidized Havana. Castro was also a tamer client. As Jorge Dominguez noted, "Cuba does not oppose Soviet interests; it exercises its autonomy mindful of, and consistent with those interests. At crucial times, as with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Cuba has adopted policies at great cost to its own interests . . . And even over domestic Soviet policies at odds with Cuba's own, Cuba is circumspect in its criticisms of Moscow. The tight Soviet hegemony thus places real and significant limits on Cuba's autonomy." To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba's Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 111 and Appendix B.

72. Quandt, Peace Process, 249. Some sources claim that Begin did not in fact break his promise, arguing that he had not initiated the discussion of AWACS but had merely expressed strong opposition to the sale when members of Congress asked him about it. It is clear from Reagan's memoirs that the former president did not find this explanation of Begins conduct convincing. "I didn't like having representatives of a foreign country—any foreign country— trying to interfere in what I regarded as our domestic political process and the setting of our foreign policy ... I felt he'd [Begin] broken his word and I was angry about it." Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 412, 414-16.

73. The English text of Resolution 242 is reprinted in The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Readings and Documents, ed. John Norton Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 1083-84. Also see David Pollock, The Politics of Pressure: American Arms and Israeli Policy Since the Six Day War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 74.

74. Despite the growing level of U.S. aid after 1968, U.S.-Israeli relations were frequently strained by disputes over the level of U.S. military support and Israeli reluctance to accept any of the peace proposals offered by the various mediators. U.S. efforts to force Israeli concessions by restricting arms generally failed, however, and concessions were won only through pledges of additional support. See William B. Quandt, Decade of Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967-1976 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 97-98, 100-102; Pollock, Politics of Pressure, 74-77; Brecher, Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy, 487-88, 493-96; and Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 190-91.

75. Quoted in Brecher, Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy, 493.

76. These amounts are in constant 2005 dollars. USAID, "Greenbook."

77. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 603-605.

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:48 PM

A NEW RELATIONSHIP: TREAT ISRAEL AS A NORMAL STATE

But what about Israel? What does offshore balancing say about U.S. relations with Israel, especially since it is of little strategic value for America?

The Jewish state is nearly sixty years old, and its existence is now recognized and accepted by almost all countries in the world. Its economy is developing rapidly and most Israelis are increasingly prosperous, even though its political system currently seems paralyzed by internal divisions, troubled by corruption, and rocked by repeated scandals. It is time for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country. In other words, the United States should support Israel's continued existence—just as it supports the existence of France, Thailand, or Mexico—and Washington should be prepared to intervene if Israel's survival were ever threatened.

Treating Israel as a normal state means no longer pretending that Israel's and America's interests are identical, or acting as if Israel deserves steadfast U.S. support no matter what it does. When Israel acts in ways that the United States deems desirable, it should have American backing. When it does not, Israel should expect to face U.S. opposition, just as other states do. It also implies that the United States should gradually wean Israel from the economic and military aid that it currently provides. Israel is now an advanced economy, and it will become even more so once it achieves full peace with its neighbors and reaches a final settlement with the Palestinians.

The United States would continue to trade with Israel, of course, and American and Israeli investors would undoubtedly continue to finance enterprises in each other's countries. Cultural, educational, and scientific exchanges would continue as they do today, and for the same reasons that the United States has extensive social connections with many other countries. The special personal and family connections between Israelis and Americans would remain intact as well. U.S. arms manufacturers would still be able to sell arms to Israel (as they do to other states in the region, subject to the relevant U.S. laws), and Washington and Jerusalem would undoubtedly share intelligence information and maintain other mutually beneficial forms of security cooperation. But there is little reason to continue the handouts that American taxpayers have provided since the early 1970s, especially when

there are many countries that have greater needs. Ultimately, U.S. aid is indirectly subsidizing activities that are not in its national interest. Although the United States may have to offer some additional support in order to persuade Israel to grant the Palestinians a viable state, treating Israel as a normal country should eventually lead to a dramatic reduction in U.S. assistance.

ENDING THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

Above all, the United States should use its considerable leverage to bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end. As the bipartisan Iraq Study Group noted in December 2006, "There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush's June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine . . . The United States does its ally Israel no favors in avoiding direct involvement to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict."5

U.S. leaders have been engaged in virtually every aspect of the peace process, but they have never used the full leverage at their disposal to push the process forward. While reaffirming its commitment to Israel's security within its pre-1967 borders, the United States should make it clear that it is dead set against Israel's expansionist settlements policy—including the land-grabbing "security fence"—and that it believes this policy is not in America's or Israel's long-term interests.

This approach means abandoning the Bush administration's moribund Road Map (which emphasized a timetable for negotiations) and instead laying out America's own vision for what a just peace would entail. In particular, the United States should make it clear that Israel must withdraw from almost all of the territories it occupied in June 1967 in exchange for full peace. Israel and the Palestinians will also have to reach agreement on the rights of displaced Palestinians to return to the lands they fled in 1948. Allowing this "right" to be exercised in full would threaten Israel's identity and is clearly infeasible. But the basic principle is both an essential issue of justice and an issue on which the Palestinians will not compromise save in the context of a final settlement. To resolve this dilemma, Israel will have to acknowledge a "right" of return—in effect acknowledging that Israel's creation involved the violation of Palestinian rights—and the Palestinians will have to agree to renounce this right in perpetuity in exchange for an appropriate level of compensation. The United States and the European Union could

organize and finance a generous program of reconstruction aid to compensate the Palestinians, which would terminate all claims for their actual return into what is now and will forever remain Israeli territory.

It is sometimes said that Israel cannot make such concessions, because it is small and vulnerable and would be even more so were it to grant the Palestinians a viable state. But this familiar argument ignores how much Israel's strategic situation has changed since its early years (when, we should not forget, it still managed to defeat its various adversaries, and with little assistance from the United States). Israel is far more secure now than it was when it first occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967. Israel's defense spending in that year was less than half the combined defense expenditures of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria; today, Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, Iraq is occupied by the United States and has little or no military power of its own, and Israel's defense budget is greater than Iran and Syria's combined. Israel's adversaries used to get substantial military aid from the Soviet Union; today, that superpower is gone and Israel's ties to the United States have grown. Israel had no usable nuclear weapons in 1967; today it has perhaps two hundred. Within the 1967 borders, in short, Israel is more secure than it has ever been, and it is its continued presence in the Occupied Territories—as well as the Golan Heights—that creates a serious security problem for Israel, primarily in the form of terrorist violence. Israel's supporters in the United States are doing it no favors by pressing Washington to continue subsidizing the occupation.

Some Israelis and Americans argue that the converse is true, that Israel's security situation is more perilous today than at any time since 1967. In particular, they argue that Islamic groups like Hamas and Hezbollah remain dedicated to Israel's destruction and are strongly backed by Syria and Iran, thereby creating a potentially lethal threat. There are two obvious responses to this line of argument. First, this view overstates the threat that terrorism poses to Israel—it is clearly a problem but not an existential threat—and, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 10, it also exaggerates the threat that Iranian WMD represent. Second, and more important, ending the occupation would also help divide and defuse the coalition of forces that doomsayers now see arrayed against Israel. Syria has made it clear it will make peace if it regains the Golan, and once it has its land back, it has promised to cut off support for Hezbollah and Hamas. Ending the occupation and helping create a viable Palestinian state will deprive Iran of local sympathizers and help turn groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad from heroic defenders of a national cause into outdated obstacles to progress and prosperity.

The United States has ample justification for pressuring Israel to cut this deal: so long as it is bankrolling Israel, and jeopardizing its own security by doing so, it is entitled to say what it is willing to support and what it is going to oppose. The Clinton parameters laid out in December 2000 identify the basic outlines of a settlement and offer the best baseline for new negotiations, and President Bush and his successor should make it clear that this is our starting point. If a final status agreement can be reached, then the United States and the European Union should be willing to subsidize the new arrangements generously and help Israeli and Palestinian leaders deal with the rejectionists on both sides.

Ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would contribute to America's national interests in another way. Despite its military prowess and geographic location, Israel's strategic value to the United States is reduced by its own pariah status within the region. So long as the Palestinians are denied a state, Israel's isolation prevents it from participating whenever the United States is trying to assemble a "coalition of the willing." If the conflict were resolved and normal relations developed between Israel and the Arab world—as the current Arab League peace proposal envisions—then the United States would not pay a diplomatic price for backing Israel, and Israel would be able to join forces with the United States and its Arab allies when serious regional threats emerged. If the conflict were resolved, in short, Israel might become the sort of strategic asset that its supporters often claim it is.

If Israel remains unwilling to grant the Palestinians a viable state—or if it tries to impose an unjust solution unilaterally—then the United States should curtail its economic and military support. It should do so not because it bears Israel any ill will but because it recognizes that the occupation is bad for the United States and contrary to America's political values. Consistent with the strategy of offshore balancing, the United States would base its actions on its own self-interest rather than adhere to a blind allegiance to an uncooperative partner. In effect, the United States should give Israel a choice: end its self-defeating occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and remain a close U.S. ally, or remain a colonial power on its own.

This step is not as radical as it might sound: the United States would simply be dealing with Israel the same way that it has dealt with other colonial democracies in the past. For example, the United States pushed Britain and France to give up their colonial empires in the early years of the Cold War and forced them (and Israel) to withdraw from Egyptian territory following the 1956 Suez War. The United States has also played hardball with plenty of other countries—including close allies like Japan, Germany, and

South Korea—when it was in its interest do so. As discussed in Chapter 7, public opinion polls confirm that the American people would support a president who took a harder line toward Israel, if doing so were necessary to achieve a just and enduring peace.

This policy would undoubtedly be anathema to most—though perhaps not all—elements in the lobby and it would probably anger some other Americans as well. Moreover, present circumstances are hardly promising, given the violent divisions within the Palestinian community, the political weakness of Israel's current leaders, the Bush administration's abysmal track record in the region, and the eroding support for a two-state solution within Israel itself. Even some of the staunchest supporters of a negotiated two-state solution now lament that "the idea that negotiations conducted bilaterally between Israelis and Palestinians somehow can produce a final agreement is dead."6

But the question must be asked: What is the alternative? What vision of the future do hard-line defenders of Israel have to offer instead?

Given present circumstances, there are three possible alternatives to the two-state solution sketched above. First, Israel could expel the Palestinians from its pre-1967 lands and from the Occupied Territories, thereby preserving its Jewish character through an overt act of ethnic cleansing. Although a few Israeli hard-liners—including current Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman—have advocated variants on this approach, to do so would be a crime against humanity and no genuine friend of Israel could support such a heinous course of action. If this is what opponents of a two-state solution are advocating, they should say so explicitly. This form of ethnic cleansing would not end the conflict, however; it would merely reinforce the Palestinians' desire for vengeance and strengthen those extremists who still reject Israel's right to exist.

Second, instead of separate Jewish and Palestinian states living side by side, Mandate Palestine could become a democratic binational state in which both peoples enjoyed equal political rights. This solution has been suggested by a handful of Jews and a growing number of Israeli Arabs.7 The practical obstacles to this option are daunting, however, and binational states do not have an encouraging track record. This option also means abandoning the original Zionist vision of a Jewish state. There is little reason to think that Israel's Jewish citizens would voluntarily accept this solution, and one can also safely assume that individuals and groups in the lobby would have virtually no interest in this outcome. We do not believe it is a feasible or appropriate solution ourselves.

The final alternative is some form of apartheid, whereby Israel continues to increase its control over the Occupied Territories but allows the Palestinians to exercise limited autonomy in a set of disconnected and economically crippled statelets.8 Israelis invariably bristle at the comparison to white rule in South Africa, but that is the future they face if they try to control all of Mandate Palestine while denying full political rights to an Arab population that will soon outnumber the Jewish population in the entirety of the land. In any case, the apartheid option is not a viable long-term solution either, because it is morally repugnant and because the Palestinians will continue to resist until they get a state of their own. This situation will force Israel to escalate the repressive policies that have already cost it significant blood and treasure, encouraged political corruption, and badly tarnished its global image.9

These possibilities are the only alternatives to a two-state solution, and no one who wishes Israel well should be enthusiastic about any of them. Given the harm that this conflict is inflicting on Israel, the United States, and especially the Palestinians, it is in everyone's interest to end this tragedy once and for all. Put differently, resolving this long and bitter conflict should not be seen as a desirable option at some point down the road, or as a good way for U.S. presidents to polish their legacies and garner Nobel Peace Prizes. Rather, ending the conflict should be seen as a national security priority for the United States. But this will not happen as long as the lobby makes it impossible for American leaders to use the leverage at their disposal to pressure Israel into ending the occupation and creating a viable Palestinian state.

The U.S. presidents who have made the greatest contribution to Middle East peace—Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush—were able to do so precisely because each was willing on occasion to chart a separate course from the lobby. As former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has written, "Carter had yet another vital advantage. A rare bird among politicians, and especially among residents of the White House, he was not especially sensitive or attentive to Jewish voices and lobbies ... As it turned out, it was this kind of President—George [H. W] Bush in the late 1980s is another case in point—who was ready to confront Israel head on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America that managed eventually to produce meaningful breakthroughs on the way to an Arab-Israeli peace."10 Ben-Ami is correct, and his important insight underscores once again how the lobby's efforts have unwittingly undermined Israel's own interests.

The United States will have to put significant pressure on Israel to get it to accept the creation of a viable Palestinian state, which in practice means ac

cepting a solution within the Clinton parameters. Although the Barak government accepted these parameters—albeit with significant reservations—in January 2001, broad support for the key elements of this solution is at present lacking. While a majority of Israelis—55 percent in 2007—support the establishment of a Palestinian state in principle, a recent survey reveals much less support for the main ingredients of the peace settlement described by President Clinton in December 2000. In particular, only 41 percent of Israelis support creating a Palestinian state on 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, even if Israel was allowed to keep its large settlement blocs. Just 37 percent would support transferring the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, while only 22 percent favor transferring control of the Jordan River Valley to a Palestinian state in a few years. Finally, 27 percent support giving control of the Temple Mount to the Palestinians (with Israel retaining control of the Western Wall), and a mere 17 percent favor allowing a limited number of refugees to return to Israel.11 In effect, there is widespread opposition in Israel to creating a viable Palestinian state, which means that any future president who hopes to settle this conflict will have to lean hard on Israel to change its thinking about how to achieve a two-state solution.

Israel's intransigence and the lobby's influence are not the only obstacles to a peaceful settlement, of course, and ending the conflict will require the United States (and others) to pressure the Palestinians as well. This will be much easier to do if the Palestinians and key Arab states see the United States as genuinely committed to a just peace and willing to act as an honest broker, instead of operating as "Israel's lawyer." A genuine effort to end the conflict—as opposed to the Bush administration's halfhearted commitment to the Road Map or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's meaningless regional visits—will force the Palestinians to make a real choice. As it stands now, there is little reason for the Palestinians not to support groups like Hamas, because the possibility of meaningful negotiations is remote and supporting the most radical groups costs little in the way of missed opportunities. But if the United States presses hard to help them gain a viable state, and Hamas is exposed as the main obstacle to that end, then the Palestinians would be more likely to turn against Hamas and seize the olive branch.

Israel's American backers need to recognize that denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights has not made Israel safer, and those who have lobbied hardest for unconditional U.S. backing have ultimately nurtured Israeli and Palestinian extremism and inflicted unintended hardships on the very country that they seek to support. It is high time to abandon this bankrupt policy and pursue a different course.

The policies sketched here are no panacea, and they will not eliminate all the problems currently facing the United States in the Middle East. Achieving a final peace between Israel and the Palestinians will require all the parties to engage in difficult and probably violent confrontations with rejectionists on both sides. Israeli-Palestinian peace is not a wonder drug that will solve all the region's problems: it will by itself neither eliminate anti-Semitism in the region nor lead Arab elites to tackle the other problems that afflict their societies with new energy and commitment. But ending the conflict and adopting a more normal relationship with Israel will help the United States rebuild its image in the Arab and Islamic world and put it in a position where it can more credibly encourage the various reforms that are badly needed elsewhere in the region.

Some may argue that the problems the United States currently faces in the Middle East are an aberration, due primarily to the influence of one faction in the lobby—the neoconservatives. Once President Bush's second term is over and the neoconservatives are out of power, one might hope, U.S. foreign policy will revert to more sensible positions and America's regional position will quickly improve.

This hopeful forecast, alas, is too optimistic. Although a number of prominent neoconservatives no longer serve in government, they are still active in current policy debates. Some of them are advising 2008 presidential candidates and they remain a ubiquitous presence in the mainstream media. To date, few neoconservatives seem chastened by the havoc their policies have wrought, and even fewer have expressed any remorse about the human costs of their misguided advice. The think tanks that support them are still flourishing and influential inside the Beltway and will continue to influence American foreign policy after the next election.

Equally important, many of the major organizations in the lobby remain committed to the same policy agenda: steadfast support for an expansionist Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, confrontation with Israel's adversaries for the purpose of either fundamentally changing each country's foreign policy or toppling the regime, and maintaining a substantial American presence in the region over the longer term. As previously noted, none of the major presidential candidates has proposed a significant alteration in U.S. Middle East policy, and certainly nothing like the strategy we have outlined here. Thus, anyone who believes that the 2008 election will lead to markedly different policies is likely to be disappointed. This situation raises the obvious question: can anything be done to break the lobby's hold?

DEALING WITH THE LOBBY

In theory, there are four ways to mitigate the lobby's negative influence. First, one could try to weaken the lobby, either by reducing its resources or by removing some of its avenues of influence. Second, other groups could try to counter the lobby's influence over elected officials and the policy-making process, thereby shifting U.S. policy to a more evenhanded position. Third, academics and the media could confront the lobby's various arguments, in order to correct enduring myths and expose the weaknesses in the lobby's policy preferences. Finally, the lobby itself might evolve in a positive direction, retaining its current influence but advocating a different set of policies.

Weakening the Lobby?

The lobby would be less influential if it no longer enjoyed generous financial support, or if its ability to direct campaign contributions and to pressure media organizations declined. Neither of these developments is realistic, however, because it is not likely to lose wealthy and generous supporters anytime soon. Although the number of Americans who are unconditionally committed to Israel is declining, there will almost certainly be a sufficient number who feel strongly enough to give large sums to support the lobby's leading organizations. Banning such contributions is unlikely and would probably be illegal. Plus, trying to restrict support for pro-Israel groups would clearly be anti-Semitic, as all Americans are within their rights to contribute to any legitimate cause.

The obvious way to reduce the lobby's influence (along with other special interest groups) is campaign finance reform. Public financing of all elections would seriously weaken the link between the lobby and elected officials and make it easier for the latter to pressure Israel (or simply withdraw U.S. support) when doing so would be in America's interest. Such a step would not eliminate the lobby's influence, as politicians would still court Jewish and Christian Zionist voters, and groups and individuals within the lobby could still press their case with U.S. officials and work to shape public opinion. Campaign finance reform would almost certainly attenuate its influence, however, and would encourage more open deliberations within the corridors of power.

Unfortunately, the prospects for meaningful campaign finance reform are dim. Incumbents have too great a stake in the current system, and plenty of other special interest groups would join forces to resist any effort to revise

the system that currently gives them disproportionate influence. It would probably take a bevy of Jack Abramoff—style scandals to convince Americans to purge private money from the electoral process. In the short term, trying to weaken the lobby directly is not going to work.

Countering the Lobby?

Creating a "counterlobby" to balance the Israel lobby is also likely to fail. As discussed in Chapter 4, Arab-American and Muslim groups are much weaker than the organizations in the Israel lobby, and the vaunted oil lobby exerts much less influence on foreign and national security policy than is commonly believed. Other countervailing organizations—such as the nonpartisan Council for the National Interest or Americans for Middle East Understanding—are also significantly smaller and less well financed than the Israel lobby.

But even if these various groups were bigger and richer, they would still find it hard to overcome the collective action dynamics that lie at the heart of interest group politics. As noted earlier, pro-Israel groups succeed in part because their members place an especially high priority on backing Israel, which means that they tend to engage in single-issue politics—backing only candidates whose pro-Israel credentials are well established. Even if many Americans are aware that unconditional support for Israel is not in America's national interest, this issue is not the top priority for most of them, and there are significant differences among the various groups that are either skeptical of unconditional aid to Israel or strongly opposed to it. As a result, trying to balance the lobby's influence by pulling these disparate groups into a sufficiently cohesive coalition is not a promising strategy. We would also view attempts to form an explicitly "anti-Israel" lobby with grave misgivings, as this sort of group could easily foster a resurgence of genuine anti-Semitism.

Fostering More Open Discourse

The third option, which is much more promising than the first two, is to encourage a more open debate about these issues, in order to correct existing myths about the Middle East and to force groups in the lobby to defend their positions in the face of a well-informed opposition. In particular, Americans need to understand the real history of Israel's founding and the true story of its subsequent conduct. Instead of passively accepting the Leon Uris version of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Americans need to absorb and reflect on the findings of Israel's "new historians," whose courageous scholarship has shed much-needed light on what the Zionists' campaign to build a

Jewish state in the midst of an indigenous Arab population entailed. Although the two situations are hardly identical, one cannot understand Zionism without understanding the long history of Christian anti-Semitism, and one cannot fathom contemporary Palestinian nationalism without being aware of the events surrounding the 1948 war, which Israelis call the War of Independence but Palestinians call al-Nakba, or "the Catastrophe."12

Because most Americans are only dimly aware of the crimes committed against the Palestinians, they see their continued resistance as an irrational desire for vengeance, or as evidence of unwarranted hatred of Jews akin to the anti-Semitism that was endemic in old Europe. Ignorance about the past also encourages Americans to reject the Palestinians' demands for compensation—especially the right of return—as utterly unjustified. Although we deplore the Palestinians' reliance on terrorism and are well aware of their own contribution to prolonging the conflict, we believe their grievances are genuine and must be addressed, even if, as noted above, some of their aspirations (such as the unrestricted right of return) will have to go unmet or be resolved in other ways. We also believe most Americans would support a different approach to the conflict if they had a more accurate understanding of past events and present conditions.

As the primary source of independent thinking in democratic societies, scholars and journalists should be encouraged to resist the lobby's efforts to shape public discourse and to encourage more open discussion of these important issues. The objective is not to single out Israel for criticism or to challenge the legitimacy of the Jewish state, but rather to help Americans gain a more accurate picture of how past behavior casts a giant shadow over the present. Israel will still have plenty of vocal defenders—as it should—but America would be better served if its citizens were exposed to the range of views about Israel common to most of the world's democracies, including Israel itself.

Journalists have a particular responsibility to ask hard questions during political campaigns. As noted at the beginning of this book, virtually all the major presidential candidates began the 2008 campaign by expressing a strong personal commitment to Israel and by making it clear that they favor unconditional U.S. support for the Jewish state and a confrontational approach toward its adversaries. Politicians should not get a free pass when they utter the usual pro-Israel platitudes. Reporters and commentators should insist that those who aspire to be president explain why they favor such strong support for Israel and ask if they support a two-state solution and will push hard for it once elected. The candidates should also be asked to consider whether a more conditional U.S. policy—for example, one that

linked American military aid to genuine progress toward peace—might be good for the United States and Israel alike. And it should be fair game to ask those who aspire to the highest office in the land if their views have been influenced by campaign contributions from pro-Israel PACs or individuals, just as one might legitimately ask about the impact of contributions received from oil companies, labor unions, or drug manufacturers.

To foster a more open discussion, Americans of all backgrounds must reject the silencing tactics that some groups and individuals in the lobby continue to employ. Stifling debate and smearing opponents is inconsistent with the principles of vigorous and open dialogue on which democracy depends, and continued reliance on this undemocratic tactic runs the risk of generating a hostile backlash at some point in the future.

We condemn all attempts to silence legitimate forms of discussion and debate—including the occasional efforts to silence pro-Israel voices—and we hope that this book will contribute to a more open exchange of views on these difficult problems. Both the United States and Israel face vexing challenges in dealing with the many problems in the Middle East, and neither country will benefit by silencing those who support a new approach. This does not mean that critics are always right, of course, but their suggestions deserve at least as much consideration as the failed policies that key groups in the lobby have backed in recent years.

A New Israel Lobby?

Convincing groups within the lobby to support a different agenda would also advance the U.S. national interest. In practice, this development could involve strengthening more moderate forces that already exist—such as the Israel Policy Forum or Americans for Peace Now—or by creating new pro-Israel groups that support different policies. U.S. and Israeli interests would also be advanced by wresting power away from the hard-liners who now control AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America, the Conference of Presidents, or the American Jewish Committee. Such efforts might also be strengthened by institutional reforms that would give the rank and file a greater voice in determining these organizations' policy positions.

Of course, this scenario requires both leaders and members of these organizations to recognize that the policies that many of them have backed in recent years have been in neither America's nor Israel's interest. They must also come to understand that clinging to these positions may condemn Israel to an even bleaker future. More sensible voices in the Jewish community will have to discard the taboo against public criticism of Israel and challenge

Israeli policies that are harmful to Israel and may even be harmful to Jews in the diaspora as well. We agree with Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, director emeritus of Harvard University Hillel, who wrote in 2002 that "American Jews, who are the largest Diaspora community, have to discover their own focus . . . Those of us who criticize Israel do so because Israel is an important part of our identity, because criticism is an integral part of our traditional culture . . . We offer it as an expression of respect and love for the people of Israel."13 Or as the Economist recently observed, "Helping Israel should no longer mean defending it uncritically . . . Diaspora institutions should . . . feel free to criticize Israeli politicians who preach racism and intolerance . . . [and] encourage lively debate about Israeli policies."14

Indeed, current conditions in the Middle East pose a serious dilemma for the more hard-line elements in the lobby. Instead of defending a weak state surrounded by enemies, created in the aftermath of a great historical tragedy, they are now forced to defend a powerful, modern, and prosperous state that is using its superior force to confiscate land from the Palestinians and to deny them full political rights, while dealing harshly with troubled neighbors such as Lebanon. When this behavior prompts criticism from sensible moderates, these groups are forced to try to smear and marginalize people who are obviously neither extremists nor anti-Semites. Condemning neo-Nazis or Holocaust deniers is a worthy enterprise, but smearing respected individuals such as Jimmy Carter, Richard Cohen, Tony Kushner, or Tony Judt, or attacking progressive groups like the Union of Concerned Zionists, is something very different and disturbing. The more the lobby's hard-liners attack any and all critics, the more they reveal themselves to be out of step with the broad American commitment to free speech and open discussion. And once virtually any criticism of Israel becomes equated with anti-Semitism, the charge itself threatens to become meaningless.

Convincing hard-line Christian Zionists to abandon their commitment to a greater Israel is less likely, given the central role that prophecies about the end-time play in dispensationalist theology, and given their apparent willingness to see the Middle East engulfed in a highly destructive "apocalyptic" war. Hope may be found in the tendency for evangelicals' agendas to shift in the perennial quest for new members and in the general tendency for these movements to fluctuate in strength over time. The next president is unlikely to be as sympathetic to these groups as George W. Bush has been, especially given the disastrous results that Bush's Middle East policies have produced. Jews in Israel and America may also realize that Christian Zionism is a dubious ally—especially when they consider the unappealing

role they are expected to play in the end-time—and begin to distance themselves from the evangelicals' embrace.15 For their part, Christian evangelicals should be encouraged to reflect on the human tragedy that Israel continues to inflict on the Palestinians and to consider whether their own commitment to a "greater Israel" is truly consistent with Christ's message of love and brotherhood.

Redirecting the lobby's agenda may seem far-fetched, but some of these organizations supported different policies in the past and there is no reason to assume that their current preferences are set in stone. Indeed, there are signs of growing disenchantment with the positions espoused by the major Jewish organizations and a renewed effort to cultivate Jewish voices that better reflect mainstream Jewish opinion. Groups like the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, and Americans for Peace Now have become more visible and effective, and are reportedly pondering a merger designed to enhance their influence and encourage greater U.S. effort toward a two-state solution. A number of prominent American Jews have also considered founding a new lobbying group explicitly intended to provide a more reasonable alternative to AIPAC.16

Similar movements are occurring in other countries as well. In February 2007, a group of British Jews founded a new organization, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), which favors the universal application of human rights law and a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians. IJV condemns anti-Semitism, anti-Arabism, and Islamophobia, and was founded "in the belief that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole." IJV's founding declaration also emphasized that "the battle against anti-Semitism is vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as anti-Semitic."17

In Australia, Jews who are critical of Israeli policy and have found it difficult to voice their views have formed an organization called Independent Australian Jewish Voices. In November 2006, twenty-five peace researchers in Germany called for questioning the "special relationship" between Germany and Israel, because of Israel's actions against the Palestinians. A few months later, in March 2007, a heated controversy broke out within the German Jewish community when a small group of Jews issued "Berlin Declaration Shalom 5767," which, according to the Forward, criticized Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories and "the limits of open debate on matters in relation to the Middle East."18 Initiatives like these remind us that the

policy positions espoused by the most influential groups in the lobby do not represent the views of all (or even most) diaspora Jews, and they give reason to hope that many groups within the lobby might eventually bring their influence to bear in more constructive ways.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Israel's creation and subsequent development is a remarkable achievement. Had American Jews not organized on Israel's behalf and convinced important politicians to support their objectives, Israel might never have been established. U.S. and Israeli interests have never been identical, however, and Israel's current policies are at odds with America's own national interests and certain core U.S. values. Unfortunately, in recent years the lobby's political clout and public relations acumen have discouraged U.S. leaders from pursuing Middle East policies that would advance American interests and protect Israel from its worst mistakes. The lobby's influence, in short, has been bad for both countries.

There is, nonetheless, a silver lining in America's current plight. Because the costs of these failed policies are now so apparent, we have an opportunity for reflection and renewal. Although the lobby remains a powerful political force, its adverse impact is increasingly hard to overlook. A country as rich and powerful as the United States can sustain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored forever.

What is needed, therefore, is a candid but civilized discussion of the lobby's influence and a more open debate about U.S. interests in this vital region. Israel's well-being is one of those interests—on moral grounds—but its continued presence in the Occupied Territories is not. Open debate and more wide-ranging media coverage will reveal the problems that the current "special relationship" creates and encourage the United States to pursue policies more in line with its own national interest, with the interests of other states in the region, and, we firmly believe, with Israel's interest as well.

NOTES

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:50 PM

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

In Part I of this book, we argued that strategic and moral considerations could neither explain nor justify the current level of U.S. support for Israel. Nor could they account for the largely unconditional nature of that support, or for America's willingness to conduct its foreign policy in ways that are intended to safeguard Israel. The main explanation for this anomalous situation, we suggested, is the influence of the Israel lobby. Like other special interest groups, the individuals and organizations that make up the lobby engage in a number of legitimate political activities, in their case intended to push U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Some parts of the lobby also employ more objectionable tactics, such as attempting to silence or smear anyone who challenges the lobby's role or criticizes Israel's actions. Although the lobby does not get everything it wants, it has been remarkably successful in achieving its basic aims.
   In Part II, we traced the lobby's impact on U.S. Middle East policy and argued that its influence has been unintentionally harmful to the United States and Israel alike. Washington's reflexive support for Israel has fueled anti-Americanism throughout the Arab and Islamic world and undermined the U.S. image in many other countries as well. The lobby has made it difficult for U.S. leaders to pressure Israel, thereby prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This situation gives Islamic terrorists a powerful recruiting tool and contributes to the growth of Islamic radicalism. Turning a blind eye to Israel's nuclear programs and human rights abuses has made the United States look hypocritical when it criticizes other countries on these grounds, and it has undermined American efforts to encourage political reform throughout the Arab and Islamic world.
   The lobby's influence helped lead the United States into a disastrous war in Iraq and has hamstrung efforts to deal with Syria and Iran. It also encouraged the United States to back Israel's ill-conceived assault on Lebanon, a campaign that strengthened Hezbollah, drove Syria and Iran closer together, and further tarnished America's global image. The lobby bears considerable, though not complete, responsibility for each of these developments, and none of them was good for the United States. The bottom line is hard to escape: although America's problems in the Middle East would not disappear if the lobby were less influential, U.S. leaders would find it easier to explore alternative approaches and be more likely to adopt policies more in line with American interests.
   The lobby's influence has not helped Israel either, especially in recent years. U.S. aid has indirectly subsidized Israel's prolonged and costly effort to colonize the Occupied Territories, and the lobby has made it impossible for Washington to convince Israel to abandon this counterproductive policy. Its ability to persuade Washington to support this expansionist agenda has also discouraged Jerusalem from seizing opportunities—such as a peace treaty with Syria or full and prompt implementation of the Oslo Accords— that would have saved Israeli lives, divided Israel's adversaries, and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Enabling Israel's refusal to recognize the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations has not made Israel safer. The long campaign to kill, imprison, or marginalize a generation of Palestinian leaders has helped bring groups like Hamas to power and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would welcome a negotiated settlement and be able to make it work. The U.S. invasion of Iraq—which Israel and the lobby both encouraged—turned out to be a major boon for Iran, the country many Israelis fear most. And by pressing U.S. officials to back Israel's assault on Lebanon, groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Christians United for Israel, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations did further damage to the country they thought they were protecting. In all these cases, the lobby's actions were directly harmful to Israel.
   What is to be done? To reverse the damage that recent U.S. policies have inflicted, a new strategy is clearly needed. But developing and implementing a different approach means finding ways to address the power of the lobby. Charting a fresh course will therefore require
• Identifying U.S. interests in the Middle East
• Outlining a strategy to protect those interests
• Developing a new relationship with Israel
• Ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a two-state solution
• Transforming the lobby into a constructive force

Let us consider each of these steps.

WHAT ARE U.S. INTERESTS?

The overriding goal of U.S. foreign policy is to ensure the safety and prosperity of the American people. In pursuit of that end, the United States has always considered the security of the Western Hemisphere to be of paramount importance. In recent decades, policy makers have also considered three other regions of the world to contain strategic interests important enough to fight and die for: Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf.1 These regions are important because they contain either concentrations of power or critical natural resources, and who controls them has profound effects on the global balance of power.
   The United States has three distinct strategic interests in the Middle East. Because this region contains a large percentage of global energy supplies, the most important interest is maintaining access to the oil and natural gas located in the Persian Gulf. This objective does not require the United States to control the region itself; it merely needs to ensure that no other country is in a position to keep Middle East oil from reaching the world market. To do this, the United States has long sought to prevent any local power from establishing hegemony in the Gulf and to deter outside powers from establishing control of the region.
   A second strategic interest is discouraging Middle Eastern states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. As discussed in Chapter 2, the risk here is not the remote possibility of deliberate nuclear attack, nuclear blackmail, or a deliberate "nuclear handoff" to terrorists, because such threats are not credible in light of America's own nuclear deterrent. Rather, the United States opposes the spread of WMD in the region because it would make it more difficult to project power into the region and thus might complicate U.S. efforts to keep Middle East oil flowing. WMD proliferation also increases the dangers of accidental or unauthorized nuclear use. Given the potential for instability in some countries in the area, it also raises the risk that nuclear weapons or other WMD might fall into the wrong hands in the event of a coup or revolt, or be stolen by terrorists from poorly guarded facilities. For all these reasons, inhibiting the spread of WMD in the region is an important U.S. objective.
   Third, the United States has an obvious interest in reducing anti-American terrorism. This goal requires dismantling existing terrorist networks that threaten the United States and preventing new terror groups from emerging. Both objectives are furthered by cooperating extensively and effectively with countries in the region, mostly in terms of intelligence sharing and other law enforcement activities. It is also imperative that the United States take all feasible steps to prevent groups like al Qaeda from gaining access to any form of WMD. Terrorists armed with WMD would be more difficult to deter than states with WMD, and they are likely to use them against America or its allies. Encouraging political reform and greater democratic participation can assist this goal as well—which in turn requires good relations with key regional powers—although the United States should be wary of rapid transformation and certainly should not try to spread democracy at the point of a gun.
   Although we believe that America should support Israel's existence, Israel's security is ultimately not of critical strategic importance to the United States.2 In the event that Israel was conquered—which is extremely unlikely given its considerable military power and its robust nuclear deterrent— neither America's territorial integrity, its military power, its economic prosperity, nor its core political values would be jeopardized. By contrast, if oil exports from the Persian Gulf oil were significantly reduced, the effects on America's well-being would be profound. The United States does not support Israel's existence because it makes Americans more secure, but rather because Americans recognize the long history of Jewish suffering and believe that it is desirable for the Jewish people to have their own state. As we have noted repeatedly, there is a strong moral case for supporting Israel's existence, and we believe the United States should remain committed to coming to Israel's aid if its survival were in jeopardy. But Americans should do this because they think it is morally appropriate, not because it is vital to their own security.

