Disillusionments.... I think that the White House's Murder Inc. is the biggest and most consequential intelligence fiasco of our lifetime. It shows how important effective congressional civilian control of the intelligence services is, because non-transparency is extraordinarily dangerous for any "managed" Democracy.
In an intelligence service, people who don’t make waves are still rewarded....
Many are worried, that the same mistakes could be repeated all over again.....
Lebanese Simplistic Analysis of American power....
The Israel Lobby is seemingly powerful because it converges with more powerful interests driving U.S. policy, particularly the drive for hegemonic domination of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Even when the Lobby was significantly weaker than it is now, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East was the largely the same...
Mearsheimer and Walt, along with their defenders, fail to make the distinction between the undeniable impact the Lobby has had on limiting debate regarding U.S. policy toward Israel and the assertion that it is the major defining force behind U.S. policy in the Middle East. As many have said at many campuses and Universities – who have been subjected to vicious attacks from right-wing Zionist groups – say more, that the Israel Lobby is responsible for “the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies.” Indeed, as pointed out in many articles, U.S. policy toward both Israel/Lebanon and the region as a whole is quite consistent with U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The consequences are more serious for Americans at home (for example, no Vietnamese or Nicaraguans ever flew airplanes into buildings), but they are not fundamentally different...
Any serious review of U.S. foreign policy in virtually every corner of the globe demonstrates how the United States props up dictatorships, imposes blatant double-standards regarding human rights and international law, supports foreign military occupations (witness East Timor and Western Sahara), undermines the authority of the UN, pushes for military solutions to political problems, transfers massive quantities of armaments, imposes draconian austerity programs on debt-ridden countries through international financial institutions, and periodically bombs, murders, kills, with savage assassinations as of late in Lebanon January 24th 2002 onwards, with the White House Murder Inc., whereby 4 wonderful young men were murdered in broad day light in Hazmieh, on direct instructions from the evil alliance of the Killers of CIA2/MOSSAD and Assef Shawkat of SMI..., imposes sanctions, stages coups, and invades countries that don’t accept U.S. hegemony. If U.S. policy toward the Middle East was fundamentally different than it has been toward the rest of the world, Mearsheimer and Walt would have every right to look for some other sinister force leading the United States astray from its otherwise benign foreign policy agenda....
In many respects, their argument is nothing new. A small group of former State Department officials and former Republican congressmen at such publications as the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and organizations like the Center for the National Interest, shares Mearsheimer and Walt’s critique of U.S. Middle East policy since 1948...., and their utter failure to acknowledge the nature of America’s hegemonic designs in the region and beyond. As many a political scientist – and self-described “ Arab Pundits...” currently serving as visiting professors at many Universities of USA– describe it, such analysis “absolves the Bush administration, any administration, from any responsibility because they become portrayed as helpless victims of an all-powerful lobby....which is propagated by all administrations, by virtue of having a firewall between atrocious WASP policies worldwide with sheer Hegemonic and imperial designs....and it is handy to have Israel as a hanger... to hang on it all their dirty deeds...which is worth a few billion USD...it's small change to pay, and Israel loves it...!”
I have been familiar with the work of Mearsheimer and Walt for many years. Professor Mearsheimer received his doctorates from Cornell University’s Department of Government (which, incidentally, did not offer a single course dealing with the Middle East.) They are considered two of the countries leading scholars in the field of international relations from the “realist” tradition. While I do not believe they are motivated by a conscious anti-Semitism or any innate hostility toward Israel, their perspective has nevertheless been compromised by another kind of ideological bias.....and they are being "used" as a cover by the PNAC crowds....unwittingly.
As political scientists, Mearsheimer and Walt should recognize that American foreign policy is a result of a complex mix of ideological prejudices, bureaucratic processes, domestic politics, group-think, and more. The interplay of these different factors has been the subject of some of the most acclaimed studies of the discipline, including Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision, regarding the decision-making within the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis (which, ironically, is the first book Stephen Walt reportedly read as a graduate student at Berkeley.)
Putting most of the blame on the Israel Lobby is reductionism at its worst, taking just one vector of power and influence and turning into a mono-causal theory. It is overly simplistic in that it embraces a naively pluralistic understanding of political power, denying the deeper power structures that drive U.S. policy in the Middle East. Indeed, I wish their analysis were correct, since a single, powerful lobby would be a much simpler problem to overcome...
Both authors blindly accept a number of naive and demonstrably false assumptions regarding America’s role in the world. For example, they assert that the foreign policy of the United States -- the world’s number one arms supplier for dictatorial regimes -- “…is designed to promote democracy and "freedom" abroad” and the U.S. effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East “has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion.” The reality, of course, is just the opposite: it has been U.S. support for the majority of the dictatorships in that part of the world that has primarily contributed to anti-American sentiment....and still does.
