America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  83. Cf. Leebaert, The Fifty Year Wound, 614–616, Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 57.

  84. Ian Williams, “A Faithful Servant,” The Nation 278, no. 7 (February 23, 2004).

  85. NSS, p.15, at http://nssarchive.us/?page_id=32.

  86. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 34.

  87. “X” (George Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25 (July 1947).

  88. “Mr. Y” (Captain Wayne Porter USN and Colonel Mark Mykleby, USMC), “A National Strategic Narrative,” http://www.wilsoncenter.org/MrY.www.wilsoncenter.org.

  89. “Mr. Y,” “A National Strategic Narrative”.

  Chapter Six

  1. Amos Oz, addressing Israeli Zionist and fundamentalist extremists, in In the Land of Israel, trans. Maurie Goldberg-Bartura (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983), 139.

  2. For the texts of the UN General Assembly resolutions and summaries of the debates, see http://www.un.org.

  3. Texts of the U.S. Senate and House resolutions of May 6, 2002 www.opencongress.org.

  4. “Israeli Prime Minister Gets 29 Standing Ovations in Congress, Sends Message to White House,” http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/05/israeli-prime-minister.

  5. Cf. the Zogby International Poll of Winter/Spring 2002, cited in Daniel Brumberg, “Arab Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy: A Complex Encounter,” testimony to the Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on National Security, U.S. House of Representatives, October 8, 2002; the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Global Attitudes: 44-Nation Major Survey (2002); Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, chaired by Edward P. Djerejian, “Changing Minds, Winning Peace,” submitted to the U.S. Congress, October 1, 2003; see also the Saudi polls of 2002 and 2003 cited by Shibley Telhami, “Polling and Politics in Riyadh,” New York Times, March 3, 2002; and Telhami, “Those Awkward Hearts and Minds,” The Economist, April 1, 2003.

  6. Shibley Telhami, “The 2011 Arab Public Opinion Poll,” Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution, November 21, 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2011/1121_arab_public_opinion_telhami.

  7. “Arab Spring Fails to Improve U.S. Image,” Gallup, May 17, 2011, http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/05/17/.

  8. Quoted in James Blitz, “US-Europe Splits ‘Misguided and Dangerous,’” Financial Times, March 19, 2003; see also Tony Blair’s speech to the U.S. Congress, July 17, 2003, http://articles.cnn.com/2003–07–17/us/blair.transcript_1_joint-session-tragic-prologue-congress-library?_s=PM:US. For a similar U.S. view, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Hegemonic Quicksand,” National Interest (Winter 2003/2004).

  9. Issued by the European Council, December 2003, quoted in Ambassador Marc Otte (EU representative for the Middle East peace process), “Towards an EU Strategy for the Middle East,” speech in London, March 1, 2004, published by World Security Network, http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com, March 12, 2004.

  10. Timothy Garton Ash, “Anti-Europeanism in America,” New York Review of Books 50, no. 2 (February 13, 2003).

  11. Cf. Dov S. Zakheim, A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2011), 39.

  12. See “President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East,” speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, November 6, 2003, http://www.ned.org/george-w-bush/remarks-by-president-george-w-bush-at-the-20th-anniversary; and the remarks by Vice President Dick Cheney to the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 24, 2004, http://www.acronym.org.uk/docs/0401/doc18.htm.

  13. Cf. Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Partner in Shaping an Assertive Foreign Policy,” New York Times, January 7, 2004; Robert Kaiser, “Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy,” Washington Post, February 9, 2003.

  14. M. J. Rosenberg, “The Full Court Pander,” Israel Policy Forum 163 (January 9, 2004), http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/commentary/full-court-pander http://www.israelpolicyforum.org.

  15. Robert D. Novak, “Politics vs. the Road Map,” Washington Post, May 26, 2003; for Newt Gingrich’s views, see his “Rogue State Department,” Foreign Policy (July–August 2003); see also Robert Kaiser, “Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy,” Washington Post, February 9, 2003. Thomas Neumann, director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, quoted in the same article. Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 70–76, 288–290; Philip H. Gordon, “Bush’s Middle East Vision,” Survival 45, no. 1 (Spring 2003); Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Partner in Shaping an Assertive Foreign Policy,” New York Times, January 7, 2004.

  16. Joseph C. Harsch, “Politics and Race,” Christian Science Monitor, October 27, 1988.

  17. Gabriel Weinstein, “The Emergence of Jewish Republicans,” November 2, 2010, http://momentmagazine.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/the-emergence-of-jewish-republicans.

  18. Roberta Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (New York: New York Times Book Co., 1983), 166. For worries in the Israeli lobby concerning the domestic U.S. agenda of the Christian fundamentalists and their partly anti-Semitic tradition, see Abraham Foxman, Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2003), 133–159; cf. also the study by the Anti-Defamation League, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1994).