A DIFFERENT STRATEGY: THE CASE FOR "OFFSHORE BALANCING"

Since 9/11, the United States has pursued a policy of regional transformation in the Middle East. In pursuit of this remarkably ambitious strategy, the Bush administration has kept large numbers of American troops in the region, something the United States never did during the Cold War. This misguided policy has helped fuel America's terrorism problem and led to the ongoing de
bade in Iraq. It has also done serious damage to the United States'reputation around the world, including its relationship with European and Arab allies.
   America would be best served if it abandoned regional transformation and adopted a strategy of offshore balancing. This strategy would be less ambitious in scope but much more effective at protecting U.S. interests in the Middle East. In this strategy, the United States would deploy its military power—especially its ground forces—abroad only when there are direct threats to vital U.S. interests and only when local actors cannot handle these threats on their own.3 Washington would remain diplomatically engaged under this approach, relying on air and naval power to signal its continued commitment to the region and to provide the capacity to respond quickly to unexpected threats. It would also maintain a robust intervention capability, along the lines of the original Rapid Deployment Force, whose units were stationed over the horizon or in the United States.
   Offshore balancing is America's traditional grand strategy and was a key component of U.S. Middle East policy for much of the Cold War. The United States did not try to garrison the region and never attempted to transform it along democratic lines. Instead, it sought to maintain a regional balance of power by backing various local allies and by developing the capacity to intervene directly if the local balance of power broke down. The United States built the Rapid Deployment Force to deter or defeat a Soviet attempt to seize the oil-rich Persian Gulf, and Washington tilted toward Iraq in the 1980s to help contain revolutionary Iran. But when Iraq's conquest of Kuwait in 1990 threatened to tilt the local balance of power in Saddam's favor, the United States assembled a multinational coalition and sent a large army to smash Saddam's military machine and liberate Kuwait.
   Offshore balancing is the right strategy for at least three reasons. First, it markedly reduces, but does not eliminate, the chances that the United States will get involved in bloody and costly wars like Iraq. Not only does this strategy categorically reject using military force to reshape the Middle East, it also recognizes that the United States does not need to control this vitally important region; it merely needs to ensure that no other country does. Toward that end, the strategy calls for husbanding U.S. resources and relying primarily on local allies to contain their dangerous neighbors. As an offshore balancer, the United States intervenes only as a matter of last resort. And when it does, it finishes the job as quickly as possible and then moves back offshore.
Second, offshore balancing will ameliorate America's terrorism problem.
One of the key lessons of the twentieth century is that nationalism and other forms of local identity remain intensely powerful political forces, and foreign occupiers invariably generate fierce resistance.4 By keeping U.S. military forces over the horizon until they are needed, offshore balancing minimizes the resentment created when American troops are permanently stationed on Arab soil. This resentment often manifests itself in terrorism or even large-scale insurgencies directed at the United States.
   Third, unlike regional transformation, offshore balancing gives states like Iran and Syria less reason to worry about an American attack and thus less reason to acquire WMD. The need to deter U.S. intervention is one reason Iran has sought a nuclear capability, and convincing Tehran to reverse course will require Washington to address Iran's legitimate security concerns and to refrain from issuing overt threats. The United States cannot afford to disengage completely from the Middle East, but a strategy of offshore balancing will make American involvement less threatening to states in the region and might even encourage some of our current adversaries to seek our help. Instead of lumping potential foes together in an "axis of evil" and encouraging them to join forces against us, offshore balancing facilitates a strategy of divide and conquer. Because U.S. interests are served so long as no hostile state or coalition is able to threaten a vital region such as the Persian Gulf, this basic approach makes good strategic sense.
   In effect, a strategy of offshore balancing would reverse virtually all of America's current regional policies. Instead of continuing the fruitless effort to transform Iraq into a multiethnic and multisectarian democracy, the United States would withdraw as soon as possible and focus on containing the regional consequences of its foolhardy decision to invade. Instead of trying to topple the Assad regime in Syria, the United States would push Israel to give up the Golan Heights in exchange for a formal peace treaty. Not only would this bring Syria into the ranks of Arab countries that have formally accepted Israel's existence, but it would isolate Hezbollah in Lebanon, drive a wedge between Syria and Iran, and reduce Iran's ability to aid Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. It would also encourage Damascus to help the United States deal with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
   Finally, instead of threatening Iran with preventive war—an approach that fuels Iran's desire for WMD and allows President Ahmadinejad to use nationalist sentiment to deflect popular discontent—the United States would try to cut a deal on Iran's nuclear ambitions and put its hard-line leaders on the defensive. This approach would not eliminate all of the problems that the United States currently faces in the region, but it would be better
for America and Israel than the policies endorsed by most groups in the lobby. We have tried their approach, and its failure is plain to see.

A NEW RELATIONSHIP: TREAT ISRAEL AS A NORMAL STATE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:52 PM

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND LEBANON

Was Washington's steadfast support for Israel's actions in Lebanon the result of the lobby's influence, or did it simply demonstrate that the American people are deeply committed to Israel? Perhaps Israel received unconditional support because U.S. public opinion demanded it. Jennifer Cannata, an AIPAC spokeswoman, made this familiar argument during the war. After denying that the lobby had any influence, she proclaimed that "the American people overwhelmingly support Israel's war on terrorism and understand that we must stand by our closest ally in this time of crisis."129
   This line of argument is not convincing. What happened during the Lebanon war fits the pattern we have already seen: U.S. policy did not reflect the views of the American public. This point is clearly revealed in a wide array of survey results on six critical issues involving Lebanon. On the question of who is to blame for starting the conflict, an ABC News—Washington Post poll conducted August 3-6, 2006, found that 46 percent of the respon
dents said that Israel and Hezbollah were equally to blame.130 Another 7 percent blamed Israel alone. A CBS News-New York Times poll conducted July 21-25, 2006, also found that 46 percent of the respondents blamed "both sides equally," while 5 percent blamed "mostly Israel."
   Regarding the question of whether Israel had gone too far in its attacks, a USA Today-GaWwp poll conducted July 21-23, 2006, found that 38 percent of the respondents said they "disapprove of the military action Israel has taken in Lebanon." In the ABC News-Washington Post poll, 32 percent of the respondents said they thought that Israel was using "too much force," while 48 percent said that Israel was "not justified in bombing Hezbollah targets located in areas where civilians may be killed or wounded." Fifty-four percent said that Israel "should do more" to avoid civilian casualties.
   On whether the United States should support Israel or remain neutral in the conflict, the USA Today-GaWwp poll found that 65 percent of the respondents said that the United States should take "neither side" in the conflict. In a Zogby poll taken August 11-15, 2006, 52 percent of the respondents said that the United States should remain neutral in the conflict.131 In the CBS News-New York Times poll, 40 percent of the respondents said that the United States should not publicly support either Israel or Hezbollah and should "say or do nothing." Seven percent favored criticizing Israel, and 14 percent were unsure what to do. Thirty-nine percent favored supporting Israel. In an NBC News-Waft Street Journal poll taken July 21-24, 2006, 40 percent of the respondents opposed "U.S. military involvement in support of Israel" if the Lebanon war expanded to the point "where Israel is fighting several other nations in the region."
   As to whether the United States and Israel should agree to an immediate cease-fire, a CNN poll conducted on July 19, 2006, found that 43 percent of the respondents thought that "Israel should agree to a cease-fire as soon as possible." In the ABC News-Washington Post poll, 35 percent of the respondents said that "Israel should agree to an immediate, unconditional cease-fire in Lebanon."
   With respect to the consequences of the Lebanon war for America's terrorism problem, 44 percent of the respondents in the USA Today-GaWup poll said that they were "very concerned" that events in Lebanon "will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the United States." Thirty-one percent were "somewhat concerned" that the Lebanon war would worsen America's problem with terrorism. Finally, 35 percent of the respondents in the ABC News-Washington Post poll said that the Lebanon war would "hurt the situation for the United States in Iraq."
   In short, there was a sizable gap between how Americans thought about Israel and the Lebanon war and how their leaders in Washington talked and behaved during that conflict. Mass opinion cannot explain why the Bush administration and Congress acted as they did in the summer of 2006.

DOING AMERICA'S BIDDING?

Another way to absolve the lobby of responsibility for American policy in Lebanon is to claim that the United States was the real driving force behind the war and that Israel was merely an obedient client state. Israel, in other words, was acting as a loyal ally and serving the Bush administration's interests in the Middle East. "The Second Lebanon War," the Israeli journalist Uri Avnery writes, "is considered by many as a 'War by Proxy.' That's to say: Hizbullah is the Dobermann of Iran, we are the Rottweiler of America. Hizbullah gets money, rockets and support from the Islamic Republic, we get money, cluster bombs and support from the United States of America."132 Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah apparently agrees, telling an Iranian television station that "the United States ordered the Zionist regime to invade Lebanon" and that Israel did so in order to "serve American ambitions in the Middle East."133
   Although many U.S. officials regard Hezbollah as an enemy and were not sorry when Israel went after it, there are four good reasons to doubt the claim that Israel was simply doing Washington's bidding when it escalated the conflict with Hezbollah. If Israel were acting on America's behalf, its bombing campaign would have been confined to southern Lebanon and great care would have been taken to protect and strengthen the Lebanese government. After all, President Bush made it clear at the start of the crisis that he did not want to endanger the government in Beirut, which he had worked hard to install. More generally, the United States almost certainly would not have wanted to "turn the clock back in Lebanon by twenty years," as called for by the IDF's chief of staff.
   There is also little evidence that the Bush administration planned the offensive and then pushed Israel to execute it. As discussed above, the available evidence about the planning process suggests that Israel had planned the Lebanon campaign in the months before the kidnapping on July 12, which it used as a pretext for launching it. Israel undoubtedly briefed the United States about the plan and got the administration's endorsement, but
giving Israel the green light is not the same as using Israel as a client state and telling it what to do.
   One sometimes hears the argument that the Bush administration encouraged Israel to bomb Lebanon because it would be an opportunity to test the weapons and strategy that the U.S. military might use in an air war against Iran's nuclear facilities. As one U.S. government consultant told Seymour Hersh, "Why oppose it? We'll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran."134 Aside from the fact that not opposing Israel's plan is different from pushing Israel to strike Hezbollah, the claim that American policy makers saw Lebanon as a dry run for Iran makes little sense, as the assigned tasks in these two scenarios have little in common. Attacking small groups of guerrillas armed with missiles and rockets who are hiding in the Lebanese countryside is a fundamentally different mission from bombing a handful of identifiable and firmly fixed nuclear installations in Iran. It is not clear what important lessons would be learned from an air war against Hezbollah that would help make a U.S. offensive war against Iran more effective.
   Furthermore, there is evidence that in the spring of 2003, around the time of the fall of Saddam, Israel was urging the United States to attack Hezbollah, not the other way around. According to the Forward, the Israelis were warning American policy makers that "the militant Shiite organization threatens the stability of the Middle East and the security of the United States worldwide."135 There is no evidence—at least in the public record— that the Bush administration was tempted to go after Hezbollah or that it encouraged Israel to handle that task itself.
   Finally, Israel's history is at odds with this depiction of it as a tame client state for any country, the United States included. Israel has always been a tough-minded and self-interested actor on the international stage, which makes sense given the challenging regional environment it has faced since independence. Shabtai Shavit, the head of the Mossad from 1989 to 1996, made this point emphatically: "We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America's requirements, that's just part of a relationship between two friends." Regarding the Lebanon war, he added, "Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it."136 These are not the words of a compliant proxy. Or as Moshe Dayan once remarked, "Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice."137
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, none of the alternative explanations can adequately account for American policy during the second Lebanon war. Nor can one find a compelling strategic or moral rationale that explains why the United States provided Israel with unyielding support while the rest of the world harshly criticized Israeli behavior. In fact, the lobby played the critical role in keeping the United States firmly aligned with Israel during the conflict, despite the strategic costs and dubious moral position this entailed.
   The war in Lebanon has been a disaster for the Lebanese people, as well as a major setback for the United States and for Israel. The lobby enabled Israel's counterproductive response by discouraging the Bush administration from exercising independent judgment and influence either before or during the war. In this case, as in so many others, the lobby's influence has been harmful to U.S. as well as Israeli interests.
   Until the lobby begins to favor a different approach, or until its influence is weakened, American policy in the region will continue to be hamstrung, to the detriment of all concerned. In the final chapter, we identify what U.S. policy ought to be, and we discuss how the lobby's negative impact might be mitigated or modified.

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:53 PM

THE LOBBY IN OVERDRIVE

AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations worked overtime from the start to the finish of the war to make sure that America fully backed Israel. Four days after the war began, Nathan Guttman reported in the Jerusalem Post that "the American Jewish community has been demonstrating wall-to-wall support for Israel as it fights on two fronts."106 The lobby raised money for the Jewish state, took out advertisements in newspapers, closely monitored the media, and sent its representatives to meet with legislators and staff in Congress, policy makers in the Bush administration, and influential media figures. Moreover, since the fighting ended, pro-Israel organizations have been hard at work dealing with the fallout from the war.
To see the lobby's impact, consider the following six incidents.
   First, at the beginning of the war, there was a bipartisan effort to temper the House resolution supporting Israel by inserting language urging "all sides to protect civilian life and infrastructure." Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (then House minority leader) and Senator John Warner (R-VA; then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee), among others, favored this change in the legislation, considering the moral issues at stake. One would think that such language would be unobjectionable, if not welcome. But AIPAC, which wrote the original resolution and was the main driving force behind it, strongly objected to this particular clause. John Boehner, the House majority leader, kept the proposed new language out of the resolution, which still passed 410-8.107
   Second, Congressman Christopher Van Hollen (D-MD) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on July 30, urging her "to call for an immediate cease-fire to be followed by the rapid deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon." He also wrote:
The Israeli response . . . has now gone beyond the destruction of Hezbollah's military assets. It has caused huge damage to Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, resulted in the large loss of civilian life, and produced over 750,000 refugees. Hezbollah is undeniably the culprit, but it is the Lebanese people—not Hezbollah—who are increasingly the victims of the violence. As a result, the Israeli bombing campaign, supported by the United States, has transformed Lebanese anger at Hezbollah into growing hostility toward Israel and the United States. The result has been a surge in the political strength and popularity of Hezbollah and its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, and the weakening of the already fragile Lebanese government . . . We have squandered an opportunity to isolate Hezbollah and strengthen our credibility and negotiating leverage in the region.108

   Although Van Hollen's letter focused primarily on U.S. interests and supported Israel's right to defend itself, the lobby was furious with him for daring to criticize Israel and quickly moved to make it manifestly clear that he should have never written that letter.109 Van Hollen met with various representatives from major Jewish organizations, including AIPAC, and the congressman immediately apologized, saying, "I am sorry if my strong criticism of the Bush Administration's failures has been interpreted as a criticism of Israel's conduct in the current crisis. That was certainly not my intention."110 He emphasized that he would continue to be a strong advocate for Israel and shortly thereafter went on a five-day visit to Israel (sponsored by an AIPAC affiliate, the American Israel Education Foundation), accompanied by three pro-Israel activists from his district and a staffer from AIPAC itself.
   Despite his apology, the leader of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington told a reporter that Van Hollen "needs to continue to reach out to the Jewish community ... to reassure the Jewish community he is going to be there" for Israel. The ADL's regional director for Washington said that as far as he was concerned, Van Hollen's response "doesn't undo the damage of the first letter."111 The goal, of course, was not merely to chastise Van Hollen but also to remind other members of Congress of the costs of getting out of line on this issue.
   Third, early in the war, President Bush gently encouraged Israel to be careful not to topple the democratically elected government in Lebanon, which he had helped put in power. "The concern," he said, "is that any activities by Israel to protect herself will weaken [the Lebanese] government,
or topple that government."112 Bush made it clear that he and his lieutenants had conveyed their views to Israeli leaders.
   The lobby took issue with Bush and made it clear that his position was unacceptable. The Forward reported on July 14 that "the Bush administration is being criticized by some Israeli and Jewish communal officials for calling on Jerusalem not to undermine the democratically elected Lebanese government." Abraham Foxman of the ADL said, "The administration and Western countries want to shore up the Lebanese government but it is a misguided policy to do so and the same holds true for Abu Mazen . . . They feel it's better than a vacuum, but you should not support what's meaningless. And we knew from day one that Abu Mazen would go nowhere and that the Lebanese government would be ineffective."113 In the wake of this criticism, Bush stopped warning Israel about the need to protect the American-backed government in Beirut.
   Fourth, Tom Ricks, the well-known Washington Post journalist, said on CNN during the war that "some U.S. military analysts" had told him that "Israel purposefully has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon."114 In response, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America condemned Ricks's remarks, and Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, wrote to Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of the Post, complaining about Ricks's comments. Koch said that they "are comparable to the age-old blood libel used by anti-Semites to incite pogroms in Europe." Downie wrote back to Koch, saying, "I have made clear to Tom Ricks that he should not have made those statements."115 Why? Downie did not say. For his part, Ricks said, "The comments were accurate: that I said I had been told this by people. I wish I hadn't said them, and I intend from now on to keep my mouth shut about it."116
   Fifth, pro-Israel groups conducted a large-scale campaign to smear Amnesty International and especially Human Rights Watch for their critical reports on Israel's bombing campaign. According to Alan Dershowitz, "Virtually every component of the organized Jewish community, from secular to religious, liberal to conservative, has condemned Human Rights Watch for its bias."117 Both human rights organizations were unfairly accused of singling out Israel while largely ignoring Hezbollah and of misrepresenting important aspects of what was happening on the ground in Lebanon. At the same time, AIPAC sent out press releases designed to convey the message that the IDF was conducting surgical strikes against terrorists and avoiding civilians.118
Charges of anti-Semitism were quickly leveled at both human rights
groups. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of HRW, took the brunt of those attacks, even though he is Jewish and his father was a refugee from Nazi Germany. The Jerusalem Post, for example, ran an op-ed by Gerald Steinberg titled "Ken Roth's Blood Libel." The New York Sun asserted in an editorial that Roth was partaking in the "de-legitimization of Judaism," because he criticized the IDF's strategy in Lebanon as an "eye for an eye—or more accurately in this case twenty eyes for an eye—[which] may have been the morality of some more primitive moment." Abraham Foxman reacted in a similar way to Roth's language, accusing him of employing "a classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews."119
   Responding to such charges, the Georgetown law professor and columnist Rosa Brooks only slightly overstated the case when she wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "anyone familiar with Human Rights Watch—or with Roth—knows this to be lunacy. Human Rights Watch is non-partisan—it doesn't 'take sides' in conflicts. And the notion that Roth is anti-Semitic verges on the insane." Brooks went on to say, "But what's most troubling about the vitriol directed at Roth and his organization isn't that it's savage, unfounded and fantastical. What's most troubling is that it's typical. Typical, that is, of what anyone rash enough to criticize Israel can expect to encounter. In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism."120
   Sixth, the lobby went to work to limit the damage from the cluster bomb controversy. On August 31, B'nai B'rith International sent a letter to Jan Ege-land, the UN leader who had criticized Israel's use of cluster bombs, accusing him of acting "as an un-appointed moral arbiter with regard to disputed, un-proven facts on the ground and the interpretation of international humanitarian law."121 A week later, the Senate was debating legislation that would ban the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas and prohibit the transfer of those deadly weapons to countries that refused to accept that ban. AIPAC lobbied hard against the legislation, which went down to defeat by a vote of 70-30.122
   Key organizations in the lobby have been open and candid in discussing their influence on U.S. policy in Lebanon. For example, AIPAC's president, Howard Friedman, wrote a letter to friends and supporters of his organization on July 30, which he began by saying, "Look what you've done!" He then wrote, "Only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job. That nation is the United States of America—and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of American Jewry."123 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Israeli
Prime Minister Olmert said during the war, "Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world."124
   Organizations like AIPAC and the ADL were not the only players in the lobby that were hard at work during the recent conflict. Journalists like Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol made the case, to use Kristol's words, that Israel's war is "our war, too."125 Many Christian Zionists also rallied behind Israel. For example, the televangelist Pat Robertson made a three-day visit to Israel during the war "to offer," according to the Jerusalem Post, "his support for a country whose very existence he believes is threatened by Hizbullah." Robertson told the Post, "The Jews are God's chosen people. Israel is a special nation that has a special place in God's heart. He will defend this nation. So Evangelical Christians stand with Israel. That is one of the reasons I am here."126 John Hagee's organization, Christians United for Israel, held a two-day Washington/Israel Summit in the capital in mid-July. It attracted thirty-five hundred people, and participants were encouraged to express their support for Israel to their senators and representatives.127 The executive director of the Christian Friends of Israel offered a rather un-Christian insight: "This was certainly an unprovoked attack and Israel has every right to go in and pound them."128
   Indeed, Israel did "go in and pound them" with the unconditional backing of the U.S. government and many in the lobby.

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND LEBANON

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:54 PM

BREAKING THE LAWS OF WAR

But what about the moral dimension? One might concede that U.S. support for Israel had significant strategic costs but argue that the United States has a moral obligation to back Israel's efforts to defend itself. Israel was attacked, so the argument runs, and it responded in a way that conformed to the laws of war. Indeed, some of Israel's supporters claim that its poor performance in Lebanon was due mainly to its strict adherence to these legal and moral principles. For example, Thomas Neumann, the executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, maintains that "it wasn't Hezbollah that tied Israel down as much as it was Israel's own sense of morality."70
   On close inspection, however, this line of argument is not convincing. Israel clearly has the right to defend itself, and that right includes retaliating against Hezbollah with military force. Hardly anyone contests that basic point, and many of the governments and individuals who have criticized Israel's conduct never questioned its right to respond to Hezbollah's raid. But having the right to defend oneself does not mean that any and all measures are legally or morally permissible. The critical issue is whether Israel's actions in Lebanon during the summer of 2006 were consistent with the laws of war and with established standards of morality.
As discussed above, Israel's strategy explicitly and deliberately sought to
inflict punishment on Lebanon's civilian population. One might easily get the impression that Israel initiated this punitive campaign in response to Hezbollah's own missile and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, but that is not how the war actually evolved. It began on July 12, when Hezbollah fighters crossed into Israeli territory, killed three Israeli soldiers, and captured two more. As part of that operation, Hezbollah launched a few dozen rockets at some Israeli towns for the purpose of diverting the IDF's attention away from the abduction site. No Israeli civilians were killed in those diversionary attacks.71 Nasrallah said immediately afterward at a news conference in Beirut, "We don't want an escalation in the south, not war."72 Though unjustifiable, the Hezbollah raid was not an unusually provocative act, as both Israel and Hezbollah had been conducting violent—and sometimes lethal—incursions into each other's territory since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000.73 Nasrallah had even made it clear months in advance that he was determined to kidnap some Israeli soldiers.74
   Nevertheless, Israel responded to the abductions by launching a massive bombing campaign against Lebanon, which in turn led Hezbollah to follow suit and unleash its rockets and missiles at towns and cities across northern Israel. Specifically, the IDF struck Beirut International Airport among other targets on July 13, the day after Hezbollah struck across Israel's border. The IDF continued to pound Lebanon from the air on the 14th, striking at bridges and roads, as well as Nasrallah's office in Beirut. At this point, with more than fifty Lebanese civilians dead and damage to Lebanon's infrastructure mounting, Nasrallah promised "open war" against Israel, which meant extensive missile and rocket attacks.75 Thus, although Hezbollah clearly precipitated the war by killing or capturing IDF soldiers on June 12, Israel initiated the large-scale attacks against civilians.
   Israeli leaders emphasized from the start that all of Lebanon would pay a severe price in the war and this punishment would be the result of a deliberate Israeli policy, not merely "collateral damage." IDF Chief of Staff Halutz said at the beginning of the conflict that he intended to "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years."76 He also said at one point that "nothing is safe" in Lebanon.77 He was true to his word. In a report issued in August 2006, just after the fighting ended, Amnesty International provided a detailed assessment of what the IDF wrought in Lebanon, which is worth quoting at length:

During more than four weeks of ground and aerial bombardment of Lebanon by the Israeli armed forces, the country's infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale. Israeli forces pounded
buildings into the ground, reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns into ghost towns, as their inhabitants fled the bombardments. Main roads, bridges and petrol stations were blown to bits. Entire families were killed in air strikes on their homes or in their vehicles while fleeing the aerial assaults on their villages. Scores lay buried beneath the rubble of their houses for weeks, as the Red Cross and other rescue workers were prevented from accessing the areas by continuing Israeli strikes. The hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who fled the bombardment now face the danger of unex-ploded munitions as they head home.
   The Israeli Air Force launched more than 7,000 air attacks on about 7,000 targets in Lebanon between 12 July and 14 August, while the Navy conducted an additional 2,500 bombardments. The attacks, though widespread, particularly concentrated on certain areas. In addition to the human toll—an estimated 1,183 fatalities, about one third of whom have been children, 4,054 people injured and 970,000 Lebanese people displaced—the civilian infrastructure was severely damaged. The Lebanese government estimates that 31 "vital points" (such as airports, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities) have been completely or partially destroyed, as have around 80 bridges and 94 roads. More than 25 fuel stations and around 900 commercial enterprises were hit. The number of residential properties, offices and shops completely destroyed exceeds 30,000. Two government hospitals—in Bint Jbeil and in Meis al-Jebel—were completely destroyed in Israeli attacks and three others were seriously damaged.
   In a country of fewer than four million inhabitants, more than 25 per cent of them took to the roads as displaced persons. An estimated 500,000 people sought shelter in Beirut alone, many of them in parks and public spaces, without water or washing facilities.
   Amnesty International delegates in south Lebanon reported that in village after village the pattern was similar: the streets, especially main streets, were scarred with artillery craters along their length. In some cases cluster bomb impacts were identified. Houses were singled out for precision-guided missile attack and were destroyed, totally or partially, as a result. Business premises such as supermarkets or food stores and auto service stations and petrol stations were targeted, often with precision-guided munitions and artillery that started fires and destroyed their contents. With the electricity cut off and food and
other supplies not coming into the villages, the destruction of supermarkets and petrol stations played a crucial role in forcing local residents to leave. The lack of fuel also stopped residents from getting water, as water pumps require electricity or fuel-fed generators.78

   Amnesty International is not alone in its assessment of the damage that the IDF inflicted in Lebanon. William Arkin, an American expert on military affairs and a self-proclaimed "fan of airpower," wrote in his Washington Post weblog that "in carrying out its punishment campaign, Israel has left behind a shocking level of destruction outside the direct battle zone. I hesitate to use the words 'laid to waste' and 'moonscape' in describing the conditions in urban Lebanon because the same kinds of words are thrown around so promiscuously in describing U.S. air strikes. But what Israel has wrought is far more ruinous than anything the U.S. military—specifically the U.S. Air Force—has undertaken in the era of precision warfare."79
   One of the more devastating punitive tactics was Israel's use of cluster bombs, which spray large numbers of bomblets over a wide area. These bomblets are not only highly inaccurate; many of them do not explode, which effectively means that they become deadly land mines that continue to be a threat long after the end of hostilities. Given how lethal these weapons can be when used in civilian areas, the United States has always insisted that Israel use them against clearly defined military targets.80 Indeed, as noted, the Reagan administration banned the sale of cluster bombs to Israel for six years during the 1980s, after it discovered that the IDF had used them against civilian areas in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.81
   In the last three days of the recent Lebanon war, when a cease-fire was known to be imminent, the IDF fired over one million bomblets into southern Lebanon, which has a population of 650,000.82 The aim was to "saturate the area" with these small but deadly bombs. One Israeli soldier in an artillery battalion said, "In the last 72 hours we fired all the munitions we had, all at the same spot. We didn't even alter the direction of the gun. Friends of mine in the battalion told me they also fired everything in the last three days— ordinary shells, clusters, whatever they had."83 Over the course of the entire war, the IDF is estimated to have fired roughly four million bomblets into Lebanon. When the fighting finally stopped in mid-August, UN officials estimated that there were about one million unexploded bomblets in the southern part of the country. Researchers from Human Rights Watch said that "the density of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon was higher than in any place they had seen."84 One Israeli soldier who helped "flood" the area with cluster
bombs said, "What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs."85 Jan Egeland, the UN's under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, labeled Israel's actions "shocking" and "completely immoral."86 In the first eight months after the war, 29 Lebanese were killed by cluster bombs and another 215 were injured, 90 of them children.87
   It seems intuitively clear that Israel's destructive campaign in Lebanon violated the laws of war. Still, that is not enough; it is important to understand what those laws are and exactly how Israel violated them.
   The bedrock distinction that underpins the laws of war—as well as modern just war theory—is between civilian and military targets.88 There is no question that states have the right to defend themselves by attacking each other's military assets. However, states are not supposed to attack civilian targets in another country unless they are transformed into military targets in the course of the war. If troops occupy a school or a church during a battle, for example, and use it as a base of operations, then it is permissible to attack them there. Furthermore, when attacking an adversary's military targets, states must make a determined effort to minimize collateral damage. This is where the well-known concept of proportionality comes into play. Specifically, states striking at military targets must make sure that there is not excessive collateral damage, given the particular value of those military targets. In short, states cannot attack enemy civilian targets on purpose or indiscriminately, and they must take great care to avoid collateral damage when striking at military targets.
   Israel failed to observe both of these distinctions in the second Lebanon war. There is no question that Israel deliberately attacked a wide array of civilian targets in Lebanon, just as General Halutz said that they would. The description of the devastation in the Amnesty International report makes this clear. Remember, it concluded that Lebanon's "infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale." That same report says at another point that Israel's bombing campaign resulted in "massive destruction of civilian infrastructure." Amnesty International issued another report in November 2006, which reinforced the findings in its August report. For example, it found that "in southern Lebanon, some 7,500 homes were destroyed and 20,000 damaged" and that in "the overwhelming majority of destroyed or damaged buildings it examined," there was "no evidence to indicate that the buildings were being used by Hizbullah fighters as hide-outs or to store weapons." Indeed, it "noted a pattern of destruction by Israeli attacks that indicated that Israeli forces had targeted objects that are indispensable to the survival of the civilian population."89 In a separate study of Israel's offen
sive in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded that "Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets."90
   It is also clear that Israel did not exercise sufficient care to avoid collateral damage when striking targets that it considered military in nature. HRW concluded that despite Israel's claims that it was "taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm," there was, in fact, "a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians."91 Consider what happened in southern Lebanon, which the Israelis effectively turned into a "free-fire zone," where any person left in the area was considered a legitimate target. After warning the residents of that area to leave, Minister of Justice Haim Ramon— who had said that "we must reduce to dust the villages of the south"— announced on July 27 that "all those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hizbullah."92 However, many residents had not left, and many of the people who remained were neither combatants nor members of Hezbollah. Amnesty International estimates that about 120,000 people remained throughout the conflict, many of them civilians. On August 7, the IDF spread leaflets over southern Lebanon warning that "any vehicle of any kind traveling south of the Litani River will be bombarded, on suspicion of transporting rockets, military equipment and terrorists."93
   In light of these actions, Amnesty International concluded in its November report that "Israeli forces committed serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes. In particular, Amnesty International has found that Israeli forces carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale."94 Similarly, the HRW report finds that "the IDF consistently tolerated a high level of civilian casualties for questionable military gain."95 At least one Israeli leader made no bones about the fact that Israel was violating the proportionality principle. Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN, said one week after the war started, "To those countries who claim that we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: You're damn right we are. Because if your cities were shelled the way ours were, if your citizens were terrorized the way ours are, you would use much more force than we are using."96
   Gillerman's telling admission was an exception, however. Most Israelis and their American supporters respond to the charge that Israel engaged in disproportionate attacks by acknowledging that Israel may have killed a large number of innocent Lebanese, but they insist that it was because Hezbollah used them as human shields.97 The evidence in Amnesty International's November report and in the HRW study contradicts that line of defense. One
part of Israel's defense is the claim that Hezbollah prevented civilians from leaving southern Lebanon because it wanted to hide behind them. Amnesty International investigated this matter and found that the available evidence "does not substantiate the allegations that Hizbullah prevented civilians from fleeing, and in several cases points to the contrary."98 Also, there is good reason to believe that Hezbollah fighters purposely avoided contact with civilians for fear that "they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators.'"
   But even more important, the available evidence, as the HRW study makes clear, does not support the claim that Israel ended up killing large numbers of civilians because Hezbollah used the civilians who remained in southern Lebanon as shields. To be clear, HRW does acknowledge that "Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers," both of which "are serious violations of the laws of war."100 In other words, there is some evidence that Hezbollah used civilians to protect its fighters and weapons. Nevertheless, those cases were clearly the exception, not the rule. "The vast majority killed," according to Kenneth Roth, HRWs executive director, "were civilians, with no Hezbollah military presence nearby."101 Specifically, HRW examined twenty-four cases in detail, which included about one-third of the civilians killed in Lebanon at the time of the report.102 It found no evidence in any of those cases that "Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack."103
   One could accept this finding and offer a different defense, claiming that although Hezbollah may not have deliberately used civilians as shields, it did fight from populated areas, especially when its fighters were defending their home village or town. In such cases, Hezbollah would not be violating the laws of war by "hiding behind civilians"; it would simply be defending its own territory. If this were the case, some may argue, Israel could not help but kill civilians in the process of targeting Hezbollah. Although Hezbollah often fought in and around towns and villages, this line of defense does not work either. In only one of the twenty-four cases researched by HRW "is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack."104 In short, both Amnesty International's November report and the HRW study provide substantial evidence that contradicts Israel's claims about Hezbollah and its human shields.
   Furthermore, the IDF clearly failed to distinguish between civilian and military targets when it saturated southern Lebanon with cluster bombs just before the cease-fire took effect. As one artilleryman put it, "We fired like madmen."105 This particularly cruel action—which is hard not to see as an
act of long-term vengeance—cannot be excused by either of the counterarguments noted above. Nor can it be justified on the grounds that Hezbollah also committed war crimes when it fired missiles and rockets indiscriminately into northern Israel, killing Israeli civilians.
   Given this overwhelming evidence, it is impossible to make the case that the United States supported Israel during the second Lebanon war because it was the morally correct policy choice. If morality were the issue, the Bush administration would have condemned both Israel's and Hezbollah's actions in Lebanon from the start.

