Liberal Utopianism

Žižek's recent book First as Tragedy, Then As Farce, which I read earlier this year, is a characteristic combination of the nearly brilliant and the borderline stupid. My favorite bit is the section during which he discusses Utopia. He would call it pragmatic liberalism—that is, the current system—the "utopia in power", which manages to dismiss all competing visions as themselves utopian, indeed as dangerously so. In fact, "ideological naturalization" is such that few enough can even imagine such visions. Instead, we are repeatedly entreated to place our trust in gradual reformism, even as the so-called "left wing" of Liberalism, the Democratic Party, moves ever rightward, ever confident that it can do so without truly alienating left-wing voters. So I love it when Žižek says that "simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence", and when he describes the noble ideals this simplistic liberalism claims to stand for and says:

The problem lies with the "utopian" premise that it is possible to achieve all that within the coordinates of global capitalism. What if the particular malfuctionings of capitalism [.. .] are not merely accidental disturbances but are rather structurally necessary?

Of course, they are exactly that, structurally necessary, there's no "what if" about it. There is simply no way for the capitalist system to meet the basic needs of the many or the many other needs it calls into being. Žižek goes on to say:

This is how one should answer those who dismiss any attempt to question the fundamentals of the liberal-democratic-capitalist order as being themselves dangerously utopian: what we are confronting in today’s crisis are the consequences of the utopian core of this order itself.

And here, I think, we confront the limits of Žižek's approach. There are, in a sense, two utopias at work here, but Žižek has a tendency to conflate them. They work hand in hand, but they are not the same, and only one has the power, the other has delusions and carries water for the utopia in power. To be sure, they both dismiss competing (leftist) visions as themselves dangerously utopian. There is the liberal capitalist economic regime—the utopia in power—now in its neoliberal phase, pretending to promote freedom for all, pretending that its notion of freedom bears any resemblance to what ordinary people understand by the word freedom. Alongside this we have the true progressive believers, those people who believe the system is good (the best we have), that the course of American history is a progressive one (a noble "experiment"), in the sense of the gradual expansion of rights to more and more people, those who believe capitalism can be restrained (or that a return to Keynesianism is possible). These are the liberal activists who believed in Bill Clinton or Al Gore or John Kerry or Barack Obama, or even if any one or all of these men have not been quite the embodiment of progressive values, believed they are nevertheless the best we have. More to the point, they believe liberalism is besieged and that any overly radical approach is either a threat to the beloved system or a dangerous risk, given the spectre of the lunatic Right. From this perspective, genuinely left-wing activists (even Nader voters) are painted as "dangerously utopian".

Confusion aside, Žižek is exactly right that the time has long since come when we should ignore the crap about freedom spouted by liberals in power and turn the tables on the true-believing reformers by labeling them "dangerously utopian".

Public Vice

I have to admit that there have always been apparently basic things about economics that have been incomprehensible to me. One example of this can be exemplified by an image that has, for me, been symbolic of the Great Depression as a whole: piles of apples, with prices set ridiculously low, yet going to waste, rotting, because still no one can afford them. Deflation, of course (link via American Leftist).

A few weeks ago, Paul Krugman, every Liberal's favorite economist, wrote about the decline in American consumption, the "long-feared capitulation of American consumers". In doing so, he touches on another example of what I'm talking about. He provides some numbers showing this decline in consumption and reminds us that this is unusual, since Americans "almost never cut spending". Americans, of course, have been without any manufacturing base for some time and have thus long since been relegated to the role of the world's consumers. Krugman doesn't say anything about this. He does, however, try to explain why the "timing of the new sobriety is deeply unfortunate". He writes:

. . .one of the high points of the semester, if you’re a teacher of introductory macroeconomics, comes when you explain how individual virtue can be public vice, how attempts by consumers to do the right thing by saving more can leave everyone worse off. The point is that if consumers cut their spending, and nothing else takes the place of that spending, the economy will slide into a recession, reducing everyone’s income.In fact, consumers’ income may actually fall more than their spending, so that their attempt to save more backfires — a possibility known as the paradox of thrift.

