A Colossal Wreck (50 page)

March 21

For the past few weeks a sometimes comic debate has been simmering in the American press, focused on the question of whether there is an Israel lobby, and if so, just how powerful is it?

To ask whether there’s an Israel lobby here is a bit like asking whether there’s a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and a White House located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. For the past sixty years the lobby has been as fixed a part of the American scene as either of the other two monuments, and not infrequently exercising as much if not more influence on the onward march of history.

The Democratic Party has long been hospitable to, and supported by, rich Zionists. In 2002, for example, Haim Saban, the Israeli-American who funds the Saban Center at the Brooking Institute and is a big contributor to AIPAC, gave $12.3 million to the Democratic Party. In 2001, the magazine
Mother Jones
listed on its website the 400 leading contributors to the 2000 national elections. Seven of the first ten were Jewish, as were twelve of the top twenty and 125 of the top 250.

There have been plenty of well-documented accounts of the activities of the Israel lobby down the years, from Alfred Lilienthal’s 1978 study,
The Zionist Connection
, to former US Rep. Paul Findley’s 1985 book
They Dare to Speak Out
, to
Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship
, written by my brother and sister-in-law, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn and published in 1991. Three years ago the present writer and Jeffrey St. Clair published a collection of eighteen essays called
The Politics of Anti-Semitism
, no less than four of which were incisive discussions of the Israel lobby.

So it can scarcely be said that there had been silence here about the lobby until two respectable professors, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt (the former from the University of Chicago and the latter from Harvard) offered their analysis in March of this year, their paper, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” being published in longer form by the Kennedy School at Harvard (which has since disowned it) and, after it had been rejected by the
Atlantic Monthly
(which originally commissioned it), in shorter form by the
London Review of Books
.

In fact the significance of this essay rests mostly on timing (three years’ worth of public tumult about the neocons and Israel’s role in the attack on Iraq) and on the provenance of the authors, from two of the premier academic institutions of the United States. Neither of them has any tincture of radicalism.

After the paper was published in shortened form in the
London Review of Books
there was a brief lull, broken by the howls of America’s most manic Zionist, Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, who did Mearsheimer and Walt the great favor of thrusting their paper into the headlines. Dershowitz managed this by his usual eruptions
of hysterical invective. The Mearsheimer-Walt essay was Nazi-like, Dershowitz wrote, a classic case of conspiracy-mongering.

In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt’s paper is extremely dull. The long version runs to eighty-one pages, no less than forty of which are footnotes. I settled down to read it with eager anticipation but soon found myself looking hopefully for the end. There’s nothing in the paper that any moderately well-read student of the topic wouldn’t have known long ago, but it does have the merit of stating rather blandly some home truths which are somehow still regarded as too dangerous to state publicly in respectable circles in the United States.

Meanwhile, mostly on the left, there has been an altogether different debate, over the actual weight of the lobby. Here the best known of the debaters is Noam Chomsky, who has reiterated a position he has held for many years, to the general effect that US foreign policy has always hewed to the national self-interest, and that the lobby’s power is greatly overestimated.

April 19

One would have thought that after the humiliating self-critiques of last year the
New York Times
would have simply withdrawn its name from contention in the 2006 Pulitzers, but shame was short-lived and the assigned function of the Pulitzer Prize Committee was to winch the paper’s name out of the mud.

The Committee’s composition made this task easier. On the eighteen-member board sits Thomas Friedman of the
New York Times
, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia J-school and contributor to the
New York Times
magazine, and Paul Tash, boss of the
St. Petersburg Times
, which has friendly ties to the
New York Times
.

So the
Times
duly reaped two Pulitzers, the first to a couple of journalists, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who sat on an explosive story through the election of 2004, and through most of 2005, before finally disclosing the NSA’s wiretaps in time to give a boost to Risen’s book on US intelligence.

Two prizes were not enough for full rehab so the Committee threw in another for two
Times
reporters for their China coverage.

April 23

I was harsh about Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, and the very next morning his press aide, Tommy Vietor, was on the phone howling about inaccuracies. It was an illuminating conversation.

Obama’s man took grave exception to my use of the word “distanced” to describe what his boss had done when Illinois’ senior US Senator, Dick Durbin, got into trouble for likening conditions at Guantanamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era camp. This was one of Durbin’s finer moments and he duly paid the penalty by having to eat crow on the Senate floor.

His fellow Senator, Obama, did not support him in any way. Obama said, “We have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while … and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we’ve operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make.”

That’s three uses of the word “mistake.” This isn’t distancing?

Nor did Obama’s man like my description of Obama’s cheerleading for the nuke-Iran crowd. Obama recently declared that when it comes to the US posture on Iran, all options, including military ones, should be on the table. “All options on the table” is standard senatorial tub-thump, meaning We can nuke ’em if we want to. Anybody aiming for high office in America has to be able to swear they’re capable of dropping the Big One. Obama knows that. HRC knows it too, but nobody bothers to ask her, since they know the answer anyway. That woman probably uses a bomb sight to target in on her breakfast grapefruit.

If Obama had any sort of guts in such matters he would have said that if Iraq is to teach America’s leaders any lesson, it is that reckless recourse to the military “option” carries a dismal long-term price tag. He did nothing of the sort, which is not surprising to anyone who read his speech to the Council of Foreign Relations last November.

Obama is one of those politicians journalists like to decorate with words like “adroit” or “politically adept” because you can actually see
him trimming to the wind, the way you see a conjuror of indifferent skill shove the rabbit back up his sleeve. Above all he is concerned with the task of reassuring the masters of the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the politico-corporate establishment, that he is safe.

