With Lieberman's Loss, the Lobby Takes a Second Hit

Is the Empire Striking Back?

By JOHN WALSH

When Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut, a prime loser was the Lobby. Like the Israeli army in Lebanon, the Israel Lobby in Connecticut was exposed as a paper tiger. Joe Lieberman is AIPAC's boy; when he speaks at the yearly AIPAC convention in Washington, he elicits wild cheers, standing ovations, shouts of "Go, Joe, Go." Only the considerably less sanctimonious Dick Cheney does as well with that crowd. If the Lobby is on your side, you are supposed to win elections, and if it is not, down you go. But that did not happen in Connecticut despite the full exertion of the Lobby. In the final days of the campaign 1.5 million dollars poured into Lieberman's coffers, and virtually the entire Dem establishment was ordered into the fray on his side. Lieberman's opponent, Ned Lamont, had his name dragged through every mud puddle in Connecticut and of course was accused of being an anti-Semite. But that was all to no avail; Lamont won and Lieberman lost. A lot of politicians must now wonder whether the Lobby can deliver victories reliably any longer.

This is the second major hit that the Lobby has taken recently. The first was the paper on the Lobby's role in drumming up the war on Iraq by Mearsheimer and Walt, Professors at Chicago and Harvard, respectively. What was the celebrated Mearsheimer and Walt paper all about anyway? There was no new information in it. With all due respect to M and W, a college student could have quickly produced the same tract for a term paper. But since it was authored by recognized figures of the Establishment the Mearsheimer and Walt paper made it respectable to go after the Lobby; and therein lies its significance. It broke the ice and opened the Lobby to attack; at last the truth about the Lobby could be told and the inevitable epithet of anti-Semitism slung at its critics could be tossed aside. That in itself was a great aid to the peace movement.

Walt had been a Dean at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and one does not get to be a Dean there simply because of sterling scholarship. Mearsheimer is a buddy of Zbigniew Brzezinski who has made known his feeling that the War on Iraq is an unmitigated disaster for the Empire, which he has served so diligently for so many years. Was the M and W paper the first serious blow that the Empire struck at the Lobby for engineering the disastrous war on Iraq? Is the Empire striking back?

Just a few blocks from Professor Walt's office at Harvard stands the main library for undergraduates. It is named the Lamont Library after Ned Lamont's great grandfather, Thomas William Lamont, Jr., whose benefaction built the library. As Wikipedia reveals, Thomas was a representative of the U.S. Treasury Department at the Treaty of Versaille, and in 1920 went to Japan on a semiofficial mission to look after American interests in Asia. On Black Tuesday, 1929, he was acting head of J.P. Morgan and became its Chairman in 1943. Thomas William Lamont, Jr., was at the center of the action when the U.S. Empire was entering its heyday. He begat Corliss Lamont (see below) and Thomas Stillwell Lamont, vice chairman of Morgan Guarantee Trust and a fellow of the Harvard Corporation. Thomas Stillwell begat Edward Lamont, Sr., aka Ted, who was an economist with the Marshall Plan and later worked in Housing and Urban Development for Richard Nixon, the last "liberal" president. And Ted begat Ed, Jr, aka Ned, who trounced the vicious warmonger, Joseph Lieberman. Ned Lamont is heir to the whole kit and kaboodle of the Lamont fortune and worth hundreds of millions. For his own exercise in begetting, Ned chose Ann Greenlee Huntress one of the quartet of senior managers in Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm, with $8.4 billion in committed capital. The Lamonts do not have to scrimp to put the kids through college ­ in a way they own the college. And they are old hands at Empire.

Ned's dad, Ted, the one who worked for Nixon, has not voted Republican since 1988, complaining to the Hartford Courant that "Eastern moderates no longer have a place in the GOP." And in this he is reminiscent of another side of the Lamont family, the side represented by Corliss Lamont, Ned's great uncle. Corliss was a long-time socialist and also a director of the ACLU for many years. While Senator Prescott Bush, father of Bush I, was trending right and falling in love with the Nazis during the near mortal crisis of Capitalism, the Lamonts were drifting "left." They apparently saw Roosevelt as the system's savior and no doubt had some socialist sympathies as many thinking, decent persons did. But they remained within the bounds of respectability, and Corliss authored a tract, "Why I Am Not A Communist." The Lamonts appear to represent "enlightened capitalists," as they were once called.

When the neocons struck back at Ned, it was Corliss who seemed to agitate them most. Neocon Martin Peretz's anti-Lamont diatribe on the editorial page of the WSJ (August 7) is riddled with terms like "Stalinist," "fellow traveling habits," "Stalin's agents," etc. These neocons seem to live in inexplicable fear that Joe Stalin will rise from the dead, pick up an ax and come after them. But after the Red-baiting (in 2006!), Peretz gets down to the brass tacks of foreign policy ­ and he faults Lamont on four counts, all having to do with Israel of course. First is the war on Iraq, which Peretz assures us, is "a just cause." Second come the Palestinians where Peretz's words are especially interesting: "Almost every Democrat feels obliged to offer fraternal solidarity to Israel and Mr. Lamont is no exception. But here he blithely assumes that the Palestinians could be easily conciliated." And worse, after his primary victory Lamont had a private dinner with Shimon Peres in NYC. Who knows, Rabin too may rise from the dead with Oslo in tow ­ when the neocons thought they had put a stake through the heart of that beast with the murder of Rabin that they engineered. Third comes Iran and to this Martin Peretz devotes most space. Here he quotes Lamont disapprovingly: "We should work diplomatically and aggressively to give them (the Iranians) reasons why they don't need to build a (nuclear) bomb, to give them incentives. We have to engage in very aggressive diplomacy. I'd like to bring the allies in when we can. I'd like to use carrots as well as sticks to see if we can change the nature of the debate. Lieberman is the one who keeps talking about keeping the military option on the table." Horror of horrors: end the war on Iraq, devise a peace between Palestinians and Israelis and forget about war on Iran. Sounds like a Commie to me.

