"THE AMERICAN IDEA" : COURSE DESCRIPTION

Every four years, a Presidential election tends to awaken the dormant idealism I nourish for the great democratic experiment which founded the land I call home.  So, to honor the pivotal historical moment that most Presidential elections pose, I post below a course description for a class titled "THE AMERICAN IDEA/THE IDEA OF AMERICA," which I recently developed for Princeton University's Anschutz Fellowship in American Studies.   A course syllabus appears in the post below this one.   Dabble, if you must, among the readings.  But, by all means, savor what you choose. 

INTRODUCTION

“It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.”—Richard Hoftstadter
          About Great Britain’s former colony, Wyndham Lewis writes as follows in his magisterial book, America and Cosmic Man,

“America is much more a psychological something than a territorial something… It is the very opposite of Blut und Boden.  A site rather for the development of an idea of political and religious freedom than a mystical terré sacréé for its sons… You become upon receiving your citizenship papers in the U.S.A. as valid an American as if your forbears had been with Washington at Valley Forge.”  

The observation inspires this class' title.  Because from de Tocqueville to Gunnar Myrdal to Dennis Brogan, foreign authors have rooted America's uniqueness in a formative Idea.  An idea, they have variously called the American Creed, the American “way of life”, or simply Americanism.  The name matters less, of course, than that each author has attributed to it a common set of principles: “liberty,” “equality,” “democracy,” “individual opportunity,” “equal justice,” “due process of law,” “freedom of opinion,” “personal privacy,” “the pursuit of happiness”.  And in their continuity and recurrence lies the suggestion that these shibboleths do more than merely inscribe our founding documents or simply anchor our political tradition.  More importantly, they supply the intellectual inspiration which propelled a remote, fractious British colony nestled in the stark New World wilderness to settle a hostile continent, to integrate a motley population, and to build a cohesive and enduring union that would shine its beacon of promise across the globe.  Even today, in fact, their premises and assumptions generate the dialectic of our culture and seed the collective unconscious out of which every one of us forges, in the smithy of his or her soul, the 'I' of his or her identity.

I.  THE AMERICAN IDEA

Our class begins accordingly with the task of defining the American Idea’s content, examining its philosophical origins, and considering its novelty, singularity, and bona fides.  Through the semester’s first four weeks, we will trace its political and religious antecedents, respectively, in the Scottish Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation.  In doing so, we also will frame, and preliminarily probe, some of the questions that will occupy us in subsequent weeks.  For example, how precisely does this ideological heritage inform our nation’s self-image, institutions, domestic conflicts, and foreign policy?  Does its legacy measurably distinguish us from the traditional Old World nations that have sprouted organically from common religious allegiances, tribal lineages, or geographical roots?  And if so, does an “exceptional” origin necessarily imply an “exceptional” destiny?  Is a sense of “Election,” then, a blessing or a curse?

II.  THE IDEA OF AMERICA

From unraveling the “American Idea,” we proceed in Weeks 5-12 to study what strikes me as its corollary--  the metaphors through which the nation have incarnated "The American Idea" in a concrete and visceral form.  Each week, in the class' second half, we accordingly focus on one of these recurring images, metaphors, and motifs and explore how it has found expression in our politics, law, literature, and foreign affairs.  As Ralph Ellison once wrote, “man cannot simply say ‘Let us have liberty, justice and equality for all,” and have it.  More than any other system, a democracy is always pregnant with its contradiction.”  Thus do the themes heading Weeks 5 through 12 stake out some of the symbolic terrain upon which the nation has struggled to reconcile its inexorable contradictions, while adjusting along the way, to vast changes in its size, composition, and affluence.     

From “The Promised Land” in Week 5 to “The Redeemer Nation” in Week 12, the tropes I've selected roughly describe a historical progression from the antebellum period through the Cold War.   Historical sweep, nevertheless, animated my choices far less than did an aim to illustrate that our culture is, in Lionel Trilling’s words, “a debate or dialectic”.  For example, Week 5’s focus on the frontier’s myth of rugged individualism and unfettered mobility is designed to throw into relief, the following week, Populism’s reverence for small-town virtue and rural permanence.  Likewise, the readings on the “Peculiar Institution” in Week 7 aim to qualify and to dispute their counterpart captioned under the “Southern Idyll”.   Where possible, even the readings within a given week challenge each other.  Week 9 thus will highlight Justice Scalia and Justice Brennan’s constitutional debate in Michael H. about whether we are an “assimilative, homogenous society” or a “facilitative, pluralistic one.”    

CONCLUSIONS

By the semester’s end, I hope the course will have imparted two overall lessons. First, is that the democratic ideals with which the Framers conceived the Republic do not merely underwrite our law or influence our politics.  They permeate and encompass America’s entire civilization, its politics, law, economy, society, and culture and not excluding its citizens’ private lives-- fueling their hopes, dreams, and expectations; instilling their morals, manners, and orthodoxies; and inspiring their vision of justice, happiness, and the good life. And secondly, I hope to dramatize the fateful legacy, as Americans, we inherit as a consequence. Each of us has to decide, for ourselves, what “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” practically mean-- "a complex fate" indeed. 

THE AMERICAN IDEA: SYLLABUS

 

I.         INTRODUCTION:  THE IDEA OF AMERICA

1.  America and Cosmic Man, Wyndham Lewis, pp. 11-35 (Chapters 1-4); pp.

     167-194 (Chapters 20-24)

2.  The Disuniting of America, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Chapter 1 (“A New

     Race”)

3.   The Cycles of American History, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Chapter 1

     (The Theory of America: Experiment or Destiny”)

4.  “The Native Bias,” Philip Rahv

5.  The American Commonwealth, Daniel Bell

     (“The End of American Exceptionalism”)

II.     RELIGIOUS ORIGINS:  CALVINISM & ORIGINAL SIN

1.   “Churches and Sects in North America,” Max Weber        

2.  “Judaism, Christianity, and the Socioeconomic Order,” Max Weber  

3.   Who Are We?, Samuel P. Huntington, Chapters 3-4 (“Components of

     American Identity” and Anglo-Protestant Culture”)

4.   The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Sacvan Bercovitch, Chaps. 1, 3, 5

      (“Puritanism and the Self,” “The Elect Nation,” and “The Myth of America”

5.   The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

III. RELIGIOUS ORIGINS (2):  GOD’S AMERICAN ISRAEL

1.  The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr, Chapter 2 (“The Innocent

     Nation in an Innocent World”)

2.  “The Archives of Eden,” George Steiner

3.  America 1750, Richard Hofstadter, Chapter VII (“The Awakeners”);

     Chapter VIII (“The Awakening and the Churches”)

4.   “Jonathan Edwards” and “The Solitude of Hawthorne,” Paul Elmer More   

5.   Moby Dick, Herman Melville, Chapters VII-IX, (“The Chapel,” “The Pulpit,”

      “The Sermon)

IV.    POLITICAL ORIGINS & FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

          1.  Second Treatise of Government, John Locke

2.  The American Political Tradition, Richard Hoftstadter, Chapter 1

     (“The Founding Fathers”)

3.  The Constitution (Preamble), Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg

     Address, Abraham Lincoln, The Federalist, No. 45-51

4.  Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923)  

5.  An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal, Vol. 1, Chapter 1

6.  Literature in America, “American Literature,” James Feinmore Cooper

V.        THE PROMISED LAND  

            1.  “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Fredrick J. Turner

2.  The Genius of American Politics, “Values Given by the Landscape” and “The

      Wilderness Confirms Puritanism,” Daniel Boorstin, pp. 1-50

3.  Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion (“Notes from a Native Daughter,

     “John Wayne: A Love Song,” “7000 Romaine”)

4.   Where I Was From, Joan Didion (Parts 3-4)

5.  Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson, “Reflections on American Identity”

6.  In America, Susan Sontag

VI.      THE AGRARIAN REPUBLIC & POPULIST MYTH

              1.  “Letter to James Madison,” Thomas Jefferson       

              2.  Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence, (“Crèvoceur”)

