接續"英美的特殊關係"

Foreign Policy 2006年七/八月號

An Uncivilized Argument

Claiming that the lobby endangers America is irresponsible and wrong.

By Aaron Friedberg

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are engaging in a stunning display of intellectual arrogance. From their Olympian perch, the authors, apparently alone, see what is truly in America's national interest. While others cower in silence, they brave accusations of anti-Semitism to speak truth to power. If the American people persist in seeing Israel in a positive light, it is because they have been manipulated and misinformed. Those who advocate policies with which the authors disagree are either unwitting dupes or active agents of a foreign power. In response to their critics, Mearsheimer and Walt recently lamented the difficulty of having a "civilized discussion about the role of Israel in American foreign policy." If that is the end they truly seek, they chose a distinctly uncivilized way to begin.

Although the authors say they believe that the United States still has an interest in Israel's well-being, they do their best to demolish any conceivable rationale for continued American support of that country. In their view, Israel has become a strategic liability, provoking Islamist jihadis and stirring anti-Americanism. Morally, Mearsheimer and Walt proclaim, Israel is no better than its adversaries. That is a distorted accounting. Israel is a democracy, and its enemies are authoritarians of various stripes. Although the authors choose to ignore it, there is an obvious moral distinction between combatants who send suicide bombers to kill civilians and those who target terrorist commanders.

That is not to say that everything Israel does is right or deserving of American support. For more than a decade, Washington has sought to broker a settlement that will lead to Israel's withdrawal to defensible borders from virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza (territories taken, it should be recalled, in a war Israel's neighbors provoked and on which they had previously refused to establish a permanent Palestinian homeland) and create a coexisting Palestinian state. Here the primary obstacle to peace has not been Israeli recalcitrance, but the absence of a Palestinian negotiating partner willing to make agreements and capable of keeping them.

What would the authors have the United States do differently? Cut off support for Israel, apparently. Such a move is unlikely to make Israel more pliant, and it will certainly embolden Israel's enemies and empower the more radical among them who still dream of its destruction. The jihadis who wage war on the West will not be mollified. Instead, they will rightly claim victory and use their success to rally more followers. Whatever the United States gains in popularity by abandoning a friend, it will lose in the more important international currency of respect. For all their tough-minded "realism," Mearsheimer and Walt are surprisingly obtuse about the pitfalls of appeasement.

Mearsheimer and Walt blame the distortion of U.S. policy on "the lobby," which in their previous writing they deemed worthy of a capital "L." They portray it as an amorphous entity, sometimes indistinguishable from a single organization, AIPAC, and at other times broad enough to include any person or group that seeks to "push U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." The authors generously noted in an essay in the London Review of Books that "not all Jewish-Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them." But their definition is so broad as to capture the great majority of American Jews who do care about Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt say there is "nothing improper" in the lobby's efforts to sway U.S. policy, but they go on to describe its activities in ways that suggest otherwise. The lobby stifles debate, "marginalize[s] anyone who criticizes U.S. support for Israel," and, as they wrote in their original essay, convinces leaders to send young Americans to do "most of the fighting [and] dying" to defeat Israel's enemies. Its members are not merely mistaken, they are guilty of putting the interests of a foreign country above their own.

At a minimum, this is a slanderous and unfalsifiable allegation of treason leveled at individuals whose views on Middle East policy differ from the authors'. At worst, it is an ugly accusation of collective disloyalty, containing the most unsavory of historical echoes. Mearsheimer and Walt have built successful careers out of advocating a rigorous, scientific approach to the study of politics. Sadly, their argument here is not only unscientific, it is inflammatory, irresponsible, and wrong.

Aaron Friedberg, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, served from 2003 to 2005 as a deputy assistant to the vice president of the United States for national security affairs.

A Dangerous Exemption

Why should the Israel lobby be immune from criticism?

By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Given that the Middle East is currently the central challenge facing America, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have rendered a public service by initiating a much-needed public debate on the role of the "Israel lobby" in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy.

The participation of ethnic or foreign-supported lobbies in the American policy process is nothing new. In my public life, I have dealt with a number of them. I would rank the Israeli-American, Cuban-American, and Armenian-American lobbies as the most effective in their assertiveness. The Greek- and Taiwanese-American lobbies also rank highly in my book. The Polish-American lobby was at one time influential (Franklin Roosevelt complained about it to Joseph Stalin), and I daresay that before long we will be hearing a lot from the Mexican-, Hindu-, and Chinese-American lobbies as well.

Mearsheimer and Walt are critical of the pro-Israel lobby and of Israel's conduct in a number of historical instances. They are outspoken regarding Israel's prolonged mistreatment of the Palestinians. They are, in brief, generally critical of Israel's policy and, thus, could be labeled as being in some respects anti-Israel. But an anti-Israel bias is not the same as anti-Semitism. To argue as much is to claim an altogether unique immunity for Israel, untouchable by the kind of criticism that is normally directed at the conduct of states.