THE LOBBY IN OVERDRIVE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:55 PM

DAMAGE TO U.S. INTERESTS

Leaving aside the issue of whether Israel or Hezbollah won the second Lebanon war, there is no question that U.S. interests suffered from its outright support for Israel's actions. As we have made clear, the United States currently faces three major problems in this region. The first problem is terrorism, which is mainly about vanquishing al Qaeda, although the United States also wants to neutralize Hamas and Hezbollah. The second concern is the remaining rogue states in the area, Iran and Syria. Both support terrorism, and Iran seems determined to master the full nuclear fuel cycle, which would put it a short step away from nuclear weapons. The third problem is the Iraq war, which the United States is in serious danger of losing. The Bush administration's unyielding support for Israel during the second Lebanon war has complicated Washington's ability to deal with each of these problems.
   The conflict in Lebanon has complicated America's terrorism problem in two ways. It has reinforced anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world, with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah describing Israel during the fighting as having been "armed with an American decision, with American weapons, and American missiles."52 This perception surely will help al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations find new recruits who want to attack the United States or its allies. For example, in a poll taken in Lebanon in late August 2006, just after the fighting had ended, 69 percent of the respondents said that they considered America an "enemy of Lebanon." Less than a year earlier, in September 2005, the number was 26 percent.53 In another poll taken in Lebanon in late August 2006, 64 percent of the respondents said that their opinion of the United States was worse after the fighting than before it. Nearly half of the respondents said that their opinion of America was "much worse" in the aftermath of the war.54 A Zogby poll taken in the fall of 2006 in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon found that "in all five countries, attitudes towards the U.S. have worsened in the last year." U.S. policy in Lebanon contributed to that negative shift in attitudes, although the war in Iraq and Washington's policy toward the Palestinians were more important factors.55 This increased hostility toward the United States will generate more public support for terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere.
   Furthermore, the conflict has increased Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon. This is partly due to its impressive performance against the IDF, which has normally defeated its Arab opponents decisively but failed to do so in this case. Israel's bombing campaign was also a major reason for Hezbollah's soaring popularity. When the war first began, many Lebanese were angry with Hezbollah for precipitating the conflict, especially because a "banner tourist season . . . was underway in Lebanon."56 There was also much goodwill toward the United States among the Lebanese people at the beginning of the conflict, mainly because the Bush administration had played the key role in pushing Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. However, that goodwill toward the United States turned to outrage when Washington backed Israel's offensive; correspondingly, Hezbollah's standing in Lebanon rose dramatically.
   One poll conducted in Lebanon after the war found that 79 percent of the respondents rated the performance of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah as either "good" or "great," while another poll found that 40 percent of Lebanese had a more positive attitude toward Hezbollah after the war, while just under 30 percent had a more negative view.57 Although Hezbollah does not directly threaten the United States, it does threaten Israel and it is aiming to reverse the Cedar Revolution completely, which President Bush supported and which he extols as a successful case of democracy promotion. By the late fall of 2006, Hezbollah was throwing its increased weight around and threatening to bring down the pro-American government in Beirut headed by Fouad Siniora.58 More worrisome is the real possibility that Hezbollah's actions will plunge Lebanon into another civil war. The United States has worked hard with its allies to prevent this outcome and has been successful so far. But in all likelihood the problem would not have arisen if Hezbollah had not been emboldened by its success and widespread support.
   The conflict in Lebanon has also made it more difficult to deal with Iran and Syria. While there is no question that both countries support Hezbollah, the United States has a powerful interest in weakening or breaking those links, as well as the link between Damascus and Tehran.59 Driving a wedge between Iran and Syria should not be difficult as they are not natural allies; Iran is theocratic and Persian, while Syria is secular and Arab. Instead, the Bush administration blindly supported Israel during the war and treated Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria as part of a seamless web of evil, pushing them closer together.60
   On top of that, many neoconservatives called for Israel or the United States to attack Syria and Iran in the midst of the conflict.61 Indeed, Meyrav Wurmser of the Hudson Institute said after the war that "many parts of the
American administration"—and almost certainly her husband, David Wurmser, and Elliott Abrams—were deeply upset with Israel for not having struck Syria as well as Hezbollah.62 The result? This policy gave Iran even more reason to acquire nuclear weapons, so that it can deter an Israeli or U.S. attack on its homeland. And Iran and Syria have continued to arm and support Hezbollah, while helping to keep the United States bogged down in Iraq, so that it cannot attack either of them.63
   The blowback had other consequences in Iraq: what happened in Lebanon also angered the Iraqis themselves, especially the Iraqi Shia, who feel a loose sense of allegiance to Hezbollah (which is also Shia). Indeed, the Shia rally for Hezbollah that took place in Baghdad on August 4 was reported to be the largest of its kind in the Middle East.64 There have even been reports in the aftermath of the Lebanon war that Hezbollah is training the Iraqi militia of Moqtada al-Sadr, who is a bitter enemy of the United States.65 The United States is in deep trouble in Iraq and cannot afford to further alienate the local population.
   In order to confront these three issues—terrorism, rogue states, and Iraq—in the most effective way, Washington needs broad support from friendly regimes in the region like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. These regimes have no love for Hezbollah, and they might have supported the United States (and tacitly, Israel) had the American and Israeli response been more restrained. Indeed, in the first days of the conflict, the leaders of those countries were critical of Hezbollah for provoking it. But once Israel's disproportionate response was clear and the Bush administration firmly endorsed it, these leaders began to criticize Washington and to condemn Israel. The main reason that they turned against the United States and Israel was to protect themselves from their enraged publics.66 American policy also angered allies in Europe as well as the Middle East, leaving the United States (and Israel) isolated and short of political clout, and raising doubts about whether President Bush is a reliable ally for dealing with the terrorist and proliferation threats.67
   One might think that the sharp cleavage that developed between Arab leaders and their publics during the Lebanon war quickly dissipated when the shooting stopped and thus has had no serious long-term effects. But that would be wrong, as Arab public opinion remains deeply hostile to the United States, making it difficult for Arab regimes to help the Bush administration contain Iran's ambitions. The root of the problem is that the so-called Arab street fears the United States much more than it fears Iran. A Zogby poll released in February 2007 found that 72 percent of the respon
dents in six Arab countries identified the United States as their biggest threat, while only 11 percent identified Iran. Furthermore, 61 percent of the respondents said that Iran has the right to develop a nuclear capability, even though more than half of them think Iran is likely to go the next step and build nuclear weapons.68
   It is also worth noting that the IDF's poor performance in Lebanon suggests that it will not be of great value to the United States in dealing with the threat environment that its actions helped create. As we argued in Chapter 2, Israel's policies nurture and inspire terrorist groups and complicate U.S. efforts to deal with rogue states like Syria and Iran, but Israel is not much of an asset for dealing with them.
   Backing Israel's strategy in its war with Lebanon was not in America's strategic interest. It is hard to disagree with former State Department official Aaron Miller's observation in the middle of the conflict: "There is a danger in a policy in which there is no daylight whatsoever between the government of Israel and the government of the United States."69

BREAKING THE LAWS OF WAR

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:56 PM

STRATEGIC FOLLY

One possible answer is that supporting Israel made eminently good strategic sense for the United States. But that is not the case. Israel's strategy for waging the war was guaranteed to fail because, as the Winograd Commission notes, "The assumptions and expectations of Israel's actions were not realistic." Israel's response reflected "weakness in strategic thinking," so the Bush administration was backing a losing strategy from the outset.32
   Israel's main goal in the second Lebanon war was to deal a massive blow to Hezbollah's effectiveness as a fighting force. In particular, the Israelis were determined to eliminate the thousands of missiles and rockets that could strike northern Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert drove this point home when he said, "The threat will not be what it was. Never will they be able to threaten this people they fired missiles at."33 Similarly, the Israeli ambassador in Washington said, "We will not go part way and be held hostage again. We'll have to go for the kill—Hezbollah neutralization."34 Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that Israel's goal was straightforward: "Remove the missiles. Or destroy them."35
   Israel had two different but complementary ways to try to neutralize Hezbollah's missiles and rockets. Israeli leaders were confident that they could use airpower to strike directly at those weapons and take almost all of them out.36 They also had a more indirect approach for dealing with the problem. Specifically, they planned a classic punishment campaign, whereby the IDF would inflict massive pain on Lebanon's civilian population by destroying residences and infrastructure and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. Such a campaign would inevitably kill a signifi
cant number of civilians in the process. Olmert made this point clearly at a press conference right after the kidnapping, when he promised a "very painful and far-reaching" response.37 The aim of the punishment campaign was to send a message to Lebanon's leadership that it was ultimately responsible for Hezbollah's actions, and therefore the country as a whole would pay a great price anytime Hezbollah attacked Israel. The prime minister was clear on this point as well: "The Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah is a member, is trying to undermine regional stability. Lebanon is responsible and Lebanon will bear the consequences of its actions."38
   Both elements of this strategy were destined to fail from the start. Trying to disarm Hezbollah from the air was simply not feasible; even with an ample supply of smart bombs, there was no way the Israeli Air Force was going to eliminate Hezbollah's ten thousand to sixteen thousand rockets and missiles.39 Most of those weapons were widely dispersed and located in caves, homes, mosques, and other hiding places. Moreover, even if the IDF managed to destroy a large portion of Hezbollah's inventory, Iran and Syria would have sent in replacements. Not surprisingly, it quickly became apparent that airpower was not having the advertised effect, as missiles and rockets continued to reach northern Israel daily. In fact, Hezbollah launched more missiles at Israel on August 13—one day before the cease-fire took effect—than on any other day of the war.40
   In late July, the Olmert government decided to rectify the problem by sending large numbers of ground troops into Lebanon, claiming that Israel would need a few more weeks to defeat Hezbollah once and for all.41 But this was another fool's errand. After all, the IDF had fought Hezbollah in Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, and Hezbollah had not only survived, it eventually forced Israel to withdraw in 2000. How was Israel now going to achieve in a few weeks what it could not accomplish in eighteen years? The ground offensive failed to produce decisive results and Israel had no choice but to accept a cease-fire on August 14.42 Israel suffered its highest single day of casualties two days before the cease-fire went into effect.43
   The second element of Israel's strategy—its attempt to punish Lebanon for allowing Hezbollah to operate freely—was also certain to backfire. A wealth of historical evidence and scholarly literature makes clear that inflicting pain on an adversary's civilian population rarely causes a rival government to throw up its hands and surrender to the attacker's demands.44 On the contrary, the victims usually direct their anger at the attacker and, if anything, become more supportive of their own government. Indeed, Israel had twice before launched large-scale bombing campaigns against Lebanon—
Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996—and both failed to damage Hezbollah in any meaningful way or undermine its popular support.45
   History repeated itself in 2006: in the wake of Israel's punishment campaign, Hezbollah's popularity surged in Lebanon (and across the Arab and Islamic world), and most Lebanese vented their rage at Israel and the United States rather than at Hezbollah or the government in Beirut.46 But even if this case had turned out to be an anomaly and Israel's bombs had convinced Lebanon's leadership that it was now time to disarm Hezbollah, it did not have the capability to do that. Hezbollah was too powerful and the government was too weak.
   After about two weeks of fighting, with Hezbollah still lobbing missiles and rockets at northern Israel and the punishment campaign backfiring, Israel began to define victory downward. Its leaders began emphasizing goals like eliminating Hezbollah's forward positions and deploying an international force to protect Israel against Hezbollah attacks.47 Back in the United States, the Forward reported that "sources close to the White House and the Pentagon said [that] administration hawks have expressed disappointment and frustration about Israel's inability to deal a swift and decisive blow to Hezbollah." Some of Israel's more hawkish supporters began saying out loud that Israel was in danger of losing the war, and a few even questioned whether Israel was still a strategic asset for the United States. Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post on August 4 that the war gave Israel "an extraordinary opportunity" to make "a major contribution to America's war on terrorism." The United States, however, "has been disappointed" in Israel's performance, which "has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America's confidence in Israel as well."48
   When the war finally ended on August 14, both sides declared victory.49 It was clear to most independent experts, however, that Hezbollah had come out ahead in the fight.50 By virtually all accounts it performed well on the battlefield, and it was standing tall when the shooting stopped. It also retained thousands of missiles and rockets that threatened Israel, and its political position in Lebanon and the Islamic world was much improved by the war. Israel, on the other hand, failed to achieve its initial goals and the IDF had stumbled badly when it engaged Hezbollah. It has become manifestly clear with the passage of time—especially in Israel—that Hezbollah was the winner and Israel the loser. The Winograd Commission "was appointed due to a strong sense of a crisis and deep disappointment with the consequences of the campaign and the way it was conducted."51 Its main findings are an
unequivocal indictment of the three main architects of the war: Prime Minister Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, and General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff.

DAMAGE TO U.S. INTERESTS

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:57 PM

"THE MIGHTY EDIFICE OF SUPPORT"13

Once the war began and Israel came in for severe criticism from all corners of the globe, the Bush administration provided Israel with extraordinary diplomatic protection. Its UN ambassador, John Bolton, whom Israel's UN ambassador once jokingly described as a sixth member of the Israeli delegation, vetoed a Security Council resolution that criticized Israel and worked assiduously for about a month to prevent the UN from imposing a cease-fire, so that Israel could try to finish the job with Hezbollah.14 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice downplayed the violence at a press conference, at one point dismissing it as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."15 Only when it became apparent that the IDF was not going to win a decisive victory did the Bush administration—and Israel—recognize the need for a ceasefire. During the ensuing negotiations that led to UN Resolution 1701, the United States went to great lengths to protect Israel's interests. In fact, as the resolution was being finalized, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called President Bush on August 11 and thanked him for "safeguarding Israel's interests in the Security Council."16
   The president frequently defended Israel's actions in public and never uttered a critical word. UN Ambassador Bolton told the Security Council that Hezbollah's goal was "to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their death," while the disproportionate numbers of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel were "the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense."17 In addition to this diplomatic support, the administration provided Israel with military intelligence during the conflict, and when Israel started running low on precision-guided bombs, the president quickly agreed to send replacements.18 During the height of the war, it successfully pressed Turkey and Iraq to deny permission to a plane loaded with missiles for Hezbollah to cross Turkish and Iraqi airspace on its way from Iran to Damascus.19 As Shai Feldman, a well-connected Israeli scholar, noted during the latter stages of the war, "There is huge, huge appreciation here for the president."20
   As we have seen in other contexts, Israel usually finds its strongest support in the U.S. Congress, and congressional behavior during the Lebanon conflict unequivocally confirmed this tendency. Democrats and Republicans competed to show that their party, not the rival one, was Israel's best friend. One Jewish activist said he thought that "it's a good thing to have members of Congress outdo their colleagues by showing that their pro-Israeli credentials are stronger than the next guy's."21 In the end, there was virtually no daylight between the two parties regarding Israel's actions in Lebanon, which is remarkable when you think of the sharp differences between Democrats and Republicans on most other foreign policy issues, like Iraq, for example. Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, made this clear when he said, "The Democrats who are opposed to the president on 99 percent of things are closing ranks on Israel."22
   Reflecting this bipartisan consensus, on July 20, 2006, the House of Representatives passed a strongly worded resolution condemning Hezbollah and supporting Israeli policy in Lebanon. The vote was 410-8. The Senate followed suit with a similar resolution, sponsored by sixty-two senators, including the leaders of both parties. A number of prominent Democrats, including the party's leaders in both the House and the Senate, tried to prevent Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, from addressing Congress, because he had criticized Israeli policy in Lebanon.23 Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic party, who had been targeted by the lobby in the past, went so far as to call the Iraqi prime minister an anti-Semite.24 Support in Congress for Israel was so overwhelming that it left Arab-American leaders stunned. Nick J. Rahall, a Democratic congressman of Lebanese descent, said
that the House resolution made him "just sick in the stomach, to put it mildly." James Zogby, who heads the Arab American Institute, said, "This is so devastating. I thought that we'd come further than this."25
   Potential presidential candidates for 2008—like Senators Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Joe Biden (D-DE)—as well as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, went to especially great lengths to convey their support for Israel.26 The only exception was Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who expressed mild reservations about Israel's response and America's support for it. Hagel's comments were largely ignored by his congressional colleagues as well as the lobby, although they undoubtedly did nothing to further his own presidential ambitions.27
   The mainstream media also stood firmly behind Israel. Editor & Publisher, a distinguished journal that covers the newspaper industry, surveyed dozens of newspapers about a week after the war began and found that "almost none of them have condemned the Israeli attack on civilian areas and the infrastructure of Lebanon."28 The twenty-four-hour cable news stations were filled with reports and commentary that portrayed the Jewish state as a beleaguered combatant that could do no wrong.
   Israel did not fare as well on the front pages of newspapers and in the straight-out news coverage in the media. A Harvard study claims that "on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, Israel was portrayed as the aggressor nearly twice as often in the headlines and exactly three times as often in the photos."29 This news coverage was largely unavoidable, however, because Israel was causing much greater destruction in Lebanon than Hezbollah was causing in northern Israel. By the end of the fighting, Hezbollah had killed 43 Israeli civilians and damaged or destroyed about 300 buildings in Israel. The IDF, by contrast, had killed as many as 750 Lebanese civilians and damaged or destroyed roughly 16,000 Lebanese buildings.30 Given those numbers, the camera quickly became Israel's enemy. Media coverage was also shaped by the fact that both Hezbollah and the Siniora government in Beirut favored a cease-fire almost as soon as the fighting started, while Israel wanted to prolong the war until its leaders realized that their war aims could not be achieved.
   Editorial commentary remained relentlessly pro-Israel throughout the conflict, however, and it often crept into the news coverage, thus ensuring that the overall portrayal of Israel in the American media was very favorable. The situation in the mainstream media was nicely summed up in an article in the British newspaper the Independent: "There are two sides to every conflict—unless you rely on the US media for information about the battle
in Lebanon. Viewers have been fed a diet of partisan coverage which treats Israel as the good guys and their Hezbollah enemy as the incarnation of evil . . . Not only is there next to no debate, but debate itself is considered unnecessary and suspect."31
   What makes America's overwhelming support for Israel so remarkable is that the United States was the only country that enthusiastically supported Israel's actions in Lebanon. Almost every other country in the world, as well as the UN leadership, criticized Israel's reaction as well as Washington's unyielding support for it. These circumstances raise the obvious question: why was the United States so out of step with the rest of the world?

STRATEGIC FOLLY

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:58 PM

PREWAR PLANNING

Israel has launched a number of major military strikes against Lebanon over the past forty years, but it previously had fought only one genuine war on Lebanese territory. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982. It was eighteen years before the IDF finally left Lebanon, and it was Hezbollah that drove them out. Israel and Hezbollah remained bitter enemies even after Israel withdrew, and occasional skirmishes continued to take place along the Israeli-Lebanese border. It was just such a skirmish on July 12, 2006, that erupted into Israel's second war in Lebanon.
   Concerned about the huge stockpile of missiles and rockets that Hezbollah had acquired from Syria and especially Iran, Israel had been planning to strike at Hezbollah for months before the July 12 abductions. Gerald Steinberg, a well-connected Israeli strategist, made these points during the war: "Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared. In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."3
   Similarly, Seymour Hersh reported, "Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers' kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. 'Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,' the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said."4 Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Winograd Commission that "his decision to respond to the abduction of soldiers with a broad military operation was made as early as March 2006," which was four months before the conflict started. At that time, he asked to see the existing "operational plans" for war with Lebanon, because "he did not want to make a snap decision in the case of an abduction." Olmert also said that in November 2005, his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, "ordered the army to prepare a 'list of targets' for a military response in Lebanon" after a failed Hezbollah attempt to capture IDF troops in a border village. Olmert held his first meeting on Lebanon in early January 2006, four days after he was appointed to replace the incapacitated Sharon, and he subsequently "held more meetings on the situation in Lebanon than any of his recent predecessors."5
   Israeli officials reportedly briefed key individuals inside and outside of the Bush administration about their intentions well before July 12. Hersh writes, "According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings." Likewise, Matthew Kalman reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that "more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified."6
   The available evidence indicates that the Bush administration endorsed Israel's plans for war in Lebanon. According to Hersh, "Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, 'to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.' The consultant added, 'Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.' After that, 'persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,' the consultant said."7
   There is not much information in the public record about the decisionmaking process that led President Bush to back Olmert's plan to attack Lebanon at an opportune moment. Nevertheless, there is reason to think that the neoconservatives played a key role in that process. Not only had the neoconservatives been angling to smash Hezbollah since September 11, but the two most influential advisers on Middle East affairs in the White House in the months before and during the Lebanon war were dedicated supporters of Israel and its hard-line policies toward its adversaries, including Hezbollah.8 Elliott Abrams was the key person on the National Security Council dealing with Middle East policy. The New York Times reported during the war that he "has pushed the administration to throw its support behind Israel."9
   The other key figure was David Wurmser, Vice President Cheney's adviser on Middle East affairs.10 He was one of the authors of the 1996 "Clean Break" study, which advocated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu end the Oslo peace process and use military force to change the political landscape in the Middle East. In particular, it called for "securing" Israel's northern border "by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."11 Wurmser was, as Adam Shatz
wrote in the New York Review of Books well before the second Lebanon war, "an open advocate of preemptive war against Syria and Hezbollah, a position favored by neoconservatives in and close to the Bush administration."12 When Seymour Hersh reports, as quoted above, that Israel was interested in getting "the support of [Cheney's] office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council," he is effectively saying that Olmert wanted the approval of Abrams and Wurmser, which he surely got. Beyond that basic fact, which is neither surprising nor controversial, little is known about the Bush administration's planning role in the months before the second Lebanon war.
   Nothing in this account suggests that either Israel or the United States was conspiring to provoke a war in Lebanon. Given the simmering tensions along the border and Israel's legitimate concerns about Hezbollah's missiles and rockets, it made perfect sense for the IDF to formulate plans for addressing this threat. After all, every competent military leadership plans for contingencies that may never arise. It also made perfect sense for Israel to consult with its American patron about its plans, to make sure it was not preparing for a course of action that Washington might oppose.

"THE MIGHTY EDIFICE OF SUPPORT"13

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 4:59 PM

THE LOBBY AND THE SECOND LEBANON WAR

In the summer of 2006, Israel fought a thirty-four-day war against Lebanon. On July 12, Hezbollah, the Shia organization that controls the southern part of Lebanon, made a cross-border raid that killed and captured several Israeli soldiers. In response, the Israel Defense Forces launched a major air campaign in Lebanon, which killed more than eleven hundred Lebanese, most of whom were civilians and roughly a third of whom were children. It also did extensive damage to Lebanon's infrastructure, including roads, bridges, office buildings, apartment buildings, gas stations, factories, water-pumping stations, airport runways, homes, and supermarkets.1 Although virtually no one challenged Israel's right to respond to the raid, or to defend itself, its excessive response was widely condemned around the globe.
   Despite strong support from the United States, Israel failed to achieve its military or political objectives and Hezbollah emerged from the war with its popularity and prestige significantly enhanced. The IDF's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, resigned a few months later, and an official Israeli government investigation chaired by former Supreme Court Justice Eliyahu Winograd subsequently issued a scathing assessment of Israel's planning and handling of the war. In particular, the Winograd Commission found that Israel's leaders had failed to "consider the whole range of options," "failed to adapt the military way of operations and its goals to the reality on the ground," and pursued goals that were "not clear and could not be achieved."2
   The war was also a major setback for the United States. It weakened the Siniora government in Beirut, whose election after the "Cedar Revolution"
of 2005 had been one of the few successes in the Bush administration's Middle East policy. The war also solidified the informal alliance among Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran, and intensified anti-American attitudes throughout the region, thereby undermining the war on terror and complicating U.S. efforts to forge a regional consensus on Iraq and Iran.
   How did this happen? Although primary responsibility for mishandling the war lies with Israel's leaders, the United States encouraged their mistakes by offering them unconditional support before and during the war. Israel had briefed the Bush administration on its plans to go after Hezbollah well before the war began on July 12 and was given a tacit green light by Washington. Unlike the rest of the world, including virtually all the major democracies, the United States did not criticize Israel's actions during the war and gave it valuable diplomatic and military backing instead. The Israel lobby worked throughout the war to keep the United States in Israel's corner.
   It did not make strategic sense for the Bush administration to back Israel's disproportionate response to Hezbollah's provocations, and there was also no compelling moral case for supporting Israel's conduct. America's uncritical backing was not in Israel's interest either. As the Winograd report suggests, Israel would have been much better off if its leaders had examined "the whole range of options." In other words, the United States would have been a better ally if it had urged a different course of action when Israel first outlined its plan to attack Lebanon. Had the United States done so, Israel would have been forced to come up with a smarter response and might have avoided the debacle that subsequently befell it in Lebanon.
   Israelis and many of their American supporters do not want to admit that the lobby heavily influenced U.S. policy both before and during the second Lebanon war, and they offer several alternative explanations designed to counter this charge. As is the case in other contexts, some defenders argue that the U.S. government's unflinching support for Israel's assault reflects the American public's deep commitment to the Jewish state. The American people, in this view, wanted U.S. leaders to back Israel to the hilt, and so President Bush and the Congress were simply bowing to the will of the people. Others claim that Israel was acting as America's client state in its war with Hezbollah. According to this version of events, the Bush administration was the driving force behind the war and it got its loyal Israeli client to do its bidding. These alternative explanations might seem intuitively plausible to some observers, but neither is consistent with the available evidence.

PREWAR PLANNING

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:00 PM

THE LEAST BAD OPTION

As noted earlier, the best option available to the Bush administration is to remove the threat of force and attempt to reach a comprehensive agreement with Iran.103 It is difficult to say whether this strategy would work, but there is good reason to think that it might have worked in the past and might even work in the future. Iran signaled on two separate occasions since 9/11 that it was seriously interested in reaching a negotiated settlement with the United States.104 Iran helped the United States topple the Taliban in the fall of 2001 by providing advice on targets to strike in Afghanistan, facilitating U.S. cooperation with the Northern Alliance, and helping with search-and-rescue missions. After the war, Tehran helped Washington put a friendly government in
place in Kabul. At the same time, Iran's President Khatami made it clear once again that he wanted to improve relations with the United States and saw events in Afghanistan as a major step in that direction.
   As was the case in the 1990s, there was substantial support within the CIA and the State Department for taking Khatami at his word and attempting to normalize relations with Tehran. The neoconservatives inside and outside of the administration, however, vehemently opposed that idea; they favored getting tough with Iran, and they carried the day with Bush and Cheney. In his State of the Union address in late January 2002, the president rewarded Iran for its cooperation in Afghanistan by including it in the infamous "axis of evil." Moreover, Bush made it clear in the following months that although he was preoccupied with regime change in Iraq, he would eventually turn to Iran and try to topple that government as well.
   Despite America's hostility, Iran tried again in the spring of 2003, as it had in 1997 during the Clinton administration, to reach out to the United States. Khatami said he was willing to negotiate on Iran's nuclear program, so that it would be readily transparent that "there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD." Regarding terrorism, he said that Iran would end "any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.)" and put "pressure on these organizations to stop violent action against civilians" within Israel's 1967 borders. On Hezbollah, Iran's goal would be to make it "a mere political organization within Lebanon." Khatami also indicated "acceptance" of the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which he made clear meant acceptance of a two-state solution. Plus, Iran would help stabilize Iraq. In return, Khatami wanted the United States to remove Iran from the axis of evil and take away the threat to use military force against his country. Sanctions also had to go, and Iran wanted "full access to peaceful nuclear technology." In essence, Khatami was pushing forward a solution that had all the ingredients of a grand bargain.105
   Iran's offer was presented in May 2003, just after the United States appeared to have scored a stunning victory in Iraq, on the heels of what seemed to be a stunning victory in Afghanistan. At that point, many people believed that the United States might actually be able to reorder the entire Middle East. It was, in fact, an ideal time to push Tehran to cut a deal, because U.S. prestige and leverage were at their peak and Iran's sense of vulnerability was acute. Unfortunately, America's favorable position made Bush more inclined to dictate rather than deal. Not only was Israel pressing the Bush administration hard at that point to take aim at Iran, but so were the
neoconservatives and others in the lobby. Bush paid hardly any attention to Khatami's offer to negotiate a comprehensive settlement between Iran and the United States, and U.S. officials were ordered not to pursue it.
   One cannot know whether a grand bargain would have been struck had the Bush administration pursued these opportunities. There were still plenty of Iranian hard-liners who would have resisted making any kind of deal with the "great Satan." Nevertheless, Bush was foolish not to try to reach an agreement with Khatami, if only because that approach was the least bad option. Trying to cut a deal might well have prevented the election of President Ahmadinejad, whose irresponsible statements and bellicose attitude have made a difficult situation worse. And if engagement had failed and Iran ultimately acquired nuclear weapons, the United States could still fall back on a strategy of deterrence.
   It may not be too late to strike a deal with Iran, although the chances of achieving success are less likely now than in either 2001 or 2003. Not only has America's bargaining position been eroded by events in Iraq, but Iranian leaders have more reason than ever not to trust Bush. Furthermore, Mah-moud Ahmadinejad has replaced Khatami as Iran's president, and he has shown little interest in reaching out to the Bush administration. Nonetheless, there are still compelling reasons to pursue a grand bargain. Not only is it still the best strategy for stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal, but the United States needs Iran's help to rescue the situation in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. This is why the Iraq Study Group recommended in December 2006 that President Bush negotiate with Iran rather than confront it.106 Its members understood that confronting Iran—as the Bush administration has done in the past—gives it powerful incentives to meddle in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is definitely not in America's interest.107
   There is actually substantial support within the United States for engaging Iran in serious negotiations.108 As noted, many in the CIA, the State Department, and the military would back the idea. A poll taken in late November 2006, just before the Iraq Study Group released its report, found that 75 percent of Americans believe that the United States "should deal with the government of Iran primarily by trying to build better relations." Only 22 percent favor "pressuring it with implied threats that the US may use military force."109 The recommendation to engage Iran from the Iraq Study Group—a bipartisan committee of prominent individuals—is another indicator of the breadth of support for negotiations. Even Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, who is usually attuned to Israel's concerns, remarked in early 2007 that Iran is a "natural ally" of the United States.110
   Although it makes good strategic sense for the United States to pursue a grand bargain with Iran, and although there is plenty of support for that policy inside and outside of America, it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Israel and the lobby will almost certainly try to thwart any efforts to seriously engage Iran before they get started, as they have consistently done since 1993. Indeed, the lobby has gone out of its way to undermine the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that the Bush administration negotiate with Iran. The release of the report, according to the Forward, "has produced an outpouring of protest from Jewish groups opposing its call for talks with Iran, Syria and the Palestinians." Nevertheless, "insiders say that the real target of Israel's anxiety is neither Syria nor the Palestinians, but Iran and its nuclear program."111
   The lobby is also likely to try to make sure that the United States continues to threaten Iran with military strikes unless it abandons its nuclear enrichment program. Given that this threat has not worked in the past and is unlikely to work in the future, some of Israel's American backers, especially the neoconservatives, will continue to call for the United States to carry out the threat. Although there is still some chance that President Bush will decide to attack Iran before he leaves office, it is impossible to know for sure. There is also some possibility, given the inflexible rhetoric of the presidential candidates, that his successor will do so, particularly if Iran gets closer to developing weapons and if hard-liners there continue to predominate. If the United States does launch such an attack, it will be doing so in part on Israel's behalf, and the lobby would bear significant responsibility for having pushed this dangerous policy. And it would not be in America's national interest.

CONCLUSION

As with U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, the tragic decision to invade Iraq, and the confrontational approach to Syria, the Israel lobby's influence on American policy toward Iran has been harmful to the national interest. By opposing any detente between Iran and the United States, much less cooperation, the lobby has also strengthened Iran's hard-liners, thereby making Israel's security problems worse. But its negative impact does not stop there. The lobby's influence during the 2006 war in Lebanon also did considerable harm to both the United States and to Israel, as the next chapter will show.

THE LOBBY AND THE SECOND LEBANON WAR

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:01 PM

THE ALTERNATIVES

The Bush administration has three options left for halting Iran's nuclear program: it can try to coerce Tehran by markedly increasing the pressure on it with military measures short of war, tougher U.S. sanctions, and an anti-Iran coalition that includes Israel and the Arab states; it can try to eliminate it with military force; or it can make a serious attempt to strike a grand bargain that keeps Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Israel and most of the key organizations in the lobby, especially the neoconservatives, favor the second option. But Israeli leaders and their American supporters are well aware that there is widespread opposition to attacking Iran inside and outside of the U.S. government, as well as in the international community, especially given the dire situation in Iraq. Moreover, it is clear that despite the rhetoric, President Bush has shown little enthusiasm for the military option, which is not to say he would never strike Iran.
   Bush's plan for 2007 appears to call for ramping up the pressure on Iran in the hopes that it will cave in to U.S. demands to stop enriching uranium.78 As noted, the administration made a number of confrontational military moves in January that were aimed directly at Iran. And the president and Secretary of State Rice have also begun making a concerted effort to get the Arab states in the Middle East to line up with the United States and Israel against Iran. Against this backdrop, key groups in the lobby, which have been going along with Bush's policy for now, are mobilizing. The Forward reported on the eve of the March 2007 AIPAC conference that "the pro-Israel lobby is backing new congressional legislation that would toughen sanctions against Iran and target foreign entities doing business with the Islamic Republic."79
   So far this strategy has failed to produce results. The United States was heavily criticized by many Iraqis and even by the Kurds for arresting the five Iranians. And then in March, the Iranians proved that two can play the game when they detained fifteen British naval troops in the Persian Gulf, accusing them of trespassing in Iranian territorial waters.80 Meanwhile, Iran continues to develop its nuclear program and support Shia groups in Iraq. There is no evidence that sending additional carrier battle groups to the Gulf has had any effect on Tehran's behavior. Congress may enact much tougher sane
tions, but the fact is that the administration is only mildly enthusiastic about taking that route, because this policy ends up imposing sanctions on allies that do business with Iran. It is a policy certain to strain U.S. relations with those allies, possibly undermining their willingness to help Washington put additional pressure on Iran.81
   The administration's attempt to work closely with Arab states has made little progress, in good part because of America's continuing support of Israel over the Palestinians. In March, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia not only invited Iranian President Ahmadinejad to visit Riyadh but also canceled a visit to the White House and condemned the U.S. occupation of Iraq as "illegal." The director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan said that Abdullah was "telling the U.S. they need to listen to their allies rather than imposing decisions on them and always taking Israel's side." As discussed in Chapter 7, Saudi Arabia was then pushing the Arab League to reissue its 2002 peace initiative for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the United States, however, was pressuring the Saudis to change the proposal because Israel was unhappy with it. Secretary Rice condescendingly asked Arab countries to "begin reaching out to Israel." This admonition angered the Saudis, especially Abdullah, who responded by lashing out at the American presence in Iraq.82
   Coercion is unlikely to alter Tehran's calculations. This point is not lost on Israeli leaders and their allies in the United States, most of whom see a nuclear Iran as a mortal threat to Israel. For that reason, many have lobbied relentlessly not only to keep the military option on the table but also to make the case that Iran is so dangerous that if it does not capitulate to Washington's demands, it will be necessary to use force. Consider what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a joint session of Congress on May 24, 2006. He likened Iran with nuclear weapons to "the savagery of slavery, to the horrors of World War II, to the gulags of the communist bloc." He emphasized that a nuclear-armed Iran was not just a threat to Israel but would put "the security of the entire world ... in jeopardy." He made it clear that he expected the United States to play the key role in preventing this "dark and gathering storm [from] casting its shadow over the world."83
   A few months later, in November 2006, Olmert told a Newsweek interviewer that he did not believe that Iran would accept a "compromise unless they have good reason to fear the consequences of not reaching a compromise. In other words, Iran must start to fear."84 By the spring of 2007, Olmert was intensifying the campaign to sell the military option. He told Germany's Focus magazine in late April, "It is impossible perhaps to destroy
the entire nuclear program but it would be possible to damage it in such a way that it would be set back years." Olmert estimated that "it would take 10 days and would involve the firing of 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles."85 One Israeli general, however, questioned whether Bush had sufficient "political power to attack Iran" and suggested instead that Israel "help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party . . . and US newspaper editors ... to turn the Iranian issue into a bipartisan one."86
   Israeli officials also warn they may take preemptive action themselves should Iran continue down the nuclear road. Besides sending a signal to Iran, these threats keep the pressure on Washington to solve the problem, because the United States does not want Israel to act on its own. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned in late 2005 that "Israel—and not only Israel—cannot accept a nuclear Iran. We have the ability to deal with this and we're making all the necessary preparations to be ready for such a situation." London's Sunday Times reported in January 2007 that Israeli pilots were rehearsing a tactical nuclear strike against Iran's facilities; although Israel officially denied the report, it did serve as a powerful reminder of the importance Israel attaches to this issue. As one Israeli defense analyst told the Associated Press, "It is possible that this was a leak done on purpose, as deterrence, to say 'someone better hold us back, before we do something crazy.'"87 Just in case this message was not getting through, Avigdor Lieberman, the deputy prime minister, told Der Spiegel in February 2007 that if the international community does not solve the problem, "Israel may have to act alone."88
   Some in the lobby have moved beyond vague calls for "regime change" and begun to make the case that a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable and the United States must be prepared to use force to deal with the problem.89 Neoconservative pundits have been especially outspoken about the threat from Iran and the need to use force, or at least threaten it, to bring Iran to heel. The essence of their perspective is captured in the headline of an op-ed that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute published in the New York Daily News on October 3, 2006: "To End Iran Standoff, Plan for War." Joshua Muravchik, who is also at the AEI, declared a month later that "President Bush will need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon its drive for the bomb."90 Similarly, Richard Perle said approvingly in January 2007 that "I have no doubt that if it becomes apparent to President Bush that during his term Iran will achieve nuclear weapons, he will not hesitate to order a strike."91 Finally, Norman Podhoretz published a widely discussed article on May 30, 2007, in the online version
of the Wall Street Journal titled "The Case for Bombing Iran: I Hope and Pray That Bush Will Do It."
   AIPAC has also played a central role in publicizing the threat from Iran and pushing forward the military option. Its annual conference for the past two years has put the Iran issue up in bright lights and emphasized the imperative of ending its nuclear program.92 Indeed, John Hagee, who heads Christians United for Israel, was invited to address the 2007 conference. Hagee had told the Jerusalem Post in 2006 that "I would hope the United States would join Israel in a military pre-emptive strike to take out the nuclear capability of Iran for the salvation of Western civilization."93 He did not disappoint the attendees at the March 2007 conference, telling them, "It is 1938; Iran is Germany, and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler. We must stop Iran's nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel." He received multiple standing ovations.94 By contrast, the New York Post reports that Senator Hillary Clinton "drew grumbles" the previous month when she suggested to an AIPAC audience that it might make sense to engage with Iran before employing stronger measures.95
   Perhaps the best evidence of AIPAC's influence on U.S. policy toward Iran was revealed in mid-March 2007, when Congress was attempting to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President Bush to get its approval before attacking Iran. In light of what has happened in the Iraq war, this was a popular measure on Capitol Hill and appeared likely to gain approval. It was also consistent with Congress's constitutional authority. But AIPAC was firmly opposed, because it saw the legislation as effectively taking the military option against Iran off the table. It went to work in the halls of Congress, and with the help of a handful of pro-Israel representatives— GaryAckerman, Eliot Engel, and Shelley Berkley (D-NV)—the provision was removed from the spending bill.96 One month later, when Congressman Michael Capuano (D-MA) was asked why the language on Iran was stripped out of the bill, he answered with one word: "AIPAC." Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) offered the same assessment.97
   Despite the commitment that Israel and some in the lobby have to pushing the military option against Iran, it is widely recognized that threatening to use force against Iran is counterproductive and actually attacking that country's nuclear facilities would have disastrous consequences.98 It would further destabilize the Middle East and cause Iran to lash out at the United States and its allies. The last thing that Washington needs at this point is another war against an Islamic country. The American military is already bogged down in Baghdad, and Iran has substantially more territory and people than
Iraq. Furthermore, Iran would almost certainly not give up its nuclear program but would redouble its efforts to rebuild it, as Iraq did after Israel destroyed its incipient nuclear capability in 1981. It is unsurprising that Charles Kup-chan, an expert on European security issues, says, "I have yet to find a European policymaker who thinks war is preferable to a nuclear Iran."99
   In fact, Israel is the only country in the world where a substantial number of people advocate the military option against Iran if it does not end its nuclear program—perhaps as much as 71 percent of the Israeli population, according to a May 2007 poll.100 Similarly, the core organizations in the lobby are the only significant groups in the United States that favor going to war against the Islamic Republic. In early 2007, when retired General Wesley Clark was asked why the Bush administration seemed headed for war with Iran, he answered, "You just have to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers." Clark was immediately smeared as an anti-Semite for suggesting that Israel and some American Jews were pushing the United States toward war with Iran, but as the journalist Matthew Yglesias pointed out, "Everything Clark said is true. What's more, everybody knows it's true."101 Even more pointedly, former UN weapons inspector turned author Scott Ritter said in his 2006 book Target Iran, "Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else."102 In short, if Israel and the lobby were not pressing this case, there would be little serious discussion inside or outside the Beltway about attacking Iran.

