Mearsheimer and Walt and The Lobby

* emptywheel takes a detailed look at the Mearsheimer and Walt study about the Lobby, and concludes:

"I guess that's what I was hoping for, from this paper. A very detailed consideration of when and why the pro-Israel lobby has been successful, and when and why it failed. The whole point is to understand how much of its influence has been genuine persuasion, how much an unfair gaming of the system, and how much a coincidence of interest with existing American interest groups (the fundamentalist Christians, the Neocon imperialists). The point is to understand why the NYT sometimes shills for Israel, and sometimes takes a more temperate stance. The point is to understand why AIPAC wins and why they lose.

It's a laudable object for study, because if average citizens don't regain some say in our country's policy, we're going to continue to engage in crazy adventures (not all of them related to Israel) that place war profiteering over education. But the study needs to be a generic study of lobbyist influence, not a study of one group's seeming all-encompassing power." (link)