Here, Krugman helps me to better understand what my problem has been. We are continually told that, collectively, we do not save enough--Americans' savings rate is effectively zero--while at the same time we are constantly told to consume more, that consumption will save us. Krugman's paragraph essentially makes it plain that the economic system does not serve people, rather people serve the system. Not that this was news to me.

My problem with the phenomenon of the rotting apples was that, in my youth and ignorance, I did not understand why the price of the apples mattered; I didn't understand why they couldn't simply be given to people. And yet, I felt that there must be some obscure reason, and I had no doubt it would be a good one and that if I studied economics I would grasp it. The fact, however, is that there is no good reason. But we've so internalized the idea that capitalism is the natural order of things that we simply accept the notion that food can and will go to waste alongside masses of people starving to death.

Krugman's article points to another element of capitalism that is deeply troubling. Any system in which "individual virtue can be public vice", in the manner in which he is discussing, is simply and profoundly wrong.

Since what I'm suggesting with the example of the apples sounds dangerously like communism, allow me to close with a quote from an article by David Graeber (link via From Despair to Where?--apologies to Stuart for quoting much of the same passage!):

Consider here the term "communism." Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply "doesn't work." Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs"—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says "hand me the wrench," the other doesn’t say, "and what do I get for it?"(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that's why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It's only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism.

(This passage is strikingly similar to that found in a pamphlet I read a few years back--called, I think, "What is Anarchism?". The simple idea was that anarchism is what we do everyday in order to get things done. I found this to be a remarkably liberating idea. Meanwhile, the other day I rejected a comment from a brave anonymous soul, which read as follows: "Please leave the Western world. We have no room for socialists. We like our people independent of mind and carefully guarding and accumulating property." No doubt.)

Myth Rushes in to Fill the Gap

"We praise democracy most of the time, but we practice it as if we had accepted every argument against it, as if we believed it must depress the level of culture and of public life." - Marilynne Robinson (2007)

". . . when communal memory, dialogic memory, breaks down or disappears, myth rushes in to fill the gap." - Gabriel Josipovici, "Memory: Too Little/Too Much" (1999) in The Singer on the Shore (2006)

"Opportunitys once lost is not easily recovered." - William Petrikin, letter to John Nicholson (1789) quoted in Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy

I've made the argument here that democracy, properly understood, should mean a society in which people have non-trivial say over basic decisions affecting their actual lives. We have a fantasy that the history of the United States is the unfolding of this great experiment in democracy, but it is exactly that: a fantasy. A case can be made, fairly easily, that the history of this country is in reality the history of the systematic prevention of democracy. The U.S. Constitution, that holy document, in particular is a key element in this thwarting of democracy, and yet in our imagination, the Constitution is held up as defining and protecting democracy.

In a recent post, I mentioned my reading of Eric Foner's book, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. I said that, for me, the most interesting aspect of the book was how it showed "how the established leaders of Pennsylvania, for example, co-opted the more radical elements, before re-consolidating their power during the revolution itself, with the resulting system being far less free than many had hoped and fought for." Subsequent to that post, I read the book Taming Democracy (Oxford 2007), by Terry Bouton. Bouton's book is subtitled "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution and is a fascinating study of the raised and finally crushed hopes of the revolutionary generation. (Full disclosure: Bouton was one of Aimée's college professors. I've never met him.) One thing that struck me about reading the book is the centrality of economics to the arguments and struggles of the time. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown (see her Democracy Against Capitalism or Empire of Capital or The Origins of Capitalism), one of the key features of capitalism is the wholesale separation of the economic from the political. Economic decisions are made outside of the political realm, whereas the state enforces the conditions necessary for these decisions to have weight. That is, since economic power lies elsewhere, our impact on crucial decisions is negligible, regardless of whatever political victories we may claim. This is why voting is reduced to our selection of one of two candidates, both of whom ultimately serve not the people, but big money. This is difficult to see, since capitalism is like the air we breath, so it is bracing to read about the obvious role of economics in the conceptions of freedom held in earlier eras.

