Juan Cole

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 »

Some commenters have gathered on my Juan Cole post to slag Cole. I need to defend him.

One thing they're angry about is that Cole is being considered for a top job at Yale. They say that he doesn't have the publications to merit such an appointment. Wrong on 2 counts. Cole has a number of books to his name. And isn't it rather silly that people who use the internet to exchange ideas seem to regard the internet as chopped liver when it comes to serious scholarship? Cole's blog, Informed Comment, is itself an act of considerable scholarship. He is constantly reading, synthesizing, and supplying research to others. This is what scholars do. And why are these critics so worked up about Yale? It is the prestige issue. They don't want Cole to gain any more legitimacy for his ideas than he has. Michigan is already Arab-American-occupied territory. Well, guess what—if he goes to Yale, he'll probably have less time to do his very influential blog.

Something else that upsets them, Cole is trying to throw the brakes on Iran war-mongering by questioning the intelligence. Maybe we should listen, inasmuch as the last time we got war-drum intelligence about a foreign country in the Middle East we ended up occupying it disastrously. Specifically, Cole questions the translation of the statement in Persian by Iran's president Ahmadinejad that he aims to "wipe Israel off the map." He says Ahmadinejad actually quoted Khomeini: "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Ahmadinejad''s comments about Israel are frightening; I agree. How should we react? For me, the larger issue is, To what extent will our foreign policy respond to Israel's interests? From hatred of the U.N., to the invasion of Iraq, to the demonization of European opinion, to the portrayal of Arabs as uncivilized, to the refusal to engage Syria as a possible partner in helping us out of the Iraq mess—again and again the neocons and fellow travelers have identified our interests and Israel's as congruent. The fellow travelers are often liberals. Like Paul Berman, who in his book Terror and Liberalism, endorsed the Iraq war in large measure because of suicide attacks in Israel. Or Tom Friedman, saying on Slate: that the only way to counter suicide bombers, at the WTC and in Israel, "was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something."

That kind of hysterical thinking has helped produce great suffering, and waves of further hysteria. At least Cole is trying to figure out what the other side is saying.

Maybe you haven't followed the on-line feud over whether rightwing columnist Christopher Hitchens's alleged alcoholism led him to publish on Slate a statement by the influential scholar Juan Cole that Cole believed to be confidential. Cole had made the statement on a confidential listserv called "Gulf 2000." He felt violated when Hitchens quoted from it, and mused that Hitchens may have done so because he's an alcoholic. Cole writes

Well, I don't think it is any secret that Hitchens has for some time had a very serious and debilitating drinking problem. He once showed up drunk to a talk I gave and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism. I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind.

Whether or not you think Hitchens is an alcoholic (and what I saw of him years ago would support that belief then), it's great the conversation is happening. It's probably relevant, to begin with. And it's Cole's honest opinion. And it would never appear in the mainstream press. That's because the print press is so monetized. You get paid so much for issuing opinions in the mainstream press, and they make so much off those opinions, that libel concerns encircle every loaded statement. (Let alone the usual social groupthink questions: Unh, can we really say this??) In the blogosphere it's about information and true opinion. Hitchens's friends get to counter the claim or ignore it. There's a free discussion, closer to what intellectuals are saying to one another on telephones and in bars (sorry!), not a stilted and false one.

Though Andrew Sullivan's claim that his countryman was sober at the time—

I was at Hitch's yesterday as he filed the piece. He was stone-cold sober. And on top form.

doesn't seem entirely relevant. As Dan Swanson points out to me, the nastiness and self-centeredness of alcoholic behavior doesn't require having had a drink..

Not that I would come down on Cole's side here (as I do on his views of the Middle East). Cole is a very important thinker, for good reason; he has great judgment and knowledge. I gather that Hitchens is not in the listserv. If someone in the listserv passed on Cole's confidential statement to Hitchens, and Hitchens chose to publish it, how different is that, in form, from what the New York Times so nobly did in breaking the story about Bush's illegal wiretaps? Yes, the leaker violated an oath in giving the journalist info; the journalist shared the leaker's view that the info was important, and passed it on to his readers.