Part 1
By Justin Raimondo
Editorial note: What follows is the text of a speech delivered at the MidCoast Forum on Foreign Relations in Rockport, Maine, on April 21, 2008.
".......The Lobby's agenda is not only to secure more aid – both military and economic – than any other recipient of American largesse, but also to use American military power to reshape the Middle East to Israel's advantage: in Lebanon, where Hezbollah threatens Israeli security, to Syria, backer of Palestinian resistance groups, to Iraq – where Saddam Hussein once offered to pay compensation to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers – to Iran, now the Lobby's main target, where the drive to acquire nuclear power has been declared an "existential threat" by Israeli leaders. Central to this agenda is the undermining of America's role as an honest Middle East peace broker when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As Mearsheimer and Walt relate in detail, the Lobby has fought relentlessly against the establishment of a Palestinian state and against the very idea of a more balanced treatment of the issue in American policymaking circles. This has been the case ever since Bush the first caved on the question of Israeli settlements in Palestine, and when Bill Clinton took office, things got worse.
The Clinton administration sided with Israel all during the Camp David process, letting the Israelis see documents and edit them before they were available to the Palestinians. Clinton also kept the Arab states away from Camp David and assembled a team bereft of anyone with expertise in Arab politics. President Clinton took daily calls from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and his chief negotiator, Dennis Ross, was and is a partisan of Israel. In the end, Clinton had the chutzpah to blame Arafat, of all people, for the failure of the peace process........"
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