Anyone who recalls World War II knows that anti-Semitism is the unbridled and irrational hatred of Jews. The case made by Mearsheimer and Walt did not warrant the hysterical charges of anti-Semitism leveled at them by several academics in self-demeaning attacks published in leading U.S. newspapers. Sadly, some even stooped to McCarthyite accusations of guilt by association, triumphantly citing the endorsement of Mearsheimer and Walt's views by vile, fanatical racists as somehow constituting proof of the authors' anti-Semitism. In contrast, several of the Israeli reactions to the Mearsheimer and Walt article were quite measured and free of such mudslinging.

I do not feel qualified to judge the historical parts of their argument. But several of the current themes that emerge from their thinking strike me as quite pertinent. Mearsheimer and Walt adduce a great deal of factual evidence that over the years Israel has been the beneficiary of privileged--indeed, highly preferential--financial assistance, out of all proportion to what the United States extends to any other country. The massive aid to Israel is in effect a huge entitlement that enriches the relatively prosperous Israelis at the cost of the American taxpayer. Money being fungible, that aid also pays for the very settlements that America opposes and that impede the peace process.

The foregoing is related to the shift, over the past quarter of a century, of U.S. policy in the Middle East from relative impartiality (which produced the Camp David agreement), to increasing partiality in favor of Israel, to essentially the adoption of the Israeli perspective on the Israeli-Arab conflict. During the last decade, in fact, some U.S. officials recruited from AIPAC or from pro-Israel research institutions were influential in favoring the Israeli preference for vagueness regarding the final shape of any peace accord, thereby contributing to the protracted passivity of the United States regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In contrast, Arab Americans by and large have been excluded from serious participation in the U.S. policy process.

Finally, Mearsheimer and Walt also provide food for thought regarding the consequences of the growing role of lobbies in American foreign policy, given the increased inclination of the U.S. Congress to become engaged in legislating foreign policy. With members of congress involved in continuous electoral fundraising, the effect has been an increase in the influence of lobbies and, particularly, those that take part in targeted political fundraising. It is probably not an accident that the most effective lobbies are also the ones that have been the most endowed. Whether that produces the best definition of the American national interest in the Middle East or elsewhere is open to question, and worthy of serious debate.

Of course, stifling such debate is in the interest of those who have done well in the absence of it. Hence the outraged reaction from some to Mearsheimer and Walt.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, is professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mearsheimer and Walt Respond (pp. 64-66)

We are grateful to Zbigniew Brzezinski for his incisive defense of our article. But one point of clarification is necessary. Brzezinski says that we might be called "in some respects anti-Israel." To be clear, although we are critical of some Israeli policies, we categorically support Israel's existence. But we believe the lobby's influence harms U.S. and Israeli interests.

Regrettably, Aaron Friedberg's comments demonstrate why it is difficult to have a candid discussion of America's intimate relationship with Israel. He accuses us of a "stunning display of intellectual arrogance," then labels our arguments "inflammatory," "distinctly uncivilized," "irresponsible," and "slanderous." He even invokes the now-familiar charge of anti-Semitism, by hinting that our article contains "the most unsavory of historical echoes." But he provides no evidence to support these charges. Friedberg does not challenge our claim that AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations exert a marked influence on U.S. Middle East policy. Instead, he invents arguments that we do not make, claiming, for example, that we accuse Israel's supporters of "treason." We make no such charge and never would. Friedberg and other supporters of Israel advocate policies that they think will benefit both the United States and Israel. That is neither improper nor illegitimate. But we believe the policies they advocate sometimes clash with U.S. national security interests, and that their feelings for Israel sometimes color their views of U.S. policy.

To their credit, Dennis Ross and Shlomo Ben-Ami focus on what we actually wrote. Both argue that the lobby does not significantly distort America's Middle East policy. Ross says that we see the lobby as "all powerful," while Ben-Ami describes our portrayal of its influence as "grossly overblown," referring to the lobby at one point as "mythological." America's unconditional support for Israel reflects, in Ben-Ami's words, "shared interests" and, in Ross's view, common "values." This argument is familiar but unconvincing. We never said the Israel lobby was "all powerful," but anyone familiar with U.S. Middle East policy knows that the lobby wields great influence. Former President Bill Clinton, for instance, described AIPAC as "better than anyone else lobbying in this town." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it "the most effective general interest group ... across the entire planet." And former Democratic Sen. Ernest Hollings noted upon leaving office, "You can't have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here."