According to the disturbing nativism implied in Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis, foreigners and those allied to their interest by ethnic or ideological connections undermine the benign instincts of America’s leaders. In doing so, the two analysts create an artificial duality with the Israel lobby on one side and U.S. national interest on the other. As such, if the pursuit of certain policies ends up being bad for the United States, it must have been the result of those with ulterior motives forcing American leaders to do so, not the well-documented hubris of the current administration. In defense of Bush, whom they insist has “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” they ignore his stubborn resistance to any facts that contradict his rigid ideological convictions, his choice to ignore public opinion calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and other changes in policies, and his dismissal of the opinions of allies whose support is so crucially needed in these dangerous times....
In the last 25 years, many Lebanese and other Arabs, in the United States and in the Arab world, have been so awed by the power of the US pro-Israel lobby that any study, book, or journalistic article that exposes the inner workings, the substantial influence, and the financial and political power of this lobby have been greeted with ecstatic sighs of relief that Americans finally can see the "truth" and the "error" of their ways.
The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington's regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Lebanese and at best it would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and friend....
What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington's Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States' government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Lebanese who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.
Let me start with the premise of the argument, namely its effect of shifting the blame for US policies from the United States onto Israel and its US lobby. According to this logic, it is not the United States that should be held directly responsible for all its imperial policies in the Arab world and the Middle East at large since World War II, rather it is Israel and its lobby who have pushed it to launch policies that are detrimental to its own national interest and are only beneficial to Israel. Establishing and supporting Arab and other Middle East dictatorships, arming and training their militaries, setting up their secret police apparatuses and training them in effective torture methods and counter-insurgency to be used against their own citizens should be blamed, according to the logic of these studies, on Israel and its US lobby.
Blocking all international and UN support for Palestinian rights, arming and financing Israel in its war against a civilian population, protecting Israel from the wrath of the international community should also be blamed not on the United States, the studies insist, but on Israel and its lobby. Additionally, and in line with this logic, controlling Arab economies and finances, dominating key investments in the Middle East, and imposing structural adjustment policies by the IMF and the World Bank which impoverish the Arab peoples should also be blamed on Israel, and not the United States. Finally, starving and then invading Iraq, threatening to invade Syria, raiding and then sanctioning Libya and Iran, besieging the Palestinians and their leaders must also be blamed on the Israeli lobby and not the US government. Indeed, over the years, many pro-US Arab dictators let it leak officially and unofficially that their US diplomat friends have told them time and again how much they and "America" support the Arab world and the Palestinians were it not for the influence of the pro- Israel lobby (sometimes identified by the American diplomats in more explicit "ethnic" terms).
While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and full of awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable power commanded by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies, the problem with most of them is what remains unarticulated. For example, when and in what context has the United States government ever supported national liberation in the Third World? The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists' war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa's main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain.
The United States has had a consistent policy since World War II of fighting all regimes across the Third World who insist on controlling their national resources, whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals. This extends from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954 to the rest of Latin America all the way to present-day Venezuela. Africa has fared much worse in the last four decades, as have many countries in Asia. Why would the United States support nationalist regimes in the Arab world who would nationalize natural resources and stop their pillage by American capital absent the pro-Israel lobby also remains a mystery unexplained by these studies. Finally, the United States government has opposed and overthrown or tried to overthrow any regime that seeks real and tangible independence in the Third World and is especially galled by those regimes that pursue such policies through democratic elections.
The overthrow of regimes from Arbenz to Goulart to Mossadegh and Allende and the ongoing attempts to overthrow Chavez are prominent examples, as is the overthrow of nationalist regimes like Sukarno's and Nkrumah's. The terror unleashed on populations who challenged the US-installed friendly regimes from El Salvador and Nicaragua to Zaire to Chile and Indonesia resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions by repressive police and militaries trained for these important tasks by the US. This is aside from direct US invasions of South East Asian and Central American countries that killed untold millions for decades.
Why would the US and its repressive agencies stop invading Arab countries, or stop supporting the repressive police forces of dictatorial Arab regimes and why would the US stop setting up shadow governments inside its embassies in Arab capitals to run these countries' affairs (in some cases the US shadow government runs the Arab country in question down to the smallest detail with the Arab government in question reduced to executing orders) if the pro-Israel lobby did not exist is never broached by these studies let alone explained.
The arguments put forth by these studies would have been more convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the United States government to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent with its global policies elsewhere. This, however, is far from what happens. While US policies in the Middle East may often be an exaggerated form of its repressive and anti- democratic policies elsewhere in the world, they are not inconsistent with them. One could easily make the case that the strength of the pro-Israel lobby is what accounts for this exaggeration, but even this contention is not entirely persuasive. One could argue (and I have argued elsewhere) that it is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around.
