So just how big a deal is this Israel lobby, anyway? Here's Joseph Massad, with what is probably the majority Left view:

While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and full of awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable power commanded by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). . . . The arguments put forth by these studies would have been more convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the United States government to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent with its global policies elsewhere. This, however, is far from what happens. . . . One could argue (and I have argued elsewhere) that it is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around.

Au contraire, says Michael Neumann:

America is a sap, a duped accomplice, not a co-conspirator. The enormous, ignored fact of the Palestinian story is that America is not, as the left so loves to think, pursuing some vital interest in its alliance with Israel. On the contrary, America is acting against its vital interests. And by America I don't just mean the wonderful, real-as-dirt Americans of Denzel Washington flicks. I also mean corporate America and the American government.

This used to be a conversation that you wouldn't hear in the "mainstream" of American political discourse, but come now Mearsheimer and Walt, presenting a view which is certainly quite novel for two such Establishment figures (John J. Mearsheimer is a professor at that hotbed of radicalism, the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt is the Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard):

Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? . . . The thrust of US policy in the [Middle East] derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the "Israel Lobby". . . . Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.

And in response to them, the biggest of big guns, Noam Chomsky:

[Mearsheimer and Walt] make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don't think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. . . . For whom has [US] policy been a failure for the past 60 years? The energy corporations? Hardly. They have made "profits beyond the dreams of avarice". . . . and still do, and the ME is their leading cash cow. Has it been a failure for US grand strategy based on control of what the State Department described 60 years ago as the "stupendous source of strategic power" of ME oil and the immense wealth from this unparalleled "material prize"? Hardly. The US has substantially maintained control -- and the significant reverses, such as the overthrow of the Shah, were not the result of the initiatives of the Lobby.

One thing that strikes me, considering Chomsky's and Massad's "rational" reading of US policy in the Middle East, is that they seem to be talking about phenomena on a bigger scale than what Mearsheimer-Walt and Neumann are considering. Chomsky and Massad seem to be arguing that the Israel lobby can't explain the whole general thrust of US Mideast policy; and of course they are right. They observe, correctly, that the quest for domination and control, the desire to suppress social revolution -- and even any potentially troublesome variety of nationalism -- are what set the broad outlines of American action in the Middle East, as they do in Asia, in South and Central America, and everywhere else in the world. It isn't fealty to Israel that makes the US want to control the Middle East's oil; that falls squarely into the ambit of imperial rationality.

Where the irrationality -- and the Lobby's influence -- comes in is at a finer level of detail, I think. Is it any part of imperial rationality to support the Israeli settlers in the West Bank? And was it rational to invade Iraq -- even by imperial standards?

No two situations are ever exactly parallel, but consider the analogy between the West Bank and, say, East Timor. Back in the early and mid-70s, it no doubt seemed rational, in the context of US-Soviet rivalry, to allow the Israelis to occupy the West Bank and suppress, as best they could, a Palestinian national movement that appeared hostile to US purposes. The same rational, though unsavory, strategic considerations presumably lay behind American consent to Indonesia's invasion and occupation of East Timor.

In both places that wasn't the end of the story. Both the Palestinians and the Timorese kept fighting, and chronic fighting, upheaval, and instability aren't good for business. Meanwhile, the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union collapsed, and there was a successful counterrevolution in China.

The upshot, in Timor, was that the Indonesians were reined in -- admittedly, it took a long time -- and Timor's independence was recognized. The global hegemon -- that's an awkward phrase; let's just call him Uncle -- seems to have been satisfied that the usual indirect and invisible means of keeping small countries in line would suffice, should the Timorese ever get feisty. There was no longer any need for the crude apparatus of Indonesian death squads and massacres.

Now the Palestinian national movement, under the late, unlamented Yasser Arafat, was hardly the Viet Cong. Indeed, its main components were so venal and vendible that they would make a Democratic politician look like the Sea-green Incorruptible himself. For at least the last 15 years, and arguably more, Uncle has had no to reason to fear much social militance from the Palestinians, apart from elements like Hamas -- whose support, however, would rapidly erode if the relentless exacerbations of Israeli occupation and repression were removed. This is not rocket science.

