John Judis at The New
Republic has taken issue with a post of mine from last week, in which I
suggested that former Prime Minister Tony Blair's testimony to Britain's Iraq
War investigation was consistent with the interpretation that John Mearsheimer
and I advanced in our book on the Israel lobby. To his credit, Judis is mostly interested in evidence and he
doesn't stoop to the same level of character assassination that some of our
critics do. He
does accuse me of
not having read the Blair transcript, which is not true; at the same
time, it appears he has not read our book or my post very carefully.
First, I made it clear in my post that Blair's comments were
not a "smoking gun" that proved we were right, and I neither suggested nor
implied that Blair's testimony demonstrated that Bush went to war at Israel's
urging or to accommodate the Israel lobby. I merely noted that Blair had said that concerns about
Israel were part of the discussion, and that Israeli officials were consulted
as part of the conversation. Indeed,
after summarizing Blair's testimony, I wrote:
Notice that Blair is not saying that Israel
dreamed up the idea of attacking Iraq or that Bush was bent on war solely to
benefit Israel or even to appease the Israel lobby here at home. But
Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation,
and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning
for the war."
In short, Judis is attacking me for claims I did not make. He suggests that perhaps the Bush
administration was just informing Israel of its plans, which is certainly possible, but we have other
evidence-including several Israeli accounts-suggesting that Israeli
intelligence was also providing Washington with information that reinforced the case
for war. (See here, pp.
235-36).
Second, given that a number of critics had taken issue with
our analysis of the Iraq war, the bulk of my post recounted the evidence that a)
prominent "pro-Israel" groups and individuals backed the decision to go to war and used their
influence to sell the war on Capitol Hill and to the public at large, and b)
Israeli officials aided this effort, even though some were initially skeptical
about going after Iraq because they wanted the United States focus on Iran instead. Judis does not challenge the evidence I
presented; he merely asserts that support from AIPAC and other "pro-Israel"
groups had hardly any influence on the decision to invade Iraq.
As I wrote in my post, "reasonable people can disagree
about how important their influence was, of course, but at a minimum, the activities of these groups and
individuals reinforced the Bush administration's resolve and made it less
likely that other politicians or commentators would conduct a serious debate
about the wisdom of the invasion." Judis ignores this caveat, and apparently believes that the extensive
efforts to sell the war by advocates inside and outside the Bush administration
were completely irrelevant to the final decision.
But consider the following counter-factual. What if Bush and Cheney had
independently dreamed up the idea of invading Iraq after 9/11, but the plan was openly questioned by Israel,
AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, and the ADL, on the grounds that it might
lead to a quagmire and maybe even strengthen Iran? What if these groups had openly opposed the war, or just quietly
pushed for an genuine debate on different options, or simply remained on the sidelines and let members of Congress know that they had their doubts?
What if their counsels of restraint had been reinforced by similarly
prudent advice from respected think-tanks like the Saban Center at Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute or
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)? What if staunchly pro-Israel pundits
like Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot, Kenneth Pollack, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Thomas
Friedman, among others, had spent
2002 raising questions about the wisdom of an attack, or arguing as
passionately against the war as they did in favor of it? It's possible that Bush & Co. still might
have been able to stampede the country to war, but surely it would have been much
harder.
In reality, of course, all of these groups and individuals
were part of the pro-war chorus, yet Judis seems to think their advocacy was just
whistling in the wind. Again,
reasonable people can disagree about just how important the lobby's activities
were; what is beyond dispute is which direction they were pushing.
Third, the real differences between Judis and us is how one defines
the "lobby" and how one interprets the role of the neoconservatives. He concedes that the neoconservatives
were the primary architects of the war, and he presumably understands that the
war would not have occurred absent their influence. But like some of our other critics, Judis wants to define
the "lobby" narrowly. Specifically, he wants to confine it to formal organizations like AIPAC that
engage in actual "lobbying" activities and exclude the neoconservatives
completely. He also wants to
exclude academics and commentators who have strong attachments to Israel and
who consistently defend the U.S.-Israel "special relationship." Employing this narrow definition enables
Judis to argue that the "lobby" had little to do with the war.
Unfortunately, that definition also ignores the obvious
fact that most special interest groups have variety of different components,
and that these different components work to shape public policy in a number of
distinct ways. Interest groups in
America do not simply "lobby" politicians directly; they also try to shape public
discourse, seek to get sympathetic individuals appointed to key positions
in the executive branch (while trying to bar those with whom they disagree), and seek to discredit or
marginalize opposing views in the public domian. Anyone familiar with the scholarly research on interest
groups knows that this is how the American system of government works, and not just when it
comes to Middle East policy.
For this reason, we employ a broader definition, which is
more consistent with common sense and with the scholarly literature on interest
groups. We defined the "Israel lobby" as a "loose coalition" of
individuals and groups that actively
works to promote and defend the "special relationship" between the United
States and Israel (i.e., the policy of generous and unconditional U.S. support).
Having a favorable view of Israel or generally pro-Israel attitude doesn't make
someone part of the Israel lobby; to qualify, a person or group has to devote a
significant portion of time, effort or money to promoting that "special
relationship."
Just as the environmental movement or the "arms control
community" is not confined to a single group, the "pro-Israel" interest group
in the United States is not limited just to formal organizations that spend
their time lobbying on Capitol Hill.
