Discussing his outspoken opposition to diplomacy with Iran, Republican Senator Mark Kirk said in a phone briefing for his supporters: “It’s the reason why I ran for the Senate, [it] is all wrapped up in this battle. I am totally dedicated to the survival of the state of Israel in the [...]]]>
Discussing his outspoken opposition to diplomacy with Iran, Republican Senator Mark Kirk said in a phone briefing for his supporters: “It’s the reason why I ran for the Senate, [it] is all wrapped up in this battle. I am totally dedicated to the survival of the state of Israel in the 21st century.” This is an important statement, and one which bears intense scrutiny at a time when the Obama Administration is trying to walk the United States back from a war footing with Iran, against the wishes of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and, especially, Israel and its domestic allies.
I hurried to congratulate my colleagues, Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton, for their reporting on Kirk’s private briefing call. I tweeted the following: “Thanks to @AliGharib and @EliClifton, we have Mark Kirk on record stating that he values Israeli interests over US’.” Naturally, I was attacked for “questioning Kirk’s loyalty.” I certainly confess; Twitter is a place for shorthand and bombastic statements, and no doubt, Kirk’s position is more complicated vis a vis US vs. Israeli interests. That’s why the interaction I had with a more sober-minded individual around this, Prof. Brent Sasley of the University of Texas at Arlington, was more probative.
Sasley’s point was that Kirk was more likely echoing the very common view that Israeli and U.S. interests are virtually identical, and that this was at least as plausible an interpretation of what Kirk was quoted as saying. I have known Sasley, online, for a while now, and I know him to be a thoughtful person, and to the extent that people who have never met face to face can call each other friends, I’d like to call him one. I get his point.
But Kirk said what he said. In that sentence, there isn’t a hint of consideration as to whether backing away from war with Iran would be the better move for the United States. Nor does any appear later in the article, as Kirk apparently reiterated his belief that U.S. intelligence could not be trusted if it disagreed with the Israeli version (although both U.S. and Israeli intelligence have generally been in agreement on Iran—it is Israel’s political leadership that has disagreed with both).
One thing that is interesting to note here is the impression one gets from Kirk. He works hand in glove with AIPAC, as he makes absolutely clear in his talk. But I’m not sold that he’s an AIPAC puppet—he comes off a lot more like a true believer, not in a religious sense, but as no less a fanatical disciple of far-right Israeli policies.
MJ Rosenberg, the former AIPAC staffer who has dedicated his work for years now to exposing the Israel lobby’s destructive role in US Middle East policy, as well as to Israel (and, obviously, the Palestinians), said this about Kirk a few years ago: “Why do the PACs love him? It is because Kirk is a pure Israel-firster. For Kirk, Israel can do no wrong. Add to that that he sits on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations where he brings home the bacon for Israel big time. … I would not categorize him as pro-Israel because that would require supporting an end to the deadly status quo. Mark Kirk is just pro-AIPAC and shaking the trees for all the campaign money he can get by his hate rhetoric about Arabs. Playing like he’s ‘pro-Israel’—and not just pro-lobby—has paid off very very well for him.”
I agree, of course, with MJ’s general characterization. And Jim Lobe suggests that Kirk may be at least partly motivated by the campaign cash he has received from pro-Israel PACs as one among many possibilities to explain Kirk’s radical stance. But Kirk seems to me to be a more interesting man than that. He is perhaps the most radical hawk on the Middle East in the Senate. But he is also a Republican who has been a strong supporter of same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Unlike many neo-conservatives, he has a radically anti-immigration agenda as well, largely informed by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.
To me, this gives the impression more of a true believer than of a political opportunist. And that’s what I think Kirk is. I think, for whatever reasons, he’d hold these views on Israel if he never received a dime of AIPAC-directed campaign funds (as a reminder to readers, AIPAC does not actually engage in campaign financing directly, but most pro-Israel PACs and major donors donate based on AIPAC’s guidance). It’s a case where the Lobby comes to him, rather than him going to them.
And this is the basis of Sasley’s and my disagreement. In one (actually, it was split into two) of his tweets to me, Brent said “’Israel lobby’-types like to take a quote or two as proof of their accusations. But if you look at consistent language about US interests, values & Israeli interests, values, they’re seen as same. That’s (the) context in which Kirk’s call should be understood.”
Sasley is making an important point here, although whether that was intentional or not is unclear to me. The “Israel lobby” theme can sometimes obscure key nuances. It is often dominated by two extremes, one which tries to downplay the lobby’s role almost to nothing (this position has become far less tenable in recent years) and considers all other views to be evidence of anti-Semitism; and the other extreme which attributes all the ills of U.S. Middle East policy to the lobby’s malign influence. The debate can never end because ultimately, there’s no way to precisely measure the lobby’s actual influence.
