Warmonger
Cotton Accuses Antiwar Think Tank of Anti-Semitism
If you wonder what the
post-Trump Republican Party will look like, take a glimpse at Tom Cotton, one
of the US senators from Arkansas (where I live). Cotton has waged a relentless campaign
for war against Iran and has supported every horror produced by
the US foreign-policy establishment for the last 20 years. He makes other
American hawks look like pacifists. Cotton once said that his only criticism of
the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where people are held indefinitely
without charge or trial, is that too many beds are empty.
Typical of
take-no-prisoners warmongers, Cotton savages critics of the pro-war policy that
has characterized US foreign policy in the 21st century. No baseless charge is
beneath him. He recently attacked the Quincy Institute in the course of remarks
about anti-Semitism. (You can see what’s coming.) According to Jewish
Insider, Cotton said that anti-Semitism
“festers in Washington think tanks like the Quincy Institute, an isolationist
blame America first money pit for so-called ‘scholars’ who’ve written that
American foreign policy could be fixed if only it were rid of the malign
influence of Jewish money.”
This is worse than a series
of malicious lies – every word is false. In fact, it’s an attempt to incite
hostility toward and even disruption of one of the bright spots on the mostly
desolate foreign-policy-analysis landscape.
The Quincy Institute for Responsible
Statecraft (QI) started last year with money from, among
others, the Charles Koch Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society
Foundations. Its officers and staff include respected and sober foreign-policy
analysts and journalists such as Andrew Bacevich, Trita Parsi, Jim Lobe, and
Eli Clifton. Also associated with the institute are the well-credentialed
foreign-policy authorities John Mearsheimer,
Paul Pillar, Gary Sick, Stephen Walt, and Lawrence Wilkerson. This is indeed a
distinguished team of foreign-policy “realists” who are heroically resisting
America’s endless-war-as-first-resort policy.
Named for
John Quincy Adams – who as secretary of state famously declared that “America
“goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” – QI “promotes ideas that
move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in
the pursuit of international peace.” The QI website goes on to state:
The US
military exists to defend the people and territory of the United States, not to
act as a global police force. The United States should reject preventive wars
and military intervention to overthrow regimes that do not threaten the United
States. Wars of these kinds not only are counterproductive; they are wrong in
principle.
It then goes on to indict the current
foreign-policy establishment:
The foreign
policy of the United States has become detached from any defensible conception
of US interests and from a decent respect for the rights and dignity of
humankind. Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a
costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and
treating armed dominance as an end in itself.
Moreover,
much of the foreign policy community in Washington has succumbed to
intellectual lethargy and dysfunction. It suppresses or avoids serious debate
and fails to hold policymakers and commentators accountable for disastrous
policies. It has forfeited the confidence of the American public. The result is
a foreign policy that undermines American interests and tramples on American
values while sacrificing the stores of influence that the United States had
earned.
This may not be pure libertarian foreign
policy (“US interests” is too slippery a term for my taste), but compared to
what passes for foreign-policy thinking these days, it’s pretty damn good.
So why is Tom Cotton so upset? It should
be obvious. QI opposes the easy-war policy of the last 20 years. Of course
Cotton is upset. Take away war, and he’s got nothing in his toolbox. He
certainly doesn’t want to see the public turn antiwar before he’s had a shot at
high office, say, secretary of state, secretary of defense, CIA director, or
even the presidency.
Cotton’s
charges against QI are wrong on every count.
QI is not isolationist as long as it
supports trade with the world and diplomacy as the preferred method of
resolving conflicts.
It’s not a blame-America-first outfit
because the object of its critique is not America or Americans, but the
imperial war-loving elite of the American political establishment. Cotton is
part of that elite, but that does not entitle him to identify the mass of
Americans with his lethal policy preferences.
It’s not a money pit. As you can see, QI
boasts eminent lineup thinkers and writers. So the money is obviously
well-spent on badly needed analysis. QI should have been set up long ago.
Cotton shows his pettiness by putting the word scholars in
sarcasm quotes. He should aspire to such scholarship as Bacevich, Parsi, et al.
have produced.
But where Cotton really shows his agenda
is his absurd claim that anti-Semitism “festers” in QI (and other think tanks –
which ones?).
Cotton here is performing that worn-out
trick that, alas, still has some life in it: conflating criticism of Israel and
its American lobby with people who are Jewish (and who may well oppose how the
Israeli state mistreats the Palestinians). I’m sure he knows better: this is
demagogy and not ignorance.
On its face, the proposition that
virtually anyone who criticizes Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians and
its Arab and Iranian neighbors probably hates Jews as Jews is patently
ridiculous. Any clear-thinking person dismisses that claim out of hand.
Undoubtedly Cotton has in mind primarily
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby and Foreign
Policy, published
in 2008. (It began as an essay in The London Review of Books.) In that work, Walt
and Mearsheimer reasonably attribute the lion’s share of influence on US policy
in the Middle East to the Israel lobby, “a loose coalition of individuals and
organizations that actively work to move US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.”
They add, “[I]t is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ US
foreign policy. It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews
and gentiles, the whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel’s case within the
United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members
believe will benefit the Jewish state.”
This is
hardly controversial stuff, although reasonable people can disagree over
whether the lobby was decisive in any given case.
But does anyone doubt that American
champions of Israel work overtime and spend a lot of money to advance what they see as Israel’s interests? If so, see this and my
book Coming to Palestine. (Many non-Zionist Jews disagree with them about
those interests.) Organizations like AIPAC often boast about their influence.
That they sincerely believe Israel’s interests coincide with America’s
interests is beside the point. (I won’t address that dubious contention here.)
That influence, which supports massive annual military aid to Israel, has
helped to facilitate the oppression of the Palestinians, wars against Lebanon,
and attacks on Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It has also provoked hostility to America
and vengeful terrorism against Americans. (For example, the 9/11 attacks as
acknowledged by the government’s commission.) Pro-Israel American political and military officials acknowledge
this.
Cotton need not wonder why the lobby has
succeeded so often since he himself is using the anti-Semitism canard to
inhibit Israel’s critics. No one wants to be condemned as anti-Semite (or as
any other kind of bigot), so we can easily imagine prominent people in the past
withholding criticism of Israel for fear of being thought anti-Jewish. (It’s
Israel and its champions, not Israel’s critics, who insist that Israel is the
state of all Jews, no matter where
else they may be citizens.) Thankfully, despite the efforts of Cotton, Kenneth Marcus, Bari Weiss, Bret Stephens, and others, the invidious conflation has lost much of
its force. More than ever, people understand that to oppose the entangling
alliance with Israel and to express solidarity with the long-suffering
Palestinians do not constitute bigotry against Jews.
Can Cotton produce any evidence that
anyone at QI believes that pro-Israel Jewish Americans should be barred from
lobbying and making political donations or that such an obvious violation of
liberty would fix American foreign policy? Of course not. There is no evidence.
Moreover, I’m sure the QI realists understand that other interests also propel
the pro-war US foreign policy, including glory-seeking politicians and generals
and the profit-craving military-industrial complex.
Those who reflexively and slanderously
tar Israel’s critics as anti-Semites seem not to realize that the worthy effort
to eliminate real anti-Semitism is undermined by their efforts to immunize
Israel and its American champions from good-faith criticism.
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