Addressing the Israel lobby.....

[CanIHaveYourRaquetErnie?]

And the fact is, Wolfowitz and Perle played a major role in the U.S. going to war against Iraq. They did not account for the entire reason that the U.S. went to war, but they certainly played a role in it. No one is saying they are the entire problem, but they are certainly part of it.

If you can even name the position Richard Perle held in the Bush administration, I'd be shocked. I would also bet my life that you couldn't name a single other figure who ever held the position Perle did.

Wolfowitz was the Deputy Secretary of Defense, an underling. Again, the chances that you can name another Deputy Secretary of Defense are nil.

Wolfowitz and Perle were supporters of the war. So were tens of millions of others, many of which were far more influential in the decision making than those two.

You also are conveniently omitting how Bush was influenced by the book of Israeli politician Natan Sharansky called "The Case for Democracy". I believe it was perhaps the second book Bush had read in his life, and it made him convinced that the world worked a certain way. The Iraqi people just needed to vote to be happy, according to Sharansky and Bush. So Bush invaded Iraq and helped the enlightened Shia women dip their fingertips in the voting ink, which is what has helped Iraq become the modern paradise that it is. Thanks Natan for your profound political philosophy!

Again, you're grasping at straws to establish an Israeli/Jewish connection to the Iraq War, a war that many administration figures had been advocating for before the Bush presidency. Israel's actual leaders told the administration not to invade Iraq because Iran was the greater threat.

Also, the philosophy behind the war is not what botched it. The incompetent manner in which the war was managed by the DoD is the main culprit. There are all sorts of things you can point to, from the dissolution of the Ba'ath Army to going in with too few troops and relying on untrustworthy political figures like Chalabi. The surge at the end of Bush's second term might have allowed a stable Iraqi democracy to form if the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds could have actually reached a power sharing coalition.

Which you do not disprove by simply hurling an epithet at it.

Look, just like the Jewish historian Peter Nozick (University of Chicago) pointed out with his excellent book in 2001, the fact that the Holocaust happened doesn't make people of Jewish ancestry perfect human beings who can't be criticized of bias or wrongdoing.

Nowadays, if you accuse a Jewish person of having loyalties to their own people, you are somehow an anti-Semite. So I guess the logic there is that if you say that a person is loyal to a group they belong to, then you are a bigot. That really waters down the negative connotations, doesn't it?

Again, you are conflating all Jews with Israelis and vice versa. It's an ignorant statement on its face considering 20% of Israel's population (and now the 3rd biggest political party in the Knesset) is Arab.

Asserting that Jews automatically support Israel over their home country cause of their Jewishness is no different than assuming all American Muslims support the Islamic State, or that Persians in America are more loyal to Iran than the U.S. Of course, nobody makes racist statements like that about any group other than Jews.

I have never argued that the Israel lobby is the entire problem with American foreign policy. I do believe though that it has a highly deleterious influence. What other country has a lobby group in D.C. (i.e. AIPAC) that can get a foreign prime minister to speak to Congress and tell the president what he should do like Netanyahu just did?

You give AIPAC way too much credit. The only thing the lobby had to do with the speech to Congress is that the timing of AIPAC's conference made it possible for Bibi to address both Congress and AIPAC on the same trip. Netanyahu did it to boost his domestic support, and the Republicans facilitated it to stick it to Obama.

AIPAC didn't even have an official position on the Iran negotiations before the trip and speech were planned. It was only after Obama admitted the proposed deal would have a sunset clause of 10 years that AIPAC started lobbying against the deal and truly throwing its weight behind the Congressional bills seeking to give Congress a vote on any deal and the ability to impose more sanctions if no deal is reached by the end of June.

 

[calitennis127]

Also, the philosophy behind the war is not what botched it. The incompetent manner in which the war was managed by the DoD is the main culprit. There are all sorts of things you can point to, from the dissolution of the Ba'ath Army to going in with too few troops and relying on untrustworthy political figures like Chalabi. The surge at the end of Bush's second term might have allowed a stable Iraqi democracy to form if the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds could have actually reached a power sharing coalition.

That is truly one of the dumbest things I have ever read. A shared Western-style democracy between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds is utterly impossible. A more aggressive or all-encompassing military strategy from the U.S. would have only delayed the inevitable breakdown along religious lines. Your John McCain-style advocacy for the U.S. to be in Iraq for 400 years with 200,000 troops is insane.

 

[calitennis127]

Again, you are conflating all Jews with Israelis and vice versa. It's an ignorant statement on its face considering 20% of Israel's population (and now the 3rd biggest political party in the Knesset) is Arab.

Asserting that Jews automatically support Israel over their home country cause of their Jewishness is no different than assuming all American Muslims support the Islamic State, or that Persians in America are more loyal to Iran than the U.S. Of course, nobody makes racist statements like that about any group other than Jews.

This argument shows why American education is in so many essential ways worthless and why democracy is a frivolous form of government, because the vast majority of people are too misinformed to make an intelligent vote on anything even if they tried.

Did you seriously just compare how Jews feel toward Israel with how Muslims feel about ISIS? I don't know why I am bothering to take 5 minutes to even contemplate responding to this, but I will anyway.

There is one country in the world with an explicitly Jewish identity for its majority population. That is Israel. There are dozens of countries in the world with an explicitly Muslim identity and the total number of Muslims in the world dwarfs the total number of Jews. There is no comparison at all between how Jews around the world view their one ethnic nation-state and how Muslims throughout the world view one radicalized version of an Islamic government.

The state of Israel is much more central to Jewish identity than any single Muslim government in the world could be to Muslims, whether we are talking about Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iran, Qatar, ISIS, or any other Muslim country. Jews have much slimmer pickings in terms of governments to identify with or consider their own; they have one choice and that's it. So to somehow compare Jewish support of Israel to Islamic support of ISIS is completely irrational and illogical. You need to go pick up a first-year Latin book and study the syntactical structures.

To conclude, I don't fault American Jews for being favorable toward Israel. My mother is Polish and she still to this day identifies more with Poland than America, so I don't fault Jews for having a special place their hearts for Israel. It makes complete sense to me and it is entirely natural. What I do have a problem with, however, is the American Jewish community influencing American politics in such a way that they can get the U.S. military to do Israel's dirty work. That is unacceptable.