One of the basic questions in science ethics classes involves to what extent a scientist is responsible for what people do with her work. If someone discovers a new polymer and someone uses it to create a toxic gas, is she to be held accountable because she should have anticipated that use? More basically: if someone tells the truth, are they responsible if telling that truth has uncomfortable consequences. Now, Walt and Mearsheimer didn’t tell the truth in their dual-loyalty-esque diatribe against the ‘Jews and their friends’ who supposedly control US foreign policy, but their defense is that they actually believe their piss-poor social science. So when unsavory characters hop on the Walt and Mearsheimer bandwagon, the claim of these two academics is that that it’s not their fault if other people agree with their conclusions for different reasons.
So when David Duke triumphantly announces (about Eliot Cohen) that “Leading Neocon Jumps into the fray against Harvard paper and me!”, we can imagine that Walt and Mearsheimer would say that it’s not their fault that they’re feeding racist fantasies because they disagree with the racist’s reasoning. They agree with him that the Israel lobby has disproportionate influence on American foreign policy, but not for the reasons that he offers. One would expect them to at a minimum disassociate themselves from such reasoning at length (given that that’s the obvious normative danger of their position), but let’s not ask too much.
Here’s the thing though – Solomonia reported earlier this weekend that Walt and Mearsheimer are teaming up with two CAIR officials to talk about how why the US acted the way it did during Lebanon II. Now we assume – in fact, we’re quite confident – that CAIR’s reasoning for why they oppose US actions is far, far different from what Walt and Mearsheimer tell themselves their reason for opposing AIPAC is. To that extent, it’s fair to ask where they draw their line on proper and improper reasons to fear the Israel Lobby. They’ll rub elbows with some people who agree with their conclusions for non-social science reasons (say, a distaste for Jews on the part of some CAIR members) but not with others (say, a distaste for Jews on the part of some of David Duke’s supporters).
We don’t think that Walt and Mearsheimer are anti-Semites. We just think that they’re among the most stereotypical of the once-venerated academic realists: seething with resentment about the precipitous loss of influence they have experienced since 9/11 and very, very pissed off about US policy in the Middle East. For the better part of half a decade, they’ve been insisting that the Bush Administration’s policy of democratization and regime change are undermining global stability – they have all but insisted that if only everyone would heed their advice and go back to propping up Arab dictators, this whole “Muslims want to conquer the world” thing would go away. But they have a problem: the palpable failure of decades of realism in the Middle East – as evidenced by things like global jihadism beginning in the 1990s – has made them sound kind of silly. Their “we should support tyrants” refrain hasn’t really caught on. Having literati like Christopher Hitchens evicerate them in print might have been discomforting, but it must have been downright embarrassing when the Secretary of State – herself once a leading light of Sovietology and realism – publicly declared them to be irrelevant.
And so a new strategy was needed. Even self-absorbed academics eventually notice when their pretentious tirades about how everyone is naive are becoming pathetic. Their solution: publish a rambling diatribe in a highbrow outlet. Fill the diatribe with the same old complaints about how turning away from realism will doom the US, but this time make a sensational accusation so that you can be sure you’ll get attention: scandalously scapegoat someone that opponents of the Iraq War from across the political spectrum can unite in vilifying. Old realist line: “Arabs aren’t good at democracy.” New realist line: “Arabs are just like us. It’s the Jews’ fault that we’re fighting them”. Out of sheer frustration and confusion, Walt and Mearsheimer latched on to the most readily available foreign policy meme in academy: neo-cons control the Bush administration.
Our point is that they should have to be a little more honest in their backtracking. Refusing to endorse people who agree with their conclusions for hateful reasons was a coherent – if unpersuasive – start. But now they’ve proven that they’re so desperate that they’re willing to sit down with people who will agree with their conclusions for far more unsavory reasons. So they’re back to sounding like anti-Semites, associating with anti-Semites, and having to claim that they’re not anti-Semites. At this point, we think we’re doing a better job arguing why they’re not anti-Semites than they were.
UPDATE: This post has been changed since its original posting. No content has been changed, but numerous typos and outright linguistic errors have been corrected. Thanks to Lynn-B for the gentle email alerting us to these errors, an email that despite its gentleness used school-teacher red to indicate errors. Which was scary. But effective.
But scary.
