The Israel Lobby

Mitchell Plitnik and Chris Toensing provide some useful perspective here. In a nutshell, their argument is not so much that the Israel Lobby doesn't exist (it does) or isn't powerful (it is), but rather that the invasion of Iraq cannot be straightforwardly attributed to the Lobby since the main architects of the invasion -- Cheney and Rumsfeld -- were enacting a strategic plan for US military dominance of the Middle East in which the primary motivation was sustaining US global power rather than furthering the interests of Israel. While the pro-Likud neocons saw these goals as convergent, it was the project of global military supremacy that moved the big dogs, who were never themselves died-in-the-wool neocons.

What unites the neo-conservatives with their traditional Cold Warrior confréres Cheney and Rumsfeld is not Israel, however, but a common set of ideas about US power. The convergence of interests first appeared in the aborted Defense Policy Guidance of 1992. This document is the Pentagon’s classified internal assessment, made every two years, of comprehensive military strategy. In 1992, the task fell to Paul Wolfowitz, who set about conceiving a justification for maintaining the military at something approaching Cold War strength. He delegated the actual writing of the Defense Policy Guidance to his top aide Libby, who in turn passed it off to his colleague Zalmay Khalilzad.

What Khalilzad came up with stunned Washington when the draft was leaked to the press: The US was uniquely qualified to be the sole superpower, and to maintain that status, the US should actively block the rise of any possible rival. Khalilzad was specific: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.” The White House swiftly disowned the document, but it found an appreciative reader in Dick Cheney. “You’ve discovered a new rationale for our role in the world,” Khalilzad recalls being told by his boss. Rebuilding America’s Defenses cites the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance as its primary intellectual inspiration. When the Cheney Defense Department was reunited in the administration of George W. Bush, much of this “inspiration” made its way into the 2002 National Security Strategy. Together with Washington’s long-standing interest in Persian Gulf oil, the genealogy of PNAC suggests that the decision to invade Iraq was determined by grand ambitions for US power—not a “desire to make Israel more secure,” as Mearsheimer and Walt assert.

An extended essay in which Michael Massing reviews the controversy is here, and the original essay by Mearsheimer and Walt is here.

My friend RO sends this link to an LRB-sponsored debate about the Lobby and its influence.