Michael Desch
Prediction: Bush Will Now Emulate His Father Re Israel/Palestine
Consider a few facts:
Former Sec'y of State James Baker is now of course prominent in Iraq policy. Baker is famous for showing contempt for the Israel lobby in the U.S. and for trying and failing to slow Israel's illegal settlements during Bush I's administration. Indeed, fear about Baker's influence is the motivator for The New Republic's latest cover story, which slams Baker as a vain and sinister shadowy figure. Baker's good friend George H.W. Bush blamed his defeat in 1992 in part on the Israel lobby, something I reported months ago, quoting Michael Desch (from his superb paper on the impact of the Holocaust on policy-making).
Desch's evidence for Bush's thinking was "informal comments" by the former President himself, in a 2005 visit to the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M—a visit at which Bush decried the power of AIPAC. The new defense secretary Robert Gates is of course the president of Texas A&M. The holder of the Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-making at the Bush School is Desch, a realist who has been highly critical of the neocons re the Middle East (but who emerged himself out of the Strauss fen at the University of Chicago; Desch says Strauss would have been against the Iraq invasion, as it lacked Straussian requirements: prudence and a respect for the "habits, mores, and customs of a society," one whose lack of formal institutions left it unready for democracy). Desch has also written favorably of Walt and Mearsheimer's findings.
Gates is friends with fellow Texan academic and spook Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, like him a top CIA official in a Republican administration. Now at UT in Austin, Inman has a pronounced belief, shared by realists Walt and Mearsheimer, that concern for Israel's security played a large role in the (disastrous) decision to invade Iraq (as reported by Peter Voskamp , editor of the Block Island Times, who once saw Gates and Inman and their wives dining together at a little Mexican restaurant in Austin).
Add this all up and what do you get?
Well, it's a different gang. The Gates appointment may well signal a shift in U.S. policy re Israel/Palestine, and a tougher American line on our militarized quasi-democratic client-state. Having first delegated his thinking on this part of the world to Dick Cheney and the neocons, thereby nullifying the existing braintrust in the State Department, President Bush is turning now to his father's circle, a circle that includes men whose ideas will be highly concerning to those who would insulate Israel from criticism. Myself, I think it's a great thing; these guys are wiser and far more balanced than the visionaries of the American Enterprise Institute. Maybe they can give our statecraft balance
The shift would also seem to reflect badly on George Bush's aforementioned intellect. Does he think? He lacks the confidence required to have a hypothesis. There's no deduction or addition, no dialectic, no synthesis. The mind behaves like a slot machine. Yesterday it was lemons, today it's cherries.
Having run away from his father, psychically, Bush is now running back at him. (Any therapist would say, that doesn't resolve the conflict.)
Israel's Interest in Leaving Occupied Territories
Israeli Foreign Ministry figures reveal that while Qassam rocket attacks increased marginally from 2004 to 2005 (309 to 377), the total number of terrorist attacks declined by almost 40 percent during that same period (from 3888 to 2456), mostly due to the over 50 percent decline of terrorist attacks in Gaza. In 2004, 117 Israeli civilians and security forces personnel died in terrorist attacks. In 2005, the year of the Gaza withdrawal, 45 Israelis died, a decline of more than 50 percent. Withdrawal from the occupied territories makes strategic sense because the vast majority of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and security personnel take place there. In 2005, the most recent year for which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports figures, of a total of 2456 total terrorist attacks, less than 8 percent (195) took place inside the Green Line. Judea and Samaria were the site of nearly half of the terrorist attacks in 2005. Despite the recent upsurge in violence, the overall trend is clear: Withdrawal from occupied territory reduces, rather than increases, the terrorist threat to Israel.
Who Does the Israel Lobby Represent?
If the Lobby is bad for Israel, and bad for America, and not so good for American Jews, who is it good for, who does it work for? We have here a strange lobby, apparently without a constituency, a lobby that mobilizes quite extraordinary resources to the benefit of nobody -- less an Israel Lobby, more a Nihilist Lobby.
Mike responds, per Walt and Mearsheimer, that it serves "conservative Jews with direct links to the Likud party. AIPAC."
It's a fascinating question. Mike Massing got at it in his searching NYRB piece on the lobby. If American Jews are statistically for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine and against the Iraq war, then how come hawks who press for more settlements/colonies are driving the train? Jewish opinion is misrepresented by the lobbyists.
My answer is that there's an old guard that controls the thrust of the lobby and that, like the gun lobby, the great tapestry of Jewish opinion simply gives way passively to that Old Guard. Lets them handle it. Says these issues are too complex and they know them. I did this for years myself, when I did nothing to challenge Eric Breindel, a neoconservative I knew, saying to myself, He knows this stuff, and cares the most, let him have the issue.
The key to understanding the Old Guard is that it's highly neurotic. It is swept by fears. This is what Henry Siegman was telling the Washington Post two weeks ago—
"There's a certain dynamic to organized Jewish life as to all so-called defense organizations created to protect a supposedly vulnerable group...It creates a culture of victimhood, and it often attracts people who feel like they're victims as well."
It is the same thing that Texas A&M prof Michael Desch says in his new paper on the Holocaust: that we have allowed people to use the fears generated by the Holocaust, and the west's alleged abandonment of the Jews to the Nazis, to manipulate policymakers re Israel.
One of my commenters makes the point himself:
No the risk is that too many of us learned our lessons from WWII and the abandonment of Czechoslovakia and the Jews of Europe. Never again actually means something to those of us not devoted to Marx and the class war.
The answer to this commenter is that we have to see human history as larger than the Holocaust, and not see a rocket attack as an existentialist threat to a state that possesses nuclear weapons. History contains many present terrors, including the destruction of great Arab cities, allegedly to save them. I think there's a new guard of Jewish opinion that may actually help defang the pro-Israel lobby, as it understands that the Holocaust was 60 years ago, and manages to emerge from the victim-neurosis and see that we are singularly privileged in America. Privilege should translate into largeness, not selfishness.
Did the First President Bush Lose His Job to the Israel Lobby?
First there's yesterday's Washington Post Magazine piece on the lobby. It explored the standoff between Bush and Yitzhak Shamir in 1992, when Bush tried to stop Israel from building more settlements in the Occupied Territories.
Bush paid a price... He got crushed in a small group of heavily Jewish precincts in states such as New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Florida in his November 1992 election loss to Bill Clinton.
The argument is made more emphatically in the Summer 2006 issue of Security Studies, in an important article on the effect of the Holocaust on our foreign policy titled: "The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy," by Michael Desch, a professor at Texas A&M. read more »
