Anatol Lieven

First off, let's be clear about something: It's easy to be against the war now; everyone is against it. Three and four years into Vietnam, more than half the country was for it—probably 60 percent. Right now no one with any sense in America thinks this war was a smart idea. Figuring out how to get out has been a moral and pragmatic nightmare.

The point Ken Brociner makes below is true: pro-Israel libs don't want any part of the left's anti-Israel rhetoric. He proves my point. The traditional left is divided. On the one side are Dem. liberals who say Israel is not the issue. On the other are lefties like myself who says, It's pointless to talk about this war unless you talk about the role of the Israeli Occupation. We each represent real blocs. And we're at loggerheads. You couldn't build a movement (when it mattered most in '02-03) with such profound disagreement between essential constituencies over a central issue

Two of my Jewish heroes during Vietnam were Norman Mailer for his book Why Are We In Vietnam, and David Halberstam for his book The Best and the Brightest. Neither a radical (ala Mark Rudd, in my last post). But both of them were concerned with a very important question; How did we get into this mess? Who were the idiots who thought this was a good idea? It wasn't hard for liberal Jews to enter into this analysis, because they were critiquing Establishment gentiles.

The problem this time around is that the same sort of analysis leaves many Jews deeply conflicted. Lefty progressives like myself are saying, It's the occupation, stupid, and Clintonite liberal Jews (Moveon.org) are saying, That has nothing to do with it! One commenter points at Dan Fleshler's piece in which Fleshler (a noble guy who has put in years working for the likes of Americans for Peace Now while I was sitting on my hands) describes the effort to pin the blame on this war on Jewish neocons as a conspiracy theory. He would seem to regard the neocons as a bunch of adjutants who were merely carrying out the wishes of a tunnel-vision President and evil vice-president. I disagree: I think high-placed advisers have real power. JFK mentioned Peace Corps in campaign speeches, sure, but it took a dozen committed idealists and intellectuals to get the executive order on his desk in 1961 and then build Peace Corps—guys who wear laurels to this day for their work. A dozen committed, brilliant (and twisted) intellectuals in high positions built the Iraq war. Many of them Jewish Likudniks. Ideas have influence.

I don't think that you can understand this war, and where America went wrong, without understanding the roles of: Israel's policy in the Occupied Territories, U.S. support for that policy, the strength of the Israel lobby, and the historic rise of the neoconservatives to real advisory power over 30 years. We were attacked on 9/11 in part because of our support for a (hateful) Occupation, and we invaded Iraq partly because of the neocons' foolish idea that you can remake Arab dictatorships as democracies—and forget about Israel's apartheid-style Occupation of Palestinian territories. These claims captured the Clintonite liberals: Ken Pollack stated emphatically that the "troubles" in Israel/Palestine had nothing to do with the strategic wisdom of going into Iraq; the issues were not linked. His advice re Iraq turns out to be brutally misguided, and we have to consider that he couldn't even utter the word "occupation" in his book. Just "troubles" in Israel/Palestine. The fact that Brookings' Saban Center where he works is underwritten by an Israeli is not a conspiracy theory; it is a fact of American public life. Pro-Israel money has transformed the culture of the thinktanks. Walt and Mearsheimer have written about this, Anatol Lieven, formerly of Carnegie, has spoken about it. Blankfort says that the Democratic party gets 60 percent of its money from Jews (which is consistent with the Washington Post's estimate of over half), which makes Jewish money a Matterhorn in the American political landscape. Last summer when Ned Lamont beat Lieberman, a lot of those big Jewish givers told the JTA or the Forward that they would stick with Lieberman no matter what, because of Israel. Didn't trust leftish-lib Lamont.

Jewish liberals tend to find this type of analysis upsetting and scary. They don't want to go there. Myself, I am motivated by the moral horror of Iraq: foolish ideas have turned it into a charnel house in which good people are terrified day and night and anyone who can has left. Like Lieven and Mearsheimer, I didn't go near this stuff till 9/11 happened. But back then Clintonite liberals were running around saying, "Our Israel policy has nothing to do with the attacks." This was foolish and defensive. Now that I've gone and seen what the Occupation is doing to Arabs—thanks to great Israelis like Yehuda Shaul and Elik Alhanan—I understand the rage it has generated across the Arab world. And as an American I say: we Americans have to address our part in that. I do so as a lefty Jew, and there are plenty of lefty Jews in the discussion. We're making an alliance with Protestant liberals, like the Presbyterian church, like Jimmy Carter. Do we think that if the Occupation ended tomorrow, the problems in the Middle East would end? Hell no. But ending the Occupation is an essential step in guiding the Islamic world toward (inevitable) reformation.

My liberal critics are right when they say I've been too blanket. I ought to acknowledge that moveon.org, the Reform rabbis and others are doing important work when they maintain pressure on Bush and other war-supporters, to the point where they at last come out of their bunker and admit what a mistake they made. Such an admission might help bring about a resolution to Iraq's horrors. But let's unpack the ideology that generated Iraq. By refusing to include the Occupation in thier analysis, liberal Jews are reducing their understanding to the crude idea that It's the evil oil companies and cowboy George, and deluding themselves about how the world works.