  19. Cf. Joel Benin, “Tel Aviv’s Influence on American Institutions,” Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2003.

  20. Richard Perle et al., “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” report prepared by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (1996).

  21. Elliott Abrams, “Israel and the ‘Peace Process,’” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. Robert Kagan and William Kristol (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 219–240.

  22. Cf. editorial, “The Olive Branch and the Gun,” Nation 219, no. 18 (November 30, 1974); see also “UN: Shadow of a Gunman,” Newsweek (November 25, 1974). For the recognition in the United States after 1991 of the Palestinians’ existence as a people, see Kathleen Christison, Perceptions of Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 268ff.

  23. New York Times/ABC poll of April 1978, cited in William J. Lanouette, “The Many Faces of the Jewish Lobby in America,” National Journal (May 13, 1978).

  24. Cf. the remarks by Irving Kristol on America’s ideological duty to support Israel as a democratic state in “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Weekly Standard 8, no. 47 (August 25, 2003).

  25. Meron Benvenisti, “The Turning Point in Israel,” New York Review of Books 30, no. 15 (October 13, 1983.

  26. Mathew Engel, “Senior Republican calls on Israel to expel West Bank Arabs,” Guardian (London), May 4, 2002.

  27. Tom DeLay, “Be Not Afraid,” speech to Israeli Knesset, July 30, 2003, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/207662/be-not-afraid/tom-delay. See the criticism of DeLay’s words by Congressman Chris Bell, reported in Karen Materson, “Houston Lawmakers Plan to Counter House Majority Leader’s Speech”, Houston Chronicle, August 1, 2003, http://business.highbeam.com/5874/article-1G1–119817993/-houston-lawmakers-plan-counter-us-house-majority-leader.

  28. Cf. Richard Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 30–33, 110–123.

  29. T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 712.

  30. John Wayne, interview with Playboy magazine, May 1971, quoted in Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 296; for the treatment of the Indians over the centuries in American school textbooks, see Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: What History Textbooks Have Taught Our Children About Their Country, and How and Why Those Textbooks Have Changed in Different Decades (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 90–93.

  31. Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: H
arvard University Press, 1996), 66–67.

  32. Cf. Christison, Perceptions of Palestine, 16–25, 103–104, passim.

  33. Senator James Inhofe, Senate Floor Statement, March 4, 2002; see also Chris Mitchell, “The Mountains of Israel,” Christian World News, January 1, 2003, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/STANDING_WITH_ISRAEL/message/8259. Strikingly enough, the Jewish American feminist Phyllis Chesler—a figure as utterly different from Senator Inhofe in other ways as can well be imagined—repeats exactly the same bases for Israel’s claim to the land of Israel in her The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 237.

  34. Cf. Pat Robertson, “Why Evangelical Christians Support Israel,” speech in Israel, December 17, 2003, http://www.patrobertson.com/Speeches/IsraelLauder.asp.

  35. Cf. Asher Arian, Israeli Public Opinion on National Security 2003 (Tel Aviv: Jaffer Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University, 2003), http://www.inss.org.il/upload/(FILE)1190276735.pdf; Daniel Pipes, “Does Israel Need a Plan?” Commentary (February 2003); for support for the idea of “transfer” on the Right in Israel, see Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 172–176, 293–298; Ian Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988), 178–180.

  36. “Survival of the Fittest,” Benny Morris interviewed by Ari Shavit, Ha’aretz, January 9, 2004. For a liberal Israeli attack on Morris’s latest views, see Professor Adi Ophir, “Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion,” Counterpunch, (January 16, 2004, originally published in Ha’aretz).

  37. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord, vii.

  38. Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right, 13; see also Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy (New York; Helios Press, 2002), 278–294; Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalism Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For the background of these movements in Israeli society and political culture, see the vignettes in Oz, In the Land of Israel.

  39. Moral Majority Report, March 14, 1980, quoted at http://static.justchristians.com/abundantLife/091996/12.html.

  40. Sidney Blumenthal, “The Righteous Empire,” New Republic (October 22, 1984).

  41. Hal Lindsey, The Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad (Murrietta, CA: Oracle House, 2002), 59, 127–129; quote from the Book of Job, 39:5–8; Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), quoted in Lindsey, The Everlasting Hatred, 127, 135–140, 149–158. For the immense audience for fundamentalist and millenarian TV shows, see Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1986), 11–14.

  42. http://www.donfeder.com/articles/0906%20whyKeepTellingUs.htm.

  43. Stephen Mansfield, The Faith of George W. Bush (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2003), 126. For the growing relationship between American evangelical fundamentalism and Israeli fundamentalism, see also Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (New York: Free Press, 2000); Hassan Haddad and Donald Wagner, eds., All in the Name of the Bible: Selected Essays on Israel and American Christian Fundamentalism (Brattleborough, VT: Amana Books, 1986); Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophesy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 183–191, 203–208. For the historical origins of American evangelical support for Zionism, see Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 4–15.

