> [...]
Thanks for this response, this gets to the substance. I'll try to address some of these points. Here goes a very long post.
> I think your confusion about what the US can or cannot do regarding a peace settlement stems from a more general one, which is the real point at issue: Who controls this alliance - the Americans, or the Israelis acting through their US proxies in the Israel lobby?
>
> It seems to me implicit, if not explicit, in the argument of those who see a sinister fifth column at work in the US that were successive Republican and Democratic administrations left to their own devices, unencumbered by the lobby, they would have conducted a substantially different bipartisan foreign policy in regards to the Middle East.
This underscores the fact that you and I are arguing from different premises. But I'm not sure you really see the premises I'm arguing from. I do think the Lobby's influence is real and that its existence and development go a long way in explaining why US Mideast policy is the way it is. But I don't believe it's a fifth column or that the policymakers associated with it are mere proxies for Israel. What I'm trying to say is that the ideas and interests and personnel of the "Lobby" are partly constitutive *of* America.
I'm trying to suggest looking at foreign policy in a different way, a sort of epistemological break. You talk as if there were an objective "US interest." But what counts as being in the US interest - whether "elite" or "national" or "corporate" or whatever - is constructed. It's not objectively given by nature or circumstances, it's the result of how people collectively see the world, which in turn is the result of politics, ideology, culture, religion, discourse, etc. etc. If you look at the history of how Americans - Jewish and non-Jewish, elite and popular, left and right - have perceived Israel, this should become clear. Anyone who thinks that Israel, and what it represents, is nothing but a "foreign country" to "America," just an indifferent object out there, a potential source of strategic or economic costs or benefits but nothing more, doesn't know very much about American society. In a certain sense, yes, US policy is "under pressure" from Zionists, but in exactly the same way that it's "under pressure" from oil companies, the Council on Foreign Relations, bankers, farmers, the AFL-CIO, the religious right, or anyone else. You seem to think there is a stable internal identity to "US foreign policy," that it has its own independent personality, and that any pressure from (say) Zionists, comes from "outside" it. But Zionists, among many others, are as much on the "inside" as anyone, and they along with the others *constitute* US policy or "US elites" or however you want to put it.
Now, I'm not saying interests are constructed and therefore "anything goes" - that there's nothing stopping the US from waking up tomorrow and deciding it's in its interest for Canada and Mexico to turn Stalinist and develop H-bombs. But that's only because there are so few Stalinists in America. In China, in 1949, there were a lot of Stalinists. And that's why many people there rejoiced when their hulking, traditionally imperialistic neighbor acquired atomic bombs. Now, isn't that bizarre, one might reasonably ask??? Surely *no* country's elites could ever *want* such a thing to happen??? Clearly the Maoists were all "fifth columns" for the Soviet Union, right?
So when you ask what I think Republican and Democratic administration officials would have done "if left to their own devices" - if there were no Lobby - you're really asking what US foreign policy would have been like if the US had had a different history. I can try to give some possible answers to that question. But I'm curious to know who you think these faceless "US elites," "Dem and Repub administrations," are? What do they want, what do they think about when they wake up in the morning? Right, right, they want to "control" the Middle East's oil, and that's why they support Israeli expansion. But on a given day, how do they know if they're succeeding or not? How can they tell if their "control" over Mideast oil has increased or decreased since yesterday? Can they look it up in the sports pages, along with the box scores? And if your answer is that they simply look to see whether Israeli expansion is succeeding or not then the argument becomes circular. And what would happen to the oil if the US did "lose control" of it? Would it levitate out of the ground and disappear? Would it start listening to rap and smoking pot in its bedroom? I've always been curious about what this phrase means.
I guess if there is such a thing as a universal "objective" interest for a particular "nation-state" (to be read as "a given person's conception of that nation-state"), it would have to be: You never want people who violently hate you to become powerful. That seems like a fair rule of thumb; it's hard to see someone perceiving any benefit from that. So that might seem to provide some guidance in formulating a foreign policy - except that who hates you is in large part a function of your policy itself. So we have what economists call an endogeneity problem. As Yoshie F. once pointed out, there's no law of nature that says the US can't be friends with Islamists, even radical ones. Just look at Afghanistan, etc. These issues come up again and again in diplomacy. China was America's arch-villain. Then Nixon went to China and the US started tilting toward Beijing in the 70's. "Ah," you say, "but that was because the strategic equation made China a useful counterweight to the USSR." Right - except that many of the wise old State Department hands thought the US should tilt toward the USSR, because it was much more powerful. *There are no objective answers to these questions*!!!
Your questions:
> 1. Absent domestic pressure from the Zionists, would the US have pursued a more "even-handed" policy against the Islamic Republic of Iran following the overthrow of the Shah? Would it have balked at imposing sanctions? Would it now be only mildly rebuking but largely turning a blind eye to the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons, as earlier in the case of Israel, India and Pakistan?
>
> 2. Does the US support Israel because it has been compelled to by the Israel lobby or because it has properly seen Israel as its strongest ally in the region against left-nationalist and then Islamist movements which have threatened its energy and geopolitical interests? Does the US refuse to support UN resolutions condemning Israel for its harsh occupation of the Palestinian territories, its brutal incursions into Lebanon and Gaza, its racial ideology, primarily because it is afraid to buck the Zionist lobby at home or because of its strategic alliance with the Israeli state?