THE LEAST BAD OPTION

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:02 PM

RISING TO ISRAEL'S DEFENSE

Israel and the lobby have been remarkably successful at convincing Bush and other leading American politicians that a nuclear-armed Iran is an unacceptable threat to Israel and that it is the responsibility of the United States to prevent that threat from increasing. In fact, there is some evidence that some individuals in the lobby think they have been too successful for Israel's own good.
   The president's current rhetoric clearly reflects Israel's preferred approach toward Iran, as is apparent from a speech he gave in Cleveland on March 20, 2006. "The threat from Iran," he said, "is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That's a threat, a serious threat. . . I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally, Israel."63 Bush's comments were consistent with his previous statements. He said a month earlier in an interview with Reuters that "we will rise to Israel's defense, if need be."64 Moreover, most of the 2008 presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, appear to agree with the president. In April 2007, for example, Senator John McCain said explicitly that he agreed with Bush that the United States had a responsibility to protect Israel from Iran and to make sure that Iran did not get nuclear weapons that might threaten Israel.65 He reiterated that claim in a May 2007 interview with the Jerusalem Post, and fellow candidates Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Bill Richardson, and Sam Brownback offered similar comments as well.66
   Bush's enthusiasm for defining Iran as a mortal threat to Israel but not the United States, coupled with his stated commitment to go to war against Iran for Israel's benefit, has set off alarm bells in various parts of the lobby. In the spring of 2006, the Forward reported, "Jewish community leaders have urged the White House to refrain from publicly pledging to defend Israel against possible Iranian hostilities." The point is not that these leaders oppose the use of American power to protect Israel, but rather that they fear that Bush's public statements "create an impression that the United States is considering a military option against Iran for the sake of Israel—and could lead to American Jews being blamed for any negative consequences of an American strike against Iran."67 As Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents, put it in April 2006, "As much as we appreciate it, the question is whether it's beneficial to tie this to Israel."68
   Israeli leaders share the same concern, as reflected in Prime Minister Olmert's comment later that spring that he hoped pro-Israel groups would
maintain a low profile regarding Iran. "We don't want it to be about Israel," he said, which was just the opposite of what the president was saying.69
   Rhetoric aside, the Bush administration has worked assiduously to shut down Iran's nuclear program and has in general taken a more aggressive posture. It has imposed economic sanctions and threatened military strikes if Iran continues down the nuclear road. "No option," American leaders are fond of saying, "is off the table."70 James Bamford and Seymour Hersh have separately described how many of the same individuals who planned the Iraq war have devised the Pentagon's plans for a military campaign against Iran. For example, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy until August 2005, played a central role in developing the plans for striking the Islamic Republic. "There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, cooperation with Israel," noted Hersh in early 2005. "Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran." The Pentagon has also been conducting intelligence-gathering operations inside of Iran and it has updated its "contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran."71
   In January 2007, the Bush administration ratcheted up the military pressure on Iran in a number of ways. It arrested five Iranian officials in the Iraqi city of Erbil, who were in a building that the local Kurds and the Iranians considered a consular facility. The president then announced that he was sending an additional carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf as well as Patriot antimissile defense systems to defend the states in the Gulf Cooperation Council. At the same time, U.S. military officials in Baghdad were claiming that Iran was shipping key components of especially deadly roadside bombs into Iraq to be used against American troops. Both Stephen Hadley the president's national security adviser, and Secretary of State Con-doleezza Rice made it clear that the administration had not ruled out the possibility that U.S. forces might cross into Iran in pursuit of Iranians trafficking in roadside bombs and other weapons.72
   These confrontational moves notwithstanding, David Wurmser, who advises Vice President Cheney on Middle East affairs, apparently felt that Rice and Hadley were too interested in negotiating with Iran—even if the diplomacy was backed up by threats—and not sufficiently committed to the military option. In spring 2007, Wurmser gave a series of talks at the American Enterprise Institute and other conservative Washington think tanks in which he said that the vice president was unhappy with the secretary of
state—as well as with President Bush—for pursuing diplomacy at all, and that Cheney was interested in working with Israel to come up with a military strategy to eliminate Iran's nuclear program that he could sell to the president. When Wurmser's activities became public knowledge, Rice denied that there were differences within the administration on Iran, and emphasized that the vice president fully supported the president's policy.73
   While Washington has relied primarily on threats rather than negotiations in its dealings with Iran, the European Union has worked in the opposite direction and has attempted to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) initiated negotiations with Tehran in early August 2003, and on October 21, Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment and reprocessing programs and to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct especially intrusive inspections. A year later, on November 15, 2004, Iran agreed "to continue and extend its suspension to include all enrichment related and reprocessing activities" and "to begin negotiations, with a view to reaching a mutually acceptable agreement on long term arrangements."74 Efforts to reach a satisfactory deal failed, however, and Iran announced in August 2005 that it would resume enriching its uranium. The EU-3 has continued talking with Iran, but to little avail.
   Although the United States was willing to allow the EU-3 to try to halt Iran's nuclear program through negotiations, it had little enthusiasm for that bargaining process and was never strongly committed to making it work.75 In fact, by constantly threatening Iran and pushing the European negotiators to be as tough as possible with their Iranian counterparts, the Bush administration virtually guaranteed that the negotiations would lead nowhere. If there was any hope that diplomacy would succeed, the military threat had to be taken off the table.
   After diplomacy backed by threats failed to resolve the problem, the Bush administration began pushing hard in the fall of 2005 to get the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran. It finally succeeded in late December 2006, when China and Russia agreed, after much foot dragging, to a package of limited sanctions.76 In late March 2007, the Security Council approved a second set of sanctions on Iran over its refusal to shut down its nuclear enrichment facilities. These new sanctions, which were also limited in scope, included a ban on Iranian arms exports, travel restrictions on individuals associated with Iran's nuclear program, and freezing the assets of some individuals and organizations untouched by the first set of UN sanctions.77 Few experts believe that these measures will cause Iran to abandon
its nuclear program, and few believe that the United States will be able to convince the Security Council to go along with the kind of tough sanctions that might work. But if UN sanctions are not the answer, what is?

THE ALTERNATIVES

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:03 PM

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND REGIME CHANGE

As discussed in Chapter 8, the attacks on September 11, 2001, led President Bush to abandon dual containment and pursue the even more ambitious strategy of regional transformation. The American military would now be used to topple hostile regimes across the Middle East. From Israel's perspective, Iran was ideally suited to be the first target on the Bush administration's hit list. Since the early 1990s, Israeli leaders have tended to portray Iran as their most dangerous enemy because it is the adversary most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. As Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer remarked one year before the Iraq war, "Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq."48
   Nevertheless, Sharon and his lieutenants recognized by early 2002 that the United States was determined to confront Iraq first and deal with Iran
after Saddam had been removed from power. They raised no serious objections to this ordering of the agenda, although they kept reminding the Bush administration that it had to deal with Iran as soon as it finished the job in Baghdad. Sharon began publicly pushing the United States to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview with the Times of London.49 Describing Iran as the "center of world terror" and bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran "the day after" it conquered Iraq.
   In late April 2003, after the fall of Baghdad, Ha'aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in Washington was now calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of Saddam, he noted, was "not enough." In his words, America "has to follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran."50 Ten days later, the New York Times reported that Washington was growing increasingly concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions and that there is "a lot of hammering from the Israelis for us to take this problem seriously. "51 Shimon Peres then published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on June 25 titled "We Must Unite to Prevent an Ayatollah Nuke." His description of the Iranian threat sounded just like his earlier description of the threat from Saddam, even including a ritual reference to the lessons of appeasement in the 1930s. Iran, he emphasized, must be told in no uncertain terms that the United States and Israel will not tolerate it going nuclear.52
   The neoconservatives also lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. In late May 2003, Inter Press Service reported that "the neo-cons' efforts to now focus US attention on 'regime change' in Iran have become much more intense since early May and [have] already borne substantial fruit."53 In early June, according to the Forward, "Neoconservatives inside and outside the administration have been urging an active effort to promote regime change in Tehran. Reports of possible covert actions have surfaced in recent weeks."54
   As usual, there was a bevy of articles by prominent neoconservatives— essentially the same people who had helped push the war in Iraq—making the case for going after Iran. William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on May 12 that "the liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle—not, we hope, a military battle—will be for Iran."55 Michael Ledeen, one of the leading hawks on Iran, wrote in the National Review Online on April 4, "There is no more time for diplomatic 'solutions.' We will have to deal with the terror masters, here and now. Iran, at least, offers us the possibility of a memorable victory, be
cause the Iranian people openly loath the regime, and will enthusiastically combat it, if only the United States supports them in their just struggle."56
   Other pundits offering similar views at this time include Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum and WINEP's Patrick Clawson, who published a piece in the Jerusalem Post on May 20 titled "Turn Up the Pressure on Iran." They called for the Bush administration to support the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a group based in Iraq that is bent on overthrowing the regime in Tehran but that the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization. Lawrence Kaplan argued in the New Republic on June 9 that the United States needed to get tougher with Iran over its nuclear programs, which he feared were further along than most American policy makers recognized.57
   On May 6, the American Enterprise Institute cosponsored an all-day conference on the future of Iran with two other pro-Israel organizations, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute.58 The speakers were all strong supporters of Israel like Bernard Lewis, Senator Sam Brownback, Uri Lubrani (senior adviser to the IDF and former Israeli government coordinator for southern Lebanon), Morris Amitay from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (and former executive director of AIPAC), Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht from the AEI, and Meyrav Wurmser from the Hudson Institute. The main question on the table was the obvious one: "What steps can the United States take to promote democratization and regime change in Iran?" The answer was predictable: each of the speakers called for the United States to do much more to bring down the Islamic Republic and replace it with a democratic state.
   Toward this end, the lobby has struck up a close relationship with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran. He is believed to have had personal meetings with both Sharon and Netanyahu, and he has extensive contacts with pro-Israel groups and individuals in the United States. The evolving relationship is much like the one that influential groups in the lobby had previously cultivated with Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi. Seemingly unaware that Pahlavi (like Chalabi) has little legitimacy in his homeland, pro-Israel groups have promoted his cause. In return, he makes it clear that if he were to come to power in Iran, he would make sure that his country has friendly relations with Israel.59
   On May 19, 2003, Senator Sam Brownback announced that he planned to introduce legislation to fund opposition groups and promote democracy in Iran. The so-called Iran Democracy Act was backed not only by Iranian exiles but also by AIPAC, JINSA, and the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, whose founders included Morris Amitay of JINSA and Michael Ledeen of
AEI. The bill was introduced in the House by Brad Sherman (D-CA), another dedicated supporter of Israel, and by late July it had been passed by both houses of Congress, although the funding was removed from the final legislation.60
   The groups backing this legislation have emphasized that Iran is a major menace because it supports terrorism and is close to becoming a nuclear power. But they also have tried to blame Iran for some of the other problems that the United States has faced since the fall of Baghdad. Neoconservatives in the Pentagon suggested that Iran was harboring some of the al Qaeda operatives who had attacked U.S. and other targets in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 12, 2003. The Iranians denied this charge, and both the CIA and the State Department viewed the neoconservatives' accusations with considerable skepticism.61 The neoconservatives have also been among the most forceful proponents of the claim that Iran has been supporting attacks against American troops in Iraq. As Michael Ledeen wrote in April 2004, "Iraq cannot be peaceful and secure so long as Tehran sends its terrorist cadres across the border."62
   If Iran is contributing to militias in Iraq, it hardly proves that U.S. and Iranian interests are irreconcilable. Iran is not the main source of America's problems in Iraq, and the United States would be in deep trouble there even if Iran were doing nothing. Nor would it be surprising if Iran were acting in this way. After all, the world's most powerful country has invaded two of Iran's neighbors while simultaneously declaring that Tehran is part of the "axis of evil." The U.S. Congress has passed a law calling for regime change in Iran, and the Bush administration has funded Iranian exile groups and hinted on several occasions that it might strike Iran with military force. Wouldn't any country facing this sort of threat do whatever it could to protect itself, including using its influence with different Iraqi factions and possibly sending them various forms of aid? If a hostile power conquered Canada or Mexico and tried to set up a sympathetic government there, wouldn't the United States try to complicate that hostile power's efforts and ensure an outcome more favorable to U.S. interests? Americans have good reason to resent Iran's influence in Iraq, but they should hardly be surprised by it or see it as evidence of unremitting Iranian hostility. It is also worth noting that deep antipathy did not prevent the U.S. government from engaging Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War, even when Moscow was providing millions of dollars' worth of military aid to North Vietnam, which used this assistance to kill thousands of American soldiers.

RISING TO ISRAEL'S DEFENSE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:04 PM

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION AND DUAL CONTAINMENT

In early 1993, just as the Clinton administration was coming to power, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, started claiming that Iran was a growing threat to both Israel and the United States. Israeli leaders portrayed Iran as a dangerous adversary in part because they saw it as a way of fostering closer relations between Jerusalem and Washington now that the Soviet threat had disappeared. The hope was that the United States would see Israel as a bulwark against Iranian expansionism, much the way Israel had been treated as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East. Israel was also justifiably concerned about Iran's renewed interest in developing a sophisticated nuclear program.12 The Washington Post reported in mid-March 1993 that "across the Israeli political spectrum, there is a conviction that American public opinion and political leaders need to be further convinced of the urgency of restraining Iran, and that the United States is the only global power capable of doing so."13
   The Clinton administration responded to Israel's entreaties by adopting the policy of dual containment, as we have discussed. Not only was the policy first enunciated at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy by Martin Indyk, but Robert Pelletreau, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs at the time, told Trita Parsi that the policy was essentially a copy of an
Israeli proposal.14 Kenneth Pollack of Brookings's Saban Center also notes that "Jerusalem was one of the few places on Earth where dual containment was not regularly misunderstood."15 The new policy called for the United States to abandon its traditional strategy of acting as an offshore balancer in the Persian Gulf and instead station a substantial number of troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for the purpose of containing both Iran and Iraq. In fact, the policy was designed to do more than just contain Iran; it also aimed to cause "dramatic changes in Iran's behavior." Among its goals was forcing Iran to stop supporting terrorists and to abandon its nuclear program.16
   Israel's concerns notwithstanding, there was no good reason for the United States to adopt a hard-line policy toward Iran in the early 1990s. If anything, just the opposite was the case. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who became Iran's president in 1989, was committed to improving relations with Washington, and Iran, which had recently suffered through a devastating war with Iraq, was hardly a military threat to the United States. In the early 1990s, in fact, American leaders were much more concerned about Saddam Hussein, against whom the United States had just fought a war.17 Plus, Iran's nuclear program had barely gotten off the ground in 1993. Few voices in Washington were calling for tougher policies against Iran before Israel began clamoring for a more confrontational policy, and dual containment was widely criticized when it was first announced.18
   By the mid-1990s, there was growing dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it forced the United States to maintain hostile relations with two countries that disliked each other intensely, and it left Washington pretty much alone to handle the demanding task of keeping them in line. Consequently, pressure began to build in the United States to think about engaging Iran rather than confronting it.19 At the same time, however, Rabin was under pressure in Israel to get the Clinton administration to toughen up the policy.20 Rabin's critics felt that dual containment had no real teeth because it had done little to stop the substantial economic intercourse between Iran and the United States. Israel and the lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, mobilized to save dual containment and to close the loopholes that allowed American companies to trade and invest in Iran. In mid-1994, Parsi reports, "At the behest of the Israeli government, AIPAC drafted and circulated a 74-page paper in Washington arguing that Iran was not only a threat to Israel, but also to the United States and the West."21 According to Pollack, "The right, AIPAC, the Israelis were all screaming for new sanctions [on Iran]."22 The Clinton administration was willing to go along, largely because it was focusing on the Oslo peace
process and wanted to make sure that Israel felt secure and that Iran, a potential spoiler, did not derail the process.
   AIPAC laid out its basic game plan in April 1995, when it issued a report titled "Comprehensive U.S. Sanctions Against Iran: A Plan for Action."23 By that point, however, steps were already being taken to tighten the economic noose around Iran's neck. Senator Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY)—with, according to Pollack, "some help from the Israelis"—introduced legislation in January 1995 to end all economic links between the United States and Iran.24 The Clinton administration opposed the legislation at first and it stalled in Congress.
   But two months later, groups in the lobby achieved their first success after Iran chose Conoco, an American oil company, to develop the Sirri oil fields.25 Iran deliberately selected Conoco over several other foreign bidders in order to signal its interest in improving relations with the United States. But this friendly overture went nowhere, because Clinton killed the deal on March 14. One day later, he issued an executive order banning American companies from helping Iran develop its oil fields. Clinton later said that "one of the most effective opponents" of the Conoco deal was Edgar Bronfman Sr., the powerful former head of the World Jewish Congress.26 AIPAC also played a key role in scuttling that deal.2'
   On May 6, the president issued a second executive order banning all trade and financial investments with Iran, which he labeled an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States."28 Clinton had actually announced that he was going to take that step one week earlier in a speech to the World Jewish Congress.29 His decision to nix the Conoco deal and issue those two executive orders was, notes Pollack, "a major demonstration of our support for Israel."30 Ironically, although Israel lay behind the American decision to cut economic ties to Iran, Israel did not pass any laws barring Israeli-Iranian trade and Israelis continued to purchase Iranian goods through third parties.31
   But those executive orders were not enough for the lobby, because executive orders could be quickly reversed if Clinton ever changed his mind. A. M. Rosenthal, a strong defender of Israel, made this point in a New York Times column in which he criticized the Conoco deal: "The only problem [with executive orders] is that what the President giveth he can cancel-eth."32 In response to this potential problem, Trita Parsi reports that "on its own initiative, AIPAC revised" the bill that Senator D'Amato had introduced in January 1995 "and convinced the New York Senator to reintroduce it in 1996—with AIPAC's proposed changes."33 The new bill, which eventually
became the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. Although the proposed legislation infuriated America's European allies, the House passed it by a vote of 415-0 on June 19, 1996, and the Senate passed it by unanimous consent one month later. Clinton signed the bill on August 5, even though there was significant opposition to the new legislation throughout the administration. Indeed, Kenneth Pollack writes that "much of the executive branch hated the D'Amato bill. In fact, for many, 'hated' was too mild a word." However, "many of President Clinton's domestic policy advisors thought it would be sheer stupidity for the White House not to endorse the bill."34
   Since Clinton was up for reelection in three months, they were probably right. As Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent for Ha'aretz, noted at the time, "Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the beltway."35 Similarly, James Schlesinger, who has held a number of cabinet-level positions in different administrations, remarked in the wake of these sanctions, "It is scarcely possible to overstate the influence of Israel's supporters on our policies in the Middle East."36
   The Conoco episode casts further doubt on the oft-repeated claim that the "oil lobby" is the real hidden hand behind U.S. Middle East policy. In this case, an American oil company wanted to deal with Iran, and Iran wanted to do business with it. The oil industry was opposed to overturning the Conoco deal, and it also opposed the legislation to impose sanctions on Iran.37 As noted in Chapter 4, Dick Cheney, a prominent advocate of confronting Iran today, publicly opposed the U.S. sanctions program when he was president of the oil-services company Halliburton in the 1990s. But oil interests were steamrolled by AIPAC on every decision. These outcomes provide more evidence of how little influence the oil companies have on U.S. Middle East policy, when compared with Israel and the lobby.
   The American posture continued to harden even as new opportunities for engagement became apparent. On May 23, 1997, Mohammad Khatami was elected president of Iran. He was even more enthusiastic than his predecessor about improving relations with the West, and the United States in particular. He made conciliatory remarks in his inaugural speech on August 4 and in his first press conference on December 14. Most important, he went out of his way in a lengthy CNN interview on January 7, 1998, to express his respect for "the great American people" and "their great civilization." He also made it clear that Iran did not "aim ... to destroy or undermine the Ameri
can government" and that he regretted the infamous takeover of the U.S. embassy in 1979. Recognizing the existing hostility between Tehran and Washington, he called for "a crack in this wall of mistrust to prepare for a change and create an opportunity to study a new situation."38
   Furthermore, Khatami did not rule out the possibility of an Israeli state in historic Palestine and declared that "terrorism should be condemned in all its forms and manifestations." He also denounced terrorism against Israelis, while noting that "supporting peoples who fight for the liberation of their land is not, in my opinion, supporting terrorism." This caveat notwithstanding, Khatami's remarks were still a marked shift in Iran's position, and other Iranian spokesmen soon echoed Iran's willingness to accept Israel if it reached an agreement with the Palestinians.39
   In the wake of Khatami's conciliatory comments, the Clinton administration—after checking with Israel and key figures in Congress—made a number of small gestures to improve relations between Iran and the United States.40 Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made contrite remarks about past Western conduct, and the United States eased visa restrictions on travel between the two countries. Even Martin Indyk, the architect of dual containment who was then serving as U.S. ambassador to Israel, told reporters that "the United States has made it clear repeatedly that we have nothing against an Islamic government in Iran . . . We are ready for a dialogue."41 But the commercial restrictions remained in force and dual containment continued for the rest of Clinton's second term. This failure to alter course was partly due to hard-liners inside Iran, who were strongly opposed to Khatami's plans to engage with the "great Satan."42 But Israel and its supporters in the United States also played an important role in discouraging an American-Iranian rapprochement.
   For starters, the lobby had been largely responsible for developing and sustaining dual containment in the years before Khatami came to power in 1997. That policy, of course, helped poison relations between Tehran and Washington, which, in turn, increased the political power of the Iranian politicians who opposed Iran's new and more moderate leader. Furthermore, as soon as it became clear in mid-December 1997 that Khatami was calling for better relations with America, Israeli officials moved to thwart his initiative. Ha'aretz reported that "Israel has expressed its concern to Washington at reports of an impending change of policy by the United States towards Iran," adding that Prime Minister Netanyahu "has asked AIPAC ... to act vigorously in Congress to prevent such a policy shift."43
AIPAC did as Netanyahu asked. According to Gary Sick, one of Amer
ica's leading experts on Iran, "The gradual improvement of U.S.-Iran relations after the election of Khatami was not reflected in AIPAC's positions. In fact, by early 1999 only AIPAC, the Iranian monarchists in exile and the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq persisted in their relentless insistence that little or nothing had changed in Iran."44 Even after the Israeli ambassador to the United States had said in the spring of 2000 that it would be acceptable for Clinton to allow certain food and medical supplies to be exported to Iran, AIPAC still campaigned against the legislation. AIPAC did not oppose Clinton's decision to lift the ban on caviar, Persian rugs, and pistachios imported from Iran, but the Anti-Defamation League and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations did.45 Clinton ultimately got his way in both cases, mainly because each involved small amounts of trade and little controversy. But the United States did not make a serious effort to grasp the hand that Khatami had tentatively extended.
   It made good sense for the United States to engage Iran during the 1990s and attempt to improve relations between the two countries. Dual containment, as Brent Scowcroft observed, "was a nutty idea."46 Israeli leaders, however, believed that it was in Israel's interest to prevent President Clinton from pursuing engagement, even if that more aggressive policy was not in America's national interest. Ephraim Sneh, one of Israel's leading hawks on Iran, put the point succinctly: "We were against it [United States-Iran dialogue] . . . because the interest of the US did not coincide with ours."47 The lobby followed Israel's lead.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND REGIME CHANGE

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:05 PM

IRAN IN THE CROSSHAIRS

The United States and Iran have had an adversarial relationship ever since the 1979 revolution established the Islamic Republic. Given past U.S. interference in Iran—most notably the 1953 coup that restored Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to power—and the new regime's support for various radical groups, it is hardly surprising that the two states have remained suspicious of one another and only occasionally engaged in limited acts of cooperation.
   Iran is a more serious strategic challenge for the United States and Israel than is Syria. Both Damascus and Tehran support Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and both are enemies of al Qaeda. Each has chemical weapons and might have biological weapons, although the evidence for the latter is not conclusive. But there are three fundamental differences between Iran and Syria.
   First, Iran is seeking to master the full nuclear fuel cycle, which would allow it to build nuclear weapons if it so chose. It is also developing missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads against its neighbors, including Israel.1 This is why Israelis often refer to Iran as an "existential" threat. Iran will not be able to strike the American homeland with nuclear missiles anytime soon, but any weapons it might develop could be used against U.S. forces stationed in the Middle East, or against European countries.
   Second, some Iranian leaders—and especially current President Mah-moud Ahmadinejad—have made deeply disturbing remarks questioning both the occurrence of the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist. Although Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to "vanish from the page of time" (or to be "erased from the pages of history") is often mistranslated as a call for Israel's physical destruction (i.e., to "wipe Israel off the map"), it was still an out
rageous assertion that was bound to be profoundly troubling to Israelis and many others.2 Iran's sponsorship of a conference on the Holocaust in December 2006, which featured prominent Holocaust deniers and other discredited extremists, merely reinforced global concerns about Iran's intentions.
   Third, Iran is the most powerful Islamic state in the Persian Gulf and has the potential to dominate that oil-rich area.3 This is especially true in light of what has happened to Iraq since America invaded in March 2003. Iraq had been Iran's principal rival in the region, but it is now a divided and wartorn society and is in no position to check Iran. Iran has links to several of the dominant Shia factions in Iraq, giving it far more influence over Iraq's evolution than it possessed when Saddam Hussein ruled in Baghdad. This dramatic shift in the regional balance of power explains why some believe that "Iran looks like the winner of the Iraq War."4 Of course, Iran's power advantage over its neighbors would be even more pronounced if it acquired a nuclear arsenal.
   Iran's growing power is not good for the United States, which has long sought to prevent any one country from establishing hegemony in the Persian Gulf. This basic principle explains why the Reagan administration backed Saddam in the 1980s, when it looked like Iran might defeat Iraq in their bloody war. The United States also has strong incentives to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Israel is equally averse to seeing Iran dominate the Gulf, because a regional powerhouse of that sort could be a long-term strategic threat. The prospect of a nuclear Iran is even more worrisome for Israeli leaders, who tend to view it as the ultimate nightmare scenario.
   But Israel is not the only Middle East country that is now worried about Iran. Many of Iran's Arab neighbors are also concerned about its nuclear ambitions as well as its growing influence in the region. They fear that an especially powerful Iran might someday try to coerce them or even invade their country, as Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990. They are also somewhat suspicious of Iran because it is a Persian rather than an Arab state, and because they care about the balance of power within Islam between Shia and Sunnis. Iran is governed by deeply committed Shia, which alarms the leaders of Sunni-dominated states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, who see Shia influence growing in the Arab world. For the first time, Shia govern Iraq, and Hezbollah, a Shia organization, has gained greater influence in Lebanon in the wake of its 2006 war with Israel. To make matters worse, Tehran has close ties with some Iraqi leaders and is a longtime supporter of Hezbollah.
   The United States, Israel, and Iran's Arab neighbors, including many of America's Gulf allies, have an independent interest in keeping Iran non-nuclear and preventing it from becoming a regional hegemon. Washington would be committed to keeping Iran in check even if Israel did not exist, so as to prevent the other Gulf states from being conquered or cowed by Tehran. Unqualified support from the Arab world would make it easier for the United States to preserve the balance of power in the Gulf, and obtaining that support requires an effective strategy.
   Over the past fifteen years, Israel and the lobby have pushed the United States to pursue a strategically unwise policy toward Iran. In particular, they 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. Unfortunately, such rhetoric makes it harder, not easier, to stop Iran from going nuclear. During the 1990s, Israel and its American supporters encouraged the Clinton administration to pursue a confrontational policy toward Iran, even though Iran was interested in improving relations between the two countries. That same pattern was at play again in the early years of the Bush administration, as well as in December 2006, when Israel and the lobby made a concerted effort to undermine the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that President Bush negotiate with Iran. Were it not for the lobby, the United States would almost certainly have a different and more effective Iran policy.
   U.S. efforts to deal with Iran are further undermined by Israel's repressive policies in the Occupied Territories, which make it harder for the United States to gain the cooperation of Arab countries. Indeed, one of the main reasons that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finally began pushing forward the Arab-Israeli peace process in late 2006 was Saudi Arabia's insistence that it could not fashion an effective Iran policy with Washington as long as there was so much anger toward the United States in the Arab world over the Palestinian issue. As discussed in Chapter 7, Rice's efforts are likely to fail, because Israel's current leaders do not want to create a viable Palestinian state and the lobby will make it very difficult for President Bush or any other president to get Israel to change its approach to this issue. In short, thanks in good part to Israel and its American backers, the United States has pursued a counterproductive policy toward Iran since the early 1990s and is having difficulty getting support from states that have their own reasons to help Washington deal with Iran and would otherwise be inclined to do so.
CONFRONTATION OR CONCILIATION?
The United States had excellent relations with Iran from 1953 until 1979, when the American-backed shah was toppled and Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic theocracy came to power. Since then, relations between the two countries have been almost entirely adversarial. Israel has also had hostile relations with Tehran since the shah's overthrow. During the 1980s, however, neither the United States nor Israel was seriously threatened by Iran, mainly because it was involved in a lengthy war with Iraq, which pinned it down and sapped its strength. To preserve the regional balance of power, the United States simply had to make sure that the war ended in a stalemate. It accomplished this objective by helping Saddam Hussein's forces stymie Iran's army on the battlefield. Iran was exhausted when the war ended in 1988, and it was in no position to cause trouble in the region for at least a few years. Furthermore, Iran's nuclear program was put on the back burner during the 1980s, possibly because of the war.
   Israel's perception of the Iranian threat underwent a fundamental change in the early 1990s, as evidence of Tehran's nuclear ambitions began to accumulate. Israeli leaders began warning Washington in 1993 that Iran was a grave threat not only to Israel but to the United States as well. There has been no letup in that alarmist and aggressive rhetoric since then, largely because Iran has continued to move ahead on the nuclear front. Today, many experts believe the Iranians will eventually build nuclear weapons unless something is done to topple the clerical regime, alter its ambitions, or deny it the capacity. The lobby has followed Israel's lead and echoed its warnings about the dangers of allowing Iran to become a nuclear power.
   Israel and the lobby are also troubled by Iran's support for Hezbollah, by its endorsement of the Palestinian cause, and by its refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. Needless to say, statements like President Ahmadinejad's reinforce these concerns. Israel and its supporters tend to see Iran's policies as a reflection of deep ideological antipathy to the Jewish state, but they are more accurately seen as tactical measures intended to improve Iran's overall position in the region. In particular, endorsing the Palestinian cause (and helping groups like Hezbollah) wins sympathy in the Arab world and helps discourage an Arab alliance against Persian Iran. As the Iran expert Trita Parsi convincingly shows, Iran's commitment to Hezbollah and to the Palestinians has varied considerably over time, usually in response to the overall threat environment. Relations between the clerical regime in Iran and the largely
secular PLO were not warm during the 1980s, and Iran began backing hardline Palestinian groups like Islamic Jihad only after its exclusion from the 1991 Madrid Conference and the onset of the Oslo peace process. These events led Tehran to resist what it correctly saw as a broad U.S. effort to isolate it and deny it a significant regional role, and it did so by backing extremist groups that also opposed Oslo. As Martin Indyk, who played a key role in formulating U.S. policy at the time, later recalled, Iran "had an incentive to do us in on the peace process in order to defeat our policy of containment and isolation. And therefore, they took aim at the peace process."5
   There are two broad alternatives for dealing with Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions. One approach, which is favored by the Israeli government and its key American supporters, proceeds from the belief that Iran cannot be contained once it acquires nuclear weapons. This view assumes that Tehran is likely to use its nuclear weapons against Israel, because Iranian leaders, with their apocalyptic vision of history, would not fear Israeli retaliation.6 They might give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use them against the United States themselves, even if doing so invited automatic and massive retaliation. Therefore, Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Israel would like Washington to solve this problem, but Israeli leaders do not rule out the possibility that the Israel Defense Forces might try to do the job if the Americans get cold feet.
   This approach also assumes that conciliatory diplomacy and positive incentives will not convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program. In concrete terms, this means that the United States has to impose sanctions on Iran— and maybe even conduct a preventive war—if it continues down the nuclear road. To facilitate putting serious pressure on Iran, Israelis and the lobby want the United States to maintain a substantial American military presence in the Middle East, in contrast to America's pre-1990 strategy of acting as an offshore balancer and keeping its military forces over the horizon.
   For the past fifteen years, this confrontational formula for dealing with Iran's nuclear program has vied with a second strategy, one more consistent with the American national interest. This alternative approach asserts that while it would be better for the United States if Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons, there is good reason to think a nuclear Iran could be contained and deterred, just as the Soviet Union was contained during the Cold War.7 It also argues that the best way to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons is to engage it diplomatically and attempt to normalize its relationship with the United States. This strategy requires taking the threat of preventive war off the table, because threatening Iran with regime change simply gives its
leaders even more reason to want a nuclear deterrent of their own. The Iranians, like the Americans and the Israelis, recognize that nuclear weapons are the best protection available for a state that is on another state's hit list. As the Iran expert Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations has written, "Iran's nuclear calculations are not derived from an irrational ideology, but rather from a judicious attempt to craft a viable deterrent capability against an evolving range of threats . . . Iran's leadership clearly sees itself as being in Washington's cross hairs, and it is precisely this perception that is driving its accelerated nuclear program."8
   The case for engagement is buttressed by the fact that preventive war looks like a very unattractive alternative. Even if the United States could eliminate Iran's nuclear facilities, Tehran would almost certainly rebuild them, and this time the Iranians would go to even greater lengths to disperse, hide, and harden them against an attack.9 Also, if Washington launched a preventive strike against Iran, Tehran would be bound to retaliate wherever and whenever it could, including going after oil shipments in the Persian Gulf and using its considerable influence to make matters worse for the United States in Iraq. Additionally, Iran would be likely to establish closer ties with China and Russia, which is not in America's interest. By contrast, if the United States were to remove the threat of war and engage Iran, then Tehran would be more inclined to help Washington deal with al Qaeda, tamp down the war inside Iraq, and stabilize Afghanistan. It would also be less likely to align with China and Russia.10
   Given the history of poisonous relations between America and Iran, there is no guarantee that engagement would produce a "grand bargain" that would halt Iran's nuclear program. After all, there is little chance that Israel will give up its own nuclear weapons, and Iranian leaders might believe that if Israel has a nuclear deterrent, then so must Iran. Nonetheless, this approach is more likely to work than threatening preventive war, and if it does fail, the United States can always fall back on deterrence.
   One might have expected the United States to have adopted some variation on the engagement strategy by this time, especially given that a decade and a half of confrontation has not borne fruit. Engagement enjoys substantial support in the CIA, the State Department, and even the U.S. military, which has shown little enthusiasm for bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. London's Sunday Times reported in late February 2007 that "some of America's most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defense and intelligence sources."11 In fact, Iran has repeatedly signaled an in
terest in engagement: its leaders have reached out to the United States on a number of occasions over the past fifteen years, hoping to improve relations between the two countries. Remarkably, Iran has even offered to put its nuclear program up for negotiation and offered to work out a modus vivendi with Israel.
   Yet despite these promising opportunities, Israel and the lobby have worked overtime to prevent both the Clinton and Bush administrations from engaging Iran, and they have prevailed at almost every turn. Unfortunately, but predictably, this hard-line approach has not worked as advertised and has left the United States worse off than if it had pursued a strategy of engagement. In response to this failed strategy, there is a growing chorus of voices inside and outside of Washington calling for a new opening toward Iran. Equally unsurprising, Israel and the lobby are fighting to prevent the United States from reversing course and seeking a rapprochement with Tehran. They continue to promote an increasingly confrontational and counterproductive policy instead.