              3.  The Age of Reform, Richard Hoftstadter (Chapters 1-2)

              4.  The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin, (Introduction, Chapter 1)

              5.  The Plot Against America, Philip Roth

              6.  “Philip Roth’s Populist Nightmare,” Matthew S. Schweber

VII.     THE SOUTHERN IDYLL  

 1.  I’ll Take My Stand, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” John Crowe Ransom

 2.  Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson, “The Myth of the Old South”

 3.  The Sound and the Fury & “The Bear,” William Faulkner

 4.  William Faulkner, Irving Howe, “The Southern Tradition”

 5.  New and Selected Essays, Robert Penn Warren, “William Faulkner”

 6.  The Portable Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction;” “Afterword”    

VIII.   THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION

             1.  Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)           

             2.  From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin, Chapters 4-10

             3.  An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal, Vol. 1, Chapter 10-11

             4.  Going to The Territory, Ralph Ellison, “Perspectives in Literature,”

                 “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks”

             5.  Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron

             6.  Amistad, Steven Spielberg

IX.   "E PLURIBUS UNUM" or "ONE VERSUS MANY"          

            1.  “Young Americans,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

            2.  “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau

            3.    Democracy in America, de Tocqueville, Vol. I, Part Two, Chapters 7, 9;

                  Vol. II, Part Two, Chapters 1-4; Vol. II, Part Three, Chapters 13-14

            4.    Michael  H. v. Gerald D., 491 U.S. 110 (1989);

                  West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

5.   “Transnationalism,” Randolph Bourne

6.   “Metamorphoses of Leatherstocking,” Henry Bamford Parkes

7.    “The Point of View,” Henry James

X.   THE SELF-MADE MAN & THE GOSPEL OF SUCCESS

1.  “The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism,” Max Weber

2.  The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz, Ch. 8, “The American World

      of Horatio Alger,” Chapter 8  

3.  “The Discovery of What it Means to be an American,” James Baldwin

4.  “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” Richard Hoftstadter

5.   The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

6.   Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, S01E12 (“Nixon v. Kennedy”)

           

XI.      HOMO AMERICANUS: THE VERNACULAR STYLE

1.  American Humor, Constance Rourke, (Ch. 1-3)

2.  Omni-Americans, Albert Murray, “Omni-Americans”

3.  Collected Essays, Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues”

     “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy”

4.  “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace

5.   The Beer Can by the Highway, John Kouwenhoven, “What’s American

      About America?”

6.  Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

           

XII.   REDEEMER NATION: PAX or POX AMERICANA?

1.  “The Myth of American Omnipotence,” D.W. Brogan

2.  The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr, Chapters 1, 7 

     (“The Ironic Element in the American Situation”, “The American Future”)

3.  “Dictatorship and Double Standards,” Jeanne Kirkpatrick

4.  A Foreigner’s Gift, Fouad Ajami, Chapter 2, (“Chronicle of a War Foretold”)

5.  Resurrecting Empire, Rashid Khalidi, Chapter 3

     (“America, The West, and Democracy in the Middle East”)

6.   Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer, Part I, (“Early Years, Early Training”)

7.   The Quiet American, Graham Greene

THE TRAGIC AMERICAN

“There is a fatality—a curse upon a race-- that is written all over a country… America seems charged with it.” --Wyndham Lewis

About the Civil War Robert Penn Warren once wrote, “Every victory has a price tag; every gain entails a loss, not merely in the price of effort and blood to achieve victory but in the rejection, or destruction, of values which are incommensurable with it.”

But the tragic consciousness Warren here expresses is alien to the American worldview. Civil War notwithstanding: of the ancient classical wisdom that the past binds, that power has limits; that fate mocks good intentions; and that progress carries upheaval in its wake, the nation does not know. American idealism precludes a sense of tragedy. Found a nation. Conquer a continent. Win a War. Spread Democracy. Americans believe they can accomplish anything they wish without cost or contradiction.

Only our idealism thrives on amnesia and self-deception-- a willful blindness to the ambiguities of our success, of the sins committed and of the wages paid in the process. Yes, the Founding Fathers pioneered in the hostile wilderness a new model Republic. But first they stole the land for it and annihilated its inhabitants-- sowing a savage, lawless frontier and a fixation with violence and guns. Then too, while their Constitution guaranteed individual liberty, it also licensed human bondage—a tragic compromise that wed the states but eighty years later, nearly sundered the Union.

Related ironies bedevil American ideals abroad. Last century, to protect (and promote) the American example, the U.S. fought two European wars. Yet triumph in the First World War led to the Second, and victory in the Second inaugurated a Third-- a Cold War with the Soviets wherein at home, we stifled the civil liberties, and abroad, subverted the electoral processes, we first went overseas to uphold. Worse, to defeat our communist foe, we collaborated with a militant Islam that has metastasized into a terrorist threat more insidious, obdurate, and lethal than the totalitarianism it displaced. Today, Iraq caps the tragedy. The war waged to propagate American democracy has re-created instead the violence of our revolution, the anarchy of our frontier, and the carnage of our civil war. America’s original sins have incurred their own punishment.

II.

But if America lives in denial of its tragic heritage, then, Hollywood is not exactly the forum one ordinarily would expect to dramatize it. The jaundiced eye of a few outspoken celebrities notwithstanding; in the studios, the bottom-line prevails. And America’s company town par excellence owes its profits to mass-producing and exporting pious and sentimental myths about the nation’s history (with the occasional gothic paranoid fantasy thrown in to project the virtual negative.) Still, every once in a while some director will dare to forgo the company formula and will cast a chapter in the nation’s biography in a starkly realistic and Aeschylean light. Indeed, this is precisely what, in The Good Shepherd, only the second film he’s directed, Robert DeNiro has had the courage and vision to do. And it’s cause for celebration, even if the critics didn’t appreciate why. (One only hopes with time it will gain the recognition it deserves.)

For as screenwriter Eric Roth has conceived it, the story of the CIA’s birth and early adolescence evokes Greek theatre: a stage where noble purposes beget ignoble consequences; where duty conflicts with virtue and where love of country and family collide; where heirs pay, generation after generation, for ancestor’s sins; and where secrets sabotage what they aim most to protect. So by The Good Shepherd’s end, its hero, Edward Wilson, has played out an allegorical drama that illuminates the CIA’s original sin, and by extension, America’s.

Of course, some of the most accomplished novels written in the English language over the past fifty years have mined the spy’s terrain to similar effect. Novels like Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost and John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy achieve their depth and gravity by tunneling beyond genre fiction into the core of the national psyche. As John Le Carre has said, “a nation’s intelligence agency functions as its political subconscious.” But the CIA also represents a synecdoche for America because the founders of each descend from the same hoary WASP lineage running from Plymouth and Jamestown to Washington and Langley. They belong to the select group of elite, blueblood families who can trace their ancestry to the men who colonized the land, subdued the Indians, imported the slaves, launched the Revolution, waged the Civil War, industrialized the economy, modernized our federal institutions and built the national security state. They form America’s aristocracy: the Protestant Ivy League Establishment that, through most of our history, has governed the country and shaped its worldview.

Indeed, Edward Wilson, (Matt Damon), The Good Shepherd’s protagonist, personifies this Elect-- inherited guilt and all. His father, Thomas Wilson, a Cabinet appointee, committed suicide amid rumors of treason. A betrayal which Edward tries to escape by spying for his country, but which only will serve instead to ensure his son revisits the crime. Apropos, the Bay of Pigs, the fiasco that marked the CIA’s fall from grace, frames the Wilson’s saga. The film opens days before the invasion as Edward and his overconfident staff boast of swimming in Havana and dancing in Castro’s bedroom. Comeuppance, naturally, beckons instead. The Cubans, anticipating the attack, neutralize the air cover, rout the exile militia, and humiliate the U.S. Someone on the inside, it appears, has betrayed the operation’s landing site. “There’s a stranger in our house,” declares Edward’s assistant. Little does Wilson suspect he will discover in the metaphor a literal resonance.

