Stephen Walt

I've just gotten a copy of a 79-page paper called "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The scholars began circulating the rebuttal privately in December but have not published it on-line, I gather, because they are working on a book about the lobby and are trying to keep some of their powder dry till publication. Nonetheless, the paper is getting around. I find it exciting, and will be referring to it in days to come.

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.

The sense of intellectual engagement here is thrilling. The tone is, Here is what our critics have said, here's our response. W&M itemize a wide range of critical arguments, and detail them, including the Forward's assertion, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." And while they don't give an inch, really, the respectful debate they are pursuing ennobles them and honors the contributions of Benny Morris and even Alan Dershowitz—far more than Dershowitz, who slimed these guys, deserves. For instance, there is a shocking quote in here from Dershowitz on MS/NBC, saying that W&M "copied" their words from neo-Nazi websites. Thus vilified, some people would threaten to sue. These scholars take the argument on calmly. God bless America.

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.

The paper concludes with a moving statement about the controversy. The ferocity of the attacks "offers additional evidence of he lobby's efforts to create a climate that discourages questioning of its actions, Israeli policies, or the U.S.-Israeli relationship. This situation is not healthy for American democracy." Hear, hear.

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.

For his Connecticut insurgency, Joe Lieberman amassed $13.8 million as of 9/30 (per the FEC). Ned Lamont was gasping away at about $9 million. Big stakes. One of Lieberman's more generous enablers is Robert Belfer, energy executive, who lives in New York. He and his wife Renee look to have given about 8 large to the diminutive power-mad son of a liquor-store-owner.

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.

The Sun reported that Belfer was not pleased by Walt's scholarship, and had made a call about it. At the time I believe Belfer had no public comment. But the Sun and others were pressing Belfer to renounce Walt, take back his money, make Walt sit on a cold metal folding chair instead of a Belfer, etc. There was also talk that Walt was being asked not to use Belfer's name in public statements on the Israel lobby. Indeed, when Walt and Mearsheimer's National Press Club event was organized by the Islamic group CAIR in late August, CAIR's press release identified them simply as professors.

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.

A smart friend tells me that despite the excited crowds gathered outside Cooper Union 3 weeks back, and the great excitement in the hall, there has been hardly a drop of ink spilled on the Israel lobby debate sponsored by the London Review of Books. The Forward covered it, the Observer covered it, so did the N.Y. Sun in passing. But as for the mainstream, zilch, on one of the most fascinating and educational evenings in memory, and an evening that consisted not of bombast or invective or accusation, or even screaming from the gallery, but in an earnest and concerted dialog aimed at determining some part of the truth. The Times is lactose-intolerant on the matter. It will be fascinating to see what coverage John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt get when FSG puts out their book. As it is, the traditional fear persists: that the seas will close over them...

As a devotee of Chris Matthews, I'd point out a couple new trends on Hardball. A, he's been using profanity, saying "damn" a lot and "bastards," usually about our failed foreign policy; and B, he's trying to give the neocons their comeuppance, but isn't able to. The trends merged last week when he said to Frank Rich, "Dammit, that's what a leader's supposed to do, avoid the traps people are leading him into" (that's not verbatim, but its close) in faulting Bush for invading Iraq and dismissing the "bad intelligence" canard.

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?

I've heard from several journalist-friends who were appalled by Dana Milbank's smear of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in Tuesday's Washington Post, in which he likened the scholars to Nazis. So: the mud has splashed back on to Milbank. That said, two "points" Milbank made deserve further rebuttal.

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.

His note also echoes something he said at CAIR when discussing the dual-loyalty charge some lodge against Jewish neocons: "All of us have many affiliations and commitments—to religion, families, even employers. It is OK for those different commitments and attachments to manifest themselves in politics." Walt went on to say that when those attachments shape how people think about things, it's OK to bring them up in political debate. I liked the way he said this. It got us past the whole rancorous dual-loyalty issue.

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.

I have tried to inject the Israel lobby question into the Connecticut Senate race. I gather that on Sunday on C-Span Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, also raised the question of where Lieberman and Lamont stand on this issue (in a discussion with Lanny Davis). Vanden Heuvel and I are for Lamont. But yesterday in the New York Sun, Lieberman-supporter Seth Gitell made the same plea in reporting on a Lamont appearance before the faithful at an Episcopal church in West Hartford:

[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?

The other day I got a copy of Stephen Walt's 2005 book Taming American Power:The Global Response to U.S. Primacy and was surprised to read the section on the Israel lobby. It was nearly as forceful as the paper on the same subject that he and John Mearsheimer published three months ago in the London Review of Books. It had many of the same ideas (including the red-hot assertion that the Israel lobby helped propel us into the Iraq war). Yet I didn't know Walt's name till the day in March that his LRB piece appeared, when a political friend emailed it to me after he was sent it by a realist friend of the authors. And when Walt spoke last month at the Naval War College, lieutenant commanders weren't bringing up the book; they were bringing up copies of his paper to be autographed. Walt himself said that the paper had been downloaded from the Kennedy School website over 200,000 times in the first month or two after publication. Wow. I wonder how many copies of the book Norton has sold.

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 »

If you go to the Foreign Policy website, you see the new magazine cover with the giant question: "Does the Israel Lobby Have Too Much Power?" This is of course a response to Walt & Mearsheimer, who are given the last word in an FP roundtable.

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 »

The authors of the bombshell critique of the Israel lobby showed up two days ago on the Diane Rehm Show and I hear they're on C-Span, too. And they're on the cover of Foreign Policy.

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."

