But Is It Good for Harvard?

The time has long passed when association with Harvard University conferred an imprimatur of presumed seriousness or even common sense on the output of its scholars. Still, it comes as a shock to read a polemic as vulgar as the "working paper" penned earlier this month by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Stephen M. Walt, and John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, carrying the title "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy." A shorter version of this travesty of scholarship appeared in the London Review of Books. It purports to explain President Bush's foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, as being almost entirely determined by a nefarious "Israel Lobby," which supposedly dragged this country into the Iraq war at the behest of Tel Aviv. The effort has been correctly identified as gross propaganda by the excellent reporters at the New York Sun and the Forward. The latter noted in an editorial:

"The core of the Lobby," [Mear-sheimer and Walt] write, "is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests." To be sure, they hasten to add, "not all Jewish-Americans are part of the Lobby." One 2004 survey found that "roughly 36 percent of Jewish-Americans said they were either 'not very' or 'not at all' emotionally attached to Israel." Good news: No more than 64% of American Jews are out to undermine America.

According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the Lobby (they always use a capital L) is so vast it unites not just Jews but "prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay," not to mention a group they charmingly dub "neoconservative gentiles," such as "John Bolton, the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, former Secretary of Education William Bennett, former U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and columnist George Will." The Lobby also infected the policies of the Clinton administration and dictates policy not just at magazines like this one, but also at the New York Times and most think tanks in Washington. In short, anyone of significance who has ever disagreed with Mearsheimer and Walt's neorealist foreign policy prescriptions is suspect, especially the Jews.

In real life, of course, the individuals and groups they identify have divergent and in some cases mutually hostile views about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Hawks when it comes to the Middle East tend to be hawkish about the rest of the world, too. Many of the Iraq interventionists also backed intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims, not to mention U.S. aid and comfort to Tibetan Buddhists, Confucians in Taiwan, and animists in Rwanda. Israeli views, for that matter, are all over the map about what the Bush administration is and should be up to in the Middle East and Iraq. Honest scholars of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be amused to learn that the word OPEC appears only once in the 83-page paper and that "AIPAC and its allies . . . have no serious opponents in the lobbying world." Men perspire and ladies glow, goes the adage. So Arabs, we suppose, don't lobby, they just bestow gifts, like the $20 million Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abd al-Aziz Al-Saud recently gave to the Kennedy School.

But really: Scholars who uncritically offer as evidence for their thesis a malicious blog by the Nation's Eric Alterman purporting to identify 61 "columnists and commentators who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification" hardly merit a serious rebuttal. Mearsheimer and Walt are following a well-worn, yet still slippery trail. As our contributor Stephen Schwartz likes to say, there is never anything new in the inventory at the Anti-Jew Store.

Illinois GOP Update

Last week brought two pieces of much-needed good news for the beleaguered Illinois state Republican party--reduced as it's been to minority status in both houses of the legislature and a single statewide office, and humiliated over the past five months by the federal racketeering and mail fraud trial of former governor George Ryan.

Item number one: For the second straight Thursday, an apparently deadlocked jury was sent home for a long weekend without having found Ryan guilty. Could've been worse, right?