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Why
the US May Be Acting Against Its Own Interests in the Middle
East
The Israel Lobby
and Beyond
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
Professors Walt and Mearsheimer's "The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" is an important contribution
to the Israel/Palestine debate. It's too bad the important stuff
got lost in the melodrama.
The melodrama is about the
Israel lobby, aka the 'Jewish lobby'. One whiff of Jewish conspiracy
theory, and squads of columnists march off to fight the Nazis
lurking in academia. But at a bit of a distance, it's hard
to see why tales of the lobby are so fascinating.
Various self-styled Jewish
organizations and pro-Israel outfits, like so many political
pressure groups, brag about their success. No one suggests
they're lying. Exactly how much influence do they have over
US policy? To what extent are they responsible for getting
the US into Iraq?
We have no idea. US policy-making
is a complicated business. Some of it is secret. People's
motives and thought processes are often hidden. And to what
extent are the lobbyists pushing decision-makers down a path
they already want to go?
I don't even find these questions
interesting.
What really matters
is whether support for Israel serves US interests. If it does,
why on earth would we care about a pro-Israel lobby? If it
doesn't, then the lobby is a bad thing even if it didn't conspire
to get us into Iraq.
Walt and Mearsheimer are among
the very few to address this important question head-on. They
say: "Israel is in fact a liability in the war
on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue
states." They argue forcefully for their claim. They
also bear some of the blame for failing to get this message across,
because this material doesn't deserve the second-billing they
gave it.
Not that the message should
need much getting across; it really is a no-brainer. No doubt
the US is very concerned about Middle East oil; it's often suggested
that this is America's main interest in the region. Well, how
is that interest served by cozying up to the one country in the
area that all its oil-producers love to hate? Some pundits tell
us, with an air of sagacity, that Israel is useful for controlling
the oil, and suggest the Big Oil Companies benefit from the arrangement.
But how exactly does Israel help control the oil?
Israel would have to shove
through Syria or Lebanon or Jordan to get near
any oil. That would cause a major conflagration and - guess
what - destroy enormous amounts of oil-producing capacity.
Besides, the US doesn't need Israel to control the oil. The
US could occupy any oilfield in the Middle East all on its own,
without Israeli help.
Not that anyone needs to occupy
any oilfields. Every country in the Middle East is quite happy
to sell the US oil. Saddam Hussein had no problem with the
idea, and it's we who won't buy oil from Iran, not the Iranians
who won't sell it to us. If it ever were necessary to place
military pressure on Middle Eastern countries, the US could sit
in the Persian Gulf and astride the pipelines out of the oil
producing regions to control the flow of that oil completely.
So no, Israel isn't exactly keeping our SUVs on the road for
us.
Why then does the US support
Israel? Here I do tend to disagree with Walt and Mearsheimer.
Maybe the influence of the Israel lobby is the only logical
explanation, but that doesn't mean the explanation is right.
Nations do not always behave logically.
The US alliance with Israel
grew out of 1950s Cold War politics. America supported Egypt
against England, France, and Israel in 1956. But when Nasser
started buying arms from the Soviet bloc, things changed. The
United States, obsessed with visions of a communist Middle East,
felt the need for an ally and a base of operations from which
it could intimidate the countries it most suspected of veering
towards the Soviet camp: Egypt and Syria. The more Israel's
military capabilities improved, the more valuable an ally it
appeared to be.
With the end of the Cold War,
the rationale for this alliance ceased to exist, but the alliance
did not. There is a great deal in the government and conduct
of nations that runs on inertia, and the US is no exception in
this respect. Just as it has taken decades for European nations
to outgrow their sentimental attachment to the Americans who
defeated Hitler, so it is taking decades for Americans to outgrow
their sentimental attachment to Israel, its ally in the fight
against communism.
Maybe I'm wrong and Walt and
Mearsheimer are right; it really doesn't matter. What matters
is that the US no longer has any reason to support Israel, and
huge reason not to. Just imagine if the US stopped backing
Israel and gave even moderate support to the Palestinians.
Suddenly Islam and America would be on the same side. The
war on terror would become a cakewalk. The credibility of American
democracy would skyrocket in the Middle East. And it would all
be a hell of a lot cheaper. This seems a tad more important
than which Jewish neocon said what to whom.
Professor Joseph Massad ("Blaming the lobby", 23 -
29 March 2006) makes a reasonable case that the influence of
the
Israel lobby on US policy has been exaggerated. However his
explanation of what drives U.S. support for Israel is less successful,
and promotes an interpretation extremely detrimental to the Palestinian
cause.
Professor Massad asserts that
"The United States is
opposed in the Arab world as elsewhere because it has pursued
and continues to pursue policies that are inimical to the interests
of most people in these countries and are only beneficial to
its own interests and to the minority regimes in the region that
serve those interests, including Israel. "
One could say of such interpretations
exactly what Professor Massad says of interpretations blaming
the Israel lobby: "...the problem with most of them is
what remains unarticulated". What are those policies,
and why does the US pursue them? Massad seems to refer to his
earlier remark that "The United States has had a consistent
policy since World War II of fighting all regimes across the
Third World who insist on controlling their national resources,
whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals. This extends
from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954 to the rest of Latin America
all the way to present-day Venezuela."
But this hardly explains current
US policy in the Middle East. Middle Eastern regimes are not,
properly speaking, Third World, and it is not the case that the
United States has consistently fought Middle Eastern regimes
that insist on controlling their resources.
On the contrary, the US has
excellent relations with the oil-rich Gulf State nations, and
these nations have throughout their history insisted, with increasing
emphasis, on such control.
The same can be said of US
oil companies, who quite obviously prefer cooperation to military
force when it comes to operating in the Middle East. They have
stuck to this preference even when it meant considerable reduction
of their profits.
For similar reasons, the really
large US oil companies did not support the invasion of Iraq:
leading oil economists such as Daniel Yergin and Fareed Mohamedi
to provide convincing arguments for this view. So Professor
Massad's explanation will not do.
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