Who’s in Charge? The Israel Lobby Ten Years Later

Mearsheimer, who was Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Walt, who was Professor of International Relations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, occupied the inner sanctum of American academe and perhaps because of the power and job security that went with those positions felt they could challenge a force in American politics that was so powerful no one dare mention its existence much less criticize its policies as having a “negative effect on America’s interests.” The reaction to the book was every bit as fierce as the authors anticipated. As anyone could have predicted, fellow Harvard professor Allan Dershowitz, called Walt an anti-Semite for broaching the issue.
In the end, neither man lost his job, but neither man emerged unscathed either. In spite of becoming a New York Times best-seller by breaking new ground, the publication of The Israel Lobby “ruined both men’s chances to serve in government or in university administration.”^[2] Because, as Walt put it, “both universities were very nervous about the fallout,” neither man was able to advance his career in either government or academe. Whatever regret both men felt paled next to the sense of duty that drove them to write the book. “If we weren’t willing to do that, then hardly anybody else would be. We couldn’t lose our jobs. We didn’t necessarily need government employment to pay the mortgage.”
The idea originated in the brief gap between 9/11 and the war in Iraq, which the neoconservatives used as its justification. The book had been brewing in the minds of its authors since the 1990s but the immediate impetus was the attack on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. That attack was used as an excuse to invade Iraq, and the invasion of Iraq, which had no “weapons of mass destruction” and had nothing to do with 9/11, made it clear that American interests no longer controlled American foreign policy, certainly not in the Middle East.
In 2002, The Atlantic Monthly commissioned an article on the topic after Mearsheimer brought it up at a meeting of the American Political Science Association convention in Boston. When Walt and Mearsheimer finally submitted their article in 2005, the Atlantic got “cold feet and killed the piece,”^[3] leaving the ms in limbo until the London Review of Books expressed an interest and eventually published it in March 2006, thereby provoking “an immediate firestorm,” according to Walt. At this point, the article landed on the internet, which turned it into an international phenomenon. According to Mearsheimer:
The internet was indispensable for making this article available to people all over the world. If this had been published in the London Review of Books in 1985 or 1990 when there was no internet, hardly anybody would have taken notice. But in the age of the internet, this article just ricocheted all over the world very, very quickly. . . Rashid Khalidi at Columbia University told me that the morning after the piece had hit the internet, 14 different people had sent him a link for the piece. It was such a big bombshell.
Both Walt and Mearsheimer would go on to learn that success in publishing an idea does not necessarily lead to that idea’s implementation of government policy. “I don’t think we—or anyone else—has had much influence on policy,” Mearsheimer opined with the benefit of ten years of hindsight:
I think the lobby is still as powerful as ever. It’s now more out in the open, and that’s not necessarily a good thing for a lobby, but it’s still remarkably effective. This is why you saw all those Republicans falling all over themselves in the 2016 Republican primaries to say how devoted they were to Israel because they understand that you don’t want to cross the lobby.
The Israel Lobby suffered a major defeat when the Obama administration passed the Iran nuclear deal, but the final lesson was that it was now stronger than ever. And yet Israel’s position is now more precarious than it was before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. How is this possible?
If there’s a plan here, it’s difficult to discern. Liddell-Hart once said that the point of strategy was to put one’s opponent on the horns of a dilemma. Secretary of State’s Tillerson has succeeded instead in putting himself on the horns of a dilemma of his own making. After Turkey invaded Syria following his announcement, Tillerson had two options: he could attack Turkey, which happened to be a fellow member of NATO and thereby bring about the collapse of one the pillars of the American empire, or he could ally himself with his archenemy Assad, the man the United States has spent the past five years trying to depose. Once again American policy had brought about the exact opposite of what it intended. After two wars, one which the US won and one which the US lost, the Shi’a crescent was stronger than ever.
Enter Trump once again. Does Trump have a plan in the Middle East? If so, what is the plan? There is a plan, but it is not of Trump’s making. As I said in more than one interview on PressTV, God is making use of Donald Trump to bring about the end of the America Empire. That is God’s plan, and it holds true for every empire on earth—past, present, and future. The United States fell under this plan when it abandoned the American Republic and embarked upon the road to empire. The trajectory of every empire was described in the Book of Daniel and then refined by St. Augustine in the City of God, who likened all empires to criminal enterprises.
Taking his cue from both sources, Hegel referred to the divine plan for human history as “die List der Vernunft,” which is normally translated as the cunning of reason. Vernunft is the German word for Logos. That final say is reserved to the Logos which created space and time and, therefore, the modalities of human history in the first place. The claim that Logos is using Trump to bring about the demise of the American Empire is still the only coherent account of his administration and its relation to the Israel Lobby to date.