Today, Glenn Frankel in the Washington Post legitimized Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis in a column entitled “A Beautiful Friendship? In search of the truth about the Israel lobby’s influence on Washington” It’s the typical recital of the ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and Israel, and the roots of that relationship, made timely by the tension within U.S. policy circles as violence spreads in the Middle East.

Frankel explains:

No, it’s about power. And not just Israeli power. It’s really about the perceived power of the Israel lobby, a collection of American Jewish organizations, campaign contributors and think tanks — aided by Christian conservatives and other non-Jewish supporters — that arose over the second half of the 20th century and that sees as a principle goal the support and promotion of the interests of the state of Israel.

Thanks to the work of the lobby and its allies, Israel gets more direct foreign aid — about $3 billion a year — than any other nation. There’s a file cabinet somewhere in the State Department full of memoranda of understanding on military, diplomatic and economic affairs. Israel gets treated like a NATO member when it comes to military matters and like Canada or Mexico when it comes to free trade. There’s an annual calendar full of meetings of joint strategic task forces and other collaborative sessions. And there’s a presidential pledge, re-avowed by Bush in the East Room, that the United States will come to Israel’s aid in the event of attack.

He explicitly references Mearshimer and Walt:

Not everyone believes this is a good thing. In March two distinguished political scientists — Stephen Walt from Harvard and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago — published a 42-page, heavily footnoted essay arguing that the Bush administration’s support for Israel and its related effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East have “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.”

The professors claim that our intimate partnership with Israel is both dangerous and unprecedented. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest,” they argue. They go on to say that the war in Iraq “was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence,” and that the same combine is “using all of the strategies in its playbook” to pressure the administration into being aggressive and belligerent with Iran. The bottom line: “Israel’s enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying.”

A sweet deal for Israel, in other words, but a very bad one for America.

Some of the lobby’s critics hailed the essay as a much-needed breath of fresh air and praised Walt and Mearsheimer for their courage and — dare we say it — chutzpah. Their paper, wrote antiwar activist and media critic Norman Solomon in the Baltimore Sun, “is prying the lid off a debate that has been bottled up for decades.”

But the two professors knew they were treading on delicate ground. For generations, the idea of a cabal of powerful Jews hijacking the national interest for its own purposes has fueled anti-Semitism around the world. Supporters of Israel argued that the essay echoed those claims.

What begins in farce sometimes becomes tragedy; I’ve cited two takedowns of Mearsheimer and Walt; one by Lee Smith on Michael Totten’s blog:

True or False: “By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.”

True – not. Psyche. Yeah, true if you exclude the obviously limited influence that oil companies have exercised in US policymaking over the last seventy years. And it’s not just the oil companies doing Gulf bidding; virtually every American ambassador who’s served in Riyadh winds up with a nice package to keep selling the Saudi line back in Washington. Yes, you’re right, AIPAC’s annual budget is a whopping $40 million dollars – or precisely equivalent to the private donation Saudi prince Walid Bin Talal recently gave to two US universities to start up Islamic centers. What? Come on Steve, he gave half of it to Harvard! OK, give me the car keys. The keys to the car, it’s how you got here. In a car. It has four wheels and a motor. It runs on gas. Gas comes from a place called Saudi Arabia….

And more crucially, one in the New Republic by historian Benny Morris who eviscerates the historical basis for their claims:

… In their introduction, Mearsheimer and Walt tell their readers that “the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars…. The evidence on which they rest is not controversial.” This is ludicrous. I would offer their readers a contrary proposition: that the “facts” presented by Mearsheimer and Walt suggest a fundamental ignorance of the history with which they deal, and that the “evidence” they deploy is so tendentious as to be evidence only of an acute bias. That is what will be not in serious dispute among scholars.

As to my own response, I’ll offer this:

and this: “Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude” by Robert Baer.

The Saudi investment in our political class easily balances the Israel lobby’s; a better reporter writing for a better editor would have avoided the cheap shot Frankel takes and wrote about the balancing act in Washington between these two powerful interest groups, and the way that national interest may or may not factor in to decisions made in between the powerful jaws of these opposing interests.

Frankel wasn’t that reporter today, and the Post wasn’t that paper.

[Update: They’re even lower in my estimation now. On rereading the article, based on other bloggers view that it was ‘relatively even-handed’, I thought for a sec and said – no it isn’t.

Here’s one thing (from the Post):

Pro-Israel interests have contributed $56.8 million in individual, group and soft money donations to federal candidates and party committees since 1990, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. (By contrast, the center says, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim groups donated $297,000 during the same period.)

Hmmm. Seems light, no? Here’s a September 2004 article from the Center for Public Integrity:

Saudi Arabia has spent more of its petroleum dollars lobbying the U