The Lobby

The pro-Israeli Lobby is in a dither due to an exquisitely documented paper by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt exposing this Lobby's detrimental domination of America's foreign policy. The working paper is on the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's web site, and the essay is published in the March 23 London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk). Meanwhile, in Iraq, sectarian slaughter continues. Martha Raddatz of ABC News reported on PBS Washington Week, March 24, that she had recently asked a group of 200 Iraqi Security Forces in Sadr City whether they had enough equipment. Answer: no. Did they have enough armored vehicles? Answer: we have no armored vehicles; the enemy has better weapons than we do. Are you better off now or before Saddam was taken down? Almost all raised their hands indicating that they were better off before Saddam was removed and explaining that now there are murders, assassinations, and no security. Understandably, many Americans are mystified about how and why we got into this mess. Agatha Christie's Mr. Quin has noted that often one sees things better afterward than at the time. "The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another." ("The Mysterious Mr. Quin") The Lobby pushed us into this war, and if the Lobby can't have a pro-Israeli puppet running Iraq, who, of course, accepts the Israeli occupation of Palestine, then the next best outcome for Israel is an intractable Muslim vs Muslim civil war.