Throughout Edward’s frantic two week investigation to identify the traitor from a blurry photograph and edited recording he receives, the film backtracks. Beginning at Yale in 1939 and culminating in Cuba in 1961, the narrative unravels the intertwined histories of Black Prince Edward and his Underground Estate. The Ivy League anoints him, among the rest of the Elect, for leadership. Skull and Bones, meanwhile, taps him, molding his character and launching his vocation. This select, clandestine society functions as the CIA’s antechamber-- its anonymous membership, esoteric rites, fraternal oaths, and shrouded insularity invest the Agency with its ethos and code in addition to initiating prospective agents in imposture, secrecy, and skullduggery. What’s more, Skull & Bones introduces Edward to his future wife and professional mentor-- Clover Russell (Angelina Jolie), daughter of Bonesman Senator Russell; and General William “Wild Bill” Sullivan (Robert DeNiro), Chief of CIA forbear, the OSS. Clover, Edward marries after getting pregnant; while Sullivan recruits him for the OSS. And, together, fatherhood and fatherland will seal his tragic destiny.

That Roth and DeNiro proceed to compress thirty years of CIA history into a 150 minute film and to imbue each discrete episode with suspense and narrative tension is of course a feat all its own. Among the CIA exploits portrayed (pruning, embroidering, and reconfiguring of course where artistic considerations warrant) are (i) the Agency’s harboring and enlistment of Nazi fugitives; (ii) the coup that deposed Arbenz in Guatemala (which the CIA Director’s position on United Fruits’ Board of Directors may have spurred); (iii) the Wall St-CIA axis; (iv) KGB agents, Golitsin’s and Nosenko’s defections, one or both of which the Soviets may have staged; (v) the KGB’s penetration of MI-6[1]; (vi) the Agency’s experimentation with LSD as a truth serum (vii) its collaboration with the mafia in Cuba, and finally, of course, (viii) the Bay of Pigs.

III.

However, The Good Shepherd’s real éclat remains the wholly invented Wilson family epic embedded within the CIA biography; and through which, it unfolds. For the Wilson saga informs the narrative’s tragic vision and accords it its symbolic resonance. The House of Wilson’s curse is born when the family patriarch, Thomas Wilson betrays his country, and in committing suicide, abandons his son and stigmatizes his name. It continues when his son, Edward Sr., endeavors to overcome it—serving his country, on the one hand; and marrying to legitimate his son, on the other. And, finally, the curse recurs when Edward Jr. reprises his grandfather’s transgression.

In the end, the CIA through which Edward seeks to rise above his father’s treason enables and abets his son’s. Edward Sr. has himself spawned “the stranger in his house”. Espionage’s ominous secrecy and consuming hours have estranged him from his family. The wife he never loved turns lonely and friendless, escaping in drink. While his son becomes a timid, fearful, neglected little boy, plagued by nightmares, prone to wetting himself, and terrified by the sinister aura that surrounds his family. And the scared boy is father to the ingenuous, vulnerable, lovelorn young man desperate for his elder’s attention and susceptible to duplicitous surrogates. He follows his father into the CIA; where, in short order, a Soviet agent seduces him into disclosing the Bay of Pigs landing site.[2] Worse, Edward Jr. plans to marry her and to install the “stranger” permanently. The revelation confronts his father with the ultimate tragic choice: protect his son and betray his country; or save his country and expose his son. A sentence the Black Prince cannot outwit. In fact, by trying to do so, he unwittingly condemns to death his unborn grandchild and perpetuates the tragic cycle.

IV.

The Wilson family’s doom, of course, reinforces the film’s tragic conception of the CIA. As The Good Shepherd’s Cassandra, General Sullivan prophesies, “Despite how much we need it… I’m concerned too much power will end up in the hands of too few.” How clairvoyant he proves! The film depicts a CIA born of a Cold War America neither sought nor declared; the unwanted child of international responsibilities the nation neither anticipated nor was equipped for. Far then from the sinister caricatures that populate the work of a Robert Ludlum or an Oliver Stone, Roth and DeNiro’s CIA men appear earnest, flawed, patriotic men, guilty often of smug hubris and myopic chauvinism, yes, but all the more real and pathetic as a consequence.

Here portrayed are the men whose real-life, modern counterparts installed the Shah of Iran and in so doing, ultimately galvanized Khomeini’s Islamic revolution; who, to combat communism in Afghanistan, nurtured the Arab militants that burgeoned into al-Qaeda; who inflated the likes of Saddam Hussein until they grew so tyrannical and ruthless U.S. troops had to invade their domains to remove them. What The Good Shepherd suggests, however, is that the CIA’s former clients often have come back—or blownback, in their parlance— as nemeses haunting the nation and imperiling its interests not because ignorant fools or diabolical knaves run America’s intelligence services. Rather, the Agency’s follies inhere in the original sin General Sullivan foresaw-- the inexorable corruptions and distortions that afflict those working underground, opaque to public scrutiny and removed from legal constraint, at a secretive Machiavellian craft alien to their nation’s democratic heritage and without an imperial history or realpolitik tradition, like the British possess, to guide or insulate them. Power corrupts. Secret power corrupts insidiously.

V.

But beyond a family epic, or CIA creation story, or a parable about espionage’s human costs, The Good Shepherd tells an allegory about America. If Edward’s hubris personifies the CIA’s; then the CIA’s, in turn, figures America’s. The House of Wilson’s fate reflects the House of Langley’s; the House of Langley’s fate, the House of Washington’s. They dramatize history’s tragic dialectic-- the punishment its actors solicit, behind their back, as they try to outrun their sins. The Wilsons replay an epic cycle that begins in suicide and ends in infanticide. The CIA frame compassing it begins and ends with the abortive Bay of Pigs. And, together, the cul-de-sac they describe evokes the tragedy of American history. The curse of a country that with sincere, honorable, and idealistic motives aspires to reshape the world in its image only to conjure instead the murderous, oppressive, insurrectionist past its self-image fails to integrate.

To explain, we, too, return to where we began with Robert Penn Warren, the Civil War, and the blight on the House of Washington. “From the land itself…from history, from an error or sin committed long ago and compounded a thousand times over, the doom comes,” Warren elaborates in an essay on Faulkner,

“The men who seized the land from the Indians… their project… was doomed from
the first. It was [also] ‘accurst’ by chattel slavery… [I]t was an evil,
and all its human and humane mitigations and all its historical necessity could
not quiet the bad conscience it engendered. The Civil War began the
fulfillment of the doom.”

“Their project,” of course, was the American Experiment: that grand, noble undertaking the Founder embarked upon of establishing in the virgin wilderness a new kind of nation whose shining democratic example would redeem mankind. Only life on civilization’s frontier, too often, was nasty, brutish, and short; and survival occasioned evils that sullied the mission’s exalted moral purpose. Land theft, genocide, insurrection, and slavery, in truth, undergird the “City on a Hill” as much as do its lofty ideals. Free land endowed democracy’s “equal opportunity”; slavery united diverse white immigrants and underwrote their wealth. Original sins no more reprehensible, perhaps, than the religious wars, ethnic cleansing and sovereign force which sired Europe’s nation-states, just more tragic-- tragic because America’s trespasses violated the democratic principles and moral promise it alone defined as its raison d’etre. If America, accordingly, is “the only idealist nation”, as Woodrow Wilson once boasted, then it is also the only nation to embody its contradiction: liberty beside bondage, equality beside race privilege, the sanctification of life amid a peoples’ extermination. The Constitution struck the Faustian bargain and in the Civil War, arrived the reckoning.

Only the humble self-awareness a tragic climax typically augurs didn’t follow. The nation didn’t gain the mature ambivalence, modest skepticism, and tempered realism some of its most perceptive and eminent tragedians expected. In Hawthorne, published 15 years after hostilities concluded, Henry James, for instance, wrote,

“[T]he Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It
introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and
relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto
seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult… the good American
[] will be a more critical person than his grandfather. He has eaten of
the tree of knowledge… He will remember that the ways of the Lord are
inscrutable. ”

Never would the Master prove more wrong.

To the tragic sensibility, the Civil War, to be sure, suggested that if America herself, the first and perhaps only nation to define liberty and equality as the basis of its identity; that if she, the world’s only “idealist nation” even after a century of internecine struggle with ancient prejudices, vested power, and hidebound atavism, had yet fully to vindicate her democratic mission, then it was probably hypocritical to demand other countries to emulate her example, folly to expect they could, and downright self-destructive to impose it upon them. Only America spurned the lesson.