Bouton focuses on Pennsylvania, as did Foner, largely because of Pennsylvania's role as both the center of the most radical popular revolutionary attitudes and as the focus of the counter-revolution that began during the war itself, finally resulting in the Federal Constitution, “taming democracy”, as the title has it. He explains the various economic policies imposed by the British that led to the revolution. It begins with British attempts to extract payment from the colonies in order to pay for the heavy expenses of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which it tried to do by "enact[ing] a set of policies encompassing trade, finance, and taxation that created a profound scarcity of money". Colonies were forbidden from printing paper money as legal tender, and paper was pretty much all the colonies used, since they had so little gold or silver (there was a huge trade deficit with Britain). Through the 1760s, it was increasingly argued by ordinary people that what was wrong with British policies was not just abstract political concepts like "Taxation without Representation”, but that such policies impacted the population unequally, and that this inequality, aside from being unfair, meant that people lacked say over important decisions. In the popular conception, independence meant owning property; most people were farmers. Economic independence meant political independence. It was widely felt that one could not be "free" if one was economically dependent. For most people, this meant owning land. (We are, of course, talking about white men, let's not forget. And it was taken for granted that they had the right to take land from Native Americans.)

By 1776, a decade-plus of popular agitation led to the adoption in Pennsylvania of a new constitution. It was the most radical, most democratic constitution in the colonies, and very popular with ordinary Pennsylvanians. It included many of the features which later became part of the Bill of Rights, and most interestingly, a unicameral legislature:

Modern Americans are accustomed to thinking about the height of democratic government as a divided legislature (house and senate) and a powerful executive (president) armed with the veto. Pennsylvania’s revolutionaries thought otherwise. They viewed such a government as checking democracy rather than promoting it. After all, divided government was a British legacy, where the king and upper chamber of Parliament (the House of Lords, filled with titled aristocrats who served for life) checked the democratic branch (the House of Commons). Most Pennsylvanians believed they had suffered under such a system. Consequently, they wanted a new government that would remove the barriers that had kept their voices from being heard.

The executive had only advisory and enforcement powers. "[T]his was the most democratic government in the new nation; according to Benjamin Franklin, that meant it was also 'the safest and best.'" Consider Marilynne Robinson's quote at the top of this post. She's right, isn't she? Don't we think it's in our best interests that there be an "upper" house of Congress, or any legislature? Got to keep the rabble in line. That is, I would wager, our official American position. Whenever I see a discussion about democracy in its purest form, there is a recoiling away: always the assumption is that you simply can't have it; people can't be trusted. But in the 18th century, the bulk of ordinary people seemed to believe otherwise. Naturally, the wealthy were horrified at the idea.

I don't plan a detailed review of the Taming Democracy here, but suffice it to say that reading it was an often revelatory and infuriating experience. I was inspired by the simple idea that most people believed they had the right to a say in decisions affecting their lives, that they believed they had the right to fight for it and did in fact fight for it. I was especially inspired by what he calls the "rings of protection", concentric rings of people resisting unpopular laws: sheriffs refusing to enforce, judges refusing to sentence, people refusing to attend property auctions, people digging trenches across access roads, preventing tax collection and eviction, and countless other kinds of acts in common cause. To quote from John Pilger, writing about his native Australia (in his book Heroes): "Genuine Australian radicalism, without the closed logic of any fear or prejudice, flowed from experience and conditions, rather than from theory or intellectual fashion. . ." The experience of ordinary colonial Americans led to the radicalism of the Revolution against the British, and to the decades-long resistance to the counter-revolution and to the unpopular Constitution. Most of this history is lost, effaced, forgotten, replaced by the myths of the founding fathers and the glory of that Constitution.

