A edição mais recente da The American Interest traz um belo dossiê sobre o Iraque e mais dois textos cujas leituras recomendo vivamente para quem gosta de política:

Testing the “Israel Lobby” Thesis

itamar rabinovich

As Israel’s Ambassador to Washington in the mid-1990s, I worked closely with the now all too famous Israel lobby. But this was not the “Israel Lobby” described by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. At that time, the right wing of what they characterize as a “loose coalition” of pro-Israeli groups, organizations and individuals was dead set on undermining the peace policy conducted by the government of Yitzhak Rabin in concert with the Clinton Administration. Meanwhile, the left wing of this “loose coalition” had its own notion of Israel’s and America’s best interests, also considerably at variance with the view of the Rabin government. The neoconservative critics were neither friendly nor helpful to our policies, and we did not perceive by any stretch of the imagination the Tikkun Community to be our supporters, not even when Hillary Clinton was speaking to Rabbi Michael Lerner about “spirituality.”

e_________________________________________________________

What Makes a Neocon?

robert tucker

They Knew They Were Right:
The Rise of the Neocons
by Jacob Heilbrunn Doubleday,
2008, 336 pp., $26

“Why still another book on neoconservatism?” Jacob Heilbrunn asks at the beginning of his interesting new study. His answer may startle many readers: “No one . . . has ever really succeeded in precisely defining neoconservatism.” It is not, Heilbrunn declares, really about ideology or even a form of apostasy from the Left; it is “a mindset, one that has been decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the 20th-century struggle against totalitarianism.” This mindset is “as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentment and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas. Indeed, however much they may deny it, neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon reflecting a subset of Jewish concerns.” Among these concerns, the principal one is the security and safety of Israel.