Tony Judt's piece in the New York Times today on the controversy over Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer's article on "the Israel Lobby" convinced me that it is time for us at America Abroad to join the discussion.

Walt and Mearsheimer's two opening paragraphs summarize their argument:

"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical."

They go on to document their claims in ways that Judt describes as "drawn from standard sources" and "mostly uncontentious." Daniel Drezner, on the other hand, describes Walt and Mearsheimer's claims as "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Much of the rest of the reaction to the article has focused much more on whether it is anti-Semitic or not than on whether it is right or not.

Yet the truth of the article, not its wisdom or even its tone, is the issue we should be discussing. Instead of condemning Walt and Mearsheimer's claims, their critics should be responding to them -- on social scientific grounds, claim by claim, source by source, argument by argument. That is precisely what Walt and Mearsheimer argue cannot happen -- because "the Lobby" has no interest in reasoned debate and will bury it under claims of anti-Semitism. Yet as Tony Judt points out, it is in Israel itself "that the uncomfortable issues raised by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have been most thoroughly aired."

I would prefer actually to have a debate, rather than debate whether we should or can have one. In this vein, see Eric Alterman in the current issue of The Nation and Juan Cole' in Salon, responding to Alan Dershowitz's attack on Walt and Mearsheimer.

For my part, I think Mearsheimer and Walt have performed a valuable service by daring to write about AIPAC just as other scholars write about the Taiwan lobby, or supporters of the IRA, or any other powerful influence on U.S. domestic politics. At the same time, their analysis is strongly, and in my view wrongly, colored by two assumptions. First is their deep opposition to the war in Iraq; they came out in favor of continued deterrence of Saddam early, and with the luxury of hindsight, probably rightly. But because they passionately opposed the war from the beginning, they find it hard to imagine any reasons to support the war other than the Israel Lobby. Yet George Packer, whose superb book The Assassins' Gate is a must read, notes that Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser, all strong "pro-Likud Americans," ended up in high positions in the Bush administration and pushed for war in Iraq. He writes:

"Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests? . . . For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover. But for others, such  as Wolfowitz, Iraq stood for different things -- an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness -- and regime change there became the foreign policy jackpot." Just because Walt and Mearsheimer discount each one of these factors does not mean that they were equally discounted in Washington, leaving only Israel's security as an argument for war.

 Second, Walt and Mearsheimer are realists, which means that they assess the strategic value of states solely in terms of their relative power, regardless of regime type. In English, that means that Israel's status as the only stable, mature democracy in the Middle East is irrelevant in assessing America's strategic interest. We liberals, on the other hand, essentially think that regime type trumps virtually every other measure of power. That does not mean that we should support Israel automatically or uncritically, but it does provide a powerful reason for why supporting Israel -- and above all Israel's continued existince as a liberal democracy, which may often require taking a tougher line with the Israeli government that we have been prepared to do in recent years -- is very much in America's strategic interest.