No, when America came of age and entered the international arena, the curse of its origins persisted. Far from the “critical” actor James intellect anticipated, the tragic innocent his imagination captured would characterize the nation’s foreign policy. Like Isabel Archer, America would venture abroad eager to realize her ideals only to founder amid ulterior motives and ruthless cynicism, ancient prejudices and fallen civilizations. From Woodrow Wilson’s to Edward Wilson’s to Joseph C. Wilson IV’s chapter and beyond, the nation would try to re-author its exemplary idyll on the international stage only to re-enact instead the dark, subterranean counter-narrative.

VI.

Like the consummate tragic actor, then, America’s offenses, as George Kennan observed, result not “from any desire on our part to bring injury to others or to establish power over them, but from our attempts to strike noble postures and to impress ourselves.” They result, that is, from the romanticism and grandiosity, from the autism and denial, with which the Eastern Establishment see their nation’s heritage and which they, in turn, project upon the world.

To Woodrow Wilson, America was an idealist nation. Idealization, as such, formed his view of the world. He declared war “to make the world safe for democracy,” with the goal of re-creating it in America’s image. His League of Nations envisioned a United States of the World where sovereign law would bind states; self-determining nations would arise out of imperial colonies; and elections would dethrone kings. Only the American model cannot be transplanted to feudal lands or tribal soil (not without centuries of cultivation anyway.) From Central Europe to the Middle East, the League carved volatile, antagonistic nation-states out of benevolent dynasties and stable empires. And where popular rule empowered demagogues who rallied the masses through bellicose nationalism and with promises to bring order, honor, and élan, and ultimately, brought dictatorship. The Weimar Republic actually elected Adolph Hitler.

But if Woodrow Wilson typified the American flaw of idealism, then Edward Wilson illustrates its narcissistic cousin. As Edward reveals in his conversation with mob boss, Joseph Palmi (Joe Pesci),

“Let me ask you something,” Palmi asks him, “We Italians, we got our families
and we got the Church. The Irish, they have their homeland. The
Jews, their tradition. Even the Negroes, they got their music. What
about you people, [you WASPs, that is], what do you have?”

Edward’s replies: “The United States of America…The rest of you
are just visiting.”

Just visiting? Negroes, just visiting? Evidently, Edward conceives of America as some old-line Anglo-Saxon country club upon whose verdant green the descendants of European immigrants and African slaves intrude. Perhaps the Board invited--or conscripted, as the case may be-- a few of its guests, but they need remember who owns the place. Of course, the filio-pietism this reflects—the blatant denial of his ancestors’ racial sins, to say nothing of the violence to our egalitarian creed —find mirror in the ethnocentric worldview. Edward’s CIA didn’t need a traitor to foil the Bay of Pigs. Chauvinism doomed it from the start (just as his fellow Wilson’s utopianism condemned the League of Nations and hastened World War II.) Why else would the CIA dispatch an ill-equipped, ragtag, exile platoon to Cuba and count on natives hostile to Yankee hegemony to rise up and overthrow Castro and to join their ranks? Why else, if not because they imagine them America’s colonial militia liberating their people from a despised tyranny and Cuba’s immiserated peasantry as beholden as Edward and his coterie to the myth of the Stars and Stripes?

The Iraq imbroglio, it’s true, departs slightly from the script. After all, in the modern rendition the CIA’s Wilson (Joseph C. Wilson IV) plays the clear-eyed, prescient foil.[3] While the President bent on discrediting him portrays tragedy’s blind protagonist. Still, if history has re-cast President Bush II in the Wilsonian role, it also has underscored his tragedy’s recurring motif. Indeed, set against the backdrop of Mr. Wilson’s War and the Bay of Pigs, the White House seems to have rehearsed a disaster preordained. The War to Make the Middle East Safe for Democracy bears all the earmarks of Woodrow’s utopian conceits. As the administration’s presumption that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops as liberators recalls the CIA’s egocentric delusions about the Bay of Pigs. Then again, few of Bush’s II predecessors have so consciously modeled their rhetoric and mission on Woodrow’s Presidency. Nor can they, despite colonial ancestors, boast Edward and Joseph’s CIA pedigree. (President Bush I was Director of the CIA from 1976-7. While both Presidents Bush attended Yale and belonged to Skull and Bones.)

Bush II, then, didn’t have to invent the specter of a nuclear Iraq as a pretext for war. No, to an ideologue in whom the messianic zeal of the one Wilson and the ethnocentric presumption of the other combine, whether or not evidence existed for Saddam’s weapons programs was decidedly beside the point. Once 9/11 occurred, the President imagined he could redraw, in the American pattern, the Middle Eastern landscape and assumed the Arab people would cooperate because they wanted nothing more to emulate our democracy. To quibble about “evidence” of WMD’s, in this view, not only missed the President’s higher purpose, it betrayed the fallacies of what one Bush aide called “the reality-based community.” America “creates its own reality,” he said. Its own reality. Indeed! As Bush agonist Norman Podhoretz writes,

“By September 11th … George W. Bush now knew that the God to whom, as a
born-again Christian, he had earlier committed himself had put him in the Oval
Office for a purpose. He had put him there to lead a war against the evil
of terrorism… and [to wage the struggle for freedom and democracy]. ”

Now, it’s probably safe to infer then that a President who dismisses “reality” doesn’t dwell on history’s burden nor reckon with the significance of slavery or Indian reservations to his nation’s identity or his designs abroad. Because consciousness of those sins would signify an understanding of the tortuous, protracted, and singular path America took toward democracy. What’s more, it would have cast doubt on the ease of reproducing our model in a Middle East, still less an Iraq, riven by sect, faction, ethnicity and clan; and warned the President, finally, of the anti-American theocrats and demagogues elections might empower by trying. To quote from Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s seminal essay “Dictatorships & Double Standards” published, ironically, in the very same Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary almost 30 years ago,

“[In Iran, Cuba, Angola, and Vietnam], the American effort to impose
liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent
internal opposition not only failed but actually assisted the coming to power of
new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less security
[]--regimes, moreover hostile to American interests and policies… In the
relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into
being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of
participation… Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to
acquire the necessary discipline and habits… American history gives no better
grounds for believing democracy comes easily, quickly, or for the asking.
A war of independence, an unsuccessful constitution, a civil war, a long process
of gradual enfranchisement marked our progress toward constitutional
government.”

What America’s recurring Wilsonian drama suggests, then, is that the world is not a stage where “evil empires” and “axes” forever bedevil God’s New World Zion, however much our Presidents’ foreign policy may evoke the vision and imagery of a black and-white melodrama. To the contrary, the laws that govern the international system more closely resemble those of The Good Shepherd’s universe. That is the international arena is the tragic theatre par excellence. It’s an arena bathed in shades of gray where the past sullies the future and constrains its possibilities; where calamity befalls even the noble and the powerful; where bias and miscalculation, subjective intelligence, and unintended consequence thwarts even the most provident statecraft; and finally, where regime change unleashes anarchy, insurgency, and new, more virulent despotisms more often than the freedom, pluralism, and democracy it promised.

Yet America cannot play the wise, canny, prescient agent of other peoples’ history until it assimilates the singular contingencies of its own. Until our worldview acknowledges the expropriated land, unremunerated slave labor, and centuries of British tutelage upon which our prosperity, democracy and pluralism depended — we will not escape the fatal ironies of a utopian and “unreality-based” foreign policy. In places like Iraq, we will re-create the historical bloody, lawless, internecine past we deny instead of the noble, virtuous, enlightened idea of America we cherish.


[1] The friendship Wilson and MI-6 agent Arch Cummings develop parallels that between the historical models upon which Roth based the two characters-- respectively, notorious British traitor, Kim Philby, and CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence from ’48-’75, James Jesus Angelton (codename, “Mother”). And like Philby, Cummings turns out to be a Soviet mole.
[2] This, too, Roth invented to give the Wilson saga its tragic dimension. No historical evidence exists that a CIA mole betrayed the Bay of Pigs operation.
[3] Ambassador Wilson, remember, in a New York Times Op-ed refuted the Bush administration’s assertion that Saddam Hussein recently had tried to acquire nuclear-grade uranium in Niger. After which the Vice-President’s office retaliated by disclosing to one or more reporters that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA and had sent her husband to Africa as the Agency’s emissary.

