Well look at that! The Jewish Lobby did not push the US into the Iraq war. In their book The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy, these two fiction writers posing as Political Scientists repeatedly make the claim that.Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was a critical element in Bush deciding to invade Iraq. Recent reports have shown that Israel lobbied AGAINST invading Iraq and tried to tell the President to concentrate on Iran.
In a major oops moment Mearsheimer was interviewed on NPR’s On Point program, hosted by Tom Ashbrook, and let the truth slip out – early on the administration itself was determined to go to war against Saddam, and once the Israelis understood the die was cast, they decided not to contradict their most important ally--Basically cutting the legs out of one of the primary hypotheses of his book. GOTCHA !!
Mearsheimer’s Blunder Contradicts Central Claim Regarding Israel Lobby and the Iraq War (CAMERA) | |
Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of the controversial paper and now book entitled The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy, have consistently leveled a key charge: That the “Israel Lobby” played a critical role in pushing the Bush administration into the Iraq War, a war which they claim was in fact fought to assure Israel’s security rather than America’s. (For CAMERA’s point-by-point debunking of the Walt/Mearsheimer work see here; for a roundup of the controversy see here.) Thus in their Harvard paper and in their book, Mearsheimer and Walt assert:
So central is this charge to Mearsheimer and Walt that they return to it again and again, for example:
But in an interview on NPR’s On Point program, hosted by Tom Ashbrook, Mearsheimer lets the truth slip out – early on the administration itself was determined to go to war against Saddam, and once the Israelis understood the die was cast, they decided not to contradict their most important ally. After admitting this, Mearsheimer suddenly remembers that for more than a year he has been making exactly the opposite case, and so he immediately tries to backtrack, but there is no doubt about what he said. Here is the segment (click here to listen):
So according to what Mearsheimer just said, rather than pushing or manipulating the U.S. into war with Iraq, the Israelis “came to understand that Iraq would be the first operation,” which makes it very clear that this was a U.S. decision which Israel was merely going along with (or “embracing” as Mearsheimer would have it). After all, if the Israelis in early 2002 merely “caught wind” of our plans to topple Saddam, they could hardly have authored those plans, or even coauthored them, Mearsheimer’s backtracking notwithstanding. (For the full details on Israel’s real stand prior to the war in Iraq see this excellent article by Prof. Martin Kramer.) The bottom line is that Professor Mearsheimer has now directly contradicted one of the central elements of his book and paper, once again underscoring just how flimsy his theories are, and how questionable his agenda |
3 comments:
Check this out as well:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/29/3488/
It cuts the bullshit quite certainly.
Cheers.
Anti-Semites? Nah. Not in the good old fashioned Jew-hating sense.
Academic frauds and amoral opportunists? Yes.
See my comment at http://jpundit.typepad.com/jci/2007/09/the-devil-is-in.html#comments
For my opinions on these issues and a surprise reply from a Big Man on Campus, see my emails to Michael Smerconish, a radio talk show host who's started a furor in Philadelphia over his support of the Walt/Mearsheimer work.
I spoke of the need for increased sensitivity to the angry responses from the Jewish community to Walt and Mearsheimer, responses based on 2,000 years of persecution often started through polemical writings.
My emails were CC'd to Walt and Mearsheimer.
Note the puerile response from someone not on the mailing list, Michael Desch, Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-making at TAMU.
Walt and Mearsheimer must have forwarded to him, but don't have the balls to reply themselves.
Stunning.
Email thread is at this link.
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