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION AND DUAL CONTAINMENT

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:06 PM

WHY DID BUSH WAVER?

Although Congress had voted overwhelmingly to turn the screws on Syria, the Bush administration was deeply divided about the wisdom of this policy. While neoconservatives like Perle, Bolton, and Wolfowitz were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, there was widespread opposition to that approach inside the State Department and the CIA.75 Even the president had little enthusiasm for directly confronting Syria, as reflected in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's description of his signing of the Syria Accountability Act: "Bush signed the act on a Friday night, the time the administration reserves for activities it would rather not share with the public, and the White House statement on the subject was about as 'I've gotta do this but I don't wanna' as it gets."76 Even after signing the law, Bush emphasized that he would go slowly in implementing it.77
   Bush had good reasons to be ambivalent. As noted, the Syrian government had provided the United States with important intelligence about al Qaeda since 9/11, and it had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf.78 Moreover, Syria gave CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Flynt Leverett, who worked for Bush in the White House at the time, writes that the president, "in his communications with Bashar, whether by letter or phone, always acknowledged Syria's cooperation with the United States
against al-Qaeda."79 Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardize these valuable connections and undermine the campaign against international terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular. The president recognized that a confrontational policy toward Syria could put America at risk.
   Bush also understood that Syria was not a threat to the United States, even taking into account its possible role in helping the Iraqi insurgency. Assad was actually eager to cooperate with Washington; according to Seymour Hersh, his chief of military intelligence told the administration that Syria would even be willing to work through back channels to discuss ways of restricting the military and political activities of Hezbollah.80 Playing hardball with Assad would make the United States look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. And putting Syria on the American hit list would give Damascus compelling reasons to cause trouble in Iraq and keep the U.S. military pinned down there, so that it could not strike Syria. Even if the president wanted to pressure Syria, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first.
   The neoconservatives in the administration were naturally opposed to cooperating with Syria. They were even unhappy with the intelligence channel that was providing Washington with important information about al Qaeda. "Neoconservatives in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Vice President," Leverett writes, "opposed accepting Syrian help, arguing that it might create a sense of indebtedness to Damascus and inhibit an appropriate American response to a state sponsor of terrorism."81 President Bush, however, has shown little interest in this kind of "appropriate response." Indeed, he instructed the Pentagon not to plan for war against Syria in mid-April 2003, when the United States appeared to have just won a dramatic victory in Iraq and when talk about striking Syria was beginning to fill the air.82 He certainly has not changed his mind on this matter in light of what has happened in Iraq since those heady days. The president has also been slow to implement the Syria Accountability Act, as he promised when he signed it, much to the irritation of pro-Israel hard-liners in the United States. By the spring of 2004, Congressman Engel and some of his colleagues were so frustrated with Bush over his foot dragging that they threatened to introduce a new and tougher version of the legislation.83
   Contrary to Olmert's claims, there have even been scattered reports in the media over the past few years that the Bush administration might react positively if Israel accepted Assad's offer to reopen peace talks. Ze'ev Schiff, for example, wrote in December 2003 that "in the opinion of American sources familiar with the thinking in the administration, it would have responded positively to an Israeli acceptance of Assad's proposal. The United States is not
looking in principle for a military confrontation with Damascus and is ready to let Assad get onto a positive track."84 A month later, Aluf Benn wrote in Ha'aretz that "senior American officials" had told the Israelis that the United States "will not object, should Israel choose to take up Syrian President Bashar Assad's offer to resume negotiations." Benn noted, however, that "Israel has received contradictory advice from lower-level administration officials."85 There have also been other reports saying that Washington was opposed to Israel talking with Syria.86 The Bush administration's bottom line is difficult to discern, due to the continuing tug-of-war among policy makers over how best to deal with Damascus and a recognition of competing interests.
   Although Bush has not taken serious measures to topple Assad, the lobby has pushed him to take a more confrontational line toward Syria than he would probably have adopted on his own.87 The president and his key advisers have consistently used harsh rhetoric or made veiled threats when talking about Damascus, and they have repeatedly charged Syria with supporting the insurgents in Iraq. They have also been quick to blame Syria anytime there is trouble in Lebanon, and Bush has made no attempt to forge a pragmatic relationship with Syria or to mend fences with it. Neoconservatives inside and outside the administration have continued to call for using military force against Assad's regime. Such calls were especially evident during the Lebanon war in the summer of 2006.88 Meyrav Wurmser, who runs the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute, commented after the war that there was much anger toward Israel among her neoconservative colleagues "over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians. Instead of Israel fighting against Hizbullah, many parts of the American administration believe that Israel should have fought against the real enemy, which is Syria and not Hizbullah."89

CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, Washington's confrontational approach toward Damascus has produced nothing but negative consequences for the United States and undermined Israel's long-term interests too. To begin with, Syria has stopped providing Washington with intelligence about al Qaeda.90 Assad has done little to help the United States shut down the insurgency in Iraq and may be trying to protect his own position by helping to keep it going.91 After all, keeping the United States bogged down in Baghdad makes it less likely that the United States will be free to go after Syria. Damascus also has continued to support
Hezbollah in Lebanon and has formed a tacit alliance with Iran, which makes it harder to maintain peace in Lebanon and to discourage Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. Although these developments are not good for the United States, hard-liners in the lobby remain committed to a policy of confrontation and are quick to criticize anyone who suggests a different course.
   Yet in the wake of Israel's debacle in Lebanon last summer, and especially given the disastrous situation facing the United States in Iraq, significant pressure is now being put on President Bush to extend an olive branch to Syria.92 The hope is that Damascus might help stabilize the situation in Iraq, allow American troops to be withdrawn, and establish some semblance of order there. It also might be possible to peel Syria away from its alliance with Iran and weaken Hezbollah in the process. As noted, a number of senators and representatives—including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi— have defied the Bush administration and traveled to Damascus to meet with President Assad. Their aim is to improve relations between Syria and the United States, as recommended by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which would make it easier to address a number of regional security issues.
   But Israeli leaders—who appear determined to hold on to the Golan Heights—have no interest in seeing the United States establish cooperative relations with Syria.93 The most powerful groups in the lobby share Israel's perspective, and they have worked hard—and thus far successfully—to keep the Bush administration from pursuing a more cooperative relationship with the Assad regime. The result is that the United States continues to pursue a strategically foolish policy toward Syria and will in all likelihood continue to do so until Israel gets a prime minister like Yitzhak Rabin, who understood that exchanging the Golan Heights for peace with Syria would leave Israel in a substantially better strategic position.
   The story here is a simple one: without the lobby's influence, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act and U.S. policy toward Damascus would have been more in line with the American national interest. One could add that a different U.S. policy might well have produced a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty by now, a treaty that would have further enshrined Israel's legitimacy and regional supremacy and reduced international support for its most determined, recalcitrant, and violent foes: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.
   America's misguided approach to Syria is not the only case where the lobby has insisted on a counterproductive policy of confrontation, to the detriment of the United States and Israel alike. One sees much the same story in recent U.S. policy toward Iran, which is the subject of the next chapter.

IRAN IN THE CROSSHAIRS

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:07 PM

THE LOBBY AND DAMASCUS AFTER 9/11

It is worth recalling that some important figures in the lobby had their sights on Syria well before the Twin Towers fell. Damascus was a prominent target in the 1996 "Clean Break" study written by a handful of neoconservatives for incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu. In addition, Daniel Pipes and Ziad Abdelnour, the head of the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL), had coauthored a report in May 2000 calling for the United States to use military threats to force Syria to remove its troops from Lebanon, get rid of its WMD, and stop supporting terrorism.54 The USCFL is a close cousin to the lobby; numerous neoconservatives are among its major activists and supporters, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser. In fact, all of them signed the 2000 report, as did pro-Israel Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), another core USCFL supporter.55
   This proposal, and others like it, did not gain much traction in Washington during the Clinton years, mainly because Israel was committed to achieving peace with Syria during that period. Apart from these hard-liners, most groups in the lobby had little incentive to challenge Clinton's policy toward Syria, because the president's approach tended to mirror Israel's. But when Sharon came to power in 2001, Israel's thinking about Syria changed dramatically. Reacting to this shift, a number of groups in the lobby began to press for a more aggressive policy toward Damascus.
   In the spring of 2002, when Iraq was becoming the main issue, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was also promoting legislation to formally place Syria on the "axis of evil" and Congressman Engel introduced the Syria Accountability Act in Congress.56 It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD, and stop supporting terrorism.57 The proposed act also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by a number of groups in the lobby—especially AIPAC—and "framed," according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "by some of Israel's best friends in Congress." JTA also reported that its "most avid proponent in the administration" was Elliott Abrams, who, as we have seen, is in frequent contact with Olmert's office.58
   The Bush administration opposed the Syria Accountability Act in the spring of 2002, in part because it feared that the legislation might undermine efforts to sell the Iraq war, and in part because it might lead Damascus to stop providing Washington with useful intelligence about al Qaeda. Congress agreed to put the legislation on the back burner until matters were settled with Saddam.
   But as soon as Baghdad fell in April 2003, the lobby renewed its campaign against Syria. Encouraged by what then looked like a decisive victory in Iraq, some of Israel's backers were no longer interested in simply getting Syria to change its behavior. Instead, they now wanted to topple the regime itself. Paul Wolfowitz declared that "there has got to be regime change in Syria," and Richard Perle told a journalist that "we could deliver a short message, a two-worded message [to other hostile regimes in the Middle East]: 'You're next.' "59 The hawkish Defense Policy Board, which was headed by Perle and whose members included Kenneth Adelman, Eliot Cohen, and James Woolsey, was also advocating a hard line against Syria.60
   In addition to Abrams, Perle, and Wolfowitz, the other key insider pushing for regime change in Syria was Assistant Secretary of State (and later UN Ambassador) John Bolton. He had told Israeli leaders a month before the
Iraq war that President Bush would deal with Syria, as well as Iran and North Korea, right after Saddam fell from power.61 Toward that end, Bolton reportedly prepared to tell Congress in mid-July that Syria's WMD programs had reached the point where they were a serious threat to stability in the Middle East and had to be dealt with sooner rather than later. The CIA and other government agencies objected, however, and claimed that Bolton was inflating the danger. Consequently, the administration did not allow Bolton to give his testimony on Syria at that time.62 Yet Bolton was not put off for long. He appeared before Congress in September 2003 and described Syria as a growing threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East.63
   In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria "should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam's reckless, irresponsible and defiant behavior could end up sharing his fate."64 On April 15, the Israeli-American journalist Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times titled "Next, Turn the Screws on Syria," while that same day neoconservative Frank Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy, wrote in the Washington Times that the Bush administration should use "whatever techniques are necessary—including military force—to effect behavior modification and/or regime change in Damascus."65 The next day Zev Chafets, an Israeli-American journalist and former head of the Israeli government press office, wrote an article for the New York Daily News titled "Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too." Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on April 21 that Syrian leader Assad was a serious threat to America.66
   The charges leveled against Syria were remarkably similar to those previously made against Saddam. Writing in National Review Online, conservative commentator Jed Babbin maintained that even though Assad's army was a paper tiger, he is still "an exceedingly dangerous man." The basis for that claim was an "Israeli source" who had told Babbin that "Israel's military and intelligence arms are convinced that Assad will take risks a prudent leader wouldn't" and, therefore, "Assad's unpredictability is itself a great danger."67 Marc Ginsberg, former U.S. ambassador to Morocco, warned of "Syria's secret production of weapons of mass destruction and its weaponization of missile batteries and rockets."68 And like their Israeli counterparts, American supporters of Israel suggested that Syria was hiding Saddam's WMD. "It wouldn't surprise me," Congressman Engel remarked, "if those weapons of mass destruction that we cannot find in Iraq wound up and are today in Syria."69
Back on Capitol Hill, Engel reintroduced the Syria Accountability Act on
April 12.70 Three days later, Richard Perle called for Congress to pass it.71 But the Bush administration still had little enthusiasm for the legislation and was able to stall it again. In mid-August, Engel and a group of politicians and Jewish leaders from New York traveled to Israel and met for ninety minutes with Ariel Sharon in his Jerusalem office. The Israeli leader complained to his visitors that the United States was not putting enough pressure on Syria, although he specifically thanked Engel for sponsoring the Syria Accountability Act and made it clear that he strongly favored continued efforts to push the legislation on Capitol Hill.72 The following month, Engel, who announced he was "fed up with the . . . administration's maneuvering on Syria," began pushing the bill again. With AIPAC's full support, Engel began rounding up votes on Capitol Hill.73 Bush could no longer hold Congress back in the face of this full-court press from the lobby, and the anti-Syrian act passed by overwhelming margins (398—4 in the House; 89—4 in the Senate). Bush signed it into law on December 12, 2003.74

WHY DID BUSH WAVER?

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:08 PM

ISRAEL AND THE GOLAN HEIGHTS

To grasp the essence of the complex dance between Washington, Jerusalem, and Damascus, and the role that the lobby has played, one must first understand why Israel came tantalizingly close to signing a peace agreement with Syria in 2000 but has been unwilling to talk with Assad since then.13
   The taproot of the present conflict between Israel and Syria involves the Golan Heights. Israel took that territory from Syria in the 1967 war and drove eighty thousand Syrians from their homes. Israeli law was extended over the Golan Heights in 1981, in what was essentially a de facto annexation.14 There are now about eighteen thousand Jewish settlers living there in thirty-two settlements and one city.15 Syria is deeply committed to getting this territory back, and toward this end it supports terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah; the Syrian military is too weak to threaten Israel and these groups are its only means of putting pressure on Israel. In 1994, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed in principle to return all of the Golan Heights to Syria in return for full normalization of relations between the two countries. It was widely understood that the "Rabin deposit," as it came to be known, meant that Israel would withdraw to the border that existed on June 4, 1967, and that Syria would then end all support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.16
   Rabin was assassinated a year later, but his successors—Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu—remained committed in principle to withdrawing to the June 4, 1967, borders. Peres's tenure in office was too short to craft a deal, however, and Netanyahu, for various reasons, did not place a sufficiently high priority on it. Netanyahu's successor, Ehud Barak, was also willing to give back virtually all of the Golan Heights to Syria, although he would not commit himself to a full withdrawal to the 1967 border.17
   Relations between Israel and Syria were not that bad in the latter half of the 1990s, as the two sides maneuvered to reach an agreement. The Clinton administration was deeply involved in the negotiating process, devoted to brokering the final deal, much the way Jimmy Carter pushed forward a deal between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1979. And this meant that Syria and the United States had a reasonably good relationship during this period, even though Syria was a one-party dictatorship and the Clinton administration was publicly committed to "expanding democracy." Israel actually welcomed this cordial relationship between Damascus and Washington at the time, because it wanted the United States to help resolve its long-standing feud with Syria. A headline in the New York Times after President Clinton
visited Damascus in October 1994 makes this point clear: "Israelis Look to Clinton Trip for Progress with Syrians."18
   In the fall of 1999, Clinton thought he finally had the makings of a deal between Israel and Syria. At the strong urging of Barak, he gathered the two sides together in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in early January 2000. But Barak, suddenly aware that Israeli public opinion was cool to giving the Golan Heights back to Syria, became inflexible and tried to show that he was being a tough negotiator by slowing the process. The talks collapsed, with Dennis Ross, Clinton's chief Middle East negotiator, later remarking, "If not for Barak's cold feet, there might have been a deal in January 2000."19 A subsequent meeting two months later in Geneva between Assad and Clinton went nowhere, mainly because the Syrian leader no longer trusted Barak. Clinton clearly blamed Israel, not Syria, for the collapse of the negotiations.20
   Sharon replaced Barak as prime minister in February 2001. This development changed Israeli-Syrian relations for the worse, which in turn undermined Syrian-American relations as well. Unlike his four predecessors, Sharon had no intention of giving back the Golan Heights. "What was offered back then," he said, "in my wildest imagination, I would not have considered."21 Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, has also made it clear that "the Golan Heights will remain in our hands forever."22
   This insistence on keeping that disputed territory as part of Israel enjoys widespread support on the Israeli right. When Javier Solana, the secretary general of the Council of the European Union, said in March 2007 that he would like to help Syria get back the territory it lost in 1967, Yisrael Katz, a Knesset member from Likud, responded, "Israel will never retreat from the Golan Heights; the region is an integral part of Israel and vital for its security and protection."23 Moreover, Benjamin Netanyahu apparently now believes that Israel must remain in the Golan Heights.24 Israeli public opinion is clearly in favor of hanging on to the territory as well; a December 2006 survey indicated that 64 percent of the respondents opposed withdrawing from the Golan even if it led to full peace with Syria. By contrast, only 19 percent favored the deal. A previous poll in early October 2006 produced similar results: 70 percent opposed full withdrawal in exchange for peace while 16 percent favored it.25
   Despite this entrenched resistance to withdrawal, there is substantial support within Israel's governing circles for trying to negotiate a deal with Syria, especially within the military. The IDF chief of staff said in 2004 that Israel was capable of defending itself without the Golan Heights and would
be more secure if it signed a peace treaty with Syria.26 Not only would Israel then have normal relations with a long-standing enemy, but Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad would no longer receive support from Syria, and in the case of Hezbollah, loss of Syrian backing would make it much more difficult for Iran to supply it with weapons. Even more important, Syria could use its considerable influence in Lebanon to rein in Hezbollah. This line of argument took on greater urgency after the 2006 Lebanon war, in which Hezbollah was able to fight the IDF to a standstill. In response, a number of influential Israelis, including a former chief of staff and a former head of Shin Bet, created an organization called the Forum of the Peace Initiative with Syria. Its goal is to persuade the Israeli government to respond to Syrian peace overtures and hopefully reach a peace agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem.27 Ha'aretz has also been a strong supporter of negotiations with Damascus, as has Olmert's defense minister, Amir Peretz.28 This approach, however, was firmly rejected by both Sharon and Olmert.
   Given that Israel's current leaders do not intend to return the Golan Heights to Syria, they have no interest in reopening peace talks with Damascus.29 What is there to talk about? To justify their intransigence, they seek to portray Syria as a rogue state that cannot be trusted and that understands only the mailed fist. It is no wonder that the Syrian ambassador to Washington said in early 2004 that "the more we talk about peace, the more we are attacked."30 Confrontation, not cooperation, is the best policy for dealing with Syria, according to Israel's current leaders, who have an obvious interest in getting the Bush administration to see Syria in a similar light. Thus, in contrast to the late 1990s, when Israel favored cooperation with Syria, since 2001 both Israel and a number of its American backers have worked hard to convince the U.S. government to treat Syria as a hostile and dangerous enemy.
   Syria still hopes to get the Golan Heights back, and it has made repeated attempts to reopen talks with Israel and negotiate a peace agreement along the lines of the "Rabin deposit."31 But Israel's leaders have refused even to countenance a dialogue with Syria. After a Syrian peace offer in early December 2003, the veteran military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff observed in Ha'aretz that "the most astonishing thing about the Syrian president's proposal to resume talks with Israel is the response of official Israel . . . Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has remained silent. Not a word has been heard from him ... In the past we always hoped for such proposals."32
   In a mid-December 2006 interview with the Italian newspaper La Re-pubblica, President Assad called on Olmert to negotiate with him: "Talk to
Syria, and like many Israelis are saying, 'even if you think it's a bluff you have nothing to lose.'"33 At the same time, the Syrian foreign minister told the Washington Post that Syria would be willing to begin talks with Israel without any preconditions, which appeared to be a significant change in Syria's bargaining position.34 Olmert rejected the opportunity to start talks and blamed it on President Bush, who, according to the prime minister, had forbidden him to negotiate with Syria.35 The implication of the prime minister's comments—which have been repeated by many other Israelis—is that he would talk with Assad were it not for his loyalty to Bush.
   This argument is unconvincing. Not only did the U.S. ambassador to Israel deny that Washington was preventing Israel from talking with Syria, but Israel is not in the habit of taking orders from any U.S. leader when its vital interests are at stake.36 Most important, there is hardly any evidence that Olmert is genuinely interested in meaningful peace talks with Syria. A senior Israeli government official told Aluf Benn of Ha'aretz that Israel, in Benn's words, "never requested American permission to talk with Syria, as it has not yet decided whether it wishes to do so."37 The prime minister's refusal to negotiate is unsurprising, because an agreement "comes with a price tag," to quote Defense Minister Peretz, which is giving up the Golan Heights, and Olmert is opposed to making that concession. Olmert grasped "the pretext" provided by Bush, the Ha'aretz reporter Gideon Samet writes, "because he will not admit the real reason: He does not want to come down from the Golan Heights."38
   Further evidence of Syria's interest in making peace with Israel and Israel's unwillingness to seize the opportunity was revealed in January 2007, when the Israeli press reported that Israelis and Syrians had met secretly in Europe between September 2004 and July 2006 for the purpose of coming up with a proposal for an agreement between the two states. The meetings were unofficial and did not involve policy makers in either government. However, both governments were kept informed of the talks and, according to Ha'aretz, "The European mediator and the Syrian representative in the discussions held eight separate meetings with senior Syrian officials, including Vice President Farouk Shara, Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, and a Syrian intelligence officer with the rank of 'general.'"39 The two sides reached an agreement calling for Israel to return to the June 4, 1967, border between the two countries. In return, Syria would stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and even "distance itself from Iran." The talks ended when the Syrians proposed that they be moved from an "academic level" to an "official level," and the Olmert government refused.
   Then, in April 2007, Speaker of the House Pelosi visited President Assad in Damascus and told him that Olmert, with whom she had previously met in Israel, "is ready to restart negotiations as well as to talk peace."40 Pelosi had misunderstood Olmert's position, however, and the Israeli government let her know in no uncertain terms that he had no interest in talking with Syria, which the official statement denounced as "part of the axis of evil and a force that encourages terror in the entire Middle East."41
   Olmert's position on the Golan Heights could always change, of course. Indeed, there were press reports in early June 2007 that he might be willing to open negotiations with the Syrians, although Shimon Peres, then vice premier, immediately threw cold water on the idea by claiming that Syria was not ready for serious talks.42 It is also possible that some future Israeli leader might be willing, as Yitzhak Rabin was, to return the disputed territory in exchange for peace. Our argument is not that Israel will forever refuse to give up the Golan Heights, but instead that Israeli policy toward Damascus, whatever it might be, largely determines U.S. policy toward Syria, not the other way around.
   Given Israel's strong opposition to negotiating with Syria since Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001, it is hardly surprising that the Bush administration, which came to power a month earlier, has gone to considerable lengths during this same time period to isolate and put pressure on the Assad government. Some might say that this analysis misses the crucial point that Syria continues to support terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and thus fully merits being treated as a rogue state by President Bush. But remember: none of those terrorist groups threatens vital U.S. interests, and Damascus backs them mainly because they are the only levers it has to pressure Israel into returning the Golan Heights. Israel could end Syria's ties to Hamas and Hezbollah by agreeing to make peace with Syria, which is why Israeli leaders negotiated with Syria during the 1990s, even though Damascus supported terrorism then as it does now.
   As noted, there has been significant resistance inside the U.S. government to treating Syria as an implacable foe. The CIA and the State Department have been especially vocal in making the case that confrontation with Damascus is strategically unwise. Israel and the lobby have taken the opposite position, however, and they have ultimately carried the day with President Bush. Let us look in more detail at the evolution of U.S. policy toward Syria since 9/11.
JERUSALEM AND DAMASCUS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11
From the outset, Prime Minister Sharon and his lieutenants made it clear to the Bush administration that they viewed Syria as a dangerous threat to the United States as well as Israel.43 They did not push Washington to focus on Syria before March 2003, however, mainly because they were more concerned about Iran, and they were pushing for war against Iraq and did not want Washington to get distracted by other problems. As soon as Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Israeli leaders began urging the United States to concentrate on Damascus and to use its unmatched power to change the regime's behavior, or perhaps the regime itself.44
   Sharon laid out his demands in a high-profile interview on April 15, 2003. In Yedioth, Ahronoth, the prime minister said that Syrian President Assad "is dangerous. His judgment is impaired," and he claimed that Assad had allowed Saddam to move military equipment into Syria just before the Iraq war began. Sharon called for the United States to put "very heavy" pressure on Syria, in order to force Assad to end its support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, push Iran's Revolutionary Guards out of the Bekka valley in Lebanon, cease cooperating with Iran, remove Hezbollah from the Israeli-Lebanese border and replace it with the Lebanese army, and eliminate Hezbollah's missiles aimed at Israel.45 On seeing this remarkably bold request, one high-ranking Israeli diplomat warned that Sharon should adopt a lower profile with regard to offering his advice about relations between Damascus and Washington.46
   But Sharon was not the only high-level Israeli official asking the Bush administration to get tough with Syria. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told Ma'ariv on April 14, "We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans."47 Specifically, he wanted Syria to stop all assistance to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and to dismantle Hezbollah. Two weeks later, Sharon's national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy came to Washington and encouraged U.S. officials to take what the Forward reporter Ori Nir termed "decisive action" against Syria. In addition to warning about Syria's weapons of mass destruction, Halevy reportedly described Assad as "irresponsible" and "brash."48 Addressing a WINEP conference on May 3, he said Assad was "prone to bad influence" and warned that he "cannot be left to his old tricks." Instead, Halevy emphasized, "There are many measures short of war that can be employed to draw the fangs of the young, arrogant, and inexperienced president of Syria."49
   With Saddam gone, Israel was trying to convince the Bush administration that Syria was at least as dangerous as Iraq, maybe even more so. The claim is absurd if one looks even briefly at Syria's capabilities—it is, after all, a country with fewer than nineteen million people and a defense budget that is l/300th that of the United States. Yet the Israeli strategist Yossi Alpher now warned that, from Israel's perspective, "Syria could do a lot of damage, a lot more than Iraq." The Washington Post reported in mid-April 2003 that Sharon and Mofaz were fueling the campaign against Syria by feeding the United States intelligence reports about the actions of Syrian President Assad.50
   In their efforts to demonize Syria and bait the United States into ratcheting up the pressure, Israel accused Damascus of harboring high-level Iraqis from Saddam's regime and, even worse, of hiding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.51 In August 2003, when a suicide truck bomber blew up UN headquarters in Baghdad, Israel's ambassador to the UN caused a diplomatic spat by suggesting that Syria had provided the truck, in effect implying that Syria was partly responsible.52 In much the same vein, Itamar Rabinovich, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, told Seymour Hersh that he "wondered . . . whether, given the quality of their sources, the Syrians had had advance information about the September 11th plot—and failed to warn the United States."53 There was little or no evidence to support these alarming charges, but Israel's willingness to make them shows how eager it was to get the United States embroiled with another Arab regime.

THE LOBBY AND DAMASCUS AFTER 9/11

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:09 PM

THE SYRIAN THREAT

Syria is not a serious military threat to the United States or to Israel. Its defense budget is less than one-fifth the size of Israel's, and it has an unimpressive army and air force that the Israel Defense Forces would easily defeat if serious fighting ever occurred.3 The IDF had little difficulty routing Syria's forces during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and that war occurred when Syria was still getting a great deal of help from its Soviet patron. Damascus has been on its own since the Soviet Union collapsed, however, while Israel has continued to receive significant U.S. aid every year. A war between Israel and Syria would be a gross mismatch, which is why Syria's leaders go to considerable lengths to avoid provoking Israel.
   The American military would have even less trouble defeating the Syrians in a war. Syria's military is much weaker than Iran's or Iraq's under Saddam, and it has not engaged a serious adversary since Israel trounced it in 1982. Unlike Iran today or Iraq under Saddam, Syria lacks the population size and wealth to be a regional hegemon. It can make life more difficult for the United States and for Israel, but it lacks the wherewithal to be a serious threat to either country.
   Furthermore, Syria does not have a nuclear weapons program, and there is no reason to think that it will pursue one anytime soon. It does have chemical weapons, which were first acquired from Egypt in 1973, and it may have a biological weapons program.4 It also has a large inventory of ballistic missiles and thus the capability to deliver its chemical weapons against Israel and other countries in the region, although not the United States. But Israel has never worried much about this threat, because it has its own chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and it could inflict far greater damage on Syria than Syria could inflict on Israel. In other words, Israel has an effective deterrent against Syria's chemical weapons.5
   Syria's ability to create trouble rests mostly in its support for a number of terrorist organizations, notably Hezbollah, but also Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Indeed, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal lives in Damascus. All of these groups threaten Israel, but unlike al Qaeda, none of them—including Hezbollah—directly threatens the United States. As Moshe Maoz, an expert on Syria at Hebrew University, notes, "Syria is not a saint—everybody knows that—but Hezbollah is mostly a threat against Israel."6 Moreover, Syria and al Qaeda are bitter enemies, mainly because bin Laden is a Sunni and an Islamic fundamentalist, while Assad is the Shia leader of a secular state. In fact, al Qaeda is believed to have links to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic terrorist group that has battled the secular Bathist government in Syria for more than twenty years.7 Given that Damascus and Washington share a common enemy in al Qaeda, it is hardly surprising that in the wake of 9/11 Syria began providing the Bush administration with important intelligence about bin Laden's organization. Contrary to the rhetoric about the global war on terror, it would be wrong to argue that Syria supports "international terrorism"—a global network of terrorist groups and states that target America and Israel alike. Rather, Syria supports a particular set of terrorist organizations whose agenda is focused primarily on Israel alone.
   One might argue that Syria is a serious threat to the United States, because it supports the insurgency in Iraq. But there is little hard evidence that Damascus is providing support to the Iraqi insurgents, which is surely why the Bush administration has mainly made that charge against Iran, not Syria. It is probably the case that Syria is turning a blind eye to some of the fighters and weapons that flow across its borders into Iraq. But Washington has pursued a confrontational policy toward Damascus since September 11, which gives the Syrians powerful incentives to keep the U.S. military busy in Iraq. Ultimately, however, Syria is not the source of America's troubles in Iraq, and Damascus would have little interest in undermining the U.S. oc
cupation if President Bush and his lieutenants were not threatening the Assad regime. The bottom line is that Syria is not a serious danger to the United States, and it has little reason to pick a quarrel with the world's most powerful state.
   In fact, Damascus has had reasonably good relations with Washington at a number of points in the recent past. Syria fought alongside the United States in the 1991 war against Iraq, and the two countries had cordial if guarded relations during the 1990s, when the United States was attempting to broker a peace deal between Damascus and Jerusalem.8 President Clinton even visited Damascus in October 1994 to meet with President Hafez al-Assad, the first visit to Syria by an American president in twenty years. Afterward, Clinton remarked, "I went there because I was convinced that we needed to add new energy to the talks, and I came away convinced that we have."9 Later, in the fall of 2002, when Syria was a nonpermanent member of the Security Council, it voted for UN Resolution 1441, which called for the return of UN weapons inspectors to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And although the Bush administration played a key role in forcing Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, for many years the United States had counted on Syria to shut down Lebanon's civil war (1976-89) and to keep the peace there.10
   Syrian President Assad is certainly not interested in being America's enemy. Flynt Leverett, a former Bush administration official and one of the West's foremost experts on Syria, notes that "Bashar has repeatedly stated his interest in a better relationship with the United States. Such interest is fully in keeping with father Hafez's script and in line with any realistic assessment of Syria's strategic needs." Leverett also believes improved relations are "critical to his [Assad's] long-term ambitions for internal reform."11 Seymour Hersh, who visited Assad in his Damascus office in 2003, found him eager to talk because "he wanted to change his image, and the image of his country."12
   Syria has also been trying to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel since the early 1990s. They came close to reaching a deal in early 2000, but Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister at the time, got cold feet at the last moment. Since then, the Syrians have made numerous offers to restart the negotiations and try to settle their differences. But Barak's successors— Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert—have refused and instead have pursued confrontational policies toward Syria. Those same Israeli leaders have also pushed the United States to treat Damascus as a dangerous adversary.

ISRAEL AND THE GOLAN HEIGHTS

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:10 PM

TAKING AIM AT SYRIA

America has had a problematic relationship with Syria for nearly fifty years. The Ba'th regime was a key Soviet client during the Cold War, and its authoritarian government has committed serious human rights abuses in the past and still denies basic freedoms to its population. President Bush did not include Syria in his infamous "axis of evil," but it is often depicted as a "rogue state" that threatens important American interests. U.S. policy toward Syria became more hostile after September 11, 2001, and the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 fueled speculation that the United States was going to go after Damascus as well. The deteriorating situation in Iraq has ended such talk for the moment, but relations with Damascus have not improved and confrontation remains the order of the day.
   Yet if one looks at Syria with a more detached eye, it is not obvious why it would be in the U.S. national interest to have a strictly adversarial relationship with that Arab country. Washington and Damascus have never been especially friendly, but they have cooperated to their mutual benefit on a number of occasions, and Syria's modest military capabilities pose no serious threat to vital U.S. interests. It is difficult to see—given present circumstances—why Syria should be considered an ideal candidate for regime change while equally odious dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere enjoy American patronage.
   In fact, the Bush administration's unremitting hostility toward Syria has been strategically unwise. Specifically, it has damaged America's position in the Arab and Islamic world, hindered U.S. efforts to thwart nuclear proliferation, made it more difficult to stabilize Iraq, and made America's terrorism problem worse, not better. Thus, it is not surprising that many voices inside
the United States have recently called for President Bush to reverse course and seek a modus vivendi with Damascus. The Iraq Study Group, for example, called in December 2006 for the Bush administration to "actively engage" with Syria in "diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions."1 That same month, four U.S. senators visited Damascus to talk with Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, and in April 2007, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi led a bipartisan delegation of six House members—including Tom Lantos and Henry Waxman, whose pro-Israel credentials are well established—to Syria to speak with Assad about pushing the peace process forward.2
   Israel and the lobby have played a central role in pushing the Bush administration to pursue an increasingly confrontational policy toward Syria, albeit with some reluctance. The lobby has worked hard to get the United States to isolate and pressure Damascus, even when doing so jeopardized valuable forms of collaboration. In the absence of this pressure, Washington's relationship with Syria would be markedly different and would probably be more consistent with the American national interest. The United States and Syria would hardly be allies if the lobby was less influential, but a pragmatic and mutually beneficial relationship would be much more likely.

