The Guardian, UK
Oct 12 2007

None dare call it lunacy

The move in the US against realism in foreign policy seems to be
acquiring more and more credence: but it’s a mistake.

Daniel Davies

About Webfeeds October 12, 2007 6:30 PM | Printable version
As Simon Tisdall says, the timing of the House of Representatives
resolution on the Armenian genocide is wildly unfortunate. Given that
Turkish tanks are being prepared to head over the border with
northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists – a terribly irresponsible
and dangerous over-reaction – it is a really bad time to have the
Turkish government feel forced by domestic politics to withdraw its
ambassador from the US. Diplomacy is badly, badly needed here.

Of course there was a genocide of the Armenians and it is both stupid
and nasty of the Turkish government to deny it, and the provisions of
the Turkish constitution which make it a speech crime to refer to
this historical fact should be a serious obstacle to their accession
to the EU. But given that the world is how it is, was there really
such an urgency to pass a resolution about 1915?

It’s something that makes me feel really out of touch with normal
politics. A lot of people clearly definitely and sincerely believe
that there is something intrinsically important about the act of
making a public statement that a genocide happened. Conor Foley has
written a number of excellent articles about how difficult the whole
subject is, and I’ve complained myself a couple of times about the
idea that "speaking truth to power" about genocide is an acceptable
reason for upsetting actually existing diplomatic efforts to try and
stop people from getting killed. The nature of diplomacy is that you
make compromises, and the nature of compromises is that you feel bad
about them. I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that facts
matter more than feelings.

The opposite point of view – which, I reiterate, is widely held and
seems to command a majority in the US House of Representatives –
seems to be based in a rejection of "realism" in foreign policy. At
its best, the anti-realism movement has some good points, as made in
Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, where he intelligently
challenges the corrosive cynicism of foreign policy realists like
Henry Kissinger, who are far too eager to support domestic strongmen
overseas in the name of "national interests". On the other hand, the
rejection of realism can be pushed too far (and I’d argue that Berman
does in fact push it too far) into something that looks uncomfortably
like a rejection of reality. A courageous stand on the Armenian
genocide exists in the realm of ideas, but if Kurdistan becomes as
unstable and violent as the rest of Iraq, then that will be a
concrete fact, and this distinction matters a hell of a lot.

One group of people who recognised this are the Israeli government
and their associated lobby in the US. Stable relations with Turkey
matter a lot to the Israelis, and it might be thought that the
government of the state of Israel, along with the anti-defamation
league (ADL), know a little bit about the importance of remembering
and recognising genocide. Last month, it very much appeared that the
ADL was going to be swinging its considerable lobbying might behind
the Bush administration’s attempts to stall this resolution. But this
caused a huge uproar (understandably, of course – "Director of ADL
denies genocide" is pretty much the ultimate in "Man Bites Dog"), and
while it looks like the Israeli government was working diplomatically
behind the scenes, the real power of the "Israel lobby" is in the
lobby part, not the Israel part, and that was not working against the
motion.

I think that this demonstrates something quite important about the
well-known book by Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and US
Foreign Policy. The professors actually note in the book, but perhaps
don’t draw enough attention in public to the fact, that the lobby
they identify is in essence a political one within the US, not a
nationalist lobby for a foreign country. In my opinion it really
ought to be called the neoconservative lobby, because that’s what it
is. Most of the time, the interests of the neoconservative,
anti-realist tendency in foreign politics run absolutely in line with
those of the state of Israel (where they come into contact at all).
But sometimes they don’t – arguably the invasion of Iraq was one such
case, and the Armenian resolution was unarguably another. And in all
cases where the so-called "Israel lobby" has to choose between
Israeli national interest and neo-conservative politics (no matter
how crazy), it is Israel, not neoconservatism, that gets the shaft.

The reason that Mearsheimer and Walt think in terms of the "Israel
lobby" is that they are "realists" in the pejorative foreign policy
sense – they don’t really use analytical categories that aren’t
related to somebody’s national interest. But the tendency that they
identify in American politics is actually the ideology called
neoconservatism – an anti-realist political movement dedicated to a
political programme of extending the American system of government
everywhere, by force if necessary. This political lobby group is
currently trading under the brand "pro-Israel", but this is no more
to be taken at face value than the logo on a fake Louis Vuitton
handbag; it just happens to be the case that branding yourself
"pro-Israel", like branding yourself Louis Vuitton, is a good way to
extract more cash for your product than it is intrinsically worth.

This is, in my opinion, quite worrying. If the largest and most
powerful foreign policy lobby group in American politics today was
simply a nationalist movement within the US for Israel (rather in the
way in which the Cuban-American lobby is purely and simply a
nationalist anti-communist movement concerned solely with Cuba), then
there would be some dealing with it. But it isn’t. It’s an ideology
that is explicitly based on a refusal to compromise with squalid
reality, and dedicated to cheerleading for war whenever one looks
practical, and a rather coarse and unattractive self-aggrandisement
of the US at the expense of all other countries (particularly Muslim
ones) at all other times. I had heard of the "Confederacy of Dunces",
but I didn’t realise that these days it needs to be taken seriously
as a political force.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress