The Weekly Standard rips the tools at Harvard a new one;
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.