Just one statement the authors made the other day. Responding to Dennis Ross's assertion that it's fine that these issues are discussed, they should be debated, Mearsheimer pointed out that the paper couldn't be published in the U.S. mainstream media, and Walt pointed out that they've paid a price for bringing this up. Just about every friend who has talked to him about the paper has said, "You're never going to work in Washington." It wasn't Walt's lifetime ambition to work in Washington, he said, and he isn't complaining about his position in life. "But I find it interesting that that is so frequently the reaction, that this has made us compete pariahs. Quite remarkable."

Commenter Miriam Reik points out a significant hole in my reporting from Newport yesterday:

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 »

The reason I went to the Naval War College was to hear Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of the controversial paper on the Israel lobby, address an audience of officers and experts at the Navy's 57th annual Current Strategy Forum. It's remarkable when you think about it. Back in April, Harvard people were saying they were going to have all kinds of forums on the paper—to denounce it, as Hillel director Bernard Steinberg told me. Well, no forums. There's been an embarrassed silence. And as has been argued here before, that probably stems from the fact that there is strong underground support for the paper's findings, including its assertion that the disastrous decision to invade Iraq came partly out of pro-Israel pressure. Yes, that's hard to talk about.  read more »

Meanwhile, (as Col. Larry Wilkerson has already indicated) the military is listening.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. urged SUNY New Paltz grads to stick to their guns and have courage.

Here is a simple test of the Times courage. Stephen Walt and Kaavya Viswanathan are both Harvard authors who published the most significant writing of their lives this spring. Go to the Times site, the search box, and type in their names for the past 90 days. "Stephen Walt" : Seven results. One article, six letters. Now type in Kaavya Viswanathan : 33 results. Looks like most are articles: about 20.

Of course, Viswanathan is the 19-year-old sophomore whose plagiarized novel, called Opal something, became a bestseller, then a scandal among the chattering classes (including moi).

While Walt is the 50-year-old Harvard dean who co-authored the bombshell paper on the Israel lobby that is being passed among government ministers around the world, is the talk of the State Department, and has (even the Forward will tell you this) "triggered an escalating debate on the influence of Israel and Jewish organizations." Nope, The Times can't touch that with a bargepole.

For months or even years a conversation has been boiling just beneath the surface in political circles, in dinner parties or offices, and finally it's come up for air. That's the discussion of the pro-Israel lobby, and how large a role it plays in a, our Middle Eastern foreign policy and b, the (disastrous) decision to invade Iraq. The worst thing about this discussion is that it has essentially been suppressed. It's not in the newspapers, not on television. Imagine talking about the politics of social security and not talking about the elderly bloc-- that's the kind of omission our media have had when it comes to the pro-Israel lobby, whatever its strength. Happily, the seal may lately have been broken by two leading American professors in an article in the London Review of Books. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html As the professors point out, their article would likely not have been published in the United States, though the shockwaves of the explosive article are being felt here more than abroad. Indeed, their standing-- John Mearsheimer is at the university of Chicago, Stephen Walt is a dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government-- has granted their argument an audience that other analyses of this question has never gotten. In other words, everyone I know is talking about it. I'm going to be writing about this article off and on in days to come-- it's that important, I think historic. It makes two controversial assertions. One is the argument that the pro-Israel lobby has exerted a "stranglehold" on American policy in the Middle East-- that our actions have reflected Israel's interests, often damaging our own. The second is the idea that the Iraqi war came out of a pro-Israel agenda within the Bush administration, fostered of course by the neconservatives. I tend to agree with Mearsheimer and Walt on both points. Our politicians' passive acceptance of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, an ongoing neocolonial tragedy that is doing no one any good, can be laid to some greater or lesser degree at the feet of the lobby. And second, the Iraqi war-planning party in the Bush Administration included as an important and even necessary component a Likudnik faction that often confused American interests with Israeli interests. Making the Middle East safe for democracy has turned out to mean mirroring and thereby validating Israel's experience-- occupying Arab lands, suffering grisly terrorist attacks, rationalizing indiscriminate attacks on locals as a justifiable response to amorphous "terror." Oh, and demonizing Arabs. The paper has drawn sharp attacks from the usual suspects. Alan Dershowitz has said that its argument draws on neo-Nazism, the New York Sun would like to see its professors defunded, Christopher Hitchens has said (on Slate) that the paper is a "vapid" effort to escape the truth: that we're in a clash of civilizations. The most interesting thing about the response so far is the resistance to it among the Jewish left. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime activist in the Peace Now crowd, reluctantly put himself behind AIPAC in a piece in the Forward http://www.forward.com/articles/7511 And here is Adam Shatz, the literary editor of the Nation, demurring on the paper in the Guardian. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/adam_shatz/2006/03/post_9.html "The vision of Mearsheimer and Walt of a lobby with the power to recast American foreign policy in its image strains credulity," Shatz says, arguing that Israel's location and ideology and militarism make it an appealing ally any way you cut it. I'm not convinced. If the lobby doesn't sway politicians, then a lot of rich shrewd people are spending a lot of money that they could better spend on other things. If it didn't exert a stranglehold, why is it that only retired politicians, like Fritz Hollings and Jimmy Carter, dare to criticize Israel openly? That John Edwards interrupts his vice-presidential debate with Dick Cheney to pander to the lobby? Or, tragically, that the 9/11 Commission Report, the official word on why they hate us, says not one word about our Israel policy as a motivation for Osama bin Laden when bin Laden has said that the Palestinian cause was high on his list of grievances against the west? I'm not sure what the lobby's true dimensions are. The one thing I'm sure about is that there is fear about examining it. Many friends of mine in the media seem to think that crediting the lobby with any power at all publicly amounts to trading in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence. I know where the fear comes from, but it doesn't show any faith on their part in the democratic process. The issue has become simply too important to keep ignoring, and meantime the prohibition against discussing it raises real issues about how free our speech is. That's the great thing about the Walt and Mearsheimer paper. It's torn down a wall. Let the discussion begin openly.