The parade of takedowns of Walt & Mearsheimer’s book continues (has anyone seen any reputable scholar or author defend their lengthy libel?) with Jeffrey Goldberg’s brilliant review in The New Republic ("The Usual Suspect"). He describes them not as anti-Semitic, but rather with a more neutral term — "Judeocentric" (reflecting the belief that all world affairs can be explained by reference to the Jews).
Previous proponents of this single-cause theory of history have included Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph P. Kennedy, Patrick Buchanan, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke and Mel Gibson (who expressed it most succinctly in his reflection, upon his arrest for drunk driving, that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world"):
But the tradition has now found a couple of unexpected new tribunes. The Judeocentric understanding of
America’s foreign policy is now the special province of two ostensibly reputable scholars, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University. The two men gained their fame — which is wildly disproportionate to their achievement — last spring, after the publication of an article in the London Review of Books that condemned the activities of Jewish-American supporters of Israel and argued that those activities are responsible for an astounding number of world-historical developments. In the article, the word "lobby" was ominously capitalized, Robert Ludlum style, as "the Lobby," to connote the perfect grip of pro-Israel activists upon Washington. In their new book, which builds on (and worsens) that earlier work, Mearsheimer and Walt lower-case the word "lobby," as a small tribute, I suppose, to the reality-based community. They have also excised some of the rougher language of their original blast. They have corrected some, though not all, of their errors of fact. But otherwise the book remains true to the malignant and dishonest spirit of the article.
Perhaps Professor Walt thought he would get some sympathy from his friend Leonard Fein of Americans for Peace Now. But Fein has published his equally devastating letter to Walt, describing the “sheer recklessness” of the book’s analysis, “so tendentiously argued”:
Stephen Walt Kennedy School of Government Harvard University Cambridge, MA
Dear Steve:
You asked for my opinion, writing to me “I’m sure I will learn from” it.
Perhaps. I’ve read the book very carefully, all 355 pages of the text and very nearly all the 1,399 footnotes. . . .
Leslie Gelb, as you know, accuses you of “puzzlingly shoddy scholarship.” I think the problem far more serious. You have sought to be thorough, but transgressions of both commission and omission abound. Methodologically, the book is a mess, adding unconnected little truths to one another as if together they constitute one big truth; relying far too heavily on secondary sources such as newspaper clippings and OpEd columns; riddled with internal contradiction.
Neither of the above excerpts do justice to the complete fricasse that Goldberg and Fein make of Walt & Mearsheimer and their book. Even after so much has been written about the academic malpractice they represent, these two articles are worth reading in their entirety.
Last night Mearsheimer was on “The Colbert Report” on the Comedy Channel.
(Hat tip for the link to the Fein article to Robert Hessen, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution).