In the audiotape Osama bin Laden released earlier this week, he had some book recommendations for the American people — Jimmy Carter’s "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid" and John Measheimer and Stephen Walt’s "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." On his ForeignPolicy.com blog, Walt responds that "while it is usually gratifying to get kudos for your work, that is certainly not the case in this instance, given what bin Laden has done in the past and given what he stands for." But he then goes on to basically say, "Well, of course bin Laden approves of our book — everything we say is so obvious he didn’t even need to read our book to know it":
In short, he didn’t need our book to tell people there’s an Israel lobby with a powerful influence on U.S. Middle East policy.
It is also important to ask why bin Laden called attention to U.S. support for Israel, and to the lobby’s role in generating that support. He did this because he understands — along with plenty of other people — that the combination of unconditional U.S. support for Israel and Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians is a source of great resentment in the Arab and Islamic world.
But Walt then says that if people do read his and Mearsheimer’s book and pursue their policy prescriptions, bin Laden will actually lose followers:
Third, my co-author and I have a very different idea of how to deal with this situation than bin Laden does. He recruits people to engage in despicable acts of violence against innocents, in the grandiose (and vain) hope of toppling all of the states in the region (not just Israel). He’s perfectly happy to kill Muslims, Christians, Jews, atheists, and just about anyone else if it will advance that goal. By contrast, Professor Mearsheimer and I reject his aims and abhor his chosen means. We believe the United States should defend Israel’s existence, and we said so repeatedly in our book. (My guess is that bin Laden missed those parts). We also think the United States should oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza and treat Israel the same way it treats other democracies. Why? Because ending the occupation and having a normal relationship with Israel would be better for us, better for Israel, and better for our other friends in the region. In short, we want the United States to pursue a smarter and more ethical policy in the Middle East. Needless to say, that’s a far cry from bin Laden’s murderous agenda.
Ironically, bin Laden’s "endorsement" of our book could even be a self-defeating gesture. If enough people were to read our book and U.S. policy were to evolve in the manner we recommend, bin Laden’s call to arms would fall on deaf ears and he’d become even more irrelevant than he is today. Furthermore, any would-be imitators who might subsequently emerge would find an even less receptive audience.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg responds:
Get it? No, of course not. Because it’s twisted. But let me try to translate: If the U.S. listens to the psychotic mass murderer Bin Laden and hops on Walt’s anti-Israel bandwagon, then Bin Laden will lose popularity, because America, by abandoning Israel and moving closer to Bin Laden’s view of the world, will no longer alienate radical Muslims, for whom the number-one cause is the destruction of Israel, and therefore Bin Laden, having won, will lose relevancy. See? If we just sacrifice Israel, then everything will be okay.
Of course, this argument assumes a couple of things: That the Palestinian cause is uppermost in Bin Laden’s mind, for one, even though no serious Bin Laden scholar believes that to be the case; and two, that giving apocalyptic mass-murdering terrorists what they say they want will make them stop being apocalyptic mass-murdering terrorists. Stephen Walt advertises himself as a "realist," but could his argument that the way to stop lunatics from killing you is to let them kill other innocent people be for real?
David Rothkopf, also writing at the same Foreign Policy Web site as Walt, also is amazed by Walt’s defense:
Walt’s response gets really good when he then goes so far as to suggest that Osama’s embrace of his book only proves his point that the Israel lobby (or is it The Israel Lobby?) is used as a justification by terrorists. Blind to the irony all his book did was weave precisely the kind of fabric of partial truths and old biases that are used to dress up the hatreds of demagogues everywhere, Walt actually has the chutzpah to try use the news that the most evil man in the world is reading his work as a soap box from which to once again sell his argument (and books).
Of course, even more disturbing to me than the fact that Bin Laden has now been given the opportunity to suggest that he has found support for his arguments from "prestigious academics" is of course, that not just terrorists are reading this book or buying its conclusions. The cold hard fact is that Walt and Mearsheimer have won the moment here in Washington. The United States is getting tougher with Israel and more open to Hamas and their supporters in the Arab world. We are seeking "balance" in the name of "realism." There are two prevailing groups who are driving the argument at the moment: those who see moral equivalency between the Israelis and the Palestinians (see yesterday’s "war crimes" report) and those who think the Israelis are worse.
He says, though, that Walt and Mearsheimer will be proven wrong:
Let’s see what happens when the United States distances itself further from Israel, when we beat up on them and embrace the Palestinians and their "allies" elsewhere in the region … soon enough we will see that we ended up in support of Israel not because of the power of the Israel lobby or America’s deep love of the Jews (hold on while I choke back my own laughter at that idea), but because they were the only country in the region that actually was a suitable and dependable ally and that as big a problem as the Israelis may have been for the long-suffering Palestinians, the Arabs have been as bad or worse. All that’s even more true today. So, Israel should go along with the new approach (careful to defend itself against imminent threats, of course) and let Hamas and Ahmadinejad do the heavy lifting when it comes to disproving the whimsy of the realists that all it will take is for us to make nice with the Arab world and all will be well. And at the same time, by losing this argument big time, those who are supporters of Israel will (once again) prove their own weakness in the U.S. political process.
In other words, go on, try "realism." Make my day. It’s the best possible way to discredit Osama, Hamas, Ahmadinejad, Walt and Mearsheimer all at once.
And he concludes:
Every book gets the readers it deserves.
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