The issue of Iran has brought the lobby’s activities into much clearer view, but not its boundaries. There is, without a doubt, a strong current of support for Israel without AIPAC. It comes largely from a small but active and well-heeled section of the U.S. Jewish community, a theology that has come to be known as “Christian Zionism,” deserved guilt over centuries of anti-Semitism (including some complicity and a lot of indifference toward the Holocaust at the time), the strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S. (especially during the Cold War), and the “David vs. Goliath” mythos around Israel. One can write a book on this stuff, and a good number have. But suffice to say it is a mistake to attribute all of even the myopic support for Israeli policies to the lobby.
So, yes, I think Kirk is a true believer, and that really is the point. Because maybe Brent is right, and Kirk simply believes that U.S. interests are best served by following Israel’s lead. Maybe he believes that the U.S. has a God-given mission to support Israel in all its hawkish and self-destructive extremism.
In the end, it doesn’t matter, because it still amounts to the same thing – subordinating US policy to Israel in a crucial arena. I don’t know whether Brent thinks of me as one of the “Israel Lobby” types, but both John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have known me for years and both are aware that, while I agreed with much of their thesis, I publicly disagreed with their points regarding the war on Iraq and their conflation of neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby. I have also written dozens of articles about the destructive role of the Israel Lobby.
But I don’t really care about Mark Kirk’s patriotism. No one has ever accused me of an over-abundance of national pride. What I do think is important, however, is that people understand what their representatives are doing. Mark Kirk is fighting tooth and nail for an attack on Iran(although he insists he wants a peaceful solution amounting to Iran’s surrender, the same rhetorical trick Benjamin Netanyahu employs) because he believes it is in Israel’s best interests. Even accepting Brent’s argument that his view is that protecting Israel’s interests is vital, in and of itself, to US interests, then this logic needs to be articulated and debated.
Personally, I doubt many US citizens are prepared to accept that the US should engage in another Middle East military adventure for the sake of Israel. Maybe others think differently. But Kirk makes it clear that this is all about Israel, and that is what I was putting out there, perhaps clumsily. That needs to be brought into the light and debated with vigor.
]]>Renowned international relations theorist John Mearsheimer writes in the London Review of Books:
So what is going on here? At the most basic level, Israel’s actions in Gaza are inextricably bound up with its efforts to create a Greater Israel that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean [...]]]>
Renowned international relations theorist John Mearsheimer writes in the London Review of Books:
]]>So what is going on here? At the most basic level, Israel’s actions in Gaza are inextricably bound up with its efforts to create a Greater Israel that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Despite the endless palaver about a two-state solution, the Palestinians are not going to get their own state, not least because the Netanyahu government is firmly opposed to it. The prime minister and his political allies are deeply committed to making the Occupied Territories a permanent part of Israel. To pull this off, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will be forced to live in impoverished enclaves similar to the Bantustans in white-ruled South Africa. Israeli Jews understand this quite well: a recent survey found that 58 per cent of them believe Israel already practises apartheid against the Palestinians.
Creating a Greater Israel will produce even bigger problems, however. In addition to doing enormous damage to Israel’s reputation around the world, the quest for a Greater Israel will not break the will of the Palestinians. They remain adamantly opposed not only to the Occupation, but also to the idea of living in an apartheid state. They will continue to resist Israel’s efforts to deny them self-determination. What is happening in Gaza is one dimension of that resistance. Another is Mahmoud Abbas’s plan to ask the UN General Assembly on 29 November to recognise Palestine as a non-member state. This move worries Israel’s leaders, because it could eventually allow the Palestinians to file charges against Israel before the International Criminal Court. Thus, the dream of a Greater Israel forces Tel Aviv to find ways to keep the Palestinians at bay.
Martin Dempsey is not a popular man in the halls of the Israeli Prime Minister’s office these days. The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff incurred the wrath of Benjamin Netanyahu by pointing out the obvious: an Israeli attack on Iran would have dire consequences.
[...]]]>Martin Dempsey is not a popular man in the halls of the Israeli Prime Minister’s office these days. The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff incurred the wrath of Benjamin Netanyahu by pointing out the obvious: an Israeli attack on Iran would have dire consequences.
Dempsey said “I don’t think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran…” and such a strike “would be destabilizing” and “not prudent.”
Well, Bibi can’t have any of that. Imagine a US military leader talking sense about the potential of a military operation that would have global consequences. How dare he? Israel must respond to such an outrage, lest it fail in its effort to have the United States carry out this foolish attack on Israel’s behalf.
Israeli officials rushed to the visiting US National Security Adviser, Tom Donilon with their complaints about Dempsey’s statements. According to Ha’aretz, a senior Israeli official told Donilon that “The Iranians see there’s controversy between the United States and Israel, and that the Americans object to a military act. That reduces the pressure on them.”
