Questions For Taranto and Fund

It seems to be my day to try to engage Op-Ed writers. I posted one pair of questions I wrote to Paul Krugman earlier today, and here are two more:

The first is to James Taranto regarding two pieces he has written (see this and this) taking issue with a paper by the Harvard Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer. The Paper argues, apparently, that the pro-Isreal "lobby" has pushed the US into foreign policy positions that are inimicable to our actual national interests. You may need to read the Taranto pieces to make sense of this. You won't need to read the Mearsheimer/Walt paper, though, since this is about is Taranto's reaction to the paper, not the paper itself:

Jimbo:

I gather you were disappointed that your March 20 "dissection" of the Mearsheimer/Walt paper has gone largely unnoticed, but you rallied to conclude that this also meant it had gone "unrebutted." Hmm.

Perhaps the reason no one was all that impressed is that you conceded the only point that really matters when you said that, although you found the arguments "wrong headed," you nonetheless would "stipulate that one can in good faith take the position that the costs to the U.S. of supporting Israel outweigh the benefits. " The rest of the piece tries to "dissect" the claim that Israel is not morally superior to the Palestinians.

I thought at the time I read this that it was strange: "Is he arguing," I wondered, "that we should take actions that he stipulates may not be in our national interests simply because it is 'moral' to do so? No, that can't be! Ruthless attention to self-interest is the neo-con creed, isn't it?"

Ruthless attention to self-interest SHOULD be our guiding principle, and I don't know why that should apply everywhere except in the case of Israel. If you concede that "one can in good faith take the position that the costs to the U.S. of supporting Israel outweigh the benefits" you have, I think, conceded that support of Israel is questionable. Morality just doesn't enter into it.

The other problem with you piece is this: all you succeeded in doing in "dissecting" the Mearsheimer/Walt moral arguments is to prove that even the moral superiority of Israel is debatable.

But the thing that really bothers me about both of your pieces is the idea that anyone that supports Israel has to deny the existence -- or at least the power -- of the pro-Israel "lobby." Of course there is a pro-Israel lobby. AIPAC is registered as such. And "lobbying" in favor of Israel and the Jews goes back at least as far as Chaim Weizman and Louis Brandeis. The question Mearsheimer/Walt raise -- legitimately, I think -- is whether, given where we are today, that lobbying has been too effective; i.e. whether it has led the US into positions that are inimitable to its national interests -- a question on which you agree reasonable minds could differ. Asking that question -- even making arguments on one side of it -- is very little different than asking whether -- and arguing that -- Pharma has been "too effective" in promoting the interests of the pharmaceutical companies.
Part of the problem with the whole Israel question is that it has become equated with anti-semitism. As you pieces demonstrate, one cannot long or seriously question our policies vis-a-vis Israel without being labeled an anti-semite. That is just wrong.

The second is a much shorter note to John Fund re the fourth or fifth editorial he has written (I have lost count) on the Yale Taliban:

John:

Give it a rest, will you. Isn't there something more important going on in the world than one silly little 20 something student at Yale?