But instead of getting elections under UN supervision, like the Timorese, and a nice flag of their own, and a couple of highly-placed former American war criminals like Clinton and Holbrooke to grace their independence festivities -- instead of this, the Palestinians get a wall that makes the Berlin wall look paltry; they get their territory carved up into little reservations and cantonments; they get a regime of economic strangulation, collective punishment, and vigilante terror. They get, in short, the frank, avowed, naked dictatorship of an occupying army, backing up a fanatical, chauvinist, bloodthirsty gang of "settlers" -- a misleadingly tranquil term for people whose métier is acquiring real estate at gunpoint. Elsewhere in Uncle's domains, people usually at least get a fig leaf of formal democracy to maintain the decencies, but not in Palestine.

And apart from a few relatively marginal elements, the entire American government and corporate media are loudly unanimous in agreeing that this very exceptional state of affairs is entirely appropriate. Not only can nothing be done for the Palestinians, but the Palestinians themselves are in fact the existential problem that needs to be solved. The kindest solution that the American executive and the American Congress can conceive for the Palestinians is a kind of communal incarceration, with Israel as the jailer -- and if this humane solution doesn't work, well then, there are other solutions!

Now there is no way this craziness is necessary for Uncle's purposes, or even in Uncle's interests. Uncle doesn't need a little pot always threatening to boil over in this tricky part of the world. He doesn't need a people so driven into desperation by grinding and utterly unnecessary oppression that they're willing to blow themselves up, in considerable numbers, to fight it. He doesn't need the resentment and anger that his psychotic little Levantine sidekick has earned for itself from everybody else in a very large and well-populated region -- resentment and anger that rub off onto Uncle himself. Uncle, when he's sober and rational, loves peace and quiet and a tranquil climate for the conduct of business. (Though it always takes a little backroom rubber-hosing to maintain this happy condition, these operations can usually be kept out of the public eye.)

No, what would be in Uncle's interests in Palestine is a Timorese solution. But try telling that to Hillary Clinton.

Now let's turn to the Iraq war. The entire 60-year trajectory of American global power since the end of World War II holds nothing like it. Sure, the US has fought imperial wars -- plenty of 'em -- since the Japanese surrendered; but only when its dominance was threatened. Uncle's legions were sent to Korea, Vietnam -- even Cuba, though rather abortively -- whenever and wherever a challenge arose to Uncle's rule. The first Iraq war can be viewed in this context -- a former stooge, feeling ill-used, got out of line and needed a reminder who was boss.

But the second Iraq war is a horse of a very different color. In all the six decades of bloodshed since 1945, there's been no other case where the legions were sent to invade a nation of any significant size that was quiet, utterly prostrate, and posed no threat at all.

Grenada, you say? Panama? Well, okay. But those were so small-scale they hardly count -- little romps, arranged to divert the Pentagon and the public, and keep the fear of God, or rather, the fear of Uncle, alive, in everybody else around the world.

Iraq, on the other hand, is a big important country in a very critical part of the world, and not even the Perles, Feiths, Wolfowitzes, Rumsfelds and so on, can really have believed that it would be a walkover. Iraq was a serious and very costly commitment, with a very significant risk of failure that anybody with a grain of sense could see -- and what was the payoff supposed to be for Uncle? Though the managers of the Empire may be very bad people, they aren't fools. From the imperial point of view, it would make a lot more sense to invade Venezuela tomorrow than it did to invade Iraq in 2003.

No invasion of Iraq was needed to secure control of the region's oil -- that was already in the bag.

Turmoil and internal strife in Iraq could only benefit Iran, and Iran has been a major strategic headache ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979. Indeed, the rational-imperial thing to do with Iraq would have been to rehabilitate it as a quietly cooperative dictatorship -- much the same position as before the invasion of Kuwait and the first Iraq war -- and use it, as it was used then, to keep Iran on the defensive.