Marilynne Robinson's words quoted at the beginning of this post come towards the end of her short essay, "A Great Amnesia", which was adapted from a talk she gave at Amherst college and which appears in the Readings section of the latest issue of Harper’s (May 2008). I think it's an important piece. She discusses the time she spent reading political economy in her spare time at Amherst, during which she learned of the "iron law" of wages, which has it that "the great class of those who lived by their labor could not earn more than subsistence", an iron law that "has come into force again in much of the world as a consequence of a form of competition that has based national economies on the poverty and low expectations of the mass of their populations." But her discussion begins in the library at Amherst, a library that was "almost always equal" to her demands. She talks about a house that was part of the Underground Railroad, and "other hints at participation in the great issues of an earlier America". And here's where her piece unfolds. The significance of these hints only struck her when she found herself in the Middle West, and "found any number of Amhersts . . . scattered over the landscape." She talks of colleges founded in the Midwest, the faculties of which

seem to have been composed largely of graduates of divinity schools in New England and New York, which sent bands out in to the West to advance the cause of liberal education and the reforms it was meant to promote, including the abolition of slavery and the advancement of women. Many of these colleges were racially integrated and integrated by gender also before the Civil War.

She elaborates:

A very generous hope was abroad in America which undertook to realize itself in the wide diffusion of a kind of education historically associated with privilege. That it was intended to break down the barriers education had historically enforced is clear from the fact that it was open to otherwise excluded groups, African Americans and women. Also, many of these schools were organized according to what was called the Manual Labor System. This meant that everyone in the college community, including the faculty, did the work involved in the keeping it fed and housed, in order to assure that there would be no economic barriers to education. On the frontier this meant everyone chopped weeds and butchered hogs and operated the printing presses that poured out abolitionist pamphlets, many of them mailed to the South. The association of learnedness with privilege or leisure was intentionally undercut.

. . . the strength of this movement was based on the willingness of a surprising number of highly educated people to leave the relative comfort of the East for lives of almost unimaginable difficulty, based on the assumption, which proved true, that the populations that found their way to the prairie would have an interest in Latin and Greek, mathematics and logic. [. . .] Their intention was to re-create American society by practicing as well as promoting standards of justice and freedom to which the nation had not risen.

What happened to destroy this great experiment in democracy? She points to "the emergence of Social Darwinism". Certainly Social Darwinism "had precursors in many forms, not surprisingly, since there is nothing easier than persuading people of their natural superiority to other people." But Social Darwinism was accepted as science for a long time, and "[t]here is no arguing with science". She talks about a "great amnesia": it mattered not that there had been blacks and women admitted to and succeeding in colleges before the Civil War; since science now "proved" that they were inferior, "there was no use for that kind of information." I think she makes a compelling point about Social Darwinism and its scientific imprimatur. (This is not the place for me to go into the differences between science as a practice, and the effects and practices of institutional Science then and now.) I would also point to the bottom-line needs of the emerging industrial economy (though they are related: Social Darwinism was tailor-made for capitalism).

Robinson in her essay notes that if she "had not been struck by the anomalous presence" of these Midwestern Amhersts, these New England colleges and towns found in the middle of the heartland, she would not have "learned that aspirations for American democracy had once been so generous and at the same time so high". While reading the essay, I immediately linked it in my mind with the stories found in Taming Democracy. With both, we have the lost history of a more expansive conception of what democracy can be, of what community can be, conceptions that I believe can help us find a way forward, out of our current mess. These conceptions have been buried beneath the weight of History. As she says, these things are not part of the "story we tell ourselves". We tell ourselves other stories, exaggerated stories: of individual freedom, of invention, of progression over time, of rights granted from above instead of won from below. Meanwhile, our communal memories of what once was, and what once was thought possible in common cause, have been obliterated, replaced in many ways by persistent "fear and prejudice" and by diminished expectations. And myth rushed in to fill the gap.

Notes on the Israel Lobby

I've been meaning to post something about the "Israel Lobby" for months. Instead of simply writing the thing and being done with it, I got ambitious, envisioning a huge, magisterial, all-encompassing post. Meanwhile, however, it's not as if the topic has lost any of its relevance. And then last week, Lenin at Lenin's Tomb posted exactly the kind of entry I had in mind, saying much of what I had intended to say. You should read it. I've tried to organize my own remaining notes as follows.