THE SYRIAN THREAT

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:11 PM

CONCLUSION

The Bush administration's plans for Iraq and the wider region have been a stunning failure. Not only is the American military stuck in a losing war, but there is little prospect of exporting democracy across the Middle East anytime soon. Iran has been the main beneficiary of this ill-conceived adventure and it seems as determined as ever to acquire a nuclear capability. Syria, like Iran, remains at odds with Washington, and both states have a powerful interest in having the U.S. military bogged down in Iraq. Hamas now dominates Gaza and the Palestinian Authority is badly split—making peace with Israel even more elusive—and Hezbollah is more powerful than ever in Lebanon, after having stood up to Israel in the 2006 war. We may be witnessing the "birth pangs of a new Middle East," to use Secretary of State Rice's regrettable phrase, but it will almost certainly be more unstable and dangerous than the one that existed before the United States invaded Iraq.160
   The war in Iraq has not been good for Israel either, especially since it has strengthened Iran's hand in the region. Indeed, the Forward reported in early 2007 that there is a "growing chorus" of voices in Israel who are saying that the Jewish state "could find itself in more danger" now that Saddam has been removed from power.161 Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on Iraq who argued for Saddam's ouster in prewar interviews in the AIPAC newsletter Near East Report, now says, "If I knew then what I know today [January
2007], I would not have recommended going to war, because Saddam was far less dangerous than I thought." Moreover, he admitted that the invasion had produced "much, much more [terrorism] than I expected." Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, said in February 2006, "I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam."162
   As the United States looks for ways to extricate itself from this disastrous situation, pressure has been growing on the Bush administration to talk with Iran and Syria, and to make a concerted effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The neoconservatives and the Israelis, of course, believed that the road to Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. Once the United States won in Iraq, they believed, the Palestinians would make peace on Israel's terms. But the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and many others believe the opposite is true: the road to Baghdad runs through Jerusalem.163 In other words, creating a viable Palestinian state will help the United States deal with Iraq and other regional problems. Israel and the lobby have vigorously challenged this line of argument, insisting that America's troubles in Iraq have nothing to do with the Palestinians. Indeed, Ha'aretz reported in late November 2006, just before the release of the Iraq Study Group report, that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "hopes the Jewish lobby can rally a Democratic majority in the new Congress to counter any diversion from the status quo on the Palestinians."164 Similarly, a number of pro-Israel groups still maintain that the United States should refuse to talk with Iran and Syria until these states agree to all of Washington's demands.165
   The Bush administration faces growing pressure to pull out of Iraq, but Israeli leaders have encouraged it to stay and finish the job. Why? Because these leaders believe that a U.S. withdrawal would jeopardize Israel's security. Both Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Prime Minister Olmert made this point to AIPAC's annual conference in March 2007. Livni said that "in a region where impressions are important, countries must be careful not to demonstrate weakness and surrender to extremists."166 Olmert was even blunter: "Those who are concerned for Israel's security ... for the stability of the entire Middle East should recognize the need for American success in Iraq and responsible exit." He ended his remarks by saying that "when America succeeds in Iraq, Israel is safer. The friends of Israel know it. The friends who care about Israel know it."167 Critics castigated Olmert for making these remarks, mainly because his comments provided additional evidence that Israel had backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Bradley Burston, who writes for Ha'aretz, was especially angry with Olmert for venturing into
the American debate on Iraq. He had a simple message for the prime minister: "Stay the hell out of it."168
   Olmert had actually expressed his support for America's continued presence in Iraq during a visit to the White House in November 2006, saying, "We are very much impressed and encouraged by the stability which the great operation of America in Iraq brought to the Middle East."169 Even some of Israel's consistent backers were put off by Olmert's prowar remarks, with Congressman Gary Ackerman saying, "I'm shocked. It's a very unrealistic observation. Most of us here understand that our policy has been a thorough and total disaster for the United States."170
   Given that many Americans now share Ackerman's sentiments about the war, we should not be surprised that some Israelis and their American allies have tried to rewrite the historical record to absolve Israel of any responsibility for the Iraq disaster. In March 2007, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz, wrote about "the false notion that Israel encouraged the US to fight the Iraq War."171 Similarly, Shai Feldman, former head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies and now head of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis, told Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post in the summer of 2006, "Look, Israel didn't mobilize anybody over Iraq, and associating Israel with the neocons on this issue is preposterous. Israel didn't see Iraq as a danger, and what's more, it had no interest in pushing the Bush administration's democracy agenda."172 This view undoubtedly reflects Feld-man's beliefs about Israel's interests and the hierarchy of threats it faced, but as we have shown, it is contrary to what Israel's leaders were actually saying and doing in the run-up to the war.
   Not to be outdone, Martin Kramer, a research fellow at WINEP, claims that any attempt to link Israel and the lobby with the war in Iraq is "simply a falsehood," arguing that "in the year preceding the Iraq War, Israel time and again disagreed with the United States, arguing that Iran posed the greater threat."173 But as shown above, Israel's concerns about Iran never led it to undertake a significant effort to halt the march to war. To the contrary, top Israeli officials were doing everything in their power to make sure that the United States went after Saddam and did not get cold feet at the last moment. They considered Iraq a serious threat and were convinced that Bush would deal with Iran after he finished with Iraq. They might have preferred that America focus on Iran before Iraq, but as Kramer admits, Israelis "shed no tears over Saddam's demise." Instead, their leaders took to the American airwaves, wrote op-eds, testified before Congress, and worked
closely with the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the vice president's office to shape the intelligence about Iraq and coordinate the drive to war.
   Yossi Alpher, an Israeli strategist at the Jaffe Center, now maintains that former Prime Minister Sharon had serious reservations about invading Iraq and he privately warned Bush against it. Alpher even hints that Sharon might have been able to prevent the war had he spoken out about his concerns. He writes, "Had Sharon made his criticism public, citing the dangers posed to vital Israeli interests, might he have made a difference in the prewar debate in the United States and the world?"1'4 This is a convenient alibi now that the occupation of Iraq has gone south, but there is no evidence in the public record that Sharon ever advised Bush not to attack Iraq. In fact, there is considerable evidence that the Israeli leader and his key advisers strongly endorsed the war and encouraged Bush to begin it sooner rather than later. If Sharon believed the war to be a mistake, why did his own spokesman repeatedly stress the danger of Iraq's WMD and why did Sharon himself warn the Bush administration that putting off the attack "will not create a more convenient environment for action in the future"?175
   It is possible that Sharon made different arguments behind closed doors than he made in public. This is not likely, however, as word of Sharon's opposition to the war would surely have leaked out before it began, if not in the first year or two after Baghdad fell. Sharon was rarely reticent about expressing his views—even when doing so involved disagreements with the United States-—and it is hard to believe that he would have kept silent in public if he thought that the decision to invade Iraq would be harmful to Israel. In short, neither facts nor logic support Alpher's claim.
   "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." As the various progenitors of the Iraq disaster now seek to deny their paternity, President John F. Kennedy's rueful remark is more appropriate than ever. But Iraq did not always look like the blunder it has turned out to be. For a few short months in the spring of 2003, the United States appeared to have won a stunning victory and there was little need for Israel's defenders to deny responsibility for the war. During this brief window of opportunity, in fact, key Israelis and their American allies began to pressure the Bush administration to bring U.S. power to bear on Syria and Iran, in the hope that these two rogue states would suffer the same fate as Saddam Hussein's regime. Let us now consider how Israel and the lobby influenced U.S. policy on Syria, and then turn to Iran.

TAKING AIM AT SYRIA

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:16 PM

THE LOBBY'S ROLE IN REMAKING THE MIDDLE EAST

By 2002, many neoconservatives were also heavily invested in the idea that the United States could democratize the Middle East and make it a more friendly environment for America and Israel. They had reached that position over the course of the 1990s as they became increasingly disenchanted with U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War.
   Pro-Israel groups—and not only neoconservatives—have long been interested in having the U.S. military directly involved in the Middle East so that it can help protect Israel. They are especially interested in seeing large numbers of American troops permanently stationed there.155 But they had limited success on this front during the Cold War, because America acted as an offshore balancer in the region. Most U.S. forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept "over the horizon" and out of harm's way. Washington maintained a favorable balance of power by playing local powers against each other, which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).
   This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of "dual containment." Instead of using Iran and Iraq to balance each other—with the United States shifting sides as needed—the new strategy called for stationing substantial American forces in the region to contain both of them at once. The father of dual containment was Martin Indyk, who first articulated the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.156 As Indyk's Brookings colleague Kenneth Pollack observes, dual containment was a policy adopted largely in response to "Israel's security concerns." Specifically, Israel made it clear to the Clinton administration that it "was willing to move ahead in the peace process only if it felt reasonably secure" from Iran.157
   There was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment by the mid-1990s, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and it forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both of them. As discussed in Chapter 10, AIPAC and other groups in the lobby not only saved the policy, they persuaded Congress and Clinton to toughen it up. The neoconservatives went even further, however; they were increasingly convinced that dual containment was not working and that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power and replaced by a democratic government. Their thinking was reflected in the two open
letters that they sent to President Clinton in early 1998 as well as their support for the Iraq Liberation Act.
   At about the same time, the belief that spreading democracy across the Middle East would pacify the entire area was beginning to take root within neoconservative circles. A few neoconservatives had flirted with this idea in the wake of the Cold War, but it was not widely embraced until the latter part of the 1990s.158 This line of thinking, of course, was evident in the 1996 "Clean Break" study that a group of neoconservatives had written for Netanyahu. By 2002, when invading Iraq had become a front-burner issue, regional transformation had become an article of faith among neoconservatives, who, in turn, helped make it the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.159 Thus, Israeli leaders, neoconservatives, and the Bush administration all saw war with Iraq as the first step in an ambitious campaign to remake the Middle East.

CONCLUSION

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:17 PM

DREAMS OF REGIONAL TRANSFORMATION

The Iraq war was not supposed to be a costly quagmire. Rather, it was intended as the first step in a larger plan to reorder the Middle East in ways that would benefit long-term American and Israeli interests. Specifically, the United States was not just going to remove Saddam Hussein from power and go home; the invasion and occupation would, in this dream, quickly turn Iraq into a democracy, which would then serve as an attractive model for people living in the various authoritarian states in the region. The results from Iraq would trigger a cascade of democratic dominoes, although it still might be necessary to use the sword to spread democracy to some countries in the Middle East besides Iraq. But once democracy took hold across the region, regimes friendly to Israel and the United States would be the norm, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would, in the words of the "Clean Break" study, be "transcended," other regional rivalries would be muted, and the twin problems of terrorism and nuclear proliferation would largely disappear.
   Vice President Cheney laid out this ambitious rationale for regional transformation in the speech to the VFW convention on August 26, 2002, opening the administration's campaign to sell the Iraq war. "When the gravest of threats are eliminated," he said, "the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace . . . Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced."146 Cheney would repeat these arguments on several occasions over the next six months.
   President Bush spoke with similar enthusiasm about regional transformation as he made the case for war against Iraq. On February 26, 2003, he told an audience at AEI that the United States aims to "cultivate liberty and
peace in the Middle East." He emphasized that "the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East." Furthermore, he claimed, "Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian peace."147
   This ambitious strategy, grounded in an almost theological belief in the transformative power of freedom, was a dramatic departure from previous U.S. policy, and there was certainly no indication before 9/11 that either Bush or Cheney would embrace it. Indeed, both men—as well as National Security Adviser Rice—were on record as being opposed to the ambitious kind of nation building that was at the heart of regional transformation, and Bush had sharply criticized the Clinton administration for its emphasis on nation building during the 2000 campaign. So what had produced this shift? According to a March 2003 story in the Wall Street Journal, the critical driving forces behind this major change in U.S. Middle East policy were Israel and the neoconservatives in the lobby. The headline says it all: "President's Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-U.S., Democratic Area Is a Goal That Has Israeli and Neoconservative Roots."148
   Charles Krauthammer says this grand scheme to spread democracy across the Middle East was the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician whose writings are said to have impressed President Bush.149 But Sharansky was hardly a lone voice in Israel. In fact, Israelis across the political spectrum maintained that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel's advantage. Writing in the New York Times in early September 2002, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak argued that "putting an end to Saddam Hussein's regime will change the geopolitical landscape of the Arab world." He claimed that "an Arab world without Saddam Hussein would enable many from this generation [leaders about to come into power] to embrace the gradual democratic opening that some of the Persian Gulf states and Jordan have begun to enjoy." Barak also maintained that toppling Saddam would "create an opening for forward movement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."150
   In August 2002, Yuval Steinitz, a Likud party member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told the Christian Science Monitor, "After Iraq is taken by U.S. troops and we see a new regime installed as in Afghanistan, and Iraqi bases become American bases, it will be very easy to pressure Syria to stop supporting terrorist organizations like Hizbullah and
Islamic Jihad, to allow the Lebanese army to dismantle Hizbullah, and maybe to put an end to the Syrian occupation in Lebanon. If this happens we will really see a new Middle East."151 Similarly, Aluf Benn reported in Ha'aretz in February 2003 that "senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Advisor Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel's other enemies: Arafat, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad, the ayatollah in Iran and maybe even Muhammar Gadaffi. Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction."152
   The New York Times also reported that Halevy gave a speech in Munich in February 2003 where he said, "The shock waves emerging from post-Saddam Baghdad could have wide-ranging effects in Tehran, Damascus, and in Ramal-lah."153 The author of the article noted that Israel "is hoping that once Saddam Hussein is dispensed with, the dominoes will start to tumble. According to this hope . . . moderates and reformers throughout the region would be encouraged to put new pressure on their own governments, not excepting the Palestinian Authority of Yasir Arafat." The Forward summed up Israeli thinking about regional transformation in an article published just before the war: "Israel's top political, military and economic echelons have come to regard the looming Iraq war as a virtual deus ex machina that will turn the political and economic tables and extricate Israel from its current morass."154
   Some might argue that Israel's leaders are too sophisticated and experienced to believe in a deus ex machina and countenance such an ambitious scheme, and too familiar with the complexities of their region to believe it could succeed. But in fact, Israel's leaders have a long history of favoring remarkably ambitious plans to remake the local map. The original Zionist dream of reestablishing a Jewish state where none had existed for nearly two millennia was nothing if not ambitious, and as discussed in Chapter 1, David Ben-Gurion had hoped to seize all of the West Bank, part of Lebanon, and portions of Egypt in the 1956 Suez War. Similarly, Ariel Sharon believed the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 would lead to the creation of a pro-Israel Christian state there and vanquish the PLO once and for all, thereby cementing Israel's control of the Occupied Territories. Given that history, it is perhaps not so surprising that many Israeli leaders held out the hope that the United States might be able to succeed where their earlier plans had failed.

THE LOBBY'S ROLE IN REMAKING THE MIDDLE EAST

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:18 PM

WAS IRAQ A WAR FOR OIL?

Some readers might concede that the Israel lobby had some influence over the decision to invade Iraq but argue that its overall weight in the decisionmaking process was minimal. Instead, many American and foreign observers appear to think that oil—not Israel—was the real motivation behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In one variant of this story, the Bush administration was determined to control the vast reserves of oil in the Middle East, because that would give the United States enormous geopolitical leverage over potential adversaries. Conquering Iraq, according to this scenario, was seen by the administration as a giant step toward achieving that goal. An alternative version sees the oil-producing states and especially the oil companies as the real culprits behind the Iraq war, driven primarily by a desire for higher prices and greater profits. Even scholars who are often critical of Israel and of the lobby, such as Noam Chomsky, apparently subscribe to this idea, which was popularized in filmmaker Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/1 J.141
   The claim that the conquest of Iraq was mainly about oil has a certain prima facie plausibility, given the importance of oil to the world economy.142 But this explanation faces both logical and empirical difficulties. As emphasized in Chapter 2, U.S. policy makers have long been concerned about who controls Persian Gulf oil; they have been especially concerned about the danger that one state might control all of it. The United States has been involved with various oil-producing countries in the Gulf, but no American government, including the Bush administration, has seriously considered conquering the major oil-producing countries in that region to gain coercive leverage over other countries around the world. The United States might consider invading a major oil-producing state if a revolution or an embargo caused its oil to stop flowing into world markets. But that was not the case with Iraq; Saddam was eager to sell his oil to any customer willing to pay for it. Moreover, 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. Plus, bin Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who struck the United States on September 11 were Saudis (none were from Iraq). If control of oil were Bush's real objective, 9/11 would have been an ideal pretext to act. Occupying Saudi Arabia would not have been a simple task, but it would almost certainly have been easier than trying to pacify the large, restive, and well-armed population of Iraq.
   There is also hardly any evidence that oil interests were actively pushing the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2002-03. In 1990-91, by contrast, Saudi Arabia's leaders clearly pressed the first Bush administration to use force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. They feared, like many American policy makers at the time, that Saddam might next invade Saudi Arabia, which would place much of the region's oil under his control. Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, worked closely with pro-Israel groups here to build support for ousting Saddam from Kuwait.143 But the story was very different in the run-up to the second Gulf War: this time Saudi Arabia publicly opposed using American force against Iraq.144 Saudi leaders feared that a war would lead to the breakup of Iraq and destabilize the Middle East. And even if Iraq remained intact, the Shia were likely to ascend to power, which worried the Sunnis who ran Saudi Arabia not only for religious reasons but also because it would increase Iran's influence in the region. In addition, the Saudis faced growing anti-Americanism at home, which was likely to get worse if the United States launched a preventive war against Iraq.
   Nor were the oil companies, which generally seek to curry favor with big oil producers like Saddam's Iraq or the Islamic Republic of Iran, major players in the decision to conquer Iraq. They did not lobby for the 2003 war, which most of them thought was a foolish idea. As Peter Beinart noted in the New Republic in September 2002, "It isn't war that the American oil industry has been lobbying for all these years; it's the end of sanctions."145 The oil companies, as is almost always the case, wanted to make money, not war.

DREAMS OF REGIONAL TRANSFORMATION

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:19 PM

FIXING THE INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ

A key part of the public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq was the manipulation of intelligence information in order to make Saddam look like an imminent threat. Scooter Libby was an important player in this endeavor, visiting the CIA several times to pressure analysts to find evidence
that would make the case for war. He also helped prepare a detailed briefing on the Iraq threat in early 2003 that was pushed on Colin Powell, who was then preparing his infamous presentation to the UN Security Council.123 According to Bob Woodward, Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, "was appalled at what he considered overreaching and hyperbole. Libby was drawing only the worst conclusions from fragments and silky threads."124 Although Powell discarded Libby's most outlandish claims, his UN presentation was still riddled with errors, as Powell now acknowledges.125
   The effort to manipulate intelligence, which was then leaked to an alarmist prowar press, also involved two organizations that were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.126 The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was tasked to find links between al Qaeda and Iraq that the intelligence community supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese American who had close ties with Richard Perle. The New York Times reporter James Risen writes that "Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn't trust the CIA," and this dissatisfaction helped cause him to rely on Ahmed Chalabi for intelligence and to create the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group.127
   The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was directed to find evidence that could be used to sell the war against Iraq. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neoconservative long associated with Wolfowitz, and its ranks included several recruits from pro-Israel think tanks like Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute, David Schenker from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Michael Makovsky who had worked for then Prime Minister Shimon Peres after graduating from college.128 OSP relied heavily on information from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles and it had close connections to various Israeli sources. Indeed, the Guardian reported that it "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorize."129 The Pentagon's inspector general released a report in February 2007 that was critical of OSP for disseminating "alternative intelligence assessments" that "were, in our opinion, inappropriate given that the intelligence assessments were intelligence products and did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community."130
   The neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the White House not only relied heavily on Chalabi and his fellow exiles for intelligence about Iraq, they also championed him as Iraq's future leader after Saddam was gone. The
CIA and the State Department, on the other hand, considered Chalabi dishonest and unreliable and kept him at arm's length. That severe judgment has now been vindicated, as we know that Chalabi and the INC fed the United States false information, and his relations with the U.S. occupation forces soon deteriorated, with Chalabi later being accused of providing classified information to Iran (a charge that he has denied). The neoconservatives' hopes that he would be the "George Washington of Iraq" fared no better than their other prewar forecasts.131
   So why did neoconservatives embrace Chalabi? The INC leader had gone to considerable lengths to establish close ties with individuals and groups in the lobby, and he had especially close links with JINSA, where he had been "a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997."132 He also cultivated close ties with pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, AEI, the Hudson Institute, and WINEP. Max Singer, who helped found the Hudson Institute, described Chalabi as a "rare find. He's deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West."133 When an embattled Chalabi returned to give his eighth address to the AEI in early November 2005, that think tank's president introduced him as a "very great and very brave Iraqi patriot, liberal and liberator."134 Another big supporter of Chalabi was Bernard Lewis, who argued that the INC leader should be put in charge of Iraq after Baghdad fell.135
   In return for the lobby's support, Chalabi pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. According to Feith's former law partner, L. Marc Zell, Chalabi also promised to rebuild the pipeline that once ran from Haifa in Israel to Mosul in Iraq.136 This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear, so they backed Chalabi in return. The journalist Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: "The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein's regime."137 Not surprisingly, Nathan Guttman reports that "the American Jewish community and the Iraqi opposition" had for years "taken pains to conceal" the links between them.138
   The neoconservatives and their allies did not operate in a vacuum, of course, and they did not lead the United States to war by themselves. As emphasized earlier, the war would probably not have occurred absent the September 11 attacks, which forced President Bush and Vice President Cheney to consider adopting a radically new foreign policy. Neoconservatives like
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been urging regime change in Iraq since early 1998, were quick to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11—even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved—and to portray his overthrow as critical to winning the war on terror. The lobby's actions were a necessary but not sufficient condition for war.
   Indeed, Richard Perle made precisely this point to George Packer in a discussion about the role that the neoconservatives played in making the Iraq war happen. "If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker," Perle noted, "which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into it the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it."139 The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman offered a similar appraisal in May 2003, telling Ari Shavit of Ha'aretz that Iraq was "the war the neoconservatives wanted . . . the war the neoconservatives marketed ... I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington, D.C.]), who, if you exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened." We agree completely with Perle's and Friedman's observations, while recognizing that it was a combination of individuals, ideas, and circumstances that came together to produce the ultimate decision for war.140

WAS IRAQ A WAR FOR OIL?

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:20 PM

SELLING THE WAR TO A SKEPTICAL AMERICA

The neoconservatives began their campaign to use military force to topple Saddam well before Bush became president. They caused a stir in early 1998 by organizing two letters to President Clinton calling for Saddam's removal from power. The first letter (January 26, 1998) was written under the
auspices of the Project for the New American Century and was signed by Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. The second letter (February 19, 1998) was written under the auspices of the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, the organization set up in 1990 by Perle, Ann Lewis (the former political director of the Democratic National Committee), and former Congressman Stephen J. Solarz (D-NY), to lobby for the first Gulf War. It was signed by the individuals mentioned above who signed the first letter as well as Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis, Martin Peretz, and David Wurmser, just to name a few.85
   In addition to these two high-profile letters, the neoconservatives and their allies in the lobby worked assiduously in 1998 to get Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, which mandated that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime." The neoconservatives were especially enthusiastic about this legislation not only because it sanctioned regime change in Iraq, but also because it provided $97 million to fund groups committed to overthrowing Saddam.86 The main group they had in mind was the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was headed by their close associate, Ahmed Chalabi. Perle, Wolfowitz, and Woolsey all lobbied hard on behalf of the legislation, as did JINSA.87 The act passed in the House by a vote of 360-38 and by unanimous consent in the Senate. President Clinton then signed it on October 31, 1998.
   Clinton had little use for the Iraq Liberation Act, but he could not afford to veto it because he was facing midterm elections and impeachment.88 Both he and his key advisers held Chalabi in low regard, and they did little to implement the law. In fact, by the time Clinton left office, he had spent hardly any of the allotted money for opposition groups like the INC. The president did pay lip service to the goal of ousting Saddam but did little to make it happen, and he was certainly not considering using the U.S. military to drive the Iraqi dictator from power.89 In short, the neoconservatives were unable to sell the idea of war against Iraq during the Clinton years, although they did succeed in making regime change in Baghdad an official goal of the U.S. government.
   Nor were they able to generate much enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration, even though a number of prominent neoconservatives held important positions in the new government and had lost none of their enthusiasm for the enterprise. Richard Perle later said that
the advocates for toppling Saddam were losing the arguments inside the administration during this early period.90 In fact, in March 2001, the New York Times reported that "some Republicans" were complaining that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "are failing to live up to their pre-election advocacy of stepping up efforts to overthrow President Hussein." At the same time, the Washington Times ran an editorial titled "Have Hawks Become Doves?" The text of that editorial was the January 26, 1998, PNAC letter to President Clinton.91
   Given the publicity and the controversy surrounding two books published in 2004—Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty—one might think Bush and Cheney were bent on invading Iraq from the moment they assumed office in late January 2001.92 This interpretation, however, is wrong. They were certainly interested in toppling Saddam, but there is no evidence in the public record showing that Bush and Cheney were seriously contemplating war against Iraq before 9/11. Bush did not advocate using force against Saddam during the 2000 campaign, and he made it clear to Bob Woodward that he was not thinking about going to war against Saddam before 9/11.9B Interestingly, his main foreign policy adviser in the campaign, Condoleezza Rice, wrote a prominent article in Foreign Affairs in early 2000 saying that the United States could live with a nuclear-armed Iraq. Rice declared that Saddam's "conventional military power" had been "severely weakened" and said "there need be no sense of panic" about his regime.94
   Vice President Cheney maintained throughout the 1990s that conquering Iraq would be a major strategic blunder and he did not sign either of the letters calling for military action against Saddam that the neoconservatives sent to President Clinton in early 199 8.95 In the closing stages of the 2000 campaign, he defended the 1991 decision not to go to Baghdad—in which he played a major role as secretary of defense—and said that "we want to maintain our current posture vis-a-vis Iraq."96 There is no evidence to suggest that either his thinking or that of the president had changed significantly by early 2001.97 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had signed both of the 1998 letters to President Clinton, appears to have been the only top-tier Bush administration official who may have favored war with Iraq upon taking office. None of the other groups that are sometimes blamed for the war—such as oil companies, weapons manufacturers, Christian Zionists, or defense contractors like Kellogg Brown & Root—were making noise about invading Iraq at this time. In the beginning, the neoconservatives were largely alone.
Yet as important as the neoconservatives were as the chief architects of
the war, they had been unable to persuade either Clinton or Bush to support an invasion. They needed help to achieve their aim, and that help arrived on 9/11. Specifically, the events of that tragic day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war to topple Saddam. Robert Kagan put the point well in an interview with George Packer: "September 11 is the turning point. Not anything else. This is not what Bush was on September 10." The neoconservatives—most notably Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis— played a critical role in persuading the president and vice president to favor war. For them, 9/11 was the new context to sell their old view of American foreign policy. Possibly their greatest advantage was that they had, in Kagan's words, "a ready-made approach to the world" at a time when both the president and the vice president were trying to make sense of an unprecedented disaster that seemed to call for radically new ways of thinking about international politics.98
   Wolfowitz's behavior is especially revealing. At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on September 15, 2001, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the United States and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan.99 Wolfowitz was so insistent on conquering Iraq that five days later Cheney had to tell him to "stop agitating for targeting Saddam."100 According to one Republican lawmaker, he "was like a parrot bringing [Iraq] up all the time. It was getting on the President's nerves."101 Bush rejected Wolfowitz's advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and the president tasked U.S. military planners on November 21, 2001, with developing concrete plans for an invasion.102
   Other neoconservatives were also hard at work within the corridors of power. Although we do not have the full story yet, there is considerable evidence that scholars like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University played an important role in convincing Vice President Cheney to favor war against Iraq.103 Indeed, Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, describes Lewis as "perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq."104 Cheney's views were also heavily influenced by neoconservatives on his staff like Eric Edelman and John Hannah. But surely the most important influence on the vice president was his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who was one of the most powerful individuals in the administration and whose views on Iraq were similar to those of his close friend and longtime mentor, Paul Wolfowitz.105 Shortly after 9/11, the New
York Times reported that "some senior administration officials, led by Paul D. Wolfowitz . . . and I. Lewis Libby . . . are pressing for the earliest and broadest military campaign against not only the Osama bin Laden network in Afghanistan, but also against other suspected terrorist bases in Iraq and in Lebanon's Bekka region."106 Of course, the vice president's position helped convince President Bush by early 2002 that the United States would probably have to take Saddam out.107
   Two other considerations show how profoundly important the neoconservatives inside the administration were for making the Iraq war happen. First, it is no exaggeration to say that they were not just determined; they were obsessed with removing Saddam from power. As one senior administration figure put it in January 2003, "I do believe certain people have grown theological about this. It's almost a religion—that it will be the end of our society if we don't take action now." A Washington Post journalist described Colin Powell returning from White House meetings during the run-up to the Iraq war, "rolling his eyes" and saying, "Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq." Bob Woodward reports that Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Board, "said he had worried to death as time went on and support seemed to wane that there would be no war."108
   Second, there was little enthusiasm for going to war against Iraq inside the State Department, the intelligence community, or the uniformed military. Although Secretary of State Powell ultimately supported the president's decision for war, he believed that it was a bad idea. The rank and file in his department shared his skepticism. There were two key outliers in the State Department, however—John Bolton and David Wurmser, both prominent neoconservatives who had close ties to the White House. George Tenet, the head of the CIA, also supported the White House on Iraq, but he was not a forceful advocate for war. Indeed, few individuals within the intelligence community found the case for war convincing, which is why, as discussed below, the neoconservatives established their own intelligence units. The military, especially the army, was filled with Iraq skeptics. General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, was severely criticized by Wolfowitz (who dismissed Shinseki's estimate of the necessary troop levels required for the occupation as "wildly off the mark") and later Rumsfeld for expressing doubts about the war plan.109 The war hawks within the administration were mainly high-level civilians in the White House and the Pentagon, almost all of whom were neoconservatives.
   They lost no time making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were partly aimed at keeping pressure
on Bush and partly intended to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside of the government. On September 13, 2001, JINSA put out a press release titled "This Goes Beyond Bin Laden," which maintained that "a long investigation to prove Osama Bin Laden's guilt with prosecutorial certainty is entirely unnecessary. He is guilty in word and deed. His history is the source of his culpability. The same holds true for Saddam Hussein. Our actions in the past certainly were not forceful enough, and now we must seize the opportunity to alter this pattern of passivity."110 One week later, on September 20, a group of prominent neoconservatives and their allies published an open letter to Bush, telling him that "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."111 The letter also reminded Bush that "Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism."
   Little more than a week later, on September 28, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after we were done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq. "The war on terrorism," he argued, "will conclude in Baghdad," when we finish off "the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world." Shortly thereafter, in the October 1 issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq immediately after the Taliban was defeated.112 Other pundits, like Michael Barone in U.S. News & World Report, were arguing even before the dust had settled at the World Trade Center that "evidence is accumulating that Iraq aided or perhaps planned the attack."113
   Over the next eighteen months, the neoconservatives waged an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq. On April 3, 2002, they released yet another open letter to Bush, which clearly linked Israel's security with a war to topple Saddam.114 The letter starts by commending the president for his "strong stance in support of the Israeli government as it engages in the present campaign to fight terrorism." It then argues that "the United States and Israel share a common enemy" and are "fighting the same war." It urges Bush "to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power," because otherwise "the damage our Israeli friends and we have suffered until now may someday appear but a prelude to much greater horrors." The letter concludes with the following message: "Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel's victory is an important part of our victory. For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism."
The basic aim of the letter was to portray Arafat, bin Laden, and Saddam
as critical parts of a looming menace that threatened both Israel and the United States. Not only did this depiction of a shared and growing danger justify close relations between America and Israel, it also justified the United States treating these three individuals as mortal enemies and backing Israel's hard-line response to the Second Intifada. As noted in the previous chapter, relations between the Bush administration and the Sharon government were especially contentious in early April 2002, when the letter was written. The signatories included Kenneth Adelman, William Bennett, Linda Chavez, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Frank Gaffney, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Joshua Muravchik, Martin Peretz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, and James Woolsey, among others.
   Other pro-Israel pundits, who are not normally thought of as neoconservatives, offered a steady drumbeat of prowar advocacy as well. The case for war got a major boost with the publication in 2002 of Kenneth Pollack's ominously titled The Threatening Storm, which argued that Saddam was too risk accep-tant and irrational to be deterred and concluded that preventive war was the only realistic option. Because Pollack was a former Clinton administration official who had previously called ousting Saddam the "rollback fantasy," his conversion to a prowar position seemed especially telling despite the book's tendentious treatment of evidence.115 Pollack moved from the Council on Foreign Relations to Brookings's Saban Center for Middle East Policy during this period, where he and Saban Center director Martin Indyk produced a number of op-eds and commentary in the months before the war, warning that Saddam was undeterrable, that UN inspections were no solution, and that however regrettable, force would almost certainly be necessary.116
   The neoconservatives and their allies deployed the same arguments and almost the same language that the Israelis used to promote the war. The neoconservatives made frequent reference to the 1930s and Munich, comparing Saddam with Hitler and opponents of the war (like Brent Scowcroft and Senator Chuck Hagel) with appeasers like Neville Chamberlain.117 Israel and the United States, they maintained, were facing a nebulous common enemy, "international terrorism," and Iraq, to quote the New York Times columnist William Safire, was "the center of world terror."118 The war hawks portrayed Saddam as an especially aggressive and reckless leader who would not only use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and Israel but would also pass them on to terrorists.119 Identifying diplomacy and multilateralism with weakness, neoconservative commentators had nothing but contempt for the UN and its inspectors in Iraq, not to mention
France.120 Indeed, they repeated the old Israeli adage that force has great utility in the Middle East, because it is a region where, to quote Krauthammer, "power, above all, commands respect."121
   One might argue that this analysis exaggerates the impact that open letters to presidents, newspaper columns, books, and op-eds can have on the policy-making process. After all, relatively few people actually read the various open letters and there were plenty of other articles, editorials, and op-eds written in U.S. newspapers that had nothing to do with Iraq. This perspective would be wrong, however. The signatories of the various letters written to Presidents Bush and Clinton are powerful individuals who have connections and influence with important policy makers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, some of whom they had worked closely with in the course of their careers. In fact, a number of the individuals who signed the earlier letters to Clinton—including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith—became key policy makers in the Bush administration. Thus, the signatories of the letters written to Bush in the period between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were not shouting into a void. The same was true for journalists like Charles Krauthammer and William Satire, who wrote frequently about Iraq for two of the country's leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively. Their views were taken seriously by influential people inside and outside of the U.S. government, as were the articles that appeared in neoconservative magazines like the Weekly Standard. Indeed, these writings by outsiders worked to reinforce the arguments made by Bush administration insiders, who shared their views on the need to invade Iraq. The underlying purpose of all these efforts was to define the terms of debate in a way that would facilitate an affirmative decision for war. By making war seem both necessary and beneficial, by portraying potential opponents as "soft" on terror, and by linking America's fate to Israel's through the repetition of familiar moral and strategic arguments, these efforts helped stifle serious discussion about the pros and cons of an invasion and were an important part of the broader campaign for war.122

