For those inquiring minds who wanted to know what Eliot “Don’t Ever, Ever Listen to the Generals in Wartime” Cohen thought about Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt’s article, “The Israel Lobby,” they had their chance in a scurrilous attack piece in the Post (Clark Stooksbury refers to it as a “shoddy hit job,” which is even more apt). Entitled, “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic,” in case anyone might miss this point in what followed, Prof. Cohen begins by invoking David Duke’s endorsement of the study as some sort of proof for the study’s anti-Semitism. If everything David Duke endorsed was thereby proven to be anti-Semitic, we might find a great many very ordinary things placed on the Index of Forbidden Thoughts and Items. Of course, the Post plays regular host to Charles Krauthammer, who believed it was axiomatic that The Passion of the Christ was an irredeemable heap of anti-Semitic garbage, so there’s no surprise that a scurrilous screed would make its way onto their op-ed pages when it is time to denounce falsely the latest iteration of anti-Semite.

Cohen’s attack has to be an all-time speed record in a race to the intellectual bottom (sorry, Max Boot, but I think you’ve lost that particular competition) and the fastest that anyone has abandoned any pretense of reasoned debate. Usually it starts with some anecdote about how academics should not resort to libeling opponents and engaging in ad hominem attacks…right before proceeding to libel his opponents and engaging in ad hominem attacks. Prof. Cohen skips the formalities and jumps right in:

The Iraq war stemmed from The Lobby’s conception of Israel’s interest — yet, oddly, the war attracted the support of anti-Israel intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and mainstream publications such as The Economist. America’s anti-Iran policy reflects the dictates of The Lobby — but how to explain Europe’s equally strong opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions?

If Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt had engaged in “piss poor monocausal social science,” as their colleague, Prof. Daniel Drezner, has maintained, it might be telling to point out other contributing factors and causes to show where the authors missed something important. But that is not what they did. The authors did not maintain that there were no other factors in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, but that it is only through the decisive influence of what they called “the Lobby” (shorthand for a congery of various pro-Israel groups and interests) that America has been as involved in the Middle East in the distinctly and overwhelmingly pro-Israel way that it has been involved. Pointing out other supporters for the invasion of Iraq as some of positive proof against the reality of pro-Israel activists who pushed for the invasion simply makes no sense. Prof. Cohen has surely heard the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows, and so there is nothing surprising about a given policy having supporters from a number of different sources. That does not tell us why a given policy is adopted or who is most responsible for pushing it. Here’s a question for Prof. Cohen: if David Duke had supported the invasion of Iraq, would that have made the war anti-Semitic and also bad for Israel?

Surely, if we are engaged in a serious investigation (and Prof. Cohen here clearly is not), we would need to weigh the relative influence of Christopher Hitchens, The Economist and the variegated interests, individuals and groups that “the Lobby” includes on the decision to go to war. Who has more influence on Middle East policy in Washington, the anti-Zionist Chris Hitchens, the “mainstream” Economist or the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC? Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt were crazy enough to answer that the latter has more influence, and indeed together with its many fellow pro-Israel groups and individuals it has more effective influence on U.S. foreign policy than any other “Lobby,” broadly defined.

Prof. Cohen invokes as proof that the paper used anti-Semitic canards any claim that would align The Washington Times and The New York Times, to cite one pairing, on a question of foreign policy, as if there has not been a pro-Israel and an internationalist-cum-interventionist consensus on both sides of the aisle and in both these newspapers specifically for years. Why, Brookings and AEI couldn’t agree on something in foreign policy! That would be crazy. That would be like The Weekly Standard and The New Republic both endorsing the bombing of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Iraq…oh, wait, that did happen. Probably mentioning those two magazines in the same sentence is in itself supposed to be vaguely anti-Semitic.

Brookings and AEI have agreed, in broad terms, on Iraq policy for over a decade and have both been more or less pro-Israel for just as long. This ardent support for Israel, which one sees on a regular basis in both the WSJ and NYT, and in major outlets of the conservative and liberal media, is what affiliates these institutions with “the Lobby.” That is one of the most important criteria of being in “the Lobby.” Someone, I implore you, please make a credible case for why this unparalleled support for a small, relatively irrelevant country is in the national interest! Oh, that’s right, there isn’t one. So supporters of Israel must resort to this increasingly tired accusation that no longer has any credibility.

There might have been an argument to be made that a general internationalist-cum-interventionist consensus in the foreign policy establishment augments or indeed outstrips the appeal of any pro-Israel political forces and that it is this consensus that at least partly explains the convergence of newspapers, think tanks and individuals supposedly on “opposite” sides of the political spectrum. Arguably, it is this consensus that informs the dedicated Christophobia, Russophobia and Serbophobia of many prominent “public intellectuals,” which some people here and abroad might construe as “bigotry” of a sort, and which justified the unconscionable attacks on Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999. But it would still not explain the singular obsession in our media and politics with the affairs of the Near and Middle East, which are obviously multifaceted and involve the United States in a number of ways, but which remain even more obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict that has, properly speaking, nothing to do with the United States in the least.

Prof. Cohen signs off with this:

Other supposed members of “The Lobby” also have children in military service. Impugning their patriotism or mine is not scholarship or policy advocacy. It is merely, and unforgivably, bigotry.

Of course, the only people who have done the real impugning of anyone’s patriotism in the last few years have been people on Prof. Cohen’s side of the Iraq war argument. There is nothing amiss questioning someone’s patriotism if you, like Prof. Cohen, accept established views and endorse the foreign policy consensus I mentioned, and indeed it is part and parcel of endorsing the consensus to doubt the patriotism of those who do not accept it (it is even more desirable to shout down critics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship as anti-Semites).

The only reason why anyone should feel his patriotism impugned by Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt is if he does consciously and reflexively support Israel with an awareness that it is to the detriment of the interests of the United States. The authors did not claim that anyone in “the Lobby” was consciously and knowingly working against the best interests of the United States, because people in “the Lobby” honestly (and, in the authors’ view, mistakenly) conflate the interests of Israel and the United States. They merely observed that this axiomatic identification of interests makes no sense on the facts, and that the most important factor in a widespread belief that these interests are essentially identical has to be the work done by those who lobby on behalf of and defend Israel.