July 28, 2006: Who's in Charge Here?

Now that Molly Ivins has made her attempt to take the media to task for its shoddy excuses for "reporting the news" (if ever there were a need to take the phrase "scare quotes" literally!), I thought I would weigh in with one of my favorite sides of the story. This is what I like to call "the AIPAC factor," which has probably been best presented and analyzed by Michael Massing in the June 8 issue of The New York Review. This article grew out of the controversy over the publication of "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in the March 23 issue of the London Review of Books. (One quickly begins to form a picture of why this essay did not appear in an American publication!) The bottom line of the discussion (and the controversy) concerns the high degree of influence that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has over (at least) the executive and legislative branches of the United States government. It is an influence that shows no preference for any political party (or any other form of blue-red coloration); but, like any other lobbying organization, it just wants to make sure it has sympathetic ears in the right places and that, when necessary, sympathy can be converted into action. (The above photograph appeared in Massing's article. I got it from the Web site for the August 2005 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, from which I appropriated their caption.)

I encourage anyone interested in how decisions are likely to be made at this time of crisis in the Middle East to read this article in full. However, we have to remember Joe Kennedy's three rules of politics:

1. Get elected
2. Stay elected
3. Don't get mad, get even

With those as context the following excerpt should give a good foretaste of what the entire article has to offer:

Emphasizing that Israel "is never the sole thing" that causes a defeat, he [Adlai Stevenson III] proceeded to give a list of several politicians who had suffered because they had offended AIPAC. They include Tony Beilenson in Los Angeles (because he had wanted to divert one percent of all US foreign aid—including aid to Israel—to help drought victims in sub-Saharan Africa); John Bryant of Texas (for seeking to withhold funds in order to protest Isreal's settlements policy); and James Moran of Virginia, who found that his anticipated election funds dropped several tens of thousands of dollars after he said at a town meeting in 2003 that the Iraq war would not have been fought had it not been for the strong support of the Jewish community. (Both Bryant and Moran won anyway.)