These comments aside, one way to gauge the lobby's impact is to consider what America's Middle East policy would look like if the lobby were weaker. To begin with, the United States would have used its leverage to keep Israel from building settlements in the occupied territories. Every American president since Lyndon Johnson has opposed building settlements, projects that many Israelis now acknowledge were a tragic mistake. But no U.S. president was willing to pay the political price required to stop them. Instead, as Brzezinski notes, the United States has subsidized a policy that directly undermines the prospects for peace. Opposing Israeli expansionism would also align U.S. policy with its expressed commitment to human rights and national self-determination. If the Palestinians had spent the past 40 years treating Israelis as they have been treated, American Jews would be outraged and would rightly demand that the United States use its power to stop it. Ross's claim that common "values" lie at the heart of the special relationship is convincing only if one endorses Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens and its Palestinian subjects.

Absent the lobby, the United States would have adopted a more independent approach toward the peace process, rather than acting as "Israel's lawyer," to quote Ross's former deputy, Aaron Miller. American leaders would have offered their own plan for a final settlement and conditioned U.S. aid on Israel's willingness to accommodate U.S. policies. Ben-Ami understands this point, since he recently wrote that Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush "managed eventually to produce meaningful breakthroughs on the way to an Arab-Israeli peace" because they were "not especially sensitive or attentive to Jewish voices and lobbies" and were "ready to confront Israel head on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America."

If the lobby had as little influence as our critics claim, the 2003 invasion of Iraq would have been much less likely. Ross thinks there is a contradiction between our twin claims that the lobby's influence was "critical" in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq and that September 11 was also a determining factor. There is no contradiction. Each was a necessary, but not in itself sufficient, condition for war. The neoconservatives' campaign for war is well documented by journalists such as James Bamford, George Packer, and James Risen. It was backed by AIPAC and other hard-line, pro-Israel organizations. September 11 was obviously important, but Saddam Hussein had no connection to it. Still, then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives were quick to link the two. They portrayed Saddam's overthrow as critical to winning the war on terror, when, in reality, September 11 was merely the pretext for a war they had long sought.

It is also worth noting that if the lobby were less powerful, the current U.S. policy toward Iran would be more flexible and effective. The United States would still worry about Iran's nuclear ambitions, but it would not be trying to overthrow the regime or contemplating preventive war, and it would be more likely to engage Tehran directly. The United States learned to live with a nuclear China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and even North Korea. Iran is treated differently not because it threatens America, but as President Bush has said, because it threatens Israel. Ironically, Iranian extremism might have been tempered if the lobby mattered less. Iran has sought better relations with Washington on several occasions, and it helped us go after al Qaeda following September 11. But these overtures were rejected, in part because AIPAC and the neoconservatives oppose any opening to Tehran. U.S. intransigence has merely strengthened Iran's hard-liners, making a difficult situation worse. In this case, as in others, the lobby's efforts have jeopardized both American and Israeli interests.

We agree with our critics that U.S. relations with several Arab states are a key source of anti-American extremism, but backing Israel at the expense of the Palestinians makes this problem much worse. Ben-Ami argues that anti-Americanism in the Middle East stems from support for "dysfunctional" Arab autocracies, and that Arafat alone is to blame for the failure of the peace process. In this reading, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and Washington's unflinching support for it, has nothing to do with America's deteriorating image in the region. But that is not what a number of objective studies of Arab public opinion have shown. As former Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman recently noted, "al Qaeda's strategic interests are advanced by the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Arab and in other Muslim countries whose cooperation we need ... judgments about American intentions are disproportionately a function of their people's views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Ben-Ami claims that Arafat's supposed rejection of Clinton's peace plan "caused America's disengagement from the peace process." Yet, in a recent discussion of the July 2000 Camp David summit, Ben-Ami admitted that "if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well." More important, the historical record shows that Ararat did not reject Clinton's December 2000 proposal. The White House announced on Jan. 3, 2001, that "both sides have now accepted the President's ideas with some reservations," a fact Clinton confirmed in a speech to the Israel Policy Forum four days later. Negotiations continued until late January 2001, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, not Ararat, broke off the talks. Barak's successor, Ariel Sharon, refused to resume the negotiations, and with the lobby's backing, he eventually persuaded President George W. Bush to support Israel's attempt to impose a unilateral solution that would keep large parts of the West Bank under Israeli control.

Arafat was a deeply flawed leader who made many mistakes. But Israeli and American policymakers are at least as responsible for the failure of the Oslo peace process. If Arafat was the chief obstacle to peace, why has the United States done so little to help Mahmoud Abbas, his democratically elected successor? Here, again, pressure from the lobby helped persuade Washington to pursue a counterproductive policy. Abbas has renounced terrorism, recognized Israel, and repeatedly sought to negotiate a final settlement. But his efforts have been spurned by Israel and the United States alike, thus undermining Abbas's authority and popularity. The result? An electoral victory for Hamas that has left everybody worse off.

The challenges facing U.S. Middle East policy defy easy solution, and we do not claim that a more balanced relationship with Israel is the key to resolving all of them. But these problems will not be properly addressed if the lobby continues to enjoy disproportionate political influence, and if Americans cannot debate these questions freely and dispassionately.