There are plenty of black people like that in the Congress now. After a decade or so of careful corporate funding, the Black Congressional Caucus is sinking under the weight of DLC clones like Artur Davis of Alabama, Albert Wynn of Maryland, Sanford Bishop and David Scott of Georgia, William Jefferson of Louisiana, Gregory Meeks of New York, all assiduously selling for pottage the interests of the voters who sent them to Washington. Obama is doing exactly the same thing.

April 24

From: Brian Rothgery

To: Alexander Cockburn

Subject: Obama

You are and were right on about Obama. I met the spineless Dem in the summer of 2004, at a private fund-raiser at the home of a wealthy, suburban Chicago attorney. I asked him one question: “I’ve heard that you call yourself a Democrat but you support NAFTA, the death penalty, and the war on Iraq—is that true?” Regarding the death penalty (George Ryan had recently suspended all pending executions), he proceeded to feed me some bullshit about how he believed that it was the right of the people to express their will, and that he wasn’t going to stand in their way (I’m paraphrasing). I said “but the death penalty is RACIST,” and he repeated himself. I got the same mish mash about the war and NAFTA. What a joke. Keep up the good work!

May 3

The Left and the Blathersphere
. Thank God Karl Rove is not to be indicted, so the left will have to talk about something else for a
change. As a worthy hobbyhorse for the left, the whole Plame scandal has never made any sense. What was it all about? Outing a CIA employee. What’s wrong with that? Many years ago a man came into the offices of the
New Left Review
in London where I was manning the portcullis at the time and said his name was Philip Agee and he wanted to write a book about the CIA. Did we call for a special prosecutor to have this fellow hauled over the coals? No we did not. We arranged for a publisher.

Rove has swollen in the left’s imagination like a descendant of Père Ubu, Jarry’s surreal monster. There is no scheme so deviously diabolical but that the hand of Rove can not be detected at work. Actually the man has always been of middling competence. Under Rove’s deft touch Bush has been maneuvered into one catastrophe after another. It was Rove who single-handedly rescued the anti-war movement last July by advising Bush not to give Cindy Sheehan fifteen minutes of face time at his ranch in Crawford.

Rove and Cheney are the White House’s answer to Bouvard and Pécuchet, counselors who have driven George W. Bush into the lowest ratings of any American President. Yet the left remains obsessed with their evil powers. Is there any better testimony to the vacuity and impotence of the endlessly touted “blogosphere” which in mid-June had twin deb balls in the form of the yearly
Kos
convention in Las Vegas and the “Take America Back” folkmoot of “progressive”
MoveOn
Democrats in Washington, DC?

In political terms the blogosphere is like white noise, insistent and meaningless, like the wash of Pacific surf I can hear most days. The blogosphere’s signature upset came in early 2004, when the Howard Dean balloon, inflated by millions of cubic feet of hot air from the bloggers, went pop at the first poke of political reality amid the cornfields of Iowa. But this fiasco was soon forgotten.
MoveOn
and
Daily Kos
have become hailed as the emergent form of modern politics, the target of excited articles in the
New York Review of Books
.

Beyond raising money swiftly handed over to the gratified veterans of the election industry, both
MoveOn
and
Daily Kos
have had zero political effect, except as a demobilizing force. The effect on writers is horrifying. Talented people feel they have produce 800 words of
commentary every day and you can see the lethal consequences on their minds and style, both of which turn rapidly to mush. They glance at the
New York Times
and speed to their laptops to rewrite what they’ve just read. Hawsers to reality soon fray and they float off, drifting zeppelins of inanity.

May 5

Galbraith died on April 29, at the great age of ninety-seven. I once drove up to Vermont to interview him in his farmhouse. It was dark and I drove uncertainly along a dirt road and up a driveway and knocked on the door, shouting, “Is this the home of Professor Galbraith?” “No,” came a testy cry from within. “It’s the home of Professor Hook.” Sidney Hook, the prototypical neocon, lived on the opposite side of the hill from the Keynesian progressive, Galbraith. By no means for the last time, I reflected how easy it is in America to take the other path, often without noticing, and end up 180 degrees from where you thought you were headed.

When I got to Oxford in 1960 people had Galbraith’s 1958 tract,
The Affluent Society
, on their desks, jacket to jacket with the works of such other moral critics of capitalist consumerism as Leavis, Hoggart, and Williams. How we sneered at the image of a car’s tailfin on the cover, which as I discovered twenty-five years later in Detroit when I tracked down the designer, was first drawn in the Chrysler studio by young Cliff Voss in 1954 as emblem of the company’s “forward look” launched in 1956.

The consumers had it right, however. Labor never was going to get any purchase on the commanding heights of the economy or any putative supervision by Congress of the allocation of credit, and of social investment, so they bought fun baroque cars on the installment plan instead, as thoughtfully arranged by GM’s Alfred Sloan decades earlier.

At least Galbraith, in his nineties, could look back to a time when a reformer could not only body forth a social vision, but tentatively identify the agencies whereby that vision could be put into practice. As I read through the
Nation
’s recent special issue on reforming the
world’s economic arrangements, with fine contributions by Stiglitz, d’Arista, Galbraith’s son James, and others, not once, in all the essays, was the question of agency ever raised, or the Democratic Party even alluded to. If there’s going to be a fork in the road ahead, the question of agency had better be on the agenda. Galbraith certainly understood that, though he politely underestimated just how roughly capitalism could play to win.

July 13

A few moments after Italy dashed French World Cup hopes with that disappointing coda of penalty kicks, Alya and I took a five-minute stroll to the Piazza San Marco to see the locals celebrate their nation’s capture of the World Cup for soccer. As we left, the TV in our hotel was showing Rome, Naples, and Milan exploding in triumph. Alya’s niece, staying in Milan, told her the next day that sleep had been impossible. The racket of cheers and honking horns had lasted all night.