Then of course there are the Kurds, a thorn in the flesh to Uncle's good pals in Turkey. Any weakening of the Iraqi state, with its large Kurdish population right across the border from their landsmen in Turkey, was bound to create more problems for the Turks. Here again, a strong Iraqi state, with no nonsense about autonomy, much less self-determination, for the Kurds, would have suited Turkey better -- and Turkey has been a cornerstone of Uncle's empire practically since the dust settled in 1945, a strategic asset of infinitely greater value than Israel.

Against all these considerations, however, lies . . . Israel. Israel's ambitions to junior-grade regional hegemony allow for the existence of no substantial and powerful Arab states, and admit of no rivals for Uncle's love and largesse. An Iraq securely hitched to Uncle's wagon would be another asset of immense value -- enough to make Israel look like very small beer by comparison, to any rational imperial eye.

And so Israel's "amen corner" has been baying for the destruction of Iraq as a state for the last decade and more; and it appears that they have now achieved their goal. Whether their triumph has conferred any benefit on Uncle is another question.

I'm with Chomsky and Massad this far: The Israel lobby doesn't define Uncle's overall goal of global domination, and would never be able to impede it in any serious way. The Lobby is not some omnipotent cabal of Illuminati, with its hands firmly on all the levers of power. The Lobby -- or rather, its backers among the wealthy and powerful of the land -- is only one faction within that loosely organized larger gang we refer to, for lack of a better word, as the American ruling class.

But the Lobby -- we might as well keep calling it that, by the figure of rhetoric known as synecdoche -- can certainly inflect the detailed workings of Uncle's hegemony racket. The Lobby is, after all, a component of the ruling class, and not an insignificant one. Absent some solid consensus, or even a core of organized opposition, among the larger gang, it can expect to have a pretty free hand in its own corner of the global playground -- until, of course, it gets so out of line that other members of the gang become concerned. Even the Mafia can call a rogue boss to heel if family feeling grows general that the rogue is creating a problem for everybody.

The criminal behavior of Israel in the Territories must surely be a source of some worry among the ruling-class gang at large. It's embarrassing, and destabilizing, it provokes unnecessary enmity and resentment, and it seems likely to eventuate in some fairly awful crime. And now there's this Iraq disaster -- here we are, stuck hand and foot to a tar baby in the sand, for no better reason, really, than Israel's hatred and fear of any viable and consequential Arab state.

I wonder, as a matter of fact, whether the Mearsheimer-Walt report isn't a straw in the wind. Considering what a bombshell it is, the response has been strangely muted. Oh, the usual frothers are running around barking at the moon -- the Alan Dershowitzes, the Martin Peretzes -- but the New York Times, as far as I can tell, has published not one word about this story; and I haven't seen any senators, not even Democratic ones, calling for sanctions against Harvard and the University of Chicago as bastions of anti-Semitism.

The American public has plenty of doubts about the war, now -- and it would be amazing if the American elites, or at least some of them, weren't at least starting to have second thoughts too. Yet this dividedness of mind, which certainly exists among the public, and probably exists among the elites as well, finds very little reflection -- next to none, in fact -- in the US Congress. There's a disconnect; plenty of division outside the Capitol, near-unanimity within.

Now I think this unanimity is plainly the Lobby's work. There is no room in the official political system for opposition to the war. Such opposition would normally be the job of, what else, the opposition party. But the opposition party, even more than the ruling party, is utterly dependent on the Lobby's money. Look at the Democrats who have large anti-war constituencies -- the Liebermans, the Schumers, the Clintons, the Pelosis. You might think that these would be the politicians who would at least be trying to split the difference. But no; as it happens, these are also the politicians most closely tied to the Lobby and most dependent on its financial support, and so they are unshakably committed to continued occupation and war. They have their orders.

If I were a member of the ruling class, I would be a little concerned that one faction within the gang had achieved such complete control of Congress -- which is, by rights, the common property of all really wealthy people. I would be a little concerned that the fanatical adventurism of this faction might end by disrupting the orderly conduct of business. And if I were the sort of person who could pick up the phone and share my concerns with a few congenial colleagues -- including, perhaps, the Dean of the Kennedy School -- why, I might do just that.

Perhaps someday, somebody's memoirs will tell the tale. In the meantime, none of my ruling-class friends is returning my calls -- so I'll just have to keep an eye out for more straws in the wind.