Walt and Mearsheimer Week 3 - Enough With the "Oh But They're So Qualified" Thing
The Arab press is still salivating about the "prominent professors" who have firmly proven that Jews are undermining the United States for their own selfish interest. We haven't posted on the issue yet, largely because the first couple of weeks have been devoted - as they rightly should be - to undermining the factual basis of the smear (and especially here.). But the actual veracity of Walt and Mearsheimer's data isn't, in the long run, going to be the issue (although of course it's important for people to know exactly why they're wrong). Whether or not Walt and Mearsheimer's hack social science is sound will have no influence on the real winners of their smear - the hate mongers and bigots who are (predictably) getting picking up and amplifying these new spokesmen for the age-old double loyalty canard. They only care that Walt and Mearsheimer are reasonably well-placed academics who seem to agree with them:
There have been attacks on the pro-Israel lobby before, but this article has raised eyebrows because of the formidable academic credentials of its authors. Prof Mearsheimer is co-director of the Programme on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. Prof Walt is academic dean and a professor at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government.
Not that it will help (it's not like the bigots care about whether or not Walt and Mearsheimer are qualified - they just have to be qualified-sounding) but Walt and Mearsheimer actually aren't all that qualified to talk about domestic US politics. Contrary to what Juan Cole (and others who somehow get away with describing "cabals" of Jews) have been telling you, this insinuation that there are Jews of dual loyalty undermining the United States was not really a "study" done by field-leading experts. And it's important to point that out.
"Studies" carry a lot of weight with the public. They resonate of objectivity and dispassionate analysis - of the gathering of data and the testing of theories. This is not a study. It does not have variables. It does not have controls. It does not really test hypothesis. It's an oversimplified assumption and an unjustified leap leading to a paranoid conspiracy theory: "since the US is acting against its national interests and since it's actions help Israel, US policy must be controlled by Israel". No high school teacher would allow a student to make such an elementary mistaken between correlations and causations, but there it is, right at the bottom of the fifth paragraph of their LRB article:
"Partly aimed" is a weasel phrase - definitionally true and therefore irrefutable, but meaningless precisely because of its triviality. "The Bush administration's ambition to transform the Middle East" is also "at least partly aimed at improving" most of the following: Kuwaiti security, the relative influence of the Pentagon versus the State Department, the lifestyle of Iraqis, the relative freedom of Lebanon from Syria, what NRO writers can demand for appearing on college campuses. This is not real scholarship.
But more importantly, it's bad scholarship that wasn't even done by field-leading experts. Walt and Mearsheimer are indeed experts in a field - just not in any field that has anything to do with teasing out the strands of domestic political decision-making. Their resumes (their CVs, actually, but never mind) certainly have a certain amount of panache - especially with the New York Times / London Review of Books cocktail party crowd that has been discussing this garbage as "sophisticated opinion". But Mearsheimer and Walt are foreign policy experts. Although they might be well-placed to elaborate on half a century's worth of their (mostly failed) foreign policy initiatives, they have no formal training or credentials in understanding domestic politics. That might help explain why they were so easily embarrassed by Caroline Glick:
For instance, the "academic" version of the paper's first footnote maintains, "The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about." Every semi-sentient person with even an incidental knowledge of American politics knows that there is no area of human endeavor that is not represented by a lobby in the US. Walt and Mearsheimer's asinine assertion means is that every American interest group - from the elderly to the insurance industry, from the Muslims to gun owners to organic food lovers - stands opposed to the American national interest simply by existing. Any professor who made a similar assertion about any other interest group would be imperiling his career.
It's not that Glick's mockery of this particular footnote does anything to undermine the rest of the paper - but that the footnote actually made it into the paper shows just how out of their element Walt and Mearsheimer are when talking about domestic politics. It's not a critical statement, but it's a statement that would never occur to anyone genuinely well-versed in domestic Washington politics. Academic specialization means that IR theorists like Walt and Mearsheimer can analyze complex game theory equations about nuclear brinksmanship on the Indian subcontinent while still being hard-pressed to name more than a handful of Congressional Representatives. So in addition to being shoddy scholarship, their rant is also trading on not a bit of intellectual dishonesty: even in the best case, where these two really are the experts on national security that they tell everyone they are, they would still be total hacks when it comes to figuring out what contributes to making US policy... which probably goes a long way towards explaining why they sound like total hacks.