It also includes think tanks like WINEP, watchdog groups like CAMERA and
the ADL, and more dovish organizations like J Street and Americans for Peace Now. It also includes Christian Zionist organization like
Christians United For Israel, but not organizations such as Jewish Voice for
Peace, because the latter does not endorse the "special relationship" (i.e., it does not favor uncritical or unconditional
U.S. support). We use the phrase "Israel lobby" as a
convenient shorthand term for this loose coalition, just as one might refer to
the "farm lobby," "gun lobby" or other ethnic lobbies, many of whom have
a number of different components as well.
As we made clear in our book, the various individuals or
groups that make up the lobby do not agree on every issue. For example, some support a two-state
solution while others favor a "greater Israel," but all agree on the importance
of preserving the special relationship. And the lobby includes unaffiliated individuals who
"actively work" (to varying degrees) to maintain that special relationship, and
who use their influence to push the United States to pursue policies that they think will benefit Israel. Just as it would not make sense to exclude a journalist like Nicholas
Kristof from the "Save Darfur" movement, or to omit Al Gore from the "loose
coalition" that favors vigorous action to halt climate change, one should not
exclude any individuals or groups who "actively work" to promote the special
relationship between the United States and Israel, even if they have no formal connection
to organizations that literally lobby in Washington like AIPAC or J Street.
By this commonsense definition, the neoconservatives are
clearly part of the lobby (or if you prefer, the "pro-Israel community"), whether
or not they belong to groups like AIPAC, the ADL, the Zionist Organization of
America, Christians United for Israel, or whatever. Both the scholarly
and popular literature on neoconservatism makes it clear that a strong commitment
to Israel is a central part of the movement's world-view, and prominent
neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol, James Woolsey, and Max
Boot have said so explicitly. Does
Judis really believe that these individuals and others like Paul Wolfowitz,
Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, "Scooter" Libby, Robert Kagan, or Charles
Krauthammer, are not part of the
"loose coalition" that actively works to promote the special relationship? Has he been paying attention to the policies
they have promoted over the past two decades? As we show at length in our book, the whole idea of invading
Iraq originated with them, and prominent neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Feith,
and Libby played central roles in pushing this policy within the Bush
administration.
If the neoconservatives are rightly regarded as a part of
the lobby -- and they should be -- and if they conceived the idea of invading Iraq
and played the central role in persuading key politicians and the public at
large to support it -- and they did -- then our interpretation of the Iraq War's
origins is correct. Having
examined the evidence, we concluded that the lobby played a major role in
driving the decision for war. We emphasized
that the lobby wasn't solely
responsible -- a point I reiterated in my post and Judis fails to mention -- but its
influence was a key cause. Remove the
neoconservatives from the picture, silence groups like AIPAC and the Presidents
Conference as well as pro-war pundits like Kenneth Pollack, and it's hard to
imagine the United States invading Iraq. Remember, the uniformed military
was not pushing for war, and nor was the State Department or the intelligence community. Nor were Halliburton or the oil
companies the driving force behind the war, despite what some of our left-wing
critics seem to think.
To be sure, the Iraq war probably would not have happened without
9/11 (another point we made in the book), but let us not forget that invading
Iraq was a strange response to that tragedy. After all, bin Laden was either in Afghanistan or
Pakistan, not Iraq, there was no credible evidence linking Saddam to al Qaeda,
and the invasion of Iraq was a massive diversion of resources away from the
real war on terror. Yet neoconservatives
like Wolfowitz were calling for an attack on Iraq within days of 9/11, even
though Iraq had nothing to do with the events of that fateful day and even
though the perpetrators of that attack were hundreds of miles from Iraq.
Bush and Cheney were obviously key players in the decision -- another
point I emphasized in my post -- but they didn't dream up the idea of invading
Iraq by themselves. As Robert
Kagan noted after the war began, but before it went south, the neoconservatives had a ready-made solution to the
post-9/11 situation, one that they had been pushing since the mid-1990s. The events of 9/11 provided an ideal
opportunity for the neoconservatives to sell their idea about invading Iraq,
and once it began to take hold in Washington, the other organizations in the
lobby and Israel itself then lent their influence to the campaign for war.
One final caveat: our definition does not imply that
anyone who backed the Iraq war is ipso facto part of the "Israel lobby." There are plenty of people who eventually
supported the war because they were convinced Saddam Hussein was evil, that he had or
was seeking WMD, or that he might threaten U.S. interests elsewhere in the
region. Plenty of these
people have no special attachment to Israel and do not "actively work" to
promote the U.S.-Israeli relationship; indeed, some of them have even been openly
critical of some of Israel's actions.
These individuals are obviously not part of the "Israel lobby," and we
never said nor implied that the only people who eventually favored war were members of the Israel lobby. The neoconservatives in the lobby conceived the war and
played the most important roles in selling it to Bush and Cheney, but they
didn't do it all by themselves.
Nonetheless, the bottom line is that the United States
would not be in Iraq today were it not for the influence of the Israel lobby-a
loose coalition of groups and individuals that includes the
neoconservatives-and no amount of dust-kicking can obscure that fact. To make matters worse, the
neoconservatives and the most influential "pro-Israel" groups do not appear to
have learned much from the debacle in Iraq. Almost all of the pro-Israel groups and
individuals who pushed for war against Iraq are now in the vanguard of the
campaign for taking military action against Iran, and for essentially the same
reasons that they favored invading Iraq. If the United States does strike Iran and the war goes badly, one can be
sure that these same groups and individuals will once again work overtime to
deny any responsibility. I wonder
what Judis will say then.
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