Correcting Robert Kaplan

Over at the Atlantic, journalist Robert Kaplan has a thoughtful piece on why the United States is losing patience with Israel and says that my work with John Mearsheimer on the Israel lobby marked a watershed in this process. I might take issue with his claim that the book "has several flaws" (he doesn’t say what he thinks they are), but I appreciate his giving us credit for shifting the discourse on this important subject. Nonetheless, he makes two observations that I would like to correct, or at least clarify.

First, Kaplan says that "the book alleges that it was Israel’s supporters in America who played a pivotal role in influencing the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq in 2003." To be precise, we do not claim that it was "Israel’s supporters" who played this pivotal role, because we were well aware that there are many supporters of Israel who also opposed the war. Rather, we argued that "the driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives" (who are a subset of those Americans who are also strongly supportive of Israel), and we also documented how some (but not all) of the other individuals and organizations in the broader Israel lobby also helped sell the war here in the United States. We emphasized that the neoconservatives and other backers of the war did not cause it by themselves and that the broader international context and the 9/11 attacks were critical factors that helped convince President Bush and Vice President Cheney that ousting Saddam was a good idea. In short, the phrase "Israel’s supporters" is too broad, and mischaracterizes our argument.

Second, Kaplan writes that the fact that we "felt confident enough to go so far out on a limb on this sensitive issue is telling," and then says that "nobody takes such a risk without outside encouragement." For the record, nobody encouraged us to write on this topic (apart from the Atlantic editor who originally asked us to do an article on the lobby). We were aware of the risks, and John and I debated whether to do it for several weeks before deciding to go ahead. Indeed, no one knew we were working on the project until we had finished our subsequent draft for the London Review of Books and began sending it to various experts for comments and suggestions. Kaplan is correct to say that we got a lot of positive feedback after we published it (most of it in private correspondence), but there was no "outside encouragement" beforehand.