FIXING THE INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:21 PM

THE LOBBY AND THE IRAQ WAR

The driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives who had long favored the energetic use of American power to reshape critical areas of the world. They had advocated toppling Saddam since the mid-1990s and believed this step would benefit the United States and Israel
alike.53 This group included prominent officials in the Bush administration such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the number two and three civilians in the Pentagon; Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey, members of the influential Defense Policy Board; Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and his special assistant, David Wurmser; and Elliott Abrams, who is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council. It also included a handful of well-known journalists like Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and William Satire.
   The appointment of a number of neoconservatives to top policy positions was seen by Israelis and their American allies as a very positive development. When Wolfowitz was selected to be deputy defense secretary in January 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported that "the Jewish and pro-Israel communities are jumping with joy."54 In the spring of 2002, the Forward pointed out that Wolfowitz is "known as the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration," and it selected him later in 2002 as the first among fifty notables who "have consciously pursued Jewish activism."55 At about the same time, JINSA gave him its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States, and the Jerusalem Post, describing Wolfowitz as "devoutly pro-Israel," named him its "Man of the Year" in 2003.56
   Feith's role in shaping the case for war should also be understood in the context of his long-standing commitment to Israel and his prior association with hard-line groups there. Feith has close ties with key organizations in the lobby like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Zionist Organization of America. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories.57 More important, as we noted in Chapter 4, Feith was a coauthor, along with Perle and Wurmser, of the famous "Clean Break" report in June 1996.58 Written under the auspices of a right-wing Israeli think tank for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the report recommended, among other things, that Netanyahu "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right." It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not implement their advice, but Feith, Perle, and Wurmser were soon advocating that the Bush administration pursue those same goals. This situation prompted the Ha'aretz columnist Akiva Eldar to warn that Feith and Perle "are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests."59 As George Packer notes
in The Assassins' Gate, "For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover" behind their support for the war.60
   John Bolton and Scooter Libby were staunch supporters of Israel as well. As America's ambassador to the UN, Bolton consistently and enthusiastically defended Israel's interests. So much so, in fact, that in May 2006, the Israeli ambassador to the UN jokingly described Bolton as "a secret member of Israel's own team at the United Nations." He went on to say that "the secret is out. We really are not just five diplomats. We are at least six including John Bolton."61 When Bolton's controversial reappointment to that position became an issue later in 2006, pro-Israel groups weighed in on Bolton's side.62 Regarding Libby, the Forward reported when he left the White House in the fall of 2005 that "Israeli officials liked Libby. They described him as an important contact who was accessible, genuinely interested in Israel-related issues and very sympathetic to their cause."63
   Neoconservatives outside the Bush administration are every bit as devoted to Israel as are their compatriots in the government. Consider the comments that the columnist Charles Krauthammer made in Jerusalem on June 10, 2002, after receiving the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University.64 The theme of his talk was characterizing Israel's participation in the Oslo peace process as an example of misguided Jewish messianism. In his remarks, Krauthammer explicitly identified himself with Israel—indeed, as Israeli. At one point he observed that "thirty-five years ago today the Six-Day war ended. It seemed like a new era . . . Jerusalem had been re-united, the Temple Mount was ours, Israel." He went on to say, "My thesis tonight is that many of our troubles today, as a people and as a Jewish state, are rooted precisely in this new Messianic enthusiasm." Krauthammer, like virtually all other neoconservative pundits, was a relentless advocate for war right up until the invasion.
   Although many of the prominent neoconservatives were Jewish Americans with strong attachments to Israel, some of the leading members of the prowar party were not. In addition to John Bolton, the signatories of the open letters to Presidents Bush and Clinton sponsored by the Project for the New American Century included gentiles such as former CIA director James Woolsey and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Woolsey was particularly obsessed with proving that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, and he devoted considerable effort trying to confirm an early report that Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. The story was implausible and is widely believed to be false, but Woolsey and Vice President Dick Cheney both invoked it to bolster the case for war.65
   The neoconservatives were not the only part of the lobby pushing for war with Iraq. Key leaders of the major pro-Israel organizations lent their voices to the campaign for war. Of course, many of the neoconservatives themselves had close ties to these organizations. In mid-September 2002, when the selling of the war was just getting under way, Michelle Goldberg wrote in Salon that "mainstream Jewish groups and leaders are now among the strongest supporters of an American invasion of Baghdad."66 This same point was made in a Forward editorial written well after the fall of Baghdad: "As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq, America's most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Some groups went even further, arguing that the removal of the Iraqi leader would represent a significant step toward bringing peace to the Middle East and winning America's war on terrorism." The editorial goes on to say that "concern for Israel's safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups."67
   Although there was hardly any opposition to the war among the major Jewish organizations, there was disagreement about how vocal they should be in backing it. The main concern was the fear that too open support for an invasion would make it look like the war was being fought for Israel's sake.68 Nonetheless, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations voted to support the use of force against Iraq ("as a last resort") in the fall of 2002, and some prominent figures in the lobby went further.69 Among the most outspoken proponents of the invasion was Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents, who made frequent public statements promoting the war. In late August 2002, he wrote in U.S. News & World Report, where he is editor in chief, "Those who predict dire results if we try to unseat Saddam simply refuse to understand—as President Bush manifestly does—that if we opt to live with a nightmare, it will only get worse. Much worse. The best medicine here, in other words, is preventive medicine."70
   Jack Rosen, the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Rabbi David Saperstein, the head of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, were also enthusiastic war hawks. Saperstein, who is known for his liberal political views and whom the Washington Post called "the quintessential religious lobbyist on Capitol Hill," said in September 2002 that "the Jewish Community would want to see a forceful resolution to the threat that Saddam Hussein poses."71 Jewish Week, an influential newspaper in the greater New York area, backed the war as well. Gary Rosenblatt, its editor and pub
lisher, wrote an editorial in mid-December 2002 in which he emphasized that "Washington's imminent war on Saddam Hussein is not only an opportunity to rid the world of a dangerous tyrant who presents a particularly horrific threat to Israel." He went on to say that "when a despot announces his evil intentions, believe him. That's one of the lessons we should have learned from Hitler and the Holocaust. What's more, the Torah instructs that when your enemy seeks to kill you, kill him first. Self-defense is not permitted; it is commanded."72 Organizations like AIPAC and the ADL also supported the war, but they did so with minimum fanfare.
   Now that the war has turned into a disaster, supporters of Israel sometimes argue that AIPAC, which is the most visible group in the lobby, did not back the invasion.73 But this claim fails the common sense test, as AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting on AIPAC's annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: "AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital."74 AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr's statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged that "'quietly' lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq" was one of "AIPAC's successes over the past year."75 And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC's policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that "AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war."76
   AIPAC has remained a firm supporter of the U.S. presence in Iraq. In the fall of 2003, when the Bush administration was having difficulty convincing Senate Democrats to allocate more money for the war, Senate Republicans asked AIPAC to lobby their Democratic colleagues to support the funding request. AIPAC representatives talked to some Democratic senators and the money was approved.77 When Bush gave a speech at AIPAC in May 2004 in which he defended his Iraq policy, he received twenty-three standing ovations.78 At AIPAC's 2007 conference, by which time American public opinion on the war had soured, Vice President Cheney made the case for staying the course in Iraq. According to David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post, he received "considerable applause."79 And John Boehner, the House minority leader, received a standing ovation when he said, "Who does not believe that failure in Iraq is not a direct threat to the state of Israel? The consequences of failure in Iraq are so ominous for the United States that you can't even begin to think
about it." By contrast, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi criticized the Bush administration's "surge" strategy, many in the audience booed.80
   AIPAC is not the only major group in the lobby to stick with Bush on Iraq, or at least not come out against the war. As the Forward reported in March 2007, "Most Jewish organizations have refused to speak out against the war, and at times they displayed support for the administration."81 This behavior is especially striking given the attitudes of most American Jews toward the war itself. According to a 2007 Gallup Organization study based on the results of thirteen polls taken since 2005, American Jews are significantly more opposed to the Iraq war (77 percent) than the general American public (52 percent).82 With respect to Iraq, the larger and wealthier pro-Israel organizations are clearly out of step with the broader population of American Jews. A few Jewish organizations, such as the Tikkun Community and Jewish Voice for Peace, opposed the war before it started and continue to do so today. But as noted in Chapter 4, these groups are neither as well funded nor as influential as organizations like AIPAC.
   This gap between the political positions taken by key groups in the lobby and the public attitudes of American Jews underscores an essential point that deserves special emphasis. Although prominent Israeli leaders, the neoconservatives, and many of the lobby's leaders were eager for the United States to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not.83 In fact, Samuel Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University, reported just after the war started that "a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%."84 It would therefore be a cardinal error to attribute the war in Iraq to "Jewish influence," or to "blame the Jews" for the war. Rather, the war was due in large part to the lobby's influence, and especially its neoconservative wing. And the lobby, as we have emphasized before, is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak.

SELLING THE WAR TO A SKEPTICAL AMERICA

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:22 PM

ISRAEL AND THE IRAQ WAR

Israel has always considered Iraq an enemy, but it became especially concerned about Iraq in the mid-1970s, when France agreed to provide Saddam with a nuclear reactor. For good reason, Israel worried that Iraq might use the reactor as a stepping-stone to building nuclear weapons. Responding to the threat, in 1981, the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor before it became operational.16 Despite this setback, Iraq continued working on its nuclear program in dispersed and secret locations. This situation helps explain Israel's enthusiastic support for the first Gulf War in 1991; its main concern was not to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait but to topple Saddam and especially to make sure that Iraq's nuclear program was dismantled.17 Although the United States did not remove Saddam from power, the UN inspections regime imposed on Baghdad after the war reduced—but did not eliminate—Israel's concerns. In fact, Ha'aretz reported on February 26, 2001, that "Sharon believes that Iraq poses more of a threat to regional stability than Iran, due to the errant, irresponsible behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime."18
   Sharon's comments notwithstanding, by early 2002, when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Bush administration was thinking seriously about another war against Iraq, some Israeli leaders told U.S. officials that they thought Iran was a greater threat.19 They were not opposed to toppling Saddam, however, and Israel's leaders, who are rarely reticent when it comes to giving their American counterparts advice, never tried to convince
the Bush administration not to go to war against Iraq. Nor did the Israeli government ever try to mobilize its supporters in the United States to lobby against the invasion. On the contrary, Israeli leaders were worried only that the United States might lose sight of the Iranian threat in its pursuit of Saddam. Once they realized that the Bush administration was countenancing a bolder scheme, one that called for winning quickly in Iraq and then dealing with Iran and Syria, they began to push vigorously for an American invasion.
   In short, Israel did not initiate the campaign for war against Iraq. As will become clear, it was the neoconservatives in the United States who conceived that idea and were principally responsible for pushing it forward in the wake of September 11. But Israel did join forces with the neoconservatives to help sell the war to the Bush administration and the American people, well before the president had made the final decision to invade. Indeed, Israeli leaders worried constantly in the months before the war that President Bush might decide not to go to war after all, and they did what they could to ensure Bush did not get cold feet.
   The Israelis began their efforts in the spring of 2002, a few months before the Bush administration launched its own campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American public. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington in mid-April and met with U.S. senators and the editors of the Washington Post, among others, to warn them that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons that could be delivered against the American homeland in suitcases or satchels.20 A few weeks later, Ra'anan Gissen, Sharon's spokesman, told a Cleveland reporter that "if Saddam Hussein is not stopped now, five years from now, six years from now, we will have to deal with an Iraq that is armed with nuclear weapons, with an Iraq that has delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction."21
   In mid-May, Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister now serving as foreign minister, appeared on CNN, where he said that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and the United States "cannot sit and wait" while he builds a nuclear arsenal. Instead, Peres insisted, it was time to topple the Iraqi leader.22 A month later, Ehud Barak, another former Israeli prime minister, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein. Once he is gone there will be a different Arab world."23
   On August 12, 2002, Sharon told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset that Iraq "is the greatest danger facing Israel."24 Then, on August 16, ten days before Vice President Cheney kicked off the cam
paign for war with a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, Tennessee, several newspapers and television and radio networks (including Ha'aretz, the Washington Post, CNN, and CBS News) reported that Israel was urging the United States not to delay an attack on Iraq. Sharon told the Bush administration that postponing the operation "will not create a more convenient environment for action in the future." Putting off an attack, Ra'anan Gissen said, would "only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction." Foreign Minister Peres told CNN that "the problem today is not if, but when." Postponing an attack would be a grave mistake, he said, because Saddam would be better armed down the road. Deputy Defense Minister Weizman Shiry offered a similar view, warning, "If the Americans do not do this now, it will be harder to do it in the future. In a year or two, Saddam Hussein will be further along in developing weapons of mass destruction." Perhaps CBS best captured what was going on in the headline for its story: "Israel to US: Don't Delay Iraq Attack."25
   Peres and Sharon both made sure to emphasize that they "did not want to be seen as urging the United States to act and that America should act according to its own judgment."26 Israeli leaders—and many of their supporters in the United States—were well aware that some American commentators, most notably Patrick Buchanan, had argued that the driving force behind the 1991 Gulf War was "the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."27 Denying any responsibility made good political sense, but there is no question—based on their own public comments—that by August 2002 Israel's leaders saw Saddam as a threat to the Jewish state and were encouraging the Bush administration to launch a war to remove him from power.
   News stories around the same time also reported that "Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons."28 Peres told CNN that "we think and know that he [Saddam] is on his way to acquiring a nuclear option."29 Ha'aretz reported that Saddam had given an "order ... to Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission last week to speed up its work."30 Israel was feeding these alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programs to Washington at a time when, by Sharon's own reckoning, "strategic coordination between Israel and the U.S. has reached unprecedented dimensions."31 Following the invasion and the revelation that there were no WMD in Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Israeli Knesset released separate reports revealing that much of the intelligence Israel gave to the Bush administration was
false. As one retired Israeli general put it, "Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq's non-conventional capabilities."32
   Of course, Israel is hardly the first state to push another country to take a costly or risky action on its behalf. States facing external dangers often try to pass the buck to others, and the United States has a rich tradition of similar behavior itself.33 It backed Saddam Hussein in the 1980s in order to help contain the threat from revolutionary Iran, and it armed and backed the Afghan mujahideen following the Soviet invasion of that country in 1979. The United States did not send its own troops to fight these wars; it merely did what it could to help others—who had their own reasons for fighting— do the heavy lifting.
   Given their understandable desire to have the United States eliminate a regional rival, it is not surprising that Israeli leaders were distressed when President Bush decided to seek UN Security Council authorization for war in September 2002, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back into Iraq. These developments troubled Israel's leaders because they seemed to reduce the likelihood of war. Foreign Minister Peres told reporters, "The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must. Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors."34 On a visit to Moscow in late September, Sharon made it clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was leading the charge for new inspections, that it was too late for them to be effective.35 Peres became so frustrated with the UN process in the following months that in mid-February 2003 he lashed out at France by questioning its status as a permanent member of the Security Council.36
   Israel's adamant opposition to inspections put it in a lonely and awkward position, as Marc Perelman made clear in an article in the Forward in mid-September 2002: "Saddam Hussein's surprise acceptance of'unconditional' United Nations weapons inspections put Israel on the hot seat this week, forcing it into the open as the only nation actively supporting the Bush administration's goal of Iraqi regime change."37
   Pressing ahead in the face of UN diplomacy, Israelis portrayed Saddam in the direst terms, often comparing him to Adolf Hitler. If the West did not stand up to Iraq, they claimed, it would be making the same mistake it made with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Shlomo Avineri, a prominent Israeli scholar, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "all who condemn the 1930s appeasement of Germany should reflect long and hard on whether a failure to act today against Iraq will one day be viewed the same way."38 The implica
tion was unmistakable: anyone who opposed invading Iraq—or, as we have seen, pushed Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians—was an appeaser, just like Neville Chamberlain, and bound to be regarded as such by future generations. The Jerusalem Post was especially hawkish, frequently running editorials and op-eds favoring the war and rarely running pieces arguing against it.39 Indeed, it went so far as to editorialize that "ousting Saddam is the linchpin of the war on terrorism, without which it is impossible to begin in earnest, let alone win."40
   Other Israeli public figures echoed Peres and Sharon's advocacy for war instead of diplomatic wrangling. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed in early September 2002 claiming that "Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program provides the urgent need for his removal." He went on to warn that "the greatest risk now lies in inaction."41 His predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece a few weeks later in the Wall Street Journal titled "The Case for Toppling Saddam." Netanyahu declared, "Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do," adding that "I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam's regime," which he claimed was "feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons."42
   Netanyahu's influence, of course, extended well beyond writing op-eds and appearing on television. Having gone to high school, college, and graduate school in the United States, he speaks fluent English and is not only familiar with how the American political system works but operates skillfully in it. He has close ties with neoconservatives inside and outside of the Bush administration, and he has extensive contacts on Capitol Hill, where he has either spoken or testified on numerous occasions.43 Barak is also well connected with American policy makers, politicians, security experts, and pundits.
   The Israeli government's war fervor did not diminish in the months before the fighting started. Ha'aretz, for example, ran a story on February 17, 2003, titled "Enthusiastic IDF Awaits War in Iraq," which said that Israel's "military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq." Ten days later James Bennet wrote a story in the New York Times with the headline "Israel Says War on Iraq Would Benefit the Region." The Forward published a piece on March 7, 2003, titled "Jerusalem Frets as U.S. Battles Iraq War Delays," which made it clear that Israel's leaders were hoping for war sooner rather than later.44
   Given all this activity, it is unsurprising that Bill Clinton recounted in 2006 that "every Israeli politician I knew" believed that Saddam Hussein was so great a threat that he should be removed even if he did not have WMD.45 Nor was the desire for war confined to Israel's leaders. Apart from
Kuwait, which Saddam conquered in 1990, Israel was the only country outside of the United States where a majority of politicians and the public enthusiastically favored war. A poll taken in early 2002 found that 58 percent of Israeli Jews believed that "Israel should encourage the United States to attack Iraq."46 Another poll taken a year later in February 2003 found that 77.5 percent of Israeli Jews wanted the United States to invade Iraq.47 Even in Tony Blair's Britain, a poll taken just before the war revealed that 51 percent of the respondents opposed it, while only 39 percent supported it.48
   This rather unusual situation prompted Gideon Levy of Ha'aretz to ask, "Why is it that in England 50,000 people have demonstrated against the war in Iraq, whereas in Israel no one has? Why is it that in Israel there is no public debate about whether the war is necessary?" He went on to say, "Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced."49
   Israel's enthusiasm for war eventually led some of its allies in America to tell Israeli officials to damp down their hawkish rhetoric, lest the war look like it was being fought for Israel.50 In the fall of 2002, for example, a group of American political consultants known as the Israel Project circulated a six-page memorandum to key Israelis and pro-Israel leaders in the United States. The memo was titled "Talking about Iraq" and was intended as a guide for public statements about the war. "If your goal is regime change, you must be much more careful with your language because of the potential backlash. You do not want Americans to believe that the war on Iraq is being waged to protect Israel rather than to protect America."51
   Reflecting that same concern on the eve of the war, Sharon, according to several reports, told Israeli diplomats and politicians to keep quiet about a possible war in Iraq and certainly not to say anything that made it appear that Israel was pushing the Bush administration to topple Saddam. The Israeli leader was worried by the growing perception that Israel was advocating a U.S. invasion of Iraq. In fact, Israel was; it just did not want its position to be widely known.52

THE LOBBY AND THE IRAQ WAR

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:23 PM

IRAQ AND DREAMS OF TRANSFORMING THE MIDDLE EAST

Why did the United States invade Iraq? In The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, George Packer declares that "it still isn't possible to be sure, and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war." He quotes Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in the State Department during Bush's first term and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, saying that he would "go to his grave not knowing the answer."1
   In one sense, their uncertainty is understandable, because the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein even now seems difficult to fathom. He was clearly a brutal tyrant with worrisome ambitions—including a desire to obtain WMD—but his own incompetence had put these dangerous objectives out of reach. His army had been routed in the 1991 Gulf War and further weakened by a decade of UN sanctions. As a result, Iraq's military power, never impressive except on paper, was a pushover by 2003. Intrusive UN inspections had eliminated Iraq's nuclear program and eventually led Saddam to destroy his biological and chemical weapons stockpiles as well. There were no convincing links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden (who were in fact hostile to each other), and bin Laden and his associates were in Afghanistan or Pakistan, not Iraq. Yet in the aftermath of 9/11, when one would have expected the United States to be focusing laserlike on al Qaeda, the Bush administration chose to invade a deteriorating country that had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and was already effectively contained. From this perspective, it is a deeply puzzling decision.
   From another angle, however, the decision is not that hard to understand. The United States was the world's most powerful country, and there
was never any doubt about its ability to oust Saddam if it so chose. The United States had not only won the long Cold War, it had also enjoyed a remarkable run of military successes after 1989: defeating Iraq handily in 1991, halting the Balkan bloodletting in 1995, and beating Serbia in 1999. The rapid ouster of the Taliban in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 reinforced an image of military invincibility and made it harder for skeptics on Iraq to convince others that going to war was unnecessary and unwise. Americans were also shocked and alarmed by 9/11, and many of their leaders were convinced that the United States could not allow even remote dangers to grow in an era when terrorists might acquire WMD. Those who favored war believed that toppling Saddam would convince other rogue states that America was simply too powerful to oppose and compel these regimes to conform to U.S. wishes instead. In the period before the war, in short, the United States was simultaneously powerful, confident of its military prowess, and deeply worried about its own security—a dangerous combination.2
   These various elements form the strategic context in which the decision for war was made and help us understand some of the underlying forces that facilitated that choice. But there was another variable in the equation, and the war would almost certainly not have occurred had it been absent. That element was the Israel lobby, and especially a group of neoconservative policy makers and pundits who had been pushing the United States to attack Iraq since well before 9/11. The prowar faction believed that removing Saddam would improve America's and Israel's strategic position and launch a process of regional transformation that would benefit the United States and Israel alike. Israeli officials and former Israeli leaders supported these efforts, because they were eager to see the United States topple one of their main regional adversaries—and the man who had launched Scud missiles at Israel in 1991.
   Pressure from Israel and the lobby was not the only factor behind the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element. Many Americans believe that this was a "war for oil" (or for corporations like Halliburton), but there is little direct evidence to support this claim and considerable evidence that casts doubt on it. Other observers blame political advisers such as the Republican strategist Karl Rove and suggest that the war was part of a Machiavellian scheme to keep the country on a war footing and thus ensure a lengthy period of Republican control. This view has a certain partisan appeal, but it too lacks supporting evidence and cannot explain why so many prominent Democrats supported going to war. Another interpretation views the war as the first step in a bold effort to
transform the Middle East by spreading democracy. This view is correct, but as we will see, this remarkably ambitious scheme was inextricably linked to concerns about Israel's security.
   In contrast to these alternative explanations, we argue that the war was motivated at least in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. This was a controversial claim before the war started, but it is even more controversial now that Iraq has turned into a strategic disaster. To be clear, the individuals and groups that pushed for war believed it would benefit both Israel and the United States, and they certainly did not anticipate the debacle that ultimately occurred. Regardless, a proper account of the lobby's role in encouraging the war is ultimately a question of evidence, and there is considerable evidence that Israel and pro-Israel groups—especially the neoconservatives—played important roles in the decision to invade.
   Before examining the evidence, however, it is worth noting that a number of knowledgeable and well-respected individuals have said openly that the war was linked with Israel's security. Philip Zelikow, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001-03), executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (2005—06), told a University of Virginia audience on September 10, 2002, that Saddam was not a direct threat to the United States. "The real threat," he argued, is "the threat against Israel." He went on to say, "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat . . . And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."3
   General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander and former presidential candidate, said in August 2002 that "those who favor this attack now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid that at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel."4 In January 2003, a German journalist asked Ruth Wedgwood, a prominent neoconservative academic and a member of the influential Defense Policy Board (chaired by Richard Perle), why the journalist should support the war. I could "be impolite," Wedgwood said, "and remind Germany of its special relationship with Israel. Saddam presents an existential threat to Israel. That is simply true." Wedgwood did not justify the war by saying that Iraq posed a direct threat to Germany or the United States.5
   A few weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, the journalist Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine, "A stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is a part of the argument that dare not
speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neo-conservative faction in the Bush Administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish community."6 Former Senator Ernest Hollings made a similar argument in May 2004. After noting that Iraq was not a direct threat to the United States, he asked why we invaded that country.7 "The answer," which he said "everyone knows," is "because we want to secure our friend Israel." A number of Jewish groups promptly labeled Hollings an anti-Semite, with the ADL calling his comments "reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."8 Hollings adamantly rejected the charge, noting that he had long been a staunch supporter of Israel and that he was simply stating the obvious, not making an untruthful claim. He demanded that his critics "apologize to me for talking about anti-Semitism."9
   A handful of other public figures—Patrick Buchanan, Arnaud de Borch-grave, Maureen Dowd, Georgie Anne Geyer, Gary Hart, Chris Matthews, Congressman James P. Moran (D-VA), Robert Novak, Tim Russert, and General Anthony Zinni—either said or strongly hinted that pro-Israel hardliners in the United States were the principal movers behind the Iraq war.10 In Novak's case, he referred to the war well before it happened as "Sharon's war" and continues to do so today. "I am convinced," he said in April 2007, "that Israel made a large contribution to the decision to embark on this war. I know that on the eve of the war, Sharon said, in a closed conversation with senators, that if they could succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel's security problems."n
   The connection between Israel and the Iraq war was widely recognized long before the fighting started. When the prospect of an American invasion was beginning to dominate the headlines in the fall of 2002, the journalist Michael Kinsley wrote that "the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel ... is the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one mentions it."12 The reason for this reluctance, he observed, was fear of being labeled an anti-Semite. Two weeks before the war started, Nathan Guttman reported in Ha'aretz that "the voices linking Israel to the war are getting louder and louder. It is claimed the desire to help Israel is the major reason for President George Bush sending American soldiers to a superfluous war in the Gulf. And the voices come from all directions."13
   A few days later, Bill Keller, who is now the executive editor of the New York Times, wrote, "The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think."14 Finally, in May 2005, two years after the war began, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowl
edged that the belief that Israel and the neoconservatives were responsible for getting the United States to invade Iraq was "pervasive" in the U.S. intelligence community.15
   Some will surely argue that anyone who suggests that concerns about Israel's security had a significant influence on the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq is either an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. Such charges are both predictable and false. As we will now show, there is abundant evidence that Israel and the lobby played crucial roles in making that war happen. This is not to assert that either Israel or the lobby "controls" U.S. foreign policy; it is simply to say that they successfully pressed for a particular set of policies and were able, in a particular context, to achieve their objective. 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.

ISRAEL AND THE IRAQ WAR

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:24 PM

CONCLUSION

Absent the lobby, the Bush administration almost certainly would have been much more self-interested and hard-nosed in pushing for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. After all, the United States has a rich history, especially in recent years, of using various tools to force other states to change their behavior to suit America's interests. Washington extracted repeated concessions from Soviet leaders as the Soviet Union broke up, and it later
pressed Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus to give up their nuclear arsenals. A similar effort eventually persuaded Libya to give up its own weapons of mass destruction programs in exchange for a lifting of extensive economic sanctions. The Clinton administration fought an intense air war to force Serbia to withdraw from Kosovo in 1999, and the Bush administration has pressured numerous countries to reject the convention establishing an International Criminal Court. And as we discuss at length in Chapter 10, the United States has gone to considerable lengths to convince Iran to give up its own nuclear ambitions. Putting pressure on Israel, the Palestinians, and the relevant Arab states in order to reach a final peace arrangement would hardly be inconsistent with America's conduct on other issues.
   The United States has enormous potential leverage at its disposal for dealing with Israel and the Palestinians. It could threaten to cut off all economic and diplomatic support for Israel. If that were not enough, it would have little difficulty lining up international support to isolate Israel, much the way South Africa was singled out and shunned at the end of the last century. Regarding the Palestinians, the United States could hold out the promise of fulfilling their dream of a viable state in the Occupied Territories coupled with massive long-term economic aid. In return, the Palestinians would have to end all terrorism against Israel. Given the political divisions within Israel and the often dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, as well as the presence of violent rejectionists on both sides, achieving a final settlement would not be easy. But doing nothing, or backing Israel so consistently, has not made things better. On the contrary, this policy has almost certainly made things worse for Palestinians and Israelis alike and continues to erode America's reputation in the world and make it more difficult to deal with urgent issues like Iran and Iraq.
   It might be argued that this analysis is unrealistic given Israel's generally favorable image in the eyes of many Americans. In this view, the real reason Bush has backed Israel against the Palestinians is that U.S. public opinion strongly favors Israel. The president, in short, is just responding to the will of the people. We have seen this claim before—it is the heart of the moral rationale for the special relationship between the United States and Israel. Yet this interpretation ignores the evidence that the American people would be willing to put pressure on Israel if it were part of a larger peace deal. Although U.S. surveys show greater sympathy for Israel than for the Palestinians, they also reveal considerable support for a more evenhanded policy. For example, most Americans were generally supportive of Bush's efforts to be tough on Israel in the spring of 2002. A Time/CNN poll taken on April
10-11 found that 60 percent of Americans felt that U.S. aid to Israel should be cut off or reduced if Sharon refused to withdraw from the Palestinian areas he had recently occupied. Moreover, 75 percent of those surveyed thought that Powell should meet with Arafat when he visited Israel. Regarding Sharon, only 35 percent found him trustworthy, while 35 percent thought he was a warmonger, 20 percent saw him as a terrorist, and 25 percent considered him an enemy of the United States.128
   One year later, a May 2003 poll conducted by the University of Maryland reported that over 60 percent of Americans would be willing to withhold aid to Israel if it resisted U.S. pressure to settle the conflict. That number rose to 70 percent among "politically active" Americans. Indeed, 73 percent said that the United States should not favor either side in the conflict. It is also worth noting that only 17 percent of respondents agreed with the claim made by Bush and Sharon that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is "part of the war on terrorism." Instead, 54 percent viewed it "as a conflict between two national groups fighting over the same piece of land." The same survey showed that although most Americans did not know much about the Road Map, 55 percent had a "positive view" of it. When informed of its key elements, support rose to 74 percent.129 Even a 2005 survey conducted by the ADL found that 78 percent of Americans believe that their government should favor neither Israel nor the Palestinians.130
   Since September 11, the American people have been receptive to pressuring Israel when they believed that doing so would be in the U.S. national interest. President Bush has also recognized that getting the Palestinians a viable state of their own was the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and his administration has tried to advance that goal on several occasions. But neither public opinion nor presidential initiatives mattered very much, because the lobby has made it nearly impossible for the United States to put pressure on Israel to negotiate a settlement.
   As we have seen, Bush formally endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state in the fall of 2001. In the spring of 2002, he called for Israel to withdraw its forces from several Palestinian areas in the West Bank and sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region to jump-start the peace process. That same summer, Bush launched the Road Map initiative, which was supposed to provide a clear timetable leading to an independent and democratic Palestinian state. The following year, Bush traveled to the Middle East to promote the Road Map. After the collapse in 2006 of the Israeli plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, the administration—with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the lead—made a renewed effort to end the conflict.
   In each case, the lobby moved quickly and effectively to neutralize the Bush administration's efforts. Groups in the lobby employed a variety of tactics: open letters, congressional resolutions, op-eds and press releases, and direct meetings between administration officials and the leaders of influential Jewish and evangelical groups. Sympathetic government officials, such as the NSC's Elliott Abrams, helped in these efforts, at times meeting with Israeli officials to thwart ongoing initiatives. Instead of using U.S. leverage to move toward peace (for example, by linking U.S. support to Israel's cooperation on the Road Map), Bush ended up instead backing Sharon's (and now Olmert's) chosen policy at every turn. As former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft declared in October 2004, Sharon had President Bush "wrapped around his little finger."131
   Israel's ability to defy the United States—-and even to get Washington to follow its preferred approach to dealing with the Palestinians—offers a classic illustration of interest group politics at work. Although public opinion polls show that the American people would support compelling Israel to offer the Palestinians a fair settlement, groups in the lobby—and especially its more hard-line elements—care more about this issue than the average American does. As a result, groups like AIPAC and the leaders of organizations like the Conference of Presidents can put disproportionate pressure on elected officials and their policy preferences are more likely to win out, even if they are bad for the United States as a whole and unintentionally harmful for Israel as well.
   Maintaining U.S. support for Israel's policies against the Palestinians is a core goal of many groups in the lobby, but their objectives are not limited to that goal. They also want America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq, Syria, and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East. Let us now consider how the lobby and Israel influenced America's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 in the hope that this bold stroke would lead to the democratization of the entire region.

