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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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