  44. Colin Shindler, “Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists: A Symbiotic Relationship,” Israel Studies 5, no. 1 Halsell, Prophecy and Politics, 145–160; Gorenberg, The End of Days, 238–240.

  45. Julia Duin, “Israeli Pits US Politics Against Road Map,” Washington Times, August 18, 2003.

  46. Cf. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll, “A Year After the Iraq War,” March 16, 2004, http://www.people-press.org/2004/03/16/a-year-after-iraq-war/; Bill Schneider, “Mideast 101: Evolution of US Feelings Towards Israel,” CNN, April 17, 2002, http://articles.cnn.com/2002–04–16/world/me101.schneider_1_american-jews-israel-public-support?_s=PM:WORLD.

  47. For limitations on debate in the United States, see Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1985). For self-censorship in the Jewish community in the United States, see the remarks of General Mattiyahu Peled and Irving Howe, quoted in Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews, 280, 278–283.

  48. See the organization’s website at http://www.jstreet.org.

  49. Cf. I. F. Stone, “Confessions of a Jewish Dissident,” in Underground to Palestine and Reflections Thirty Years Later (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 229–240.

  50. Allyn Fisher-Illan, “Israeli Ex-Security Chiefs Draft New Peace Plan,” Reuters, April 5, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/05/uk-israel-palestinians-initiative-idUKTRE7344AZ20110405; and Molly Moore, “Ex-Security Chiefs Turn on Sharon,” Washington Post, November 15, 2003.

  51. Cf. the advice to the Israeli government and lobby from the public relations firm Wexner Analysis, “Israeli Communications Priorities 2003,” to be found at http://www.adc.org/index.php?id=1789.

  52. For a suggestion that Israeli settlement policy has in fact already wrecked the possibility of a two-state solution, and that the only possible and just solution that remains is a unitary binational state, see Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books 50, no. 16 (October 23, 2003); for a rejoinder from a liberal partisan of Israel, see Leon Wieseltier, “What Is Not To Be Done,” New Republic (October 27, 2003).

  53. Cf. “Middle East Partnership Initiative: Arab Press Wary,” U.S. Department of State, International Information Program, Foreign Media Reaction, December 20, 2002; see also Augustus Richard Norton, “America’s Approach to the Middle East: Legacies, Questions and Possibilities,” Current History (January 2002), 3–7.

  54. Contrast, for example, the discussion of this issue by Quentin Peel, “A Big Idea that Europe Won’t Buy,” Financial Times, February 5, 2004, with that of David Ignatius, “The Allies’ Mindless Bickering,” Washington Post, February 10, 2004.

  55. I. L. Kenen, former chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), links both these assertions in his autobiographical profile of the Israeli lobby and its battles, Israel’s Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981), 332 and passim.

  56. Zakheim, A Vulcan’s Tale, 215.

  57. Correlli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (London: W. W. Norton, 1991), 378–389.

  58. Cf. D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London: MacMillan, 1983), 40–43, 139–151.

  59. Stanley Hoffmann, “The High and the Mighty,” American Prospect, January 13, 2003, f.

  60. Quoted in Joyce R. Starr, Kissing Through Glass: The Invisible Shield Between Americans and Israelis (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990), 225.

  61. Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), epigraph. See especially Samuel Langdon, “The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States,” in God’s New Israel, 93–105.

  62. For the combination of religious, cultural, and ideological sympathy in the United States for the Zionist movement, see Grose, Israel in the Mind of America; for the representative views of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, see Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 784–785.

  63. Cf. Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 58–62.

  64. Quoted in Halsell, Prophecy and Politics, 113–114.

  6
5. Secretary Rumsfeld, Town Hall Meeting, August 6, 2002, http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3573.

  66. Cf. David Weisburg with Vered Vinitzky, “Vigilantism as Rational Social Control: The Case of the Gush Emunim Settlers,” in Cross Currents in Israeli Culture and Politics, ed. Myron J. Aronoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), 69–88.

  67. Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (London: Sphere Books, 1972), 232–235; David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 183–184; for a portrait of a similar (unnamed) figure, and his views concerning Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and Arabs, see Amos Oz, “The Tender Among You, and Very Delicate,” in In the Land of Israel, 85–100. For the comparison with “Indian fighters” see also Uri Avnery, Israel Without Zionism (New York: Collier Books, 1971). For the tradition of freelance and vigilante violence on the American frontier, see Joe B. Franz, “The Frontier Tradition: An Invitation to Violence,” in Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Gurr (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 127–153; H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg, “Vigilantism: An Analysis of Establishment Violence,” Comparative Politics 6, no. 4 (July 1974).