BOOK
REVIEW No, it's the dog that wags
the tail The Israel Lobby and US
Foreign Policy by John J
Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt
Reviewed by Mark LeVine
Ever since
the London Review of Books published the
controversial findings of University of Chicago
Professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard Professor
Stephen Walt's research into the power of the
Jewish - or Israel - lobby in the United States, the
two
men have been demonized as anti-Israel and even
anti-Semitic.
Now that the full product of
their research has been published as The Israel
Lobby and US Foreign Policy, it has generated
even more controversy because of its detailed,
well-footnoted argument that unquestioning US
support for Israel goes against core US strategic
interests and continues because of the undue
influence and power of the so-called "Israel
lobby".
The book is being severely
criticized because it seems to confirm long-held
anti-Semitic beliefs about undue
Jewish political power. But in reality, the
authors' premise and conclusions are all wrong or,
more precisely, backward.
Mearsheimer and
Walt seem to know little about the Middle East,
Israel's role in US foreign policy, and what are
core US goals and strategic interests in the
region. They argue that this is a case of the
"tail wagging the dog" - a small client state and
its allies in the US leading the US government to
engage in policies that are manifestly against its
interests because of undue political power.
But this is nonsense. In fact, it is the
other way around. The United States has been using
Israel to fulfill its policy objectives for
decades, from its role as a regional "pillar"
(along with Saudi Arabia and Iran) in US
containment strategies against the Soviet Union in
the 1970s up until last summer, when the
administration of President George W Bush
encouraged a disastrous proxy war with Hezbollah
as a way of testing the weapons and tactics of
Iran, Hezbollah's main sponsor, in the event of a
US attack.
Mearsheimer's and Walt's book
is also naive. It assumes that US political and
economic leaders, especially those close to the
Bush administration, want to build peace and
democracy in the Middle East, and that therefore
supporting Israel's occupation of Palestine hurts
this cause. In reality, nothing could be further
from the truth. As I showed in great detail in my
last book, Why They Don't Hate Us, and my
new book on the Oslo peace process, An
Impossible Peace: Oslo and the Burdens of
History, the US has never supported democracy
and peace in the region.
Instead, its
strategic goals center on the perpetuation of
continuous but manageable levels of conflict,
punctuated every decade or so by major wars, as
the way to ensure relatively high oil prices,
control over key petroleum reserves or at least
denying China uncontrolled access to them, a
disproportionate level of arms spending across the
region (by far the highest in the world, with the
majority of funds spent on US weapons systems),
and the continued survival of the authoritarian
regimes that ensure the perpetuation of a system
that has generated more than a trillion dollars in
profits to US oil and arms companies just since
September 11, 2001.
This pattern was made
evident most recently by the announcement of a
US$20 billion arms sale to the Saudis, which was
naturally compensated for by a $30 billion sale to
Israel (much of it paid to US arms companies by
the US government in one of the largest
corporate-welfare schemes in history, under the
guise of "aid to Israel") and at least $20 billion
more to Egypt (much of that also in the form of
aid paid directly to defense manufacturers) and
other allies. That's $70 billion for US weapons
manufacturers in the next decade or so, just to
keep the "balance of power" in the region.
Viewed this way, the end of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by all accounts one
of the main fulcrums of the larger problems of the
region, would be a strategic disaster for the
United States. It would lead to lower oil prices,
less spending on arms, and a loss of whatever slim
levels of legitimacy is possessed by Arab
dictators and monarchs, and open up the chance
that the people of the region would decide to
spend their money on other things than overpriced
US weapons, consumer debt, and high-end real
estate.
The authors have it wrong:
it's not Americans who are suffering from undue
influence of the Jewish lobby; it's
Israelis and Palestinians along with Iraqis and
the citizens of most every country of the
region, and now the families of US
servicemen and women deployed in the conflict
zones of the "arc of instability" in the Middle
East and Central Asia, who are suffering so that
some of the most powerful and wealthy corporations
in world history can continue to reap hundreds of
billions of dollars in profits without anyone
questioning why this system continues and whose
interests it actually benefits.
One thing
is for sure: aside from the "Jewish lobby" (for
whom the book is a godsend of a fundraising tool),
the two groups most happy about the publication of
book are the oil and arms lobbies, unquestionably
the most powerful, and invisible, lobbies in the
United States.
The Israel Lobby and US
Foreign Policy by John J Mearsheimer and
Stephen M Walt. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August
27, 2007). ISBN-10: 0374177724. Price US$26, 496
pages.
Mark LeVine is professor
of modern Middle Eastern history, culture and
Islamic studies, University of California-Irvine,
and author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting
the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld, 2005).
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beliefs about undue
Jewish political power. But in reality, the
authors' premise and conclusions are all wrong or,
more precisely, backward. 