There have been attacks on the pro-Israel lobby before, but this article has raised eyebrows because of the formidable academic credentials of its authors. Prof Mearsheimer is co-director of the Programme on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. Prof Walt is academic dean and a professor at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government.
Not that it will help (it's not like the bigots care about whether or not Walt and Mearsheimer are qualified - they just have to be qualified-sounding) but Walt and Mearsheimer actually aren't all that qualified to talk about domestic US politics. Contrary to what Juan Cole (and others who somehow get away with describing "cabals" of Jews) have been telling you, this insinuation that there are Jews of dual loyalty undermining the United States was not really a "study" done by field-leading experts. And it's important to point that out.
"Studies" carry a lot of weight with the public. They resonate of objectivity and dispassionate analysis - of the gathering of data and the testing of theories. This is not a study. It does not have variables. It does not have controls. It does not really test hypothesis. It's an oversimplified assumption and an unjustified leap leading to a paranoid conspiracy theory: "since the US is acting against its national interests and since it's actions help Israel, US policy must be controlled by Israel". No high school teacher would allow a student to make such an elementary mistaken between correlations and causations, but there it is, right at the bottom of the fifth paragraph of their LRB article:
"Finally, the Bush administration's ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel's strategic situation".
"Partly aimed" is a weasel phrase - definitionally true and therefore irrefutable, but meaningless precisely because of its triviality. "The Bush administration's ambition to transform the Middle East" is also "at least partly aimed at improving" most of the following: Kuwaiti security, the relative influence of the Pentagon versus the State Department, the lifestyle of Iraqis, the relative freedom of Lebanon from Syria, what NRO writers can demand for appearing on college campuses. This is not real scholarship.
But more importantly, it's bad scholarship that wasn't even done by field-leading experts. Walt and Mearsheimer are indeed experts in a field - just not in any field that has anything to do with teasing out the strands of domestic political decision-making. Their resumes (their CVs, actually, but never mind) certainly have a certain amount of panache - especially with the New York Times / London Review of Books cocktail party crowd that has been discussing this garbage as "sophisticated opinion". But Mearsheimer and Walt are foreign policy experts. Although they might be well-placed to elaborate on half a century's worth of their (mostly failed) foreign policy initiatives, they have no formal training or credentials in understanding domestic politics. That might help explain why they were so easily embarrassed by Caroline Glick:
For instance, the "academic" version of the paper's first footnote maintains, "The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about." Every semi-sentient person with even an incidental knowledge of American politics knows that there is no area of human endeavor that is not represented by a lobby in the US. Walt and Mearsheimer's asinine assertion means is that every American interest group - from the elderly to the insurance industry, from the Muslims to gun owners to organic food lovers - stands opposed to the American national interest simply by existing. Any professor who made a similar assertion about any other interest group would be imperiling his career.
It's not that Glick's mockery of this particular footnote does anything to undermine the rest of the paper - but that the footnote actually made it into the paper shows just how out of their element Walt and Mearsheimer are when talking about domestic politics. It's not a critical statement, but it's a statement that would never occur to anyone genuinely well-versed in domestic Washington politics. Academic specialization means that IR theorists like Walt and Mearsheimer can analyze complex game theory equations about nuclear brinksmanship on the Indian subcontinent while still being hard-pressed to name more than a handful of Congressional Representatives. So in addition to being shoddy scholarship, their rant is also trading on not a bit of intellectual dishonesty: even in the best case, where these two really are the experts on national security that they tell everyone they are, they would still be total hacks when it comes to figuring out what contributes to making US policy... which probably goes a long way towards explaining why they sound like total hacks.
