Oh Come On, Let’s Blame The Israel Lobby For Iraq
March 19th, 2009 § 3 Comments
My friend, the great Philip Weiss, states the obvious in his review of Juan Cole’s book. With all due respect, I found Cole’s evasions of the lobby question, and his curious insistence on wielding a club while ‘engaging with the Muslims’ world rather insulting. Both on Democracy Now and the Colbert Report his performances were anything but impressive. Frankly, it is very unlikely that I’d bother reading his book if his media performances are in any way a reflection of the book’s contents.
I’m going to order Juan Cole’s book today. I have the typical American understanding of the Muslim world –pretty small–and admire the engagement and seriousness that Cole has brought to this issue again and again. That’s why I’m addicted to his blog.
But let’s talk about the Israel lobby and the Iraq War. Reading MJ’s synopsis, I find Cole’s view unpersuasive. I don’t think the oil companies had any interest in the Iraq War. Saudi Arabia didn’t want it. Just ask Chas Freeman, the former ambassador, who vehemently opposed the war. Realists hated this war. John Mearsheimer was for the Gulf War out of an American interest that included oil, Saudi Arabia was for that war. Both were against the Iraq war.
Using the oil companies as a motivator strikes me as a lazy leftwing parking job. Everyone’s going to believe it on our side because we all hate the oil companies; but the evidence isn’t there.
It’s true that Cheney was at American Enterprise Institute before the Bush administration, and he brought all the brains into the White House from AEI, and AEI’s board has a lot of oil guys on it. Ok. The problem with this chain of logic is: Cheney is one of the most opaque guys in American public life. When he does admit of a philosophy it’s straight neocon stuff.
He got the neocon doctrine at AEI; and that was that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and we have to change regimes to make the Middle East safe for the west. Cheney fell in love with Bernard Lewis, a leading neocon. Had him to the White House, toasted him at his birthday. Cheney believes Bernard Lewis. The brains that came in from AEI were people like David Wurmser and Richard Perle. These guys didn’t care about oil, they care about Israel and ending the Oslo peace process, taking the world’s eyes off the Israeli occupation.
The problem I have with people who diminish the neocon influence is that they are diminishing the reason that Juan Cole blogs and that people put millions into thinktanks– ideas have influence. They are diminishing the crucial role of intellectuals in coming up with really good and bad policy ideas. Peace Corps, Vietnam, Great Society, welfare reform, all these things come out of people thinking. Iraq came out of very bad thinking. So did Vietnam. David Halberstam wrote The Best and the Brightest about those bad ideas.
Another reason people blame the oil companies is to escape the thrust of Walt and Mearsheimer’s argument, which the Forward, a Jewish newspaper in New York, summed up, In Dark Times, Blame the Jews. Good liberal war critics don’t want to be in the position of blaming the Jews.
I’m Jewish. And I blame some Jews. Rightwing neocon Jews who share the Likudnik view that the Israeli occupation is OK. Until Jews deal with this issue, the community I grew up in won’t be healed of its responsibility for violence in the Middle East. And until the U.S. deals with its special relationship to Israel and the afflictions of the Israeli occupation, our foreign policy in that region will be hamstrung. As Cole has pointed out in his first post, That’s what the region cares about: Palestinian statelessness.
Talking about this stuff means facing the sociological piece, which is the incredible success of Jews in American society and the importance of Jewish money in the political process. I know, that’s uncomfortable stuff. As a Jew, I wish that money had a neutral effect. But right now it tends to be a rightward effect, and it gives a blank check to Israel, which in turn gives my country a terrible reputation in the Arab world. Both the Lebanon war in ’06 and the Gaza slaughter in ’09-’09–both strategic disasters that anyone could see coming–were signed off on by overwhelming majorities of Congress because of fears of Jewish power in the political process.
When Juan Cole’s job offer was knocked down at Yale University a couple years ago, it wasn’t because of the oil companies. It was the neocons who care about Israel and who want to sustain the ideas behind the war on terror, and who feared an intellectual threat to this orthodoxy from Cole, who has done amazing work on his blog on this issue. And the political question here is: Why did the Yale brass overturn a faculty decision in favor of Cole? It wasn’t oil companies, it was, I believe, fears of losing funding. Similarly, some of the first threats Harvard got when Steve Walt’s name showed up on the Israel Lobby paper in ’06 came from the Hillel rabbi at Harvard and the neocon New York Sun saying they were going to question the funding for Walt’s chair–from Robert Belfer, who is on the board of the neocon thinktank WINEP. Big money helps explain Bill Clinton’s support for the horrifying West Bank colonies (“settlements”) in the ’92 election and his wife’s support for the Iraq war. You just can’t get around that factor.
To sum up, I’m not sure why we went into Iraq. We’ll have a better idea when all the memoirs come out. George Bush was the decider. He has a very weak mind. I don’t think the Oedipal–war my daddy didn’t have the cojones to attempt; Saddam tried to take out my dad–stuff can fully be discounted. Cheney has a strong will, and probably a high IQ, but he’s not an intellectual. I think he got his ideas here from the neocons, who were pushing this stuff for many years, pushing the invasion of Iraq.
It strikes me as a form of politeness to excuse the Israel lobby from the motivation here. And many former policy people have basically seconded this view, from Colin Powell saying it was the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that pushed Iraq, to George Tenet blaming the Jews in Pat Tyler’s recent book, to Condi Rice deputy Philip Zelikow saying the Israel-security interest was the interest that dare not speak its name, to Rice herself saying as much in Glenn Kessler’s superb biography, The Confidante.
Muhammed, Cole was a regular pundit on Al Franken’s radio show. Franken had a slew of left-of-center politicians and pundits on his show that wouldn’t dare rock the boat re: Israel-Palestine. Cole was one of them, every Thursday I recall. Hope that clarifies some things!
[...] Update: Juan Cole revisited by P U L S E [...]
Weiss is not wrong in identifying the Israeli Lobby as a preeminent factor in the US motivation for attacking Iraq.
Freeman himself drew a pointed distinction between what is simplistically over-generalized here by Weiss as the Israeli Lobby and the specific Lieberman fascist network and its US camp followers like the Lieberman-loving Rosen and Pipes that vetoed his appointment.
As well as the Israeli Lobby,it was the Murdoch press,Fox News and Nancy Pelosi who did for Freeman.
The last three named are British-linked assets as much as they are pro-Israeli ones.