For the moment the Lobby and the neocons have suffered a setback, but they are nothing if not dogged. It took them over a decade after the first Gulf War to foist upon us the occupation of Iraq for which they yearned. And they will try to make a comeback in Connecticut. To weaken the Lobby for 2008, Lieberman must be defeated in Connecticut in the Fall. In itself that will be sweet. Failing that, we may all be one step closer to a worldwide conflagration sparked in the Middle East. I would say that Lamont needs a good mushroom cloud advert.

John Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

he Reservists' Protest

Fed Up with Whiners

By GIDEON LEVY

"The candle kids" grew up and became the "protest movement" of this war. The confused youth who sat crying with their guitars and candles in the city square in Tel Aviv after Rabin's assassination are now sitting in the Rose Garden opposite the Prime Minister's Office, no less confused, and seemingly protesting against the war - of course only after it ended.

Just as it was impossible to know what the candle kids wanted, it is difficult to understand what the reservists and the bereaved families want. Most of their complaints should be directed at themselves: Where were you until now? If it is only the demand that some officials go home, it's a waste of their time and ours. Clones of those who are deposed will replace them very quickly and nothing will change. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz will go home, and Netanyahu, Mofaz and Barak will come to power.

For the first time after many terrible years in which we killed and were killed for no reason, there are question marks hanging over the public discourse. That change should be welcomed. But those who examine the content of the new protest should not hold out great hopes. The arguments of the protesters come down to two main issues, both of them as narrow as the world of the reservist: the IDF wasn't prepared for the war, and the war was cut short.

On the first matter, many are responsible, and the second issue doesn't warrant protest. Much weightier and deeper questions hover in the air about why we even went to this war, how it could have been avoided, why is war our only language, what are the limits of power that can be used and where are we going now. The new protest movement is not raising those questions.

Even if this wave of protests succeeds, a commission of inquiry is established and two or three people even pay with their seats, nothing will change. Just as the protests of 1973 did not bring about the desired change, except for a few people removed from office, the protests of 2006 won't bring real change. Whining after the war is not a national agenda, and certainly not if it runs for its life from any of the main questions. If it is just the "orange" disengagement protesters in disguise, it even foretells new dangers.

Above all, the petition signers and sit-in protesters in the Rose Garden should ask themselves where they were until now. Except for the "oranges" among them, most voted Kadima, maybe Likud or Labor, many of them served in reserves in the occupied territories, dealt with their personal affairs and kept quiet. For years they took direct or indirect part in worthless national projects, from building the wall to the settlement enterprise and deepening the occupation. With their own eyes they saw how the IDF was turned into an occupying police force, bullying the weak but untrained to deal with the strong.

They protected settlers, saw the suffering caused by the occupation, were witness to or participated in abuse of Palestinians. The responsibility for the IDF's lack of preparation, therefore, is theirs, partly because of what they did and partly because of their silence. They cannot claim now that they were surprised by the IDF's failure to execute: they were there when the army changed its face. They knew all these years that checking IDs at roadblocks, invading bedrooms, chasing children in alleys and demolishing thousands of houses is no preparation for war.

They were supposed to understand that the occupation army's activities in the territories inspires great hatred of us, that Israel's rejectionists policies endanger it more than anything else and that the real test of the army is not in the casbahs. Even the home front's lack of readiness should not have surprised them: a country that abuses its weak at times of quiet will do so in times of war, as well. What is so new and surprising about all this?

The other matter, the halt in the fighting, certainly does not warrant protest, but actually a compliment. Instead of asking why the war broke out, the protesters are asking why it ended. If there is anything that the war's command deserves credit for it is its hesitation in the final stages of the war. It is a shame they did not hesitate sooner. And if we had continued the war, where exactly would we have ended up? It was the resolve, hubris and haste of the war's leadership in the first stages that were the original sin against which the protest should be directed.

Above all, it is depressing to find out that none of the protesters are raising moral questions. A protest movement that says nothing about the terrible destruction we wreaked in Lebanon, how we killed hundreds of innocent civilians and turned tens of thousands into impoverished refugees is by definition not a moral movement. Even after it has been proved that the excessive force was not effective, no protest has been directed at it. How long will we only focus on ourselves and our distress?

Is it too much to ask for the protesters, who are supposedly the cadres of the avant garde, to look for a moment at what we did to another nation? Why is it that after Sabra and Chatilla massacres, which were not even directly our handiwork, masses of people took to the streets and now nobody peeps about the destruction we sowed in Lebanon with our own hands, and for nothing?

With such protest movements, Israel does not need the silent sheep that has so characterized it in recent years. We should be fed up with such whiners. Maybe they are brave soldiers on the battlefield, but on the fields of protest they are nothing more than cowardly soldiers.

Gideon Levy writes for Ha'aretz, where this essay originally appeared.

Good article, thanks for posting.

"-Sabra and Chatilla massacres, which were not even directly our handiwork"

Disgusting legalese from the grease weasels camped on this wire to pave the way for another israeli war.

look it up:

Sabra and Chatilla massacres

Get stuffed, "Proud Jew"

I just kinda gaged at the line there.

It happens all the time.