LIES MY PROFESSORS TOLD ME: THE MYTH OF THE ISRAEL LOBBY

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

-- Saul Bellow


Beneath Plymouth Rock, in the deep substratum of the American psyche, lies a mythic Jew. The Puritans lay the ground for it when they fled across the Atlantic to found a “New Zion.” They conceived their mission messianic, anointing themselves God’s “American Israel.” The “Judeo-Christian heritage” our politicians love to invoke then is no mere ceremonial. America owes its identity to Old Testament tropes and legend. As Edmund Wilson once wrote, “The Puritanism of New England was a kind of new Judaism, a Judaism transposed into Anglo-Saxon terms.”

A Jew-fixation runs accordingly through the American mind. But like everything American it assumes a peculiar New World cast: as often manifest as Philo-Semitism as its ominous mirror image. Typically, it is war that awakens the dark incarnation. Henry Ford, for example, would blame America’s entry into the First World War on a phantom German-Jewish banking syndicate. As the Second raged, isolationist and America First spokesman, Charles Lindbergh would charge the “British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration” with pushing the nation into the conflict. A half century later Patrick Buchanan would rehabilitate the America First movement and echo Lindbergh’s slander: “there are only two groups beating the drums for [the first Gulf] war,” he sneered, “the Israeli Defense Ministry and their amen corner in the U.S.” And finally, prior to the Gulf War’s sequel, Virginia Congressman James Moran would reprise the refrain: “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war in Iraq, we would not be doing this.”

Now, the notion that the Jews control American statecraft might seem as nothing more than the lurid delusion of cranks, demagogues, and politicians too marginal to take seriously. Only recently, members of the Academy has indulged it too. Drs. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, two political scientists from no less eminent universities than Harvard and Chicago, respectively, not only rehearse their tawdry little folie á deux in public; they actually claim to prove it. (While their colleagues-- NYU’s Tony Judt, in The New York Times, and Michigan’s Juan Cole, in Salon, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in Foreign Policy--have come forward to defend them.)
II.

The London Review of Books published Walt and Mearsheimer’s agitprop in their March 23, 2006, issue in an article titled “The Israel Lobby.” Naturally, the more sophisticated the paranoid, the more elaborate the rationalization his delusions embrace. So in the “Israel Lobby” the professors have conjured a chimera a bit more subtle, a tad more circumstantial, than the classic Jewish conspiracy but no less fictive or sinister.

The distortion begins with the very first sentence. “Following the Six-Day War,” it reads, “Israel became the centerpiece of America’s Middle East policy.” Oil-- the imperative that has preoccupied US decision-making in the region since at least FDR—plays no role in their fiction. Drs. Mearsheimer and Walt, evidently, never bothered to familiarize themselves with the Carter Doctrine, which just happens to explain why the U.S. maintains bases throughout the Arab Gulf and has gone to war there twice in little more than a decade.

“An attempt… to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force… The region… is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil.

”

Since ‘67, their revisionist history continues, America has set aside its strategic interests in the region in order to serve Israel’s. And why does Washington do the Jewish state’s bidding? Well, naturally, because of the infamous “Israel Lobby”. But before they get to their villain, they first mischaracterize the U.S-Israeli alliance’s two principal parts—its strategic and its ideological underpinnings. The geopolitical basis they dismiss by understating Israel’s strategic value during the Cold War. Sure, it contained Soviet expansion and humiliated the Soviet’s Syrian and Egyptian clients, they concede. Sure, it mobilized its armies in 1970, during Black September, to protect America’s ally, Jordan’s King Hussein. But what about the OPEC oil embargo in ’73? Wasn’t U.S. support for Israel at fault? (Pace the then popular bumper sticker: burn Jews, not oil!) And what was Israel’s virtue during the Iranian revolution, they ask? Israel, in the end, couldn’t prevent it. A perfect illustration of the kind of absurd straw men the professors contrive throughout.

Anyway, now, post-09/11, the eminent scholars assert, Israel poses an unmitigated strategic liability. The U.S., in fact, allegedly has a terrorism problem “in good part” because of Israel; support for which contributes an “important” source of anti-American terrorism (on more, later). As for Israel’s role as a surrogate for U.S. interests; that is, its value in distracting Syria from otherwise meddling in Iraq or in containing Iran? Well, Syria and Iran don’t threaten the U.S., Walt and Mearsheimer claim, only Israel. No, the U.S.’s recent obsession with Iran’s nuclear program, in their mind, is a function of the Israel Lobby. “In their mind” being the operative phrase. They conveniently ignore the European Community’s (and the UN’s) supporting role and interest in averting a nuclear Iran in addition to Iran’s sponsorship of Islamic terrorist groups. Groups the U.S. has its own interest in extirpating, according to CIA analyst Robert Baer in See No Evil, because of the international terrorist war they’ve waged on American forces, including their bombings of our Beirut embassy and marine barracks.

And what about America’s moral calling to spread its way of life and to defend small, embattled democracies? Well, Israel, in their view, is neither an underdog nor a genuine democracy. The self-styled Middle East experts have determined that 6.5 million Israelis can fend for themselves indefinitely against 320 million Arabs and 60 million Iranians. Moreover, as a Jewish state, “where citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship,” they write, Israel violates America’s equal rights creed. Never mind that any Israeli resident—religion, race, color or creed, notwithstanding-- can apply for citizenship after living there five years or that democracies like Ireland and Germany accord citizenship priority to their Diasporas, as does Israel’s right of return: but, hey, what’s a little “blood” libel between friends?

What’s more, “viewed objectively, [Israel’s] past and present conduct offers no basis for privileging it over the Palestinians,” they continue, because “on the ground, [its] record is not distinguishable from its [Arab] opponents”. Perhaps, the professors can’t apprehend the moral distinction between IDF raids that endeavor to assassinate terrorists, which collaterally and inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, and PLO/Al-Aqsa brigade guerilla operations and suicide bombings whose very purpose and raison d’être is to slaughter and to terrorize Israeli citizens. (See Dr. Benny Morris’ article, “And Now for Some Facts, The New Republic, May 8, 2006, on how Mearsheimer and Walt falsify his scholarly work on the partition period to exaggerate Israelis transgressions and accuse it of “crimes” it didn’t commit.)
But even if, we acknowledge, for arguments’ sake, Israel’s original sin, its displacement of the Palestinians, and its subsequent draconian suppression of their two intifadas, do these transgressions even approach the same order of magnitude as the crimes and depredations of Assad, Saddam, Mubarak, and the House of Saud, etc, let alone suggest commensurability? “Israel does not behave significantly better than most other states,” Walt and Mearsheimer write: are Harvard and Chicago’s own kidding? Even by the standard other democracies set, Israel compares favorably. Did the British use rubber bullets in India? Did an English equivalent of Israel’s B’Tselem monitor their occupation of Northern Ireland and publish the Royal Army’s human rights violations? Or what about those humanitarian cynosures, the French, in Algeria: remember Setif? Or the Belgians’ in the Congo? And what occupation escutcheon would be complete without the blot of America’s Indian Removal Act or Wounded Knee?

Anyway, whatever “special treatment” Israel once earned because of the Holocaust, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer are not having it anymore. Israel has forfeited the mantle of victim by committing “fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.” Innocent? Non-violent resistance is innocent; a cult of martyrdom is not. Victimization doesn’t exempt one from moral responsibility. And innocents don’t encourage suicide bombers to blow themselves up in discotheques and then canonize them afterward, however brutal their treatment or excruciating their suffering.

“Fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians… whose national ambitions and sovereignty Israel, to this day, allegedly, has refused to recognize.” Repeating the PLO’s fraudulent alibi for Camp David’s failure: Prime Minister Barak’s proposal, they submit, only would have created a “disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control.” The authors’ response to the map Dennis Ross published in his memoir, The Missing Peace, which exposed this lie by documenting the contiguous Palestinian state constituting 91% of the West Bank that Barak offered at Camp David, and the 98% proposed at Taba? The proposal was only oral; they cavil, never presented on an illustrated map. And then again, why believe anything Dennis Ross has to say about Camp David? According to them, the American delegation was in thrall to Israel and Ross himself is a card-carrying member of “The Israel Lobby”.
III.