Israel is a perversely difficult topic of conversation in the United States. It is even more difficult to talk about Israel's role as an ally of the United States or about the role played by the "Israel Lobby" in shaping public debate or public policy. Nobody wants to be accused of anti-Semitism. My take on the Israel Lobby is that of course it is a powerful interest group lobbying members of Congress. I think the Lobby does have undue influence on aspects of American policy, and especially on the quality and content of American public debate. My view is that its lobbying achievements, such as they are, are largely at the level of stifling debate within Congress--as Lenin points out, this is a key reason why the right wing courted the Lobby in the first place. And it might just be possible that if debate in Congress could ever rise to the level of common sense or decency, then that august body might be able to put pressure on the executive. But the fact is that very few members of Congress question the basic aims of American foreign policy. (I wonder how many of them even understand it.) The few that occasionally make some noise about our role in the Middle East, or our relationship with Israel, have indeed run into problems. (Cynthia McKinney is but one example.)

But to leap from this limited exercise of influence to the larger point, that the Lobby determines American foreign policy, to the detriment of both Israel and American so-called "national interests", is to seriously misunderstand the purposes behind the policy (or even to not grasp the facts themselves). The argument presented by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, first in their hugely controversial article nearly two years ago in the London Review of Books, now expanded into book-length with The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (which I have not read), does just that. Such is the debased nature of our public discourse that Mearsheimer and Walt have been subjected to the customary accusations of anti-Semitism, even in normally level-headed places. It somehow never occurred to many people that such a conclusion could be reached without the presence of anti-Semitism. Nor did it seem to occur to these sorts critics that the thesis might simply be wrong for other reasons. (Though of course the accusation of anti-Semitism is so often merely a rhetorical ploy anyway, so it's likely that such critics simply don't care.)

It was on the occasion of Leslie H. Gelb's review of the book in The New York Times Book Review in September of last year, that I began to assemble my notes on the Lobby. To his credit, Gelb does not accuse the authors of anti-Semitism. He disagrees with the book’s premise, but he takes it seriously. He makes some good points, but he also operates under some questionable assumptions. Since Gelb is a former Times columnist and President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, his long review can be seen as an official response, of sorts, to the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis, as well as an official attempt to reinforce the preferred view of things. In his review, Gelb observes that, after an opening in which they explain that the Lobby is "certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that 'controls' U.S. foreign policy", Mearsheimer and Walt offer what Gelb says are largely unsubstantiated claims of the Lobby’s dominance. From there, Gelb proceeds to explain what he sees as the correct view. He begins fairly well:

At one level, this argument is obviously correct. Of course, America's close ties with Israel compund its problems with Arabs and Muslims. But at a deeper level, one ignored by Mearsheimer and Walt, these problems would not disappear or seriously lessen if Washington abandoned Israel. The main source of anti-Americansism and anti-American terrorism is America's deep ties with highly unpopular regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not to mention the war in Iraq.

So far, so good. But he goes on to make several demonstrably false statements, and reveals various working assumptions. Before I get to those, let me excerpt from Lenin's post now, on the purposes of the Israel alliance, and the problems that the war against Iraq poses for the thesis:

The American Right has latched onto Israel precisely because it helps them regulate discourse and win hegemonic battles. It facilitates the repackaging of an aggressive programme of imperial domination and extreme global violence as the defense of the ideals of democracy against - what do you know? - anti-Semites. [...] people who are primarily concerned with stifling internal left-wing dissent, and critical analysis of US policy, have used Israel as a crucial alibi in that struggle. And these lobbies and think-tanks, like the Hoover Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, are recipients of huge amounts of corporate cash. When it comes to corporate America, Israel can't compete in terms either of dollars or ideological reproduction. And this is a problem for Mearsheimer and Walt throughout their book. They list people and institutions as belonging to an 'Israel Lobby', even where their activity isn't really lobbying, even where they aren't funded by Israel, even where their motive has rather little to do with Israel. The neoconservatives support Israel, but the key institutions in which they work are auxiliaries of US capital, not of the Knesset. They are unable to explain anywhere why these pro-Israel neoconservatives have the weight that they do (and why being pro-Israel matters to US capital). This is because they have no conception of class power, a reductionist conception of the 'national interest' and a flimsy account of ideology.