A few minutes ago in a speech before the New America Foundation, Flynt Leverett, a former CIA and NSC official, attacked Kenneth Pollack, the "thinker" at Saban/Brookings who served up the Iraq war on a silver platter for liberals. Leverett said Pollack had made a "deeply-flawed and flat-out wrong case regarding WMD," which led him to assert in his book The Threatening Storm that invading Iraq was "the conservative option."

The speech was remarkable because Leverett once worked alongside Pollack at Brookings. Sort of like Anatol Lieven, who had to parachute out of Carnegie when they didn't want to hear what he had to say about Israel. "People at the thinktanks have courage somewhere between a seaslug and sheep-guts," Lieven told me earlier this year. What a pleasure to watch the war-party delaminate.

But how amazing is it that Pollack maintains credibility? "Now he's doing it on Iran," Leverett notes, pointing to a Dec. 8 Op-Ed in the Times. And at a CFR event not long ago, Pollack was all-but-praising neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht's burn-down-the-house option for Iran.

As a devotee of Chris Matthews, I'd point out a couple new trends on Hardball. A, he's been using profanity, saying "damn" a lot and "bastards," usually about our failed foreign policy; and B, he's trying to give the neocons their comeuppance, but isn't able to. The trends merged last week when he said to Frank Rich, "Dammit, that's what a leader's supposed to do, avoid the traps people are leading him into" (that's not verbatim, but its close) in faulting Bush for invading Iraq and dismissing the "bad intelligence" canard.

Matthews's great virtue, and limitation, is that he's so street-smart. He has political understanding and shrewdness in his fingertips. And so he recognizes the continued effectiveness, politically, of Bush's idea: the way we fight terrorism is over there, not here, and aggressively and unilaterally; that will make America safer. It still works on the street. But Matthews is enough of a thinker to recognize the intellectual bankruptcy of those ideas, and to wonder at why the neocons and their fellow travelers (who have never shouldered a weapon, as he points out) are not now smoldering on the ashheap of history. Last week he said, in so many words, Someone has to come up with a better idea to counter that Bush idea. This is a great political challenge. It's one thing for any thinking person to know that Bush and the neolibs and John Podhoretz and David Frum got it wrong in Iraq and the Middle East, it's another to come up with a positive vision of limited American power that can be stated in a slogan and that has traction on the street—that people think will make them safer in an unsafe world. Matthews himself joined the Peace Corps in the 60s because of such a vision, put forward by JFK. Myself, I think the neorealists are doing the best thinking here, from Robert Pape to Stephen Walt to Anatol Lieven—along with the understanding that we win hearts and minds by offering a helping hand, the idea of Navy Secretary Winter. But someone smart and political has to imbibe the ideas and then regurgitate them into the tiny beaks of the general populace. Any takers?

In New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen offers an agonized but honorable take on the liberal taboo on talking about Israel, and says that Walt and Mearsheimer "have been both strenuously ignored and unjustly besmirched as anti-Semites." Good for him. But when it comes to the Iraq war, Andersen doesn't buy their argument that the U.S. invaded Iraq "primarily to indulge the Israel lobby."

Myself, I'm still waiting to hear the true reasons we invaded Iraq. In the meantime, I like Mearsheimer's line, that Israel's interests were a necessary but not sufficient factor.  read more »

I'd offer two more data points in the discussion, about two warmongering thinktankers and their supporters who played important roles in getting us into this disaster:

The Observer did what I wanted a newspaper to do: reporter Jason Horowitz stuck Israel into the Connecticut Senate race. He asked Lieberman how Israel played out in the politics of the primary, and Lieberman said (in a lovely allusion to Rabbi Hillel's famous trope on the Torah), "That's too big a question to answer on one foot." Then Lamont ran away as though his hair was on fire. He told Horowitz that since 9/11 he's come to admire that "feisty" democracy, Israel. Of course many observers of the race regard the Lamont groundswell as drawing life from subterranean criticism of Israel. Some supporters of Lieberman are angered by this, and point to what they see as antisemitic comments on Kos. The one statement Horowitz quotes is inflammatory—all about Lieberman's Israel "graft"—but it does touches on what is central to understanding the Israel issue in American politics: money. This issue should not be dismissed as antisemitic; it should be dealt with head-on, because it is so important. Here, for instance, is Harvard Professor Steven Walt, till lately a dean at the Kennedy School of Government, talking about money in his 2005 book, Taming American Power:

Israel is able to obtain U.S. support and influence U.S. policy because it receives sustained political support from the comparatively wealthy, well-educated, well-connected, and politically mobilized community of Jewish Americans, and from other social groups allied with them.

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America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies, by Georg  read more »