Which brings us to the real cause of the US-Israeli bond, in Walt and Mearsheimer’s fiction-- domestic politics; that is, the “unmatched power” of the “Israel Lobby.” A domestic lobbying group they portray as a treacherous Behemoth with tentacles penetrating nearly every branch, agency, and power center of America’s foreign policy apparatus—tentacles sufficiently long and sinewy to maneuver the entire U.S. government to sacrifice its own interests in order to serve another nation’s.
Not all “Jewish Americans,” they feel constrained to tell us, are part of the Lobby. There are some Jews-- Walt and Mearsheimer’s best friends, no doubt-- who don’t concern themselves very much with Israel. There are others who even beg to “differ” about specific Israeli policies. Yet about one thing the Jews all agree: “despite their differences, moderates and hardliners both favor giving steadfast support for Israel.” Naturally, this elision minimizes the dissension between dovish groups like Peace Now and The Israel Policy Forum, on the one hand, and hawkish AIPAC and The Zionist Organization of America, on the other, and disregards entirely the latitude this discord gives antagonistic policymakers to pit the two camps against each other to stymie opposition.

But like any paranoid, they discern their figment and its influence everywhere. The “Israel Lobby,” in their description, positively owns Congress. No representative can debate the Lobby, let alone defy it. The evidence: former Democratic Senator, Ernest Hollings, noted upon leaving office, “you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.” Supposedly, the ubiquitous Jewish voter gives the Lobby leverage over the Executive branch as well. True, they constitute less than “3%” of the population (actually, it’s more like 2%). But the Jews, you see, turnout in large numbers on Election Day; they donate lots and lots of money; and they live in pivotal states (cunning aren’t they?) And if you criticize Israel, forget about getting a job in the President’s administration. The Lobby allegedly will veto your appointment, filling the administration’s ranks instead with Israel sympathizers and fellow-travelers. Mearsheimer and Walt, apparently, aren’t familiar with George Marshall, Allen Dulles, William Rogers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger or James Baker.

But wait: the Lobby’s omnipotence extends further still. It manipulates the media; dominates the think-tanks; monitors, blacklists and intimidates scholars; and worst of all, smears anyone who criticizes Israel as Anti-Semitic. Well, I ask you, what does one call animus toward the Jewish state so irrational that it could prompt two academics to indulge historical errors, to misquote another scholars’ work, and (as we shall see) to resort to obvious fallacy to infer conclusions about America’s motives in Iraq which mock the evidence? An animus so rabid that it would equate democratic Israel with Arab tyranny, and compare IDF human right violations with Syrian and Iraqi genocide, and finally would breed a fantasy of a confederate domestic lobby so omnipotent it can actually compel the U.S. President, Congress, military, State Dept., Pentagon, and intelligence services to betray the nation’s interests for Israel’s sake? Arabism, perhaps? (Pace Sheik Nayef Rajoub, Hamas’ leading vote-getter in the recent Palestinian election, “And now it is the Jewish lobby in the U.S. that is setting policy in the world and causing it to wage war the world over.”)
IV.

The professor’s little yarn continues with their “Lobby” inciting the war in Iraq.
“Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical… [T]he war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure… Within the U.S., the main driving force behind the war was small band of neoconservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organizations also lent their voices to the campaign… There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts…And although many claim that the Iraq war was about oil, there is hardly any evidence to support that proposition, and much evidence of the Lobby’s influence.” ”

Not 09/11; not President Bush’s oedipal conflicts; not imagined collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda; not Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction or his ejection of UN weapons inspectors; not the failures of the sanctions regime or the Saudi bases their enforcement required or the fatwa from Bin-Laden this “infidel” presence provoked; not the missionary impulse to spread democracy; nor the strategic goal of a new headquarters from which to observe the virulent anti-American poisons purveyed throughout Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world—No, “the key factors” behind the invasion of Iraq, the professors conclude, were Israel and the Lobby.

The “evidence” implicating Israel,

(1) Prime Minister Sharon reportedly called US-Israeli strategic coordination “unprecedented”; (2) a retired Israeli general also said, “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities”; (3) former Prime Ministers Barak and Netanyahu, in public editorials, also advocated deposing Saddam Hussein; (4) “apart from Kuwait…Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and the public favored war” [no citation provided]; (5) Philp Zelikow, former Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board member and current advisor to Condeleezza Rice, told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002, “The unstated threat was the threat against Israel”; (6) in August of 2002, Dick Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Affairs, “Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.”

The “evidence” implicating the “Lobby”,

(

1) An editorial in The Forward reported that, “As President Bush attempted to sell the… war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense;” (2) prominent neoconservatives inside the administration-- many pro-Israel and with close ties to pro- Israeli groups-- zealously advocated toppling Saddam (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Abrams, and Bolton, among others); (3) on September 15, 2001, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz proposed attacking Iraq before Afghanistan but President Bush rejected it; (4) but by early 2002, Vice-President Cheney had changed the President’s mind because three neoconservatives on Cheney’s staff had convinced him; (5) prominent neoconservative pundits outside the administration led a relentless public relations campaign in favor of the war-- Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, among them

.

For all the tediously redundant citations and superfluous quotes, Walt and Mearsheimer’s logic amounts to the following syllogism: (1) Largely Jewish neoconservatives vociferously championed the Iraqi War; (2) These same neo-cons belong to the Lobby and support Israel (which also endorsed the Iraq War); (3) Ergo, America went to war in Iraq because of the Lobby and Israel. Yet the flaws this logic betrays are so flagrant an undergraduate would shrink from them. The minor fallacy: the Lobby is so vast and prolific that in subsuming practically every public proponent of war, it renders the category meaningless. Supporters of the Iraq War belong to the Lobby; ergo, the Lobby supported the Iraq War. As for the major fallacy—well, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Messrs. Harvard and Chicago flunk Social Science 101. That neoconservatives and Israel advocated the Iraqi war before its declaration doesn’t prove that their support triggered it. The evidence the authors cite could as easily stand for the converse. That is, Israel and the neo-cons touted the war to please and/or to back a President who, Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill have disclosed, had fixated on Iraq as early as September 12, 2001, and who, following his success in Afghanistan, decided to found his legacy on completing what his father already had started.

Or more probably, following 09/11, a consensus of elite and public opinion, obsessed with the specter of al-Qaeda cooperating with, and obtaining nuclear and/or chemical weapons from rogue states like Iraq, coalesced around the necessity of removing Saddam to preempt this possibility. The neo-cons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Pentagon, the NSC, Congress, the American public, the British, the Israelis, and the “coalition of the willing”—each for their own independent, related, or identical motives— were suddenly of a piece. Israel and the Lobby no more “caused” the Iraqi war than did Halliburton, the oil companies and/or defense contractors which profited from it; the 62% of Americans who supported it, the Congress which voted for it, or the 09/11 attacks which enabled it. You would think two academics would know better than to draw conclusions about cause from anecdote. Then again, as Orwell once observed, propaganda “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

V.

Alas, Mearsheimer and Walt’s 12,700 word screed reeks of so much mendacity no essay of this length could dispel it all. Nonetheless two of its most invidious canards bear refuting: (1) that U.S. support for Israel stems from the connivance of an all-mighty domestic lobby and its corollary, that, for this reason, protecting Israel has dominated U.S. Middle East policy since ’67; and (2), that the U.S.’s terrorism problem is somehow owed to this paternalism. The irony is that the work of Wiliam Quandt and Rashid Khalidi, two Middle East scholars the authors themselves cite for objectivity-- for their supposed immunity from the “Lobby’s” insidious influence-- gives the lie to the former.

In American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Quandt-- a former NSC official, Mearsheimer and Walt characterize as a “senior Middle East expert…with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness”-- writes,

“Managing the relationship with the Soviet Union in the Middle East, access to inexpensive oil, and support for Israel were American interests readily accepted by successive administrations… Support for Israel [however] was always tempered by a desire to maintain some interests in surrounding Arab countries, because of either oil or competition with the USSR.”