Perhaps the least persuasive of all examples is that of Iraq. Although, Mearsheimer and Walt concede that the US had powerful motives to invade Iraq, they insist that the Israel Lobby was the element without which it would not have happened. It is undoubtedly true that supporters of Israel were also strong supporters of the invasion of Iraq. It is true that Israel has also regarded Iraq as an enemy. It is true that Israeli interests were involved here. It is true that pro-Israel organisations 'lobbied' or simply vocalised hard on behalf of war with Iraq. Yet, if this is supposed to trump - not merely complement - US 'national interests', it is necessary for Mearsheimer and Walt to minimise the benefits of war. Their dismissal of the reasoning that holds control of the oil spigot to be a key goal is roughly as follows: if they wanted oil, they could have invaded Saudi Arabia, and anyway the oil companies would rather have traded with Saddam than overthrow him. This part of the argument is dealt with in a rather perfunctory fashion, but it demands considerably more attention than they are prepared to allot it. For example, it would appear as if the authors did not realise that Saudi Arabia is already subordinate. There is no need for an invasion force to trundle across the Nejd. Actually, one of the problems that Iraq solved was to enable America's troops to move out of Saudi Arabia, where their presence caused some trouble. Saddam Hussein represented, by contrast, the last outpost of Arab nationalism. Successfully conquering Iraq and installing a pro-American client state with a thin veneer of democratic rule, which must have looked incredibly easy after the initial cake-walk in Afghanistan, would have decisively altered the regional balance of power in America's interests. It would also have provided a model for further expansion. The aggressive right-wingers who contrived this policy explained their rationale: in the absence of a serious superpower rival, there was a brief window in which the US could powerfully assert itself as the next century's sole power, demonstrate its ability to fight and win multiple wars, and secure its dominance for the long-term.

In light of sensible, acute analysis like this, it increasingly appears that those "experts", like Gelb, who the press turns to for insight into these matters, either themselves don't understand American foreign policy, including the nature of the close relationship between the United States and Israel (recall Chomsky's many sarcastic comments over the years about how clueless Kissinger always seemed to be), or else they simply see it as necessary to reinforce widely held misconceptions. I'm focusing on Gelb, though his review is by now out of date, because his response is symptomatic of typical mainstream discourse--at least that discourse that has some claim to respectability (alas, truly typical mainstream discourse rarely rises to this level). In his review, Gelb repeats nonsense about Saddam Hussein's "quest" for nuclear arms and claims that "the more we know, the clearer it is" that Bush went to war to correct his father's "blunder" in allowing Hussein to remain in power in 1991. It doesn't seem to occur to him--or, more likely, perhaps, he is unwilling to admit--that it was at that time in the ruling class's interests ("national interests" as they are more generally known) to keep Hussein there. He says that "the greatest strategic bond between" the United States and Israel is that the latter is "one of the few nations in the world that share American values and interests, a true democracy." This sort of garbage is only true if, again, you correctly read the phrase "American values and interests" as those interests of the ruling class we continue to call "national interests". Gelb asserts that the U.S. has no choice but to ally itself not only with Israel, but also with the repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. This is because, he tells us, the alternative is far worse; there is, he says, no source of "moderate" views in the Middle East (no "center"). This sort of assertion is typical. And, typically, it elides an entire half-century and more of American political activity in the Middle East. Indeed, Gelb and the establishment he represents have no interest in anyone knowing or remembering this history. For example, he writes:

It's important to remember that the shah of Iran was overthrown not because he enjoyed good relations with Israel, which he did, but because a majority of his own people came to hate his regime and also his ties to the United States. There was no sustainable moderate center between the shah and the fanatical mullahs. And the lack of such a center is precisely what Washington needs to worry about now in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Of course, much of this paragraph is true. But it intentionally leaves out a lot (and there are numerous other similar paragraphs in the review).  Gelb doesn't address why the shah's people hated his regime, or why he had good relations with Israel, or what variety of purposes the shah's regime, combined with Israel, served for American interests in the Middle East (for some details on this, see Mahmood Mamdani's excellent book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror). "There was no sustainable moderate center between the shah and the fanatical mullahs." "Sustainable" is an interesting word, and the words "moderate center" are nearly devoid of content (these kinds of words only ever refer to politicians or movements which are amenable to U.S. demands). What there was, in fact, was a left-wing revolutionary movement--a movement, to be sure, that finally ended up being destroyed by the "fanatical mullahs"--but what might have been the role of the U.S. in all of this? How does a democratic movement "sustain" itself under continuous threat of destruction from abroad?

