What Did Walt & Mearsheimer Learn, and When Did They Learn It?

The May 25 issue of the London Review of Books has a letter from Philip Zelikow, who has held a wide variety of positions both in government and in academia.  He asserts that Walt & Mearsheimer “misused my comments” in “The Israel Lobby.”

In their essay ‘The Israel Lobby’, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt invoke comments made by me as evidence for a controversial assertion of their own concerning the motives for the US invasion of Iraq (LRB, 23 March):

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical . . . The war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States.  The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the Universityof Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

Zelikow writes in his letter that he “did not state an opinion – or even have any special knowledge – about motives of the Bush administration for going to war in 2003.”

But back in early 2003, someone else did: Walt & Mearsheimer.  Here’s what they wrote just weeks before the war began, in "An Unnecessary War" (Foreign Policy, January-February, 2003 at pp. 50-59):

If the United States is already at war with Iraq when this article is published, the immediate cause is likely to be Saddam’s failure to comply with the new U.N. inspections regime to the Bush administration’s satisfaction.  But this failure is not the real reason Saddam and the United States have been on a collision course over the past year.

The deeper root of the conflict is the U.S. position that Saddam must be toppled because he cannot be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  Advocates of preventive war use numerous arguments to make their case, but their trump card is the charge that Saddam’s past behavior proves he is too reckless, relentless, and aggressive to be allowed to possess WMD, especially nuclear weapons.  They sometimes admit that war against Iraq might be costly, might lead to a lengthy U.S. occupation, and might complicate U.S. relations with other countries.  But these concerns are eclipsed by the belief that the combination of Saddam plus nuclear weapons is too dangerous to accept.  For that reason alone, he has to go.

In their 2003 article, Walt & Mearsheimer disagreed, arguing the U.S. could contain Iraq even if Saddam had nuclear weapons.  They opposed military action under all circumstances — “[r]egardless of whether Iraq complies with U.N. inspections or what the inspectors find . . .”  Israel is mentioned only in passing, as support for Walt & Mearsheimer’s argument that Saddam’s WMD were nothing to worry about:

Saddam’s record of chemical weapons use is deplorable, but none of his victims had a similar arsenal and thus could not threaten to respond in kind. . . .  Saddam thus has no incentive to use chemical or nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies — unless his survival is threatened.  This simple logic explains why he did not use WMD against U.S. forces during the Gulf War and has not fired chemical or biological warheads at Israel.

* * *

Of course, now the real nightmare scenario is that Saddam would give nuclear weapons secretly to al Aqeda or some other terrorist group.  Groups like al Qaeda would almost certainly try to use those weapons against Israel or the United States, and so these countries have a powerful incentive to take all reasonable measures to keep these weapons out of their hands.

However, the likelihood of clandestine transfer by Iraq is extremely small. . . .

That’s it. No mention anywhere in the entire article of pressure from Israel.  No mention of an all-powerful Israel Lobby. No mention of a “critical role” played by a vast “Lobby” whose interests allegedly differed from those of the United States.  No mention of an alleged desire to make Israel more secure.  No mention of “neocons” or other code words, or listing of Jewish names.  Just one overriding “real reason” — a strategic concern of the utmost seriousness in a post-9/11 world.

Three years later, Walt & Mearsheimer issued their infamous “research” paper blaming the “Israel Lobby.”  The paper contained no original research, had multiple factual errors that were obvious to anyone conversant with the subject, and used language so tendentious and polemical that it was self-evidently not a work of serious scholarship. 

Given the style and content of their 2003 article, it is almost as if the “research” and writing in their 2006 paper was done by someone else — a theory explored by S. Silverstein here and here.  Consider this a partial response to the MSM concern expressed here, and a vote for further investigation of Option #2.