In other words, Israel’s security never has been the “centerpiece” of U.S. Middle East policy, not before ’67, not after. Since World War II, three equivalent objectives have governed American statecraft in the region: (i) securing access to oil (thus the Carter doctrine); (ii) safeguarding Israel’s survival; and (iii) ensuring America remained the Great Power with preponderant influence in the region, which, through the Cold War, meant checking the Soviets and their Arab clients and now translates into limiting Russian and European influence. The first and third priorities, in fact, account for U.S. alliances with Arab regimes antagonistic to, if not belligerent toward, Israel. Close ties with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE has secured access to oil; while conservative Jordan, post-Nasser Egypt and Saudi Arabia have balanced radical Syria and Iraq and projected U.S. influence beyond the Levant. Egypt, for this reason, received over $2 billion in foreign aid last year. While Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain host U.S. military bases.

Not that preserving a rapport with both Israel and her Arab foes hasn’t demanded nimble U.S. statesmanship on occasion, it has. When the Arab-Israeli conflict seethes, for example, American interests collide and the immediate priority of one or the other can mean sacrificing the third. Sometimes, Washington’s need to appease and protect its pro- Arab allies has trumped Israel’s interests and overridden the objections of pro-Israel groups at home; other times Israel’s needs have prevailed. But when oil concerns or Great Power rivalry has spurred the U.S. to bridle or to rebuke or to strong-arm Israel, no amount of Israeli protest or AIPAC pressure could dissuade or thwart a President from doing otherwise. So,
• Eisenhower wielded the threat of sanctions to compel Israel to withdraw from the Sinai following the Suez crisis;
• Nixon and Kissenger delayed a weapons airlift to Israel during the ’73 War and later prevented Sharon from vanquishing the Egyptian’s encircled Third Army;
• President Carter extracted from Begin, a paladin for “Greater Israel,” a West Bank autonomy arrangement in the Camp David Accords;
• Following the Iranian revolution, Carter authorized, and Reagan approved, the sale of F-15s and AWACS defense systems to Saudi Arabia;
• Reagan condemned Israel for bombing Iraq’s nuclear reactor in Osiraq; and during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he forbade Sharon from entering West Beirut and vanquishing Arafat and his commandos;
• Bush I excluded Israel from the international Gulf War coalition and later conditioned a shipment of Patriot missiles on Israel forgoing retaliation to Iraqi SCUD attacks;
• Bush I, later, won his infamous showdown with AIPAC on Israeli loan guarantees, persuading Congress to deduct each dollar spent for West Bank settlements;
• Clinton coaxed Netanyahu, an adamant opponent of Oslo, to assent to the Wye River Accords, further withdrawing the IDF from West Bank cities;
• Bush II formally endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state;
• Finally no American President has ever conferred legal recognition on Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, its West Bank settlements, or its designation of Jerusalem as its capital.

In each instance, the President exercised his constitutional authority as the final arbiter of U.S. foreign policy, to which the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, Congress (and the interest groups lobbying it), and every other agent of America’s fragmented foreign policy apparatus had to defer. AIPAC, oil concerns, defense contractors, the Saudi ambassador, the Arab-American Alliance, or any other rival interest group can stage blusterous press conferences, register formal complaints, elicit non-binding Congressional resolutions, induce bureaucratic foot-dragging and stall policy implementation. They even can embarrass a President or tarnish his political standing, but, in the end, lobbies cannot impose a policy they favor or derail a course they dislike. In foreign affairs, the President’s perceptions of U.S. interests, and his will to pursue them, reign supreme.

VI.

It is true however that the breadth and depth of U.S. solicitude for Israel exceeds its support for its Arab allies. A religious, historical, and existential kinship bind the Calvinist and Jewish democracies above and beyond their strategic partnership. It imparts to their relationship a separate ideological dimension which makes it unique-- a “special relationship”, in the scholar’s parlance. Pro-Israel lobbying groups, in mobilizing and marshalling widespread affection for Israel among the American public, cement this ideological bond.
“We agree there is strong support for Israel in America,” Walt and Mearsheimer counter, “But we believe this popularity substantially due to the lobby’s success at portraying Israel in a favorable light and effectively limiting discussion of Israel’s less savory actions.” They, evidently, would have us believe AIPAC manufactures this good will and burnishes Israel’s reputation, like some low-rent public relations firm handling an incorrigible celebrity.

But U.S. partiality toward Israel reflects nothing so transitory or synthetic. Their bond is ontological. The Puritans, remember, founded these United States as a missionary project to redeem mankind. As such, we are an ideological nation. That is, a core of principles forms our identity and sets us apart. Foremost among them is that our Republic ordains a universal example, a promise of salvation for all who would follow. Regimes matter; or to us, they matter anyway. The U.S., for this reason, does not play the cynical game of realpolitick Metternich-style as the Europeans do. France could go from Israel’s foremost military patron to its Arab nemeses’ chief arms supplier in the space of a few years once withdrawal from Algeria militated otherwise. The U.S. does not-- the U.S. cannot-- treat democracies so capriciously. Rather, as democracy’s apostle and guardian, we see its proliferation not just as a good in itself but also as a vital national interest—an imperative for preserving the American experiment and way of life. U.S. foreign policy consequently betrays a greater, more enduring affection for democracies like Israel that embody its values than Arab dictatorships and monarchies that do not. This isn’t to say that U.S. foreign policy is more virtuous than that of Europe’s democracies or that over the past two centuries exigencies haven’t occasioned U.S. alliances with tyrants or even condoned our destabilization of a hostile democracy. It is to suggest, rather, that when the U.S. forges strategic partnerships with fellow democracies, that democratic fellowship deepens their relationship and binds them together with a fastness autocracies cannot equal or even approximate. Or, to quote, Quandt again,

“The bond between the United States and Israel is unquestionably strengthened because of the presumed congruence of values between the two nations. Americans can identify with Israel’s national style—the commitment to western-style democracy, the ideals of individualism and freedom—in a way that has no parallel on the Arab side. Neither the ideal of a well-ordered Muslim community nor that of a modernizing autocracy evokes much sympathy among Americans. Consequently, a predisposition no doubt exists in American political culture that works to the advantage of the Israelis”

What Walt and Mearsheimer refuse to see, in other words, is that American electorate’s affinity for Israel doesn’t emanate from what Israel does, but from what Israel is, a kinship born of culture and identity, not behavior. Israel, like the U.S., is a settler democracy. Israel, like the U.S., did not grow organically around communities rooted in the medieval soil. Immigrants established them, purposefully, post-Enlightenment. Israel, as such, evokes a vision of America’s younger self-- a small, beleaguered democracy settled by hardy pioneers who fled Europe to found a new and better nation amid an alien population in inhospitable environs. A kinship of origin that elevates the U.S-Israeli special relationship to a primal attachment the U.S. enjoys with no other nation save Great Britain. Even their founding myths and motifs resemble each other, a likeness of patrilineal cousins: the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer and Zionism’s rugged kibbutznik; America, “The City on a Hill”, and Israel, “The Light Unto Nations”; God’s “Chosen People” and Christ’s “Elect”; a New and Old Jerusalem, each erected on Promised Lands. Professor Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East history professor of Palestinian descent, echoes this view in his recent book, Resurrecting Empire:

“[T]he same religious and romantic factors that led many European Protestants to extend their fervent support to Zionism affected American Protestants, with the same potent political results…There were other reasons beyond the potent influence of the Bible for Americans to be attracted by the lure of Zionism. Because of their own pioneer heritage, Americans were more apt than Europeans to identify with lurid images of brave, outnumbered settlers of European stock taming an arid land in the face of opposition from ignorant, fanatical nomads… Like European political leaders, they [American political leaders] were swayed mainly by their own beliefs, which tended to reflect the biblically induced pro-Zionist sentiment prevalent among their Protestant constituents.”

(italics mine) .

This ideological bond and symbolic connection between the U.S and Israel, on the one hand, intensifies their strategic cooperation when their interests converge, as in the second Gulf War; on the other, it preserves their relationship even when their leaders disagree and their respective interests clash, as in the first. More often than not though, the geopolitical and ideological dimensions reinforce each other.
That is, democracies may or may not be more peaceful, as Kant believed, or disposed to U.S. interests. Regime change may or may not bring the prosperity, security, or the strategic boon neoconservatives have promised. However, once in the U.S.’s geopolitical orbit, democracies, certainly, make for more reliable allies. Changes in the Israeli government, for instance, do not risk abrogated commitments or herald wholesale shifts in allegiance. The same cannot be said of our other friends in the region. For America’s ties to Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia remain only as durable as their authoritarian rulers’ grip on power. Indeed, Iran’s history (and Libya’s, a US ally before Qaddaffi’s coup) offers an enduring object lesson in the sudden strategic reversals and dramatic realignments autocracies threaten.

