On first reading, my chief response is (surprise) positive: the paper humanizes Walt and Mearsheimer, the voice is warmer and more intimate than their stunning original of last March. You have the feeling here of two minds struggling through a difficult subject. For instance, the authors say that it was former Harvard Dean Walt's decision—not Harvard's—to remove the Harvard logo from the on-line Kennedy School version of the original after newspapers began referring to the paper as "the Harvard study," but that given the great symbolism attached to this gesture, it was a mistake, and illustrates the saying, no good deed goes unpunished.

Something else that humanizes the document is the section at the end titled, "Our Mistakes." O.K., a number of these are penny-ante, still the tone is humbling. "...there are places where our choice of words could have been clearer or more nuanced... although we went to some lengths to demonstrate that we harbor no animus towards Israel or its more ardent defenders in America, it is possible that some of our discussion did not make this point as forcefully as would have liked. First and foremost, we regret having capitalized the word 'Lobby' in our original article..." Etc.

But now the anger over their publication seems to be dissipating, and what they had hoped for is coming to pass: a discussion of the ideas on their merits. Myself, the March day that a friend first emailed me W&M's paper and I read it through at my desk with my eyelids glued open was a great day. I had long felt constrained by the lobby, it had limited my work and freedom. W&M had a liberating effect.

I wish I could take credit for my clever headline. I can't, the highly-influential New York Sun came up with it, last spring, a week after the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby was printed by the London Review of Books. The Sun was calling Belfer out, because he's a big philanthropist to Jewish causes and also funds the Belfer center at Harvard's Kennedy School; Stephen M. Walt, one of the authors of the Israel lobby paper, holds the Robert and Renee Belfer chair in international relations there.

Big deal. Walt still holds the Belfer chair at Harvard. It does not appear that Robert Belfer has forced him to revoke anything, or has taken his money back. I imagine there's been a lot of pressure on Steve Walt, professional and social, at Harvard, and I hope we will read that story one day in his and Mearsheimer's book for FSG. But Belfer, too, has been pressured; and I'm going to take things at face value and say, People have behaved in a sophisticated and mature way here, even members of the Loose Coalition of Affinity for Israel (formerly known as the Israel lobby). Props to Robert Belfer.

Matthews's great virtue, and limitation, is that he's so street-smart. He has political understanding and shrewdness in his fingertips. And so he recognizes the continued effectiveness, politically, of Bush's idea: the way we fight terrorism is over there, not here, and aggressively and unilaterally; that will make America safer. It still works on the street. But Matthews is enough of a thinker to recognize the intellectual bankruptcy of those ideas, and to wonder at why the neocons and their fellow travelers (who have never shouldered a weapon, as he points out) are not now smoldering on the ashheap of history. Last week he said, in so many words, Someone has to come up with a better idea to counter that Bush idea. This is a great political challenge. It's one thing for any thinking person to know that Bush and the neolibs and John Podhoretz and David Frum got it wrong in Iraq and the Middle East, it's another to come up with a positive vision of limited American power that can be stated in a slogan and that has traction on the street—that people think will make them safer in an unsafe world. Matthews himself joined the Peace Corps in the 60s because of such a vision, put forward by JFK. Myself, I think the neorealists are doing the best thinking here, from Robert Pape to Stephen Walt to Anatol Lieven—along with the understanding that we win hearts and minds by offering a helping hand, the idea of Navy Secretary Winter. But someone smart and political has to imbibe the ideas and then regurgitate them into the tiny beaks of the general populace. Any takers?

1. Milbank says he overheard Walt saying after his talk at the Council on American-Islamic Relations that if you take a position against Israel, your business will suffer. Wrong. Walt is no businessman, he's a student of policy, and what he said is that if you talk about this stuff, your academic/professional career suffers. (It's the same point he made several weeks back on the Diane Rehm show and that I blogged about then.) Many colleagues have said to Walt, "You're never going to work in Washington." He adds, "I find it interesting that that is so frequently the reaction, that this has made us compete pariahs. Quite remarkable." Yes, and Milbank is now running around collecting wood to burn the heretics in Lafayette Park. 2. Milbank hinted that Walt and Mearsheimer are Nazis because their names sound German. I emailed Walt to ask him about two things I'd heard (and never thought worth writing about before) —he's of Danish ancestry, his wife is Jewish. Walt wrote back to amend those reports:

I am 1/4 Danish, insofar as my maternal grandfather was an immigrant from Denmark, who arrived here as a very small boy. His mother was a widow, and she died shortly after they emigrated here. He was subsequently adopted by an American family, although he still spoke a bit of Danish as an adult. The rest of my ethnic background--if it matters-- is some mix of English, German, French, and I think a bit of Swedish.

My wife's background is a bit more complicated. She comes from Russian and Rumanian Jews on her father's side, and Episcopalians and Catholics on her mother's side. (Interestingly, her maternal grandfather worked in the 1930s helping German Jews escape Nazi Germany.) She grew up in New York City, in what might be loosely termed a culturally Jewish extended family, and there's been lots of inter-marriage throughout. She was not raised in any particular faith.

As you might imagine, I find this whole type of discussion disheartening. Our country shouldn't be debating important issues by focusing on people's individual characteristics and backgrounds. That is what racists and anti-semites do: they look at someone's heritage and claim to know what they think, what they believe, and how they will act. Instead of focusing on our arguments and evidence, people want to look for some hidden motivation.

Walt's note is interesting on a couple of grounds. For one thing, it underscores the scholar's largeness of mind. Walt is no provincial. He is a sophisticated guy, his resume is Mandarin through and through: Stanford-Princeton-Harvard. He was a dean at Harvard; he is, or he was, going places. Yet he put everything on the line because of an idea. Impressive.

My critics are going to say, Weiss, ala Milbank, opened the door on this stuff by discussing Jewish tribal affiliations so bluntly. It's true, I opened the door, and I'll open it again (hopefully with accuracy). The point is, these affiliations have real meaning in our lives—but important ideas transcend them.

[Having praised Zbig Brzezinski, Lamont] was not asked about and did not volunteer on his own Mr. Brezinski's recent defense of the authors of the "Israel Lobby" thesis, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in the journal Foreign Policy.

Sarcastic that. But Gitell seems to want what I want: a public discussion of Walt and Mearsheimer's bombshell paper. Will George Bush, Joe Lieberman or Ned Lamont please give us a little help?

New ideas are exchanged on the internet. That's the thoroughfare. Walt and Mearsheimer might be able to sell a big book contract now, because people want to curl up on the couch at night with a good solid story about something they know is important, but the flow of new ideas is all electronic.  read more »

This is amazing. When Walt & Mearsheimer came forward in March in LRB, they were chopped down immediately by Alan Dershowitz and Eliot Cohen as "anti-semitic." Dershowitz said they had "destroyed their professional reputations." Now here they are with their professional reputations in tatters—on the front of Foreign Policy?! FP was acknowledging the fact that these men's ideas are simply too important, and too many people agree with them, not to be taken on fairly.  read more »

Diane Rehm was their first broadcast appearance. Stephen Walt says they waited three months because they wanted the paper to be absorbed first as ideas, without having the discussion personalized to "John and Steve, rather than what we wrote." Enough time has passed. "Now it's time for us to start talking more openly about it."

I wish Weiss had reported the answer given to the Lt. Commander's question about "how the Palestinians can combat the Israelis' foreign influence in the United States." Maybe it wasn't answered, but it is a key question that needs to be engaged if US foreign policy is to return to normal and a healthy relationship with the Arab/Muslim world.

The answer given at the War College by Harvard professor Stephen Walt:  read more »