The Mearsheimer/Walt Israel Lobby thesis suffers from a lot of the same problems that seem to face most Americans--especially educated Americans--in trying to make sense of U.S. foreign policy.  As Lenin puts it, they have a "reductionist conception of the 'national interest'".  This means, essentially, that they buy the basic rhetoric used by the ruling class to gain support for its actions and policies.  It is impossible to fully grasp the purposes behind American foreign (and, really, domestic) policy, if you persist in believing that the United States is a functioning democracy (and that, in general, it seeks to inculcate democratic values abroad); that the so-called "national interests" resemble what might actually be in the interests of the people of the nation, as opposed to simply those interests of the ruling class; that capitalist and neoliberal twaddle about free trade has anything to do with ideas of "freedom" as understood by actual people; etc.  It is belief in these kinds of ideas that allows many to accept notions of "humanitarian intervention" without investigating too deeply into other reasons that exist behind a given action.  These other beliefs are necessary to sustain the illusion that American foreign policy is intended to serve the interests of the American people, which then forces one to look to other causes which prevent these interests from being successfully served--in this case, the Israel Lobby.  So, for example, if you identify one such "interest" as "security from acts of terrorism", and you observe that the alliance with Israel, and the war against Iraq, has clearly only made matters worse, it is then all too easy to conclude that the alliance does not "serve" American "interests".  From this basic error, Mearsheimer and Walt then notice the very real impact of the Israel Lobby in such areas as the stifling of public debate, and leap to the conclusion that the Lobby determines that unsuccessful policy, and then are able to locate piles of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence in support of that conclusion. These kinds of errors are common, and themselves only serve to mystify and deflect and ultimately to aid the ruling class in its endless class war against the rest of us.

“We are the upholders, not the violators, of international law”

The decade-long dissolution of Yugoslavia is one of the most widely misunderstood cluster of events in recent history. The cynical manipulation of local political problems by the United States under Clinton, and Western Europe, through the UN and NATO, helped set the stage for the wars under the Bush Administration. Liberals and erstwhile leftist intellectuals have a lot to answer for when it comes to misinformation about these years, as well as the general acceptance of the idea of "humanitarian interventions", which can only be seen as a grotesque comedy. I've previously recommended Diana Johnstone's excellent book Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusion. Let me now urge you to read "The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse", at the Monthly Review, by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. The article is very long, but I think it's absolutely crucial reading. (And, hey, it's shorter than Johnstone's book.) (The quotation in the title to this post is attributed to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, commenting on the relationship between NATO and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) --the former having "established" and being "'amongst the majority financiers' of the tribunal".) (Thanks to Stan Goff at Feral Scholar for the link.)

Speaking of deluded Liberals and confused Leftists, let me also point you to CounterPunch, where Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair recently posted a three-part series on Hillary Clinton (one, two, three). Sometimes Cockburn can seem contrarian just for the hell of it (cf. his views on global warming) and here he and St. Clair occasionally overstate the credibility of certain sources, but these pieces are worth reading, especially for those who still cling to the idea that Clinton would be any kind of "progressive" leader, or even better than other candidates on issues specifically affecting women, as many otherwise sane commentators still argue.

Finally, I am happy to link, as many others have, to Ronan Bennett's article in the Guardian, "Shame on Us", about Martin Amis' recent idiotic comments (but there are so many!) about Muslims and Islamism, and the shameful lack of outrage they elicited. And I note, as does Steve Mitchelmore, that Ellis Sharp takes issue with Bennett's contrasting praise of Ian McEwan in the same piece.