IRAQ AND DREAMS OF TRANSFORMING THE MIDDLE EAST

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:25 PM

RICE GETS "POWELLIZED"101

The Bush administration had also figured out that unilateralism was a losing strategy, and it began pushing again for a negotiated settlement along the lines of the Road Map. In late 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took the lead in trying to get the Palestinian and Israeli leaders talking to each other.102 Her goal was to start a discussion about what the broad
outlines of a comprehensive settlement—which she termed the "political horizon"—should look like.
   While Rice was pushing the Israelis and the Palestinians to negotiate seriously, the Saudis convinced the Arab League in March 2007 to reissue its 2002 peace plan. The new proposal, like the original one, offered Israel peace and normal relations not just with the Palestinians but with all twenty-two members of the Arab League. In return, Israel would have to withdraw from all of the Occupied Territories and the Golan Heights, accept the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories with East Jerusalem as its capital, and negotiate a "just solution" to the Palestinian refugee problem that was "agreed upon" by the relevant parties.103 The Saudis made it clear that the proposal was a basis for negotiation, not a take-it-or-leave-it deal.
   Both the Americans and the Saudis had powerful incentives to put an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.104 Continuing U.S. support for Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories was not only helping fuel America's terrorism problem, but it was making it difficult for the Bush administration to get Arab states to help it deal with the war in Iraq and Iran's nuclear program. The Saudis, for their part, wanted to work closely with the Americans to contain Iran, but they were limited in what they could do because there was so much anger among the Saudi people over U.S. support for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. The Saudis also wanted to end the conflict, because Iran was gaining influence with radical Palestinian forces in the Occupied Territories.
   Given these circumstances, conditions would seem ripe for serious movement forward in the peace process. But that did not happen. Olmert showed little interest in the Arab League initiative, which appeared destined to share the same fate as the 2002 peace proposal. The Israeli prime minister was unhappy with some parts of the proposal, such as the stipulation that Israel would have to withdraw from all of the Occupied Territories. He also rejected any compromise on the issue of a Palestinian "right of return," telling the Jerusalem Post in March 2007, "I will not agree to any kind of Israeli responsibility for this problem. Full stop." He went on to say that the return of even one Palestinian refugee to Israel was "out of the question."105
   But that point of dispute and any others could have been dealt with in the negotiations that would have ensued if Israel had agreed to talks on the basis of the proposal. Ha'aretz put the point well in a late March editorial: "A realistic government would have rushed to embrace this willingness for
recognition and reconciliation, expressing reservations for what it does not accept and seeking dialogue on the regional level."106 In mid-May, Olmert was widely criticized for failing to seriously pursue peace with the Arabs, including by two staunch supporters of Israel: Abraham Foxman of the ADL and the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. In the face of this mounting criticism, the prime minister responded by saying that Israel was willing to discuss the Arab League initiative, but he has taken little action beyond his rhetoric. Instead, Israel has launched a diplomatic campaign to blame the Arabs for the failure of the peace initiative.107
   The Bush administration did nothing substantive to push Olmert to embrace the Arab League's proposal, although it did urge Arab leaders to alter the proposal to Israel's liking.108 So far, Rice's own efforts to push the peace process forward have come to naught. For starters, Rice made it clear in an early February 2007 meeting with leaders from fifteen major Jewish organizations that not only would the administration refrain from putting pressure on Israel, but it would not offer its own suggestions on what the "political horizon" might look like.109 Those concessions greatly limited the secretary's effectiveness. Rice then traveled to Jerusalem where, on February 19, she brought Olmert and Abbas together for talks. But Rice's efforts to revive the peace talks were a bust, as the Israeli prime minister refused to discuss the outlines of a possible settlement. In fact, both Olmert and Abbas refused to appear with her at the press conference afterward. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times ran an editorial on the meeting titled "Charade in Jerusalem," which pointed out that Rice could not even get the two leaders to stand at her side while she read a "content-free joint statement to which they have grudgingly agreed."110
   In late March 2007, Rice returned to Israel to meet with Olmert and raise the possibility that she might serve as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians. It was her seventh visit to Israel in eight months. Olmert flatly rejected the idea of Rice acting as a diplomatic broker, forcing her to cancel the press conference planned for after the meeting. The Daily Telegraph (London) headline the day after the Olmert-Rice meeting said it all: "Israel Snubs Condoleezza Rice."111 The secretary of state returned to Washington empty-handed and with little prospect that the Bush administration would make meaningful progress toward Arab-Israeli peace before leaving office.
   This outcome, which is not only humiliating for the secretary of state but is contrary to America's national interest as well, is the result of at least two factors. First, Olmert, like his predecessor Sharon, has no interest in nego
tiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians, because it would require Israel to give up almost all of the West Bank and create a viable Palestinian state on that territory. Olmert has made it clear that he would be willing to give up some parts of the West Bank, but he intends to keep large parts of it for Israel. Indeed, his government announced in late December 2006 that it was constructing its first new settlement in the West Bank in ten years, and the following month Israel announced that it planned to build new houses in Ma'aleh Adumim, Israel's largest existing settlement.112 Israel would prefer the occupation to peace, if the latter means giving 95 percent or so of the West Bank to the Palestinians.113
   One might argue that the real obstacle to peace is not Israel but Hamas, which came to power in January 2006 and remains formally committed to Israel's destruction. There is no question that Hamas's growing stature within the Palestinian community complicated any efforts to achieve peace. Nevertheless, this problem is not insurmountable. If the Israelis were genuinely interested in reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians, they could work with the Arab League, Abbas, and the more moderate elements within Hamas to push the peace process forward and isolate—or maybe even convert—the rejectionists in Hamas and other radical groups like Islamic Jihad.114 But instead, the Israelis have shown little enthusiasm for working with the growing number of Arabs who are genuinely interested in making peace with the Jewish state. By undermining moderates who want to negotiate peace, this policy merely strengthens those factions that claim that violence is the only effective tactic.
   Second, pro-Israel forces in the United States have made it impossible for the United States, especially Secretary of State Rice, to push the Olmert government toward peace. Inside the White House, the main obstacle to putting any kind of meaningful pressure on Israel is Elliott Abrams. He has help, however, from two powerful neoconservatives who work for the vice president, John Hannah and David Wurmser. The journalist Jim Lobe reports that various sources have told him that "Abrams has been working systematically to undermine any prospect for serious negotiations designed to give substance to Rice's hopes—and increasingly impatient demands by Saudi King Abdullah—of offering the Palestinians a 'political horizon' for a final settlement."115
   Abrams has a close relationship with Yoram Turbowitz, Olmert's chief of staff, and Shalom Turgeman, Olmert's diplomatic adviser, who all work together to make sure that the Bush administration does not push Israel to pursue policies that Olmert dislikes. Daniel Levy, a former adviser in the Is
raeli prime minister's office, notes that "if Rice is getting too active with her peace-making quest, then T+T (Yoram Turbowitz and Shalom Turgeman) can always be dispatched to Elliott Abrams at the White House, who in turn will enlist Cheney to keep the president in tow."116 Correspondingly, Henry Siegman, who long worked on Middle East issues at the Council on Foreign Relations, maintains that "every time there emerged the slightest hint that the United States may finally engage seriously in a political process, Elliott Abrams would meet secretly with Olmert's envoys in Europe or elsewhere to reassure them that there exists no such danger."117 Right before Rice arrived in Israel for her February 19 meeting with Abbas and Olmert, the Israeli prime minister put the secretary of state in her place by letting the media know that he had talked to Bush the day before and that "the prime minister and president see eye-to-eye." As Aluf Benn and Shmuel Rosner wrote in Ha'aretz, "The message was unmistakable: What Rice had to say barely mattered."118
   The extent to which the balance of power inside the Bush administration is stacked against Rice is further illustrated by Philip Zelikow's resignation as the State Department's counselor at the end of 2006. He was Rice's longtime friend and coauthor and one of her closest advisers. By the late summer of
2006, he was encouraging Rice to make a serious effort to negotiate a peace
agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. He felt that was essential if
Washington hoped to get the Arab states and the Europeans to form an effec-
tive coalition against Iran. He made this very point on September 15, 2006,
in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.119
   Following the speech, there was an immediate outcry from pro-Israel groups, and, according to the New York Times, "The State Department quickly distanced itself from the speech, issuing a statement denying any linkage, and Israeli officials, flustered by Mr. Zelikow's remarks, said Ms. Rice later assured the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, that the United States saw the Iranian and Palestinian issues as two separate matters."120 Zelikow announced he was leaving the State Department the following month. He gave anodyne reasons for his departure in his resignation letter, although one unnamed White House source said that his departure was due in part to his unhappiness with U.S. Middle East policy. In early March
2007, Rice named Eliot Cohen, a neoconservative who had signed all the
earlier PNAC letters, as Zelikow's successor.121
   Despite the restrictions on her room to maneuver, Rice has tried to help strengthen Abbas at the expense of Hamas. But the lobby has limited her effectiveness on that front as well. Specifically, President Bush decided in late
January 2007 to give Abbas $86 million to beef up his security forces. But Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-NY), a stalwart defender of Israel and the chair of an important appropriations subcommittee, held up the request.122 Another pro-Israel lawmaker, Anthony Weiner, wrote to Rice and asked her to withdraw the requested money.123 Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, weighed in, saying that Bush "should be as tough on Abbas as he is on Hamas and al Qaeda."124
   Klein's uncompromising views on Abbas were shared by many Jewish leaders.125 They were especially upset with Abbas for agreeing in February 2007 to join a unity government with Hamas, even though the Palestinian president made it clear that he remained committed to negotiating a two-state settlement and living in peace with Israel. AIPAC tried to push Congress to make it impossible for the U.S. government to deal with anyone in the unity government, Abbas included; but that effort failed.126 To mollify Lowey, the administration reduced the requested amount to $59 million and stipulated that it would be used only for training, purchasing nonlethal equipment, and improving security at a critical crossing point between Israel and Gaza. Lowey consented to this arrangement and the money was authorized.127
   Nevertheless, the Bush administration's efforts to isolate and marginalize Hamas backfired in June 2007, when Hamas preempted the American attempt to strengthen Fatah's security forces by driving them from Gaza and seizing power there. In a belated effort to bolster Abbas, Israel has promised to release Palestinian prisoners as well as frozen Palestinian tax revenues, and Jerusalem and Washington have lifted some economic restrictions. But there is no sign that Israel will give the Palestinian leader the one thing he needs to establish his authority and trump the rejectionists: the realistic prospect of a viable state. Thus, the conflict will continue to fester, doing further damage to America's position in the Arab and Islamic world.

CONCLUSION

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:26 PM

ARAFAT DIES AND NOTHING CHANGES

Arafat died in November 2004 and Abbas emerged as the Palestinian's new leader, eventually winning office in January 2005 in a peaceful democratic election that was hailed by outside observers as free and fair. One would think that this event would have been an ideal opportunity to push the peace process forward, as Abbas recognized Israel, renounced terrorism, and was eager to work out a negotiated settlement to the conflict.95 Furthermore, Bush had just won reelection to a second term and thus was in about as good a position as any president could be to help bolster the moderate Abbas. The Bush administration embraced the new Palestinian leader from the start, but it did virtually nothing to help him negotiate a viable state, and so ultimately undermined his power base.
   The main reason Bush did little to help Abbas was that he had already committed himself to supporting Sharon's plan (and that of his successor, Ehud Olmert) to disengage unilaterally from the Palestinians. Contrary to his own pronouncements about the necessity of the Road Map, Bush was backing a strategy that held no promise of the Palestinians getting a viable state of their own, which doomed the plan from the start.
   Some pro-Israel groups like the Zionist Organization of America and the Orthodox organizations were opposed to giving up any territory to the Palestinians. But the major organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee backed disengagement. Senior officials in the Conference of Presidents estimated that somewhere between 60 and 75 percent of the leaders favored the pullout, which was more than enough to ensure that the lobby ultimately backed Sharon and Bush's shift in policy, although not with great enthusiasm.96
   By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon contributed directly to Hamas's electoral victory in January 2006. The Ha'aretz columnist Bradley Burston wrote just before that election, "If it appears to you . . . that Israel is Hamas' campaign manager in next week's elections for the Palestinian parliament, few would argue—especially in Hamas."97 With Hamas in power, Israel had another reason not to negotiate and the Bush
administration was even less likely to push them to talk with the Palestinians.
   To make matters worse, Israel's policy of unilateral disengagement collapsed in the summer of 2006, about two months after Bush had hailed the policy during Ehud Olmert s first visit to the White House as the new prime minister.98 After pulling out of Gaza in August 2005, the Israelis effectively cordoned off that small piece of real estate, making it impossible for the Palestinians living there to lead a decent life, much less have a state of their own. The Palestinians in Gaza continued launching rockets into Israel, and then they captured an Israeli soldier on June 25, 2006. The Israelis felt that the situation had become intolerable, so three days later they reentered Gaza.99 It quickly became apparent to most Israelis, and certainly to Olmert, that Israel would face a similar situation if it unilaterally withdrew from some parts of the West Bank and effectively locked up the Palestinians left behind.
   A few weeks later, on July 12, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers along the Israel-Lebanon border, precipitating a war in which Hezbollah fired rockets and missiles into northern Israel. Given that Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from southern Lebanon in 2000, this crisis reinforced the point that simply pulling back from parts of the West Bank would not by itself end Israel's conflict with the Palestinians. Consequently, with the Israeli public behind him, Olmert abandoned unilateral disengagement in the late summer of 2006. In a candid interview with the Chinese news agency Xinhua in January 2007, Olmert said that when he took over from the incapacitated Sharon in January 2006, he was confident that a unilateral strategy, or what he called his "convergence plan," could solve the Palestinian problem. But he was wrong, and now, "under the existing circumstances, it would be more practical to achieve a two-state solution through negotiations rather than [unilateral] withdrawal."100

RICE GETS "POWELLIZED"101

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:27 PM

UNILATERALISM IN, ROAD MAP OUT

Much the same pattern was evident in late July 2003, when the Bush administration began to voice its objections to Israel's so-called security fence, which was widely seen as an Israeli attempt to create "facts on the ground" that would be a major obstacle to a negotiated settlement. The issue was not construction of the fence itself but rather its intended route, which in effect would incorporate additional parts of the Occupied Territories and impose significant additional hardships on thousands of Palestinians.74 Bush ex
pressed his displeasure at a joint White House press conference with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on July 25: "I think the wall is a problem, and I discussed this with Ariel Sharon. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank."75 But four days later at the White House, with Bush standing at his side, Sharon made it clear that he intended to continue building the fence, although he said he would try to minimize the hardships it inflicted on the Palestinians. Bush did not challenge Sharon but instead accepted the prime minister's view that Palestinian terrorism was "the fundamental obstacle to peace."76
   Nevertheless, the Bush administration continued to express its unhappi-ness with the security barrier. Secretary of State Powell suggested in an interview that the fence was an Israeli attempt to appropriate Palestinian land, and Condoleezza Rice hinted that the administration might deduct the cost of the fence from $9 billion in loan guarantees that the United States had approved in April.77 Israel's supporters in Congress mobilized and emphasized to the White House, as Senator Charles Schumer put it, that if the president "flouts the will of Congress and tries to penalize Israel for defending itself, Congress will do everything in its power to ensure that these loan guarantees are not held up."78 The Israelis themselves were not seriously concerned. As one senior Israeli official put it, "We are not under any pressure . . . The United States is a very vibrant democracy, and this is a very politically oriented administration. Reality is made sometimes by political constraints."79
   The issue of loan guarantees would not go away, however, and in late November the Bush administration said that it would cut $289.5 million from the $3 billion in loan guarantees allocated to Israel earlier that year. The lobby did not protest strongly, mainly because the punishment was effectively a weak slap on the wrist. The United States was not cutting direct foreign aid, the real meat and potatoes of its material support to Israel. Reducing the loan guarantees by roughly 10 percent simply meant that Israel had to pay a higher interest rate on a small portion of the overall amount it intended to borrow. The former director general of Israel's Finance Ministry estimated that it would cost Israel about $4 million a year in higher interest costs, which is not a lot of money for a prosperous state like Israel.80
   The Bush administration won another small victory in the fall of 2003. Sharon was threatening to expel Arafat from the West Bank and send him into exile. Powell and Rice told the Israelis that expelling the Palestinian
leader was unacceptable to the United States. They got the message and Arafat remained in the West Bank.81
   But these small victories were not indications of a changing tide. On the contrary, in the fall of 2003, Sharon began moving to wreck George Bush's Road Map once and for all by pushing forward his own plan for unilateral disengagement.82 In November, Sharon invited Elliott Abrams, the senior director for Near East and North African Affairs on the National Security Council (NSC) and a well-known neoconservative, to a secret meeting in Rome. At the meeting, Sharon informed the American official that instead of pursuing a negotiated settlement, as called for in the Road Map, he intended to impose his own settlement on the Palestinians.83 As the policy evolved in the next few months, it became clear that Israel would first withdraw all of its settlements from Gaza and turn that territory over to the Palestinians. Israel would then turn some areas of the West Bank over to the Palestinians but keep large parts of that contested land for Israel.
   Sharon's decision to leave these parts of the Occupied Territories to the Palestinians was based not on sympathy for their plight but on the fear that if Israel retained Gaza and all of the West Bank, Arabs would soon outnumber Jews in "greater Israel." The demographic issue, in other words, was driving the prime minister's policy.84
   The Palestinians would have virtually no say in the process. Israel would dictate the terms of the settlement, and in the end, the Palestinians would not get a state of their own. Dov Weisglass, Sharon's closest adviser, made this clear when he said that "the significance of what we did ... is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely." Weisglass also said that Sharon's plan "is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."85
   One might have expected Bush to be angry with Sharon and to try to keep the Road Map alive, especially since the president, according to his national security adviser, believed that "it is the only course that will bring durable peace and security."86 But that is not what happened. In the spring of 2004, Bush publicly embraced Sharon's unilateral approach, saying that it was a "bold courageous step" and that the world owed Sharon a "thank you" for pursuing it.87 Then in a dramatic shift, on April 14, Bush reversed the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson by proclaiming
that Israel would not have to return virtually all of the territories that it occupied in 1967, and that Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to return to their former homes in Israel but would have to settle in a new Palestinian state.88 Previously, American policy was that the Israelis and the Palestinians would negotiate these issues. These moves sparked outrage in the Middle East but were widely seen in the United States as smart politics in a year when George Bush was up for reelection.89
   Writing in early 2004, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times captured the essence of Bush's predicament regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he's had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year—all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing."90
   During this entire period, the Israelis continued building settlements in the West Bank, despite American protests and despite the fact that the Road Map explicitly calls upon Israel to "freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)."91 They also continued assassinating Palestinian leaders, sometimes at the most unhelpful moments—at least from a U.S. perspective. For example, the IDF scuttled a proposed Palestinian cease-fire on July 22, 2002, when it killed Sheik Salah Shehada, a prominent Hamas leader, and fourteen others (including nine children). The White House denounced the attack as "heavy handed" but did not force Israel to end its targeted assassinations policy.92 As noted previously, the IDF undermined another emerging cease-fire in June 2003, when it tried but failed to kill Rantisi, another Hamas leader.
    On March 22, 2004, Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin with American-made Hellfire missiles. This move was generally perceived as a serious blow to America's position in the Middle East, not only because U.S. weapons were used but also because many in the Arab world believed that the Bush administration had given Israel the green light to kill a paraplegic in a wheelchair. The Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland wrote in the wake of that killing, "With the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, no friendly foreign leader has complicated modern American diplomacy and strategy more consistently or gravely than Ariel Sharon. He pursues Israel's interests with a warrior's tenacity and directness that take away
the breath, and the options, of everyone else."93 Less than a month later, on April 17, 2004, the IDF finally killed Rantisi.94

ARAFAT DIES AND NOTHING CHANGES

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:28 PM

"THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . ."

Despite these setbacks, Bush continued looking for a way to end the Second Intifada and create a viable Palestinian state living in peace next door to Israel. He understood that it is in America's national interest to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict as soon as possible. Bush has not come close to achieving that goal, however, mainly because there has been little change in the balance of power between Bush and the lobby since the spring of 2002. This situation has given Israeli leaders considerable leverage over Bush's Middle East policies and enables them to ignore or neutralize policies they dislike.
   Seeking to move beyond his troubles in the spring of 2002, Bush gave a major speech on the Middle East on June 24.43 It was a noteworthy address for two reasons. First, Bush maintained that Arafat had to give up power before the peace process could move forward. "Peace," he said, "requires a new and different political Palestinian leadership." In effect, as David Landau pointed out in Ha'aretz, "Yasser Arafat, the seemingly immortal leader of the Palestinian national movement, was politically assassinated ... by President George W. Bush."44 The Israelis, who had been calling for Arafat's isolation for months, were ecstatic. In fact, at least two prominent conservative Israelis, Natan Sharansky and Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that they had played a major role in convincing Bush to insert that demand in his speech.45 Ha'aretz ran a story on the speech with the headline, "Analysis: Ariel Sharon Agrees to His Own Ideas."46
   Second, Bush called for creating a Palestinian state by 2005. In pursuit of that goal, he emphasized that "Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop" and, as the security situation improved, "Israel forces need to withdraw fully to positions they held prior to September 28, 2000
[the start of the Second Intifada]." Bush was widely criticized for not saying more about what the final settlement would look like and how he planned to get from here to there.47 While the speech was certainly vague about the particulars of a future agreement, Bush's comments were nevertheless important. At the time, the Bush administration was working closely with the European Union, Russia, and the UN to fashion a "Road Map" leading to a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The plan of the so-called Quartet was specifically designed to build on the main points laid out in Bush's speech.
   In essence, the Bush administration decided in the summer of 2002 that the Road Map was the best way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But little progress was made in implementing it until the spring of 2003. The delay was due to the fact that it took time to convince Arafat to step aside and for the Quartet to work out the details of the Road Map. Furthermore, the Bush administration was busy preparing for war with Iraq, which it invaded on March 19, 2003. Serious movement on the Road Map finally began on March 7, when Arafat signaled that he was reducing his own political power by nominating Mahmoud Abbas to be the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.48 A week later, on March 14, Bush proclaimed that he was ready to promote the Road Map. On April 30, the Quartet released the details of that peace plan.49
   Then in early June, the president traveled to the Middle East to push the Road Map and try to strengthen Abbas's hand vis-a-vis Arafat. Bush's prestige was sky-high in the wake of the successful ouster of Saddam. His triumphant "Mission Accomplished" photo op on the USS Abraham Lincoln had occurred the previous month, the problems of postwar reconstruction in Iraq were barely apparent, and Bush's popularity at home was at near-record levels. He was in an ideal position to press all sides to get serious about peace. He met first with Arab leaders in Egypt on June 3 and then the following day with Abbas and Sharon in Aqaba, Jordan. Before the trip, reporters were skeptical about whether Bush could put pressure on Israel to achieve his goals, especially with his reelection campaign looming in 2004. "Of course I can," he told them. "Listen, if I were afraid of making the decisions necessary—for political reasons—to move the process forward, I wouldn't be going."50
   The meetings were cordial and Bush's efforts to get directly involved in the peace process appeared to be off to a good start. But the Road Map went nowhere. Despite occasionally paying lip service to the Quartet's plan, Sharon was opposed to creating a viable Palestinian state, and thus he had
no interest in negotiating with the Palestinians, since the aim of such negotiations was to create just such a state in the Occupied Territories. His opposition to the Road Map was clear well before March 2003. The Washington Post opined in an editorial on December 16, 2002, that although Sharon "has been telling voters about his readiness to support the Bush scheme," the fact is that his "envoys have been harshly criticizing the draft 'road map' in meetings with U.S. officials. According to Israeli press reports, Mr. Sharon himself dismissed the administration's plan as 'irrelevant' in a recent cabinet meeting."51
   Sharon did not say much publicly in mid-March 2003, when Bush announced that he was pushing the Road Map forward, mainly because he did not want to criticize Bush when the United States was getting ready to invade Iraq.52 Nevertheless, Sharon's views on the plan had not changed, as Chemi Shalev made clear in an article in the Forward: "The strategic goal of Sharon and his advisors is ultimately to undermine the road map and to exclude the three remaining members [the EU, UN, and Russia] of the so-called Madrid Quartet. . . from active involvement in the peace process."53 In mid-April, Ha'aretz declared in an editorial that Sharon "has not internalized the conceptual change necessary to achieve a peace arrangement based on compromise. Apparently . . . the prime minister has yet to give up the vision of the settlements and the creeping annexation of the West Bank."54
   Given Sharon's opposition to the Road Map, it is hardly surprising that the heads of the key organizations in the lobby viewed Bush's plan as the "road map to nowhere," to quote Conference of Presidents chairman Zuck-erman.55 Within hours after Bush said on March 14 that he was getting behind the Road Map, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice met at the White House with a delegation of Jewish leaders. The aim of the meeting, according to an article in Ha'aretz, was "to neutralize American Jewish reservations about the plan."56 But according to the same article, "Rice was unable to allay the concerns of many of the participants at the meeting." Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, and Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents, were especially critical. Although Hoenlein said it was necessary to wait for Israel's reaction to the plan, he emphasized that the American Jewish community would support Israel if it expressed reservations.
   AIPAC also sponsored a letter to President Bush on Capitol Hill, urging him not to put pressure on Israel regarding the Road Map and demanding that the Palestinians be required to comply fully with the plan's security requirements before Israel had to make any concessions. By early May, 85
senators and 283 representatives had signed the letter.57 While AIPAC ultimately endorsed the Road Map—with qualifications—it did not campaign to win it support in Congress, which "effectively left the lobbying front open to groups that openly oppose the plan."58 Many pro-Israel commentators lambasted the administration's decision to push the Road Map forward. For example, Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post, maintained that "proceeding along the road map" as long as Arafat retained any power was "diplomatic suicide."59 Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, however, was critical of the major Jewish organizations for not supporting the peace plan.60 Apart from more dovish groups such as the Tikkun Community and the Israel Policy Forum, there were few pro-Israel groups enthusiastically backing the Road Map. That meant it had no future.
   Consequently, Israeli hard-liners were not worried much about the Road Map when its details were spelled out on April 30. In an article in Ha'aretz the following day, Bradley Burston asked, "So why are these people smiling?"61 The answer is that the Bush administration had privately reached a series of understandings with Sharon and his lieutenants that greatly allayed their fears about the Quartet's peace plan.62 In fact, the Financial Times reported that Elliott Abrams and Stephen Hadley, two key players on the National Security Council, secretly assured Sharon "that he would not face US pressure over the road map."63
   Still, Sharon must have been worried after Bush's trip to the Middle East in early June 2003, which was widely seen as an important step in promoting the president's peace effort. Shortly after the president returned to the United States, Israel tried but failed to kill Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a key Hamas leader. It was the first of seven targeted assassinations in five days.64 Sharon had promised Secretary of State Powell in May that Israel would stop targeted assassinations unless they involved a "ticking bomb," which was clearly not the case in this instance.65 Indeed, Hamas had announced the day before the attack that it was willing to renew talks about a cease-fire.66 Moreover, the Forward reported that at the Aqaba summit meeting Sharon had "agreed to avoid actions that might 'inflame' the situation and weaken the rookie Palestinian prime minister."67 Israeli commentators understood that the Israeli prime minister was now attempting to sink the Road Map. "The curious timing of the assassination campaign," a Ha'aretz correspondent wrote, "was not lost on Israelis."68
    Bush was not pleased. Yet he only mildly rebuked Sharon, saying on June 10, "I am troubled by the recent Israeli helicopter gunship attacks." His aides' remarks, according to the Washington Post, were only "slightly
stronger." But even the slightest criticism of Israel was unacceptable to the hard-liners in the lobby, who soon mobilized to check Bush's brief show of independence. DeLay had a private meeting with the president's aides and told them that he would push forward a congressional resolution supporting Israel if Bush continued to criticize it. On the evening of June 11, Bush hosted a dinner at the White House with one hundred Jewish leaders to celebrate a new exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Malcolm Hoen-lein, who met privately with Bush that evening, said that the president "and others at the White House recognized that their reaction could be counterproductive." Hoenlein went on to say that "people were taken a little aback by the comments and, from what everyone could tell, the White House was well aware of it."69
   By the next day, June 12, the White House had done another U-turn and was firmly supporting Israel. The Washington Post reported that "in coordinated statements, White House and State Department officials tried to shift the diplomatic focus from Israeli actions to the commitments made by Arab leaders at a summit last week in Egypt to cut off funding and support for terrorist attacks against Israelis. Secretary of State Colin Powell made that point in a round of phone calls to Arab foreign ministers."70 Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said, "The issue is not Israel," it is "terrorists who are killing in an attempt to stop a hopeful process from moving forward."71 Later that month, the House passed a resolution—by a vote of 399 to 5—expressing "solidarity with the Israeli people" and saying that Israel was fully justified in using force to deal with terrorism.72
   Bush had once again tried to curb Israeli actions that strengthened anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world and undermined the administration's war on terrorism, but he ended up suffering another humiliating defeat.73

UNILATERALISM IN, ROAD MAP OUT

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:29 PM

THE LOBBY HUMILIATES BUSH

Although the American and Israeli positions were now converging, trouble between the two states erupted again in late March 2002, when a Hamas suicide bomber killed thirty Israelis at a Passover seder. The Palestinian Authority immediately denounced the attack and pledged to prosecute those responsible. But its dismal record of punishing militants left the Israelis cold; they had had enough. Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield in which the IDF resumed control of virtually all of the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank.25 Bush knew right away that Israel's action would damage America's image in the Arab and Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded on April 4 that Sharon "halt the incursions and begin withdrawal." He underscored this message two days later, saying this meant "withdrawal without delay." On April 7, Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told reporters that '"without delay' means without delay. It means now." That same day Secretary of State Powell set out for the Middle East to pressure all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.
   The administration soon came under fire to adopt a different approach. A key target was Powell, who was not only considered unsympathetic, if not hostile, to Israel, but was also planning to meet with Arafat during his Middle East trip. The secretary of state immediately began feeling the heat from staunch supporters of Israel in the vice president's office and the Pentagon, who pushed Bush and Rice to abandon the effort to restrain Israel. Rice was constantly on the phone to Powell, sometimes sounding like she was giving him a "dressing-down." He believed that her concerns reflected "the views of somebody in the White House."26
   Neoconservatives in the media piled on Powell as well. Robert Kagan and William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on April 11 that Powell
had "virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists."27 The following day, David Brooks, then working for the Weekly Standard, described Powell's trip on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as "a disaster as opposed to an unmitigated disaster." He went on to say that Powell "hurt U.S. prestige . . . shredded U.S. policy in the Middle East . . . and most importantly, he hurt our moral clarity."28 Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was making Israel's case in the United States at the time, said even before Powell arrived in Israel that his trip "won't amount to anything."29 He was right: the balance of power inside the administration shifted against Powell so quickly and completely that his deputy in Washington called the secretary in Israel and told him, "I'm holding back the fucking gates here. They're eating cheese on you."30 Powell later said that his trip to the Middle East was "ten of the most miserable days imaginable."31
   Powell got the message, as reflected in his behavior at a joint press conference he held with Ariel Sharon before leaving Israel. "The Secretary of State's language, body and verbal," John Simpson of the Sunday Telegraph wrote, "certainly were not that of the paymaster coming to call a client to account. Far from it. Mr. Powell seemed ingratiating, deferential; no doubt he realizes how much support Mr. Sharon has back in Washington and how much influence his friends have there with the President."32 Netanyahu's prediction proved correct. Powell's trip did not "amount to anything."
   A second target was Bush himself, who was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott visited the White House on April 10 and personally warned Bush to back off.33 On the following day, according to Time magazine, "a group of Evangelical leaders led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer sent Bush a letter demanding that the Administration 'end pressure' on Sharon to withdraw from the West Bank. After Falwell adjured his followers to do the same, the White House was flooded with calls and e-mails. The next day, sources say, senior presidential aides phoned Falwell to reassure him that Bush stood behind Sharon."34
   The first external sign that Bush was caving came that same day (April 11)—only one week after he insisted that Sharon withdraw his forces— when Ari Fleischer said the president believed that Sharon was "a man of peace."35 Bush publicly repeated this statement on April 18 on Powell's return from his abortive mission, and the president also told reporters that Sharon
had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal.36 Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it. Israel announced the formal end of Defensive Shield on April 21, but IDF forces remained in many Palestinian areas, and significant elements of the Israeli control regime are still in force today.
   Other groups in the lobby kept up the pressure. The Conference of Presidents and the United Jewish Communities sponsored a major rally in Washington in mid-April, with appearances by Armey, Netanyahu, Zucker-man, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, and other prominent officials. The crowd even booed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (shouting "Down with Arafat") when he briefly referred to Palestinian suffering and the possibility of a Palestinian state. Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America, said that "if Bush doesn't get the message to stop pressuring Israel, we will have lost a great opportunity with this rally." Responding to the gathering, an unnamed administration official remarked that "policy is not based on what's popular." But the same official also admitted that "we hear so much from Jewish leaders, to see that many Jews turn out for this [rally] will just speak volumes."37
   Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. Netanyahu visited Capitol Hill in mid-April, where he met forty senators, accompanied by a "security cordon fit for a head of state."38 On May 2, it overrode the administration's objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel (the Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House version passed 352 to 21). Both resolutions emphasized that the United States "stands in solidarity with Israel," and that the two countries are, to quote the House resolution, "now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism." The House version also condemned "the ongoing support of terror by Yasir Arafat," who was portrayed as a central element of the terrorism problem.39
   A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission in Israel publicly proclaimed that Sharon (who was then in Washington meeting with Bush) should resist the administration's pressure to negotiate with Arafat.40 Then, on May 9, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. The White House was opposed to the package and Secretary of State Powell took the lead and met with congressional leaders in an attempt to stop it. But the lobby backed it, just as it had helped author the two congressional resolutions. Powell lost and Bush reluctantly signed the legislation, giving Israel the money.41
Sharon and the lobby had taken on the president of the United States
and his secretary of state and triumphed. Chemi Shalev, a journalist for the Israel newspaper Ma'ariv, reported that Sharon's aides "could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell's failure. Sharon saw the white in President Bush's eyes, they bragged, and the President blinked first." Indeed, Bush's humiliation was not lost on commentators around the world. Spain's leading daily, El Pais, expressed the views of many outside observers when it commented, "If a country's weight is measured by its degree of influence on events, the superpower is not the USA but Israel."42 But it was pro-Israel forces in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in thwarting Bush's efforts to pursue a more evenhanded policy.

"THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . ."

John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt - The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Aug. 3rd, 2008 at 5:30 PM

THE LOBBY VERSUS THE PALESTINIANS

It is now largely forgotten, but in the fall of 2001, and again in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration sought to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab and Islamic world by pressing Israel to halt its expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and by advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Following the September 11 attacks, American policy makers believed that shutting down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or at least making a serious attempt to do so, would undermine support for terrorist groups like al Qaeda and facilitate the building of an international coalition against terrorism— which might even include states like Iran and Syria.1
   Yet the Bush administration was unable to persuade Jerusalem to change its policies, and Washington instead ended up backing Israel's hard-line approach toward the Palestinians. Over time, Bush and his lieutenants also adopted Israel's justifications for this approach, and U.S. and Israeli rhetoric became similar. A Washington Post headline in February 2003 summarized the situation: "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy."2 The lobby's influence was one of the central reasons for this shift.
   The story begins in late September 2001. President Bush began pushing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories and to do everything possible to contain the violence of the Second Intifada. The administration put what the New York Times described as "enormous pressure" on Sharon to allow Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, even though Bush was highly critical of Arafat's leadership.3 In early October, the new American president said publicly for the first time that he supported a Palestinian state. This event was itself a surprising development, since even President
Clinton, who had worked assiduously for a two-state solution, did not dare utter the words "Palestinian state" in public until his last month in office.4 Bush had emphasized before 9/11 that he intended to take a hands-off approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, which makes his sudden interest in this issue especially revealing.
   Israeli leaders were alarmed by these developments, fearing that Washington might "sell out" the Jewish state to win favor with the Arabs. The Washington Post reported that "sources close to Sharon say he is furious at U.S. attempts to enlist Iran, Syria and other states that have sponsored attacks on Israel into the U.S.-led coalition."5 In early October, Sharon erupted, accusing Bush of trying "to appease the Arabs at our expense." Israel, he warned, "will not be Czechoslovakia."6 Hours after making these comments, the Israel Defense Forces invaded several Palestinian areas in Hebron.7
   Bush was reportedly angry at Sharon's likening his actions to Neville Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich, and White House press secretary Ari Fleischer called Sharon's remarks "unacceptable."8 The Israeli prime minister offered a pro forma apology, but the basic problem remained unresolved.9 Later in October, following the assassination of Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavam Zeevi by a renegade Palestinian splinter group, the IDF launched another large-scale incursion into Palestinian-controlled territory in the West Bank. Bush met personally with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and demanded a quick withdrawal, saying that he hoped "the Israelis would move their troops as quickly as possible."10 The Israeli government rejected that demand and said it would leave when it was satisfied that Arafat had cracked down on Palestinian terrorists. The Guardian wrote that Ariel Sharon had "provoked the most bruising confrontation with Washington since George Bush came to power, flatly rejecting a demand to end an occupation of Palestinian lands that threatens the survival of Yasser Arafat."11
   Sharon and the pro-Israel lobby moved quickly to resolve this growing dispute by convincing the Bush administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and key groups in the lobby would repeatedly emphasize over the next few years that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden and that therefore the United States and Israel should isolate the Palestinians' elected leader and not politically engage with him. As Sharon told his self-described "longtime supporter," the columnist William Satire of the New York Times, in December 2001, "You in America are in a war against terror. We in Israel are in a war against terror. It's the same war."12
   Sharon's concerns about U.S. Middle East policy actually began immediately after 9/11, several weeks before Bush first expressed his support for a Palestinian state. He had a telephone conversation with American Jewish leaders on September 14, in which he made it clear that he was worried that the Bush administration would treat Arafat differently from bin Laden and that Bush would try to be tough on Israel as a way of winning Arab support for the war on terrorism. Sharon asked those leaders for their help.13 But little happened in the wake of that conversation, in part because almost everyone in the United States was still reeling from the events of 9/11, but also because it was not clear at that point where American policy was headed. In that uncertain moment, the Project for the New American Century released an open letter to Bush on September 20, signed by many neoconservatives, including William J. Bennett, Eliot Cohen, Aaron Fried-berg, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Jeane Kirk-patrick, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz. The letter described Israel as "America's staunchest ally against international terrorism" and called for the president to "fully support our fellow democracy." It also recommended that the United States cut off all support for the Palestinian Authority.14
   The broad outlines of Bush's policy to defeat terrorism became much clearer after he backed a two-state solution, and neither Sharon nor the lobby was happy with the new agenda. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee immediately responded to Bush's comments about a Palestinian state by issuing a statement declaring that the advisers who were pushing this idea on Bush were "undermining America's war against terrorism. They are encouraging the president to reward, rather than punish those that harbor and support terrorism."15 At the same time, Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said that Bush was pursuing "a very short-sighted and erroneous policy."16 Pro-Israel forces began repeating this basic message at every opportunity.
   Influential figures in the lobby began to put pressure on the Bush administration to allow the IDF to remain in the Palestinian areas it had recently reoccupied for as long as Sharon saw fit. Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell on October 23, in which he said that he was "extremely troubled" by the State Department's demand that Israel withdraw its forces from the recently seized areas. "We consider such comments to be inappropriate," he wrote, "and contrary to the long-standing American policy that Israel has the right
to defend itself. The world is uniting to fight terrorism and unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority has refused to take steps to stem violence and terrorism."17 Zuckerman echoed this view, saying Bush's effort to press Israel was "inappropriate, intemperate and defies logic in the face of U.S. efforts in the war on terrorism."18
   The lobby also worked the halls of Congress. On November 16, eighty-nine senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat until the Palestinian leader took the necessary steps to end the violence against Israel. They also demanded that the United States not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians and insisted that the administration state publicly that it stood steadfastly behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter "stemmed from a meeting two weeks ago between leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators," adding that AIPAC was "particularly active in providing advice on the letter."19
   By late November, relations between Jerusalem and Washington had improved considerably. This was due in part to the lobby's efforts, but also to America's initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al Qaeda. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush. In fact, just before the meeting began, the IDF attacked targets in Gaza in response to three suicide bombings in Israel. Bush neither criticized the Israelis nor asked them for restraint in the future. The White House spokesman emphasized instead that "Israel is a sovereign government" and that it "has a right to live in security." At the same time, Bush demanded that Arafat do more to stop terrorism against Israel.20
   Sharon visited the White House again in February 2002 and had another amicable visit with Bush. The Israeli prime minister reiterated the accusation that Arafat was supporting terrorism and identified him as the principal obstacle to settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush was now clearly receptive to this line of argument. He believed reports that Arafat was behind the controversial Karine A incident that had occurred a month earlier, in January 2002. The Karine A was a freighter loaded with fifty tons of weapons and explosives that was apparently sailing from Iran when it was captured by the Israeli navy in the Red Sea. Its final destination appeared to be Gaza, although the evidence at the time was not clear. In fact, some argued that the arms were bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon.21
   While there was no definitive evidence that directly implicated Arafat, the Israeli government and the lobby worked hard to make the case that Arafat had procured the weapons and explosives to abet his terrorism cam
paign against Israel.22 The Palestinian leader deni