>
> 3. Did the Bush-Cheney administration reluctantly invade Iraq at the behest of pro-Likud Jewish advisors like Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Abrams solely for the purpose of ridding Israel of the "rejectionist" Baathist regime or were other considerations of Empire involved for Jewish and non-Jewish neocons independent of their alliance with Israel and their ties to Zionist lobbyists?
>
Some answers:
1. To be honest, the history of Iran policy is sort of a gap in my knowledge. But I would say, probably not. Like I said, you generally don't want people who violently hate you to get more powerful. The IRoI hated America, because America tortured Iran for 25 years. On the other hand, it's theoretically conceivable that some kind of rapprochement could have been attempted. And didn't the Reagan admin try to cultivate elements in the Iranian military and the bureaucracy? Isn't that what the arms sales were all about?
2. This is the key issue.
So, as I noted before, right now US Mideast policy is run in large part by Dennis Ross. Does he feel pressure from the Israel Lobby? No, he is the Israel Lobby. So what does he think? Dennis Ross - like you - would say he supports Israel because it's America's strongest ally against Islamist movements that threaten our geopolitical interests. He would also say Israel shares the values that the US tries to project into the world. (I'm guessing you'd agree with that too.) Robert Malley would say Dennis Ross is profoundly mistaken and that America should adopt a different policy. So to some extent the question you're asking me is: Why does Dennis Ross run US Mideast policy and not Robert Malley? Obviously because Obama chose him, but why did he choose him? Presumably Obama consulted America's vital geopolitical and energy interests before deciding. But where do you find out America's geopolitical interests? Can you look them up on AskJeeves? Probably Obama would need a specialist to help illuminate US interests before deciding. So which specialist should he choose to explain them - Dennis Ross or Robert Malley? Boy, this is a little more complicated than Noam Chomsky makes it out to be! Maybe Obama would go straight to the source and ask the real bosses - the CEOs of, say, Boeing, Exxon, or the Carlyle Group. Except that I just checked and executives of all three are on the board of the Arabist, anti-Lobby Middle East Policy Council, whose president is.....Chas Freeman! Oh, the world is such a confusing place.
My view is that from about 1948 to 1956, to the relatively limited extent that Israel was supported by the US it was supported because it was perceived by a very significant fraction of American society - not just Jews or fundamentalists!!! - as a deeply moral cause, one with profound meaning for their vision of America. However, they didn't run the show. The strong preference of Eisenhower and the State Department establishment was to cultivate the conservative Arab regimes as a bulwark against the USSR, and that meant keeping a cool distance from Israel. But from 1956 onward, the conservative Arab regimes became ever weaker, and fewer, and more fragmented, as radical nationalism became more popular in the Arab world. Israel was increasingly a better option than the conservative Arab states. The diplomatic logic of the modern Israeli alliance has its origins there. So there I agree with you. But "logic" only exists in classified policy papers. As the establishment moved toward a strategic alliance with Israel, the *meaning* of that alliance - as it was understood by elites and many non-elites - was supplied by the pro-Israel fraction of American society, some of whom created the Lobby. That meaning is powerful.
Again, I agree with you in the sense that at *that* point (the 60's and 70's) the pro-Israel fraction/lobby was given a chance to invest the US-Israeli alliance with a certain meaning only because foreign policy officials, seeking to stem radical nationalism and the USSR, created an alliance that they could invest with meaning. But now it's 2010. It's not 1965. I'll say it again: It's Not 1965!!! What would Eisenhower say today? I think he might look around and say - hey, is America lucky or what! Look how much the Arab world has calmed down since my day! Not only is there no more Soviet Union to subsidize the troublemakers. The regimes and elites in places like Libya, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia - even Iran - seem more interested in reading the Economist and hiring privatization consultants than stirring up revolution. And yet the US is not only spitting in their faces *every day* on the Palestine issue, it's weakening them from the inside by supplying constant grist for their radical Islamist oppositions. Prescription: The US should get brutally tough with Israel, like I did (especially in my first term).
Naturally, one could also make the contrary argument - the Gandall-Ross argument, you might say - that Israel is our key ally in fighting the radicals; not, as Robert Malley would say, our worst problem in generating the radicals. That's why I said there are no objective answers to these questions. But if there are no objective answers then we're back to the question of how does Obama choose between Dennis Ross and Robert Malley? And I would give a very banal answer: Tell me what happened when Obama tried to appoint Chas Freeman. Answer: he was successfully demonized by the Lobby and forced to bow out. Okay, but *why* was he demonized with such enormous success? Because the *meaning* of the Israeli alliance is still very much with us, the meaning created by the pro-Israel fraction and sustained by the Lobby.
3. This post is already too long, so I'll just say: I never believed the Iraq war had anything directly to do with Israel. The Israeli security establishment for the most part didn't even think it was a good idea.
One minor petty point:
> You seem uncertain about this. On the one hand, you say you are "puzzled why the US refuses to settle the Israel-Palestinian conflict"; on the other, you suggest there's a "widespread misconception...that the US, if it wanted to, could force a settlement on Israel very easily."
Actually, I *didn't* say I was "puzzled" why the US refuses to settle the conflict. I said it was "a puzzle." I meant that it's a problem that requires explanation, not that it's a mystery to me.
Anyway, that's my 73 cents.
SA