http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/18/jonathan-freedland-israel-lobby<snip>
....The flaws in the Mearsheimer-Walt case remain as visible as when they were exposed by the Palestinian-American scholar Joseph Massad, Noam Chomsky and a clutch of other anti-Zionists. For one thing, if Israel and its backers really did control United States foreign policy, there would never be any divergence between them: Washington would simply do “the Lobby’s” bidding. But that is hardly the case. One can go back to the mid-1980s, when Israel and its friends begged the Reagan administration not to sell Awacs surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia - to no avail: the Saudis got their planes. Or spool forward to 1991 when George Bush pressured Israel to attend a peace conference against its will and withheld $10bn in much-needed loan guarantees unless Israel agreed to freeze settlements on occupied land. You might mention Israel’s proposed arms sales to China: Washington compelled Israel to back down, first in 2000 and again in 2005. More awkwardly, Israel has long sought the release of those who spied for it against the US. Washington has consistently refused.
Chomsky asks a useful question. If the US has been led to behave the way it does in the Middle East by the cunning “Israel Lobby”, how come it behaves the same way elsewhere? “What were ‘the Lobbies’ that led to pursuing very similar policies throughout the world?” As for the Middle East, Chomsky quotes the scholar Stephen Zunes: “There are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does Aipac
, such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby …”
The naive assumption at work here is that the American dog has no interests of its own, leaving it free to be wagged by the pro-Israel tail. It’s a convenient view, casting the great superpower as a hapless, and essentially innocent, victim. But guess what: the US emphatically does have its own strategic interests - oil chief among them - and it guards them fiercely. Support for Israel as a loyal, dependable ally - ready to take on Arab and other forces that might pose a threat to those interests - has served America’s purposes well. That’s why the US acts the way it does, not because Aipac tells it to.
Perhaps the most powerful example - if only because so many believe the reverse to be true - is the Iraq war. Plenty of Mearsheimer-Walt followers reckon it was the “Lobby” wot done it: it was Israel that pushed for war. But as Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and others have explained, Israel’s leaders in fact repeatedly warned against an attack on Saddam, fearing it would distract from, and embolden, what it regarded as the real threat, namely Iran. As it happened, they were right.
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