VII.But

America’s Arab alliances risk worse than defection. And that Walt and Mearsheimer imagine the U.S.-Israeli alliance “an important source” of “anti-American terrorism” implies a perverse irony: they write, “There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama Bin Laden are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians.” Ironic because what 09/11 actually dramatizes is the al-Qaedan scourge America’s alliance with Israel’s foes has begotten. The stark discovery that our Arab allies breed a malignant anti-Americanism transmissible to U.S. shores. That in violently suppressing opposition, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan have radicalized their politics and galvanized a generation of Islamic militants with nihilist rage. Only their despotisms prove too entrenched to topple, too wily and ruthless in effacing opposition and in channeling it elsewhere-- at Israel, at the U.S., at Western Europe, anywhere but at its source.

Fouad Ajami writes in his new book The Foreigner’s Gift,

“Post-09/11…the American imperial position in its two pillars of influence—Saudi Arabia and Egypt—was reeling… $2 billion a year of aid to the regime of Muburak [] bought for America the hatred of Egypt’s middle classes and the virulent enmity of its Islamists. It was in Mubarak’s political prisons that countless Islamists had endured brutality and torture and vowed revenge on the Egyptian ruler and the foreign power that backed him… If Al Qaeda’s money came from the Arabian Peninsula, the Egyptians had provided the backbone of operational leadership…. America’s authoritarian… friends rode with America but brought down on it the wrath of the aggrieved and disgruntled in their domains… September 11th cast the bargain with Arab authoritarianism in an entirely different light

.”

Even Bin-Laden himself lists U.S. support for Israel third among his litany of grievances. The Saudi Arabian’s infamous fatwa, “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders” inveighs first and foremost at the presence of infidel U.S. troops on Saudi soil and the protection they buy his sworn enemy, the House of Saud. A military presence having nothing whatsoever to do with Israel but rather with the First Gulf War and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait; and where troops have remained ever since because under-populated Saudi Arabia cannot defend itself or secure the oil fields so indispensable to U.S. strategic needs. Thus the added irony: far from a sub rosa plot to make the world safe for Israel, as Walt and Mearsheimer suppose, the Second Gulf War actually was propelled by the ulterior motive of making the Middle East safe for the House of Saud. A peaceful regime in Iraq, the U.S. calculated, would enable the U.S. to dismantle its base in Saudi Arabia and to curtail sanctions against Iraq, thereby defusing al-Qaeda’s two most explosive charges: that U.S. troops were desecrating sacred Muslim soil and enforcing a humiliating and genocidal sanction regime against the Iraqi people.

But let us, for a moment, confront Walt and Mearsheimer’s premise head-on. After all, it’s practically an article of faith in Europe (thus their London forum), to say nothing of the Arab world, that by acquiescing to Israel’s Occupation and self-destructive settlement policy, the U.S. invites its terrorism problem and creates one for Europe. But consider the alternative and this shibboleth reveals itself for the myth it is. Imagine, that is, a world in which a U.S President, defying domestic opposition, forced Israel to withdraw fully from the Territories. That tomorrow we awaken to discover that the PLO has established a Palestinian state more or less along the lines Mahmoud Abbas’s referendum proposes—a sovereign country equal to 100% of the West Bank’s land mass before ‘67; its capital in East Jerusalem; the Jewish settlements evacuated; Hamas and Islamic Jihad disarmed and/or co-opted; and Israel’s absorption of a token number of Palestinian refugees and compensation for the rest. Imagine this utopian scenario and reevaluate. Would the normalization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict strengthen Arab moderates in their ongoing war with the Jihadists? Yes. Would it fortify the U.S.’s strategic presence thereby in the Levant and improve its standing in the Gulf, especially in Iraq? Of course. But-- and herein lies the qualification that swallows the premise: would it quell the seismic unrest, the febrile resentment, the volatile Jihadist backlash sudden oil wealth-- and the modernization accompanying it-- has precipitated or dispose of the corrupt, oppressive, sclerotic Arab regimes oil money has buttressed and enabled? No. Would it diminish Western civilization’s threat to the Islamic world’s traditional elites? No. Would al-Qaeda and the other Jihadists, in short, still beset the U.S and target its shores? And the answer, regrettably, is an unqualified yes.

Because however much the Palestinians’ plight may infuriate Islamic militants, and rationalize anti-American terror, Israel still functions more as lightening rod than spark, more effect than cause, more object than subject of displaced rage and cathartic delusion. For what really inflames al-Qaeda-- and every other Islamic militancy for that matter, whether Hamas, Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad-- is not the Occupation but the Jewish state’s very existence. The presence of which in the Middle East they perceive to be the satanic agent of America’s crusade to corrupt their sacred pan-Islamic ulama. In this, the Jihadists and the U.S. projections of Israel actually mirror each other; they’re existential. Israel signifies for the U.S. the very democratic pluralism it embodies and champions. To the Jihadist, on the other hand, Israel incarnates the modern civilization they deplore. Israel represents the revolutionary Western dynamo that has diluted their culture, devalued their status, and eroded their identity-- uprooting, alienating, and disenfranchising them. Francis Fukuyama, in America at the Crossroads, explains,

“Islamism and its radical jihadist offshoots are the products of what Olivier Roy calls ‘deterritorialized’ Islam, in which individual Muslims find themselves cut off from authentic local traditions, often as uprooted minorities in non-Muslim lands. This explains why so many jihadist have not come from the Middle East but have rather been bred in Western Europe…. Jihadism is a byproduct of modernization and globalization… an attempt to create a new universalistic doctrine that can be a source of identity within the context of a modern, globalized, multicultural world.”

And which, if true, means the U.S. will have to battle the Jihadists for the foreseeable future, an endemic menace spurning Israel could do nothing to pacify.

VIII.

And it’s the traumas of modernity, what’s more, which returns us to where we started—the origin of Walt and Mearsheimer’s tract in the netherworld of the America mind. After all, how, in the “Israel Lobby,” do two academics—two academics who profess to deplore anti-Semitism—fall prey to a crude analytical tool reminiscent of the Judeophobic ravings of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Patrick Buchanan?
Well the story begins with America’s own trial with modernization at the turn of the 20th century and the emergence, in turn, of our own homegrown political atavism, the Populist movement. Populism, like Jihadism, Richard Hofstadter observed in The Age of Reform, arose from the havoc—the confusion, the alienation, the dissolution of old certainties and faiths-- modernization wreaked on a pre-modern society. Populism, like Jihadism, expressed a nostalgic longing for a return to a purer, more pastoral, traditional order. And Populism, like Jihadism, seized on a vivid symbolic target, a scapegoat upon which the dispossessed could vent his rage and frustration-- modernity incarnate, the international Jew. And so, the Jewish specter, previously confined to private space, enters American politics, an incubus forever after.

For as David Plotke writes in his introduction to The Radical Right, “

once a movement introduces durable themes into a national political culture or tradition, those themes become widely available to later forces who may not be identical in aims or composition to those who came before them

.”

Or, I would add, who may not even be aware of their theme’s origin. Thus the Jewish chimera could pass through the collective subconscious from the Populists to Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Patrick Buchanan, and on up to the Ivory Tower without the professors, perhaps, even conscious they had succumbed to its mythology. Because if the bogeyman has mutated ever so slightly from Jewish bankers to Jewish lobbyists, the basic fixture remains the same. God’s American Israel no longer can determine its own destiny because a Jew, whose loyalties forever lie in a Jerusalem elsewhere, has subverted America’s will and internationalized its identity.

Alas, finance capital eludes sovereign control. Middle Eastern violence and instability redound overseas. And on 09/11, the innocent nation, stricken for the first time by the plagues of Job, discovers that the “champion and vindicator of only her own freedom,” now has “monsters to destroy” all its own. Because Chosen-ness and Election confer no privilege beyond their lead role as the phantoms the paranoid and malevolent, the sophistic and grandiose, project in their shadowy worldview.