Newsweek Senior Editor Says 'Israeli Lobby' Is Shaping U.S. Policy Toward Iran

Mondoweiss - Sept 27, 2007

The greatest achievement so far of Walt & Mearsheimer is that they have knocked down a wall in the American discourse: They have licensed ideas and statements that would have been impossible to imagine even a month ago.

On Monday at Hopkins's SAIS in D.C., there was a forum for Trita Parsi's fabulous book on the Iran/Israel/U.S. triangle, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States. Newsweek Senior Editor Michael Hirsh, the magazine's former foreign editor, was one of the respondents, and in the Q-and-A, a Georgetown grad student asked why the U.S. was not negotiating with Iran re nukes, and whether this reflected pressure from the Israelis. Hirsh answered that the reason was "entirely ideological." The Bush Administration still adheres to the "neocon position... essentially, that by talking to a regime you legitimize it."

• "As I said earlier, with North Korea, the only reason they changed their tune a little bit--'Kim Jong Il is evil'--is that they simply got too distracted by [the ongoing problems in] Iraq. And North Korea is not important enough. On Iran, considerations of the Israeli lobby and Israel do come into play to some degree, I don't know how much... But they do. It is seen as a different animal..."

I don't think Hirsh would have used the word "lobby" pre-Walt/Mearsheimer. Wow. Isn't it about time we talked about this, when we are threatening to bomb Iran? Will Hirsh put W&M on the cover of Newsweek?