The objection is overstated by a wide margin, and there’s a lot more going on here than the Israelis are talking openly about.
The “pressure” reduction Israeli officials are concerned about is only significant if the US is clearly opposed to an attack. This is not the case, either in the White House or in Congress. It is true the President sees an immediate attack as premature, but the threat of attack remains, even if the US and Israel are debating the timing.
Iran may see that the US doesn’t interpret the situation exactly as Israel does. However, the pressure remains high despite this because the threat of force from both countries is unchanged. The Israeli response is another example of what has become typical hysteria from the Netanyahu government.
In his four months in office, Dempsey has not been inclined to make a great many public statements about strategy and tactics with regard to Iran. That he did so now was not an accident.
We’re all well aware of the intense amount of debate going on in both the US and Israel over the question of an attack on Iran. Lines have been drawn on this issue, and many different pieces have come into play.
One of those pieces, in Washington, is the concern that if the US doesn’t strike Iran, Israel will, and that an Israeli strike would have even greater consequences for regional stability than an American one. This is certainly the case made to Donilon, and it is one that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has reinforced again recently.
There is also a bill, introduced in the Senate last week, S.Res.380, which is intended to greatly increase the pressure on President Barack Obama to take military action.
These are coordinated actions, with Israel not only using the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a go-between, but with Bibi and Barak also directly mobilizing their friends on Capitol Hill.
S.Res.380 is being pushed hard by AIPAC, and it is a bill that is much more dramatic than it might seem at first blush.
The official description of the bill is telling: A resolution to express the sense of the Senate regarding the importance of preventing the Government of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.
The idea here is to move the red line for US military action from imminent Iranian acquisition of a nuclear device to Iran’s capability to build such a device, a level of nuclear technology that has other uses and that nations are entitled to pursue under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. From reports about Iranian capabilities, that could well be a threshold that it has already passed.
Here is how the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) put it, in an excellent critique of the bill:
The Secretary of Defense stated in January 2012 that an Iranian attempt to actually build a nuclear weapon is the United States’ “red line” that Iran must not cross. But this resolution does not reflect or reinforce the “red line” articulated by the United States – it further confuses them. As currently drafted, the resolution blurs the critical distinction between nuclear weapons capability and nuclear weapons acquisition. Nuclear capable is an imprecise term with no clear definition. By some accounts, Iran could already be described as “nuclear capable,” as Iran already has the capability and expertise to build a nuclear weapon. It should continue to be the goal of the U.S and international community to use all non-military means at our disposal to put concrete constraints on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, with the ultimate objective of ensuring Iran does not actually acquire a nuclear weapon.
This, just as much as an independent Israeli strike, is what Dempsey was trying to counter.
Within the Israeli leadership as well, there is considerable opposition to an attack on Iran. Some reports indicate that a majority of the military leadership is opposed to an attack, and there are signals that evenNetanyahu is not convinced.
There had been speculation that Iran hawk Yohanan Locker would be appointed the head of the Israeli Air Forces. But Netanyahu chose Amir Eshel, who is considered to be more cautious about an attack on Iran, leading to speculation that Bibi is not yet convinced that Israel should take this initiative.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak is seen as leading the charge toward war,. However, both he and Netanyahu seem to be of one mind that the Obama Administration can and should be pushed toward a more aggressive stance against Iran.
The two-pronged attack, with Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, publicly attacking Dempsey while their friends on the Hill lead a charge toward making war harder to avoid, abetted by AIPAC pushing hard on potentially vulnerable senators in an election year, will not be an easy one for rationality and sober analysis to withstand.
These are considerable political pressure being brought to bear. Virtually none of it is based on US strategic interests (which do include preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon, yes, but also include maintaining some stability in the Gulf region.) It is also not coincidental that the rhetoric and political jockeying are swelling noticeably just before the annual AIPAC convention, when Netanyahu will again be meeting with Obama and which will be a stage show for the push to war with Iran.
And, as is too often the case, Iran does opponents of war no favors with yet another episode just yesterday ofrefusing to cooperate with inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and giving a double-talking excuse as to why.
Though I have never subscribed to the notion that the Israel Lobby was not a significant factor in policy formation, neither do I believe it is as decisive as some make it out to be. I found merit in the arguments of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, but absolutely and frequently disagreed with their charge that the invasion of Iraq was largely the work of the Lobby and was, in essence, a war for Israel.
I still disagree with them on that score. But if the US goes to war with Iran, that will indeed be a war for Israel, and one that Israel, and its Lobby here engineered, not through some nefarious means, but by playing the political game in Washington and the diplomatic game on the global stage very well.
And, folks, we’re just letting it happen.
As a Jew, as an American, as someone who cares deeply for Israel and who also cares about a better future for my child, I have to call this out. I hope you’ll join me.
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