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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.
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