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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (10433)	3/23/2006 7:34:19 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 22250

Emile > These are dark, poisonous days we live in, and the poison is spreading. In Iraq, America has stumbled into a quagmire of historic proportions, with global consequences that are proving nothing short of catastrophic. If that weren't enough, our nation is nearly bankrupt, with a national debt nearly equal to our Gross Domestic Product. And the Arctic is melting. The miscalculations seem inexplicable. There must be someone to blame. But everyone knows who is to blame. One thing about the neocons is that they hid nothing about their ambitions. > They [Mearsheimer and Walt] argued merely that the Iraq War had been fought for Israel's benefit. In this they were echoing the widespread theory that the war was foisted on the Bush administration by a cabal of mostly Jewish neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. That was a shaky enough argument back in 2004. It was already clear by then, from the disclosures of former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and others, that President Bush had Saddam Hussein in his sights from the moment he entered office. It was also clear, or should have been, that Bush and Cheney had assembled an administration of known quantities, including Wolfowitz and Feith, who served their purposes. That's perfectly true, Bush and Cheney did want the war. But what the article omits is the neocon's mein kampf, ie the PNAC policy document, which provided the intellectual basis for implementing the Iraq war and others to come. > The notion that a group of Pentagon underlings could bamboozle the White House into an unintended war was ludicrous on its face. Through their Office of Special Plans, Messrs Feith & Co merely provided the fake intelligence which was necessary to justify the White House ambitions to the US Congress, the UN and the world. If that's not collusion, then I don't know what it is? > Supporters of Israel's cause are depicted as unanimous in backing territorial expansion and opposing concessions to the Palestinians; when the authors happen to notice advocates of compromise, such as Edgar Bronfman and Seymour Reich, they are presented as lonely voices of dissent rather than as leaders of major factions within the organized Jewish community. I would agree that they are lonely voices of dissent. > Mearsheimer and Walt join a long line of critics who dislike Israel so deeply that they cannot fathom the support it enjoys in America, and so they search for some malign power capable of perverting America's good sense. They find it, as others have before, in the Jews. And, as expected, the author attributes legitimate anti-Israel and anti-AIPAC criticism to anti-Semitism, the good old standby smear -- except now it's beginning to wear very thin. First, let AIPAC be treated as a lobby for a foreign nation, which it is, then one will be able to see where the anti-Semitism comes in if, indeed, there is any?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (10433)	3/24/2006 5:41:41 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22250

Re: Its authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists. One, Mearsheimer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. The other, Walt, is academic dean of the nation's most prestigious center of political studies, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Though it's tempting, they can't be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. Indeed, they can't be "dismissed" --they're just "disclaimed": Fri., March 24, 2006 Adar 24, 5766 Harvard to remove official seal from anti-AIPAC 'working paper' By Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz Correspondent WASHINGTON - Harvard University has decided to remove its logo from a study that denounces the pro-Israel lobby's impact on American foreign policy, in order to distance itself from the study's conclusions. The university also appended a more strongly worded disclaimer to the study, stating that it reflects the views of its authors only. The former disclaimer said merely that the study "does not necessarily" reflect the university's views. The controversial study, published this week, was authored by Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. It charged that American foreign policy has been subordinated to Israeli interests and accused the pro-Israel lobby of responsibility for America's invasion of Iraq. The study's many critics claim that its academic quality is poor, and that it is essentially a political polemic rather than genuine academic research. Well-known researchers such as Marvin Kalb, also of Harvard's Kennedy School, said this week that the study fails to meet minimal academic standards. However, it has aroused great interest among the Arab media and been widely quoted there. The Palestine Liberation Organization's office in Washington distributed it by email to thousands of subscribers, and lobbyists for Arab states have been passing it around. The study also earned praise from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. One of the study's claims is that American opponents of Israel are consistently silenced by charges of anti-Semitism from the pro-Israel lobby. Congressman Eliot Engel of New York, in an interview with Haaretz this week, termed the study itself a form of anti-Semitism and said that it deserved the American public's contempt. According to the study, the pro-Israel lobby is an octopus whose tentacles affect congressional legislation, administration policies, the press and other agencies. The paper focuses on the main pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, but also discusses other organizations, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and devotes considerable attention to pro-Israel government officials - many of them Jewish - such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Bush administration and former assistant secretary of state Martin Indyk in the Clinton administration. The study also accused the pro-Israel lobby of monitoring academics to ensure that they do not diverge from the pro-Israel line. They will undoubtedly see proof of this contention in Harvard's decision to distance itself from the study due to pressure applied by pro-Israel donors. According to the New York Sun, Robert Belfer - who gave the Kennedy School $7.5 million in 1997 in order, among other things, to endow the chair that Walt now occupies - called the university and asked that Walt be forbidden to use his title in publicity for the study. Israeli officials have been concerned over the study, saying it is liable to be used to delegitimize Israel among the American intelligentsia. As of yesterday, however, it did not seem to have won much support among academics specializing in American foreign policy. According to one such academic, who asked to remain anonymous, "the study obviously contains many correct facts, but their presentation is skewed and the conclusions [the authors] derive from them are unfit for publication. For instance, it completely ignores the enormous influence of the Arab oil lobby on American policy, and presents a one-sided and utterly politically biased picture of the world." Other academics - some of them not known as fans of AIPAC - also cited many professional flaws in the study, such as omitting relevant facts, relying on unofficial sources (including Haaretz), and leaping to conclusions that are not necessarily supported by the facts. In addition to reiterating the well-worn charge that Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush administration were responsible for America's invasion of Iraq, the study accuses the pro-Israel lobby of inciting the American government and people against the Palestinian Authority, tilting American policy against Syria and other Arab states, and trying to push the United States into aggressive action against Iran's nuclear program. haaretz.com