Indeed, many of the recent studies highlight the role of pro-Likud members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton administration) as evidence of the lobby's awesome power, when, it could be easily argued that it is these American politicians who had pushed Likud and Labor into more intransigence in the 1990s and are pushing them towards more conquest now that they are at the helm of the US government. This is not to say, however, that the leaders of the pro-Israel lobby do not regularly brag about their crucial influence on US policy in Congress and in the White House. That they have done regularly since the late 1970s.
But the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel is contextualized in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle East. The pro- Israel lobby plays the same role that the China lobby played in the 1950s and the Cuba lobby still plays to this day. The fact that it is more powerful than any other foreign lobby on Capitol Hill testifies to the importance of Israel in US strategy and not to some fantastical power that the lobby commands independent of and extraneous to the US "national interest." The pro-Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel was a communist or anti-imperialist country or if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere in the world...
Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap its interests with those of the US, that its lobby is misleading American policy- makers and shifting their position from one of objective assessment of what is truly in America's best interest and that of Israel's. The argument runs as follows: US support for Israel causes groups who oppose Israel to hate the US and target it for attacks. It also costs the US friendly media coverage in the Arab world, affects its investment potential in Arab countries, and loses its important allies in the region, or at least weakens these allies. But none of this is true. The United States has been able to be Israel's biggest backer and financier, its staunchest defender and weapon-supplier while maintaining strategic alliances with most if not all Arab dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority under both Yasser Arafart and Mahmoud Abbas.
Moreover, US companies and American investments have the largest presence across the Arab world, most prominently but not exclusively in the oil sector. Also, even without the pathetic and ineffective efforts at US propaganda in the guise of the television station Al-Hurra, or Radio Sawa and the now-defunct Hi magazine, not to mention US-paid journalists and newspapers in Iraq and elsewhere, a whole army of Arabic newspapers and state-television stations, not to mention myriad satellite television stations celebrate the US and its culture, broadcast American programmes, and attempt to sell the US point of view as effectively as possible encumbered only by the limitations that actual US policies in the region place on common sense. Even the offending Al-Jazeera has bent over backwards to accommodate the US point of view but is constantly undercut by actual US policies in the region. Al-Jazeera, under tremendous pressure and threats of bombing from the United States, has for example stopped referring to the US occupation forces in Iraq as "occupation forces" and now refers to them as "coalition forces". Moreover, since when has the US sought to win a popularity contest among the peoples of the world ? Arabs no more hate or love the United States than do Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, or even and especially "Old Europeans"....who have become "enemy number One" for the USA...
Finally we come to the financial argument, namely that the US gives an inordinate amount of money to Israel -- too exorbitant a cost that is out of proportion to what the US gets in return. In fact, the United States spends much more on its military bases in the Arab world, not to mention on those in Europe or Asia, than it does on Israel. Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether in channeling illegal arms to central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period, supporting pro-US, including Fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan, coming to the aid of conservative pro- US Arab regimes when threatened as it did in Jordan in 1970, and attacking Arab nationalist regimes outright as it did in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed that country's nuclear reactor.
While the US had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralized him in the 1967 War. It is thanks to this major service that the United States increased its support to Israel exponentially. Moreover, Israel neutralized the PLO in 1982, no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron who could not fully control the organization until then. None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record. Critics argue that when the US had to intervene in the Gulf, it could not rely on Israel to do the job because of the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition which would embarrass Arab allies, hence the need for direct US intervention and the uselessness of Israel as a strategic ally. While this may be true, the US also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army. American bases in the Gulf did provide important and needed support but so did Israel....
AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar as it pushes for policies that accord with US interests and that are resonant with the reigning US imperial ideology. The power of the pro-Israel lobby, whether in Congress or on campuses among university administrators, or policy-makers is not based solely on their organizational skills or ideological uniformity. In no small measure, anti- Semitic attitudes in Congress (and among university administrators) play a role in believing the lobby's (and its enemies') exaggerated claims about its actual power, resulting in their towing the line. But even if this were true, one could argue, it would not matter whether the lobby has real or imagined power. For as long as Congress and policy-makers (and university administrators) believe it does, it will remain effective and powerful.
We of course concede this point...
What then would have been different in US policy in the Middle East absent Israel and its powerful lobby? The answer in short is: the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies. Is the pro- Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for US policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world...? Absolutely not.
The United States is opposed in the Arab world as elsewhere because it has pursued and continues to pursue policies that are inimical to the interests of most people in these countries and are only beneficial to its own interests and to the minority regimes in the region that serve those interests, including Israel. Absent these policies, and not the pro-Israel lobby which supports them, the United States should expect a change in its standing among Arabs. Short of that, the United States will have to continue its policies in the region that have wreaked, and continue to wreak, havoc on the majority of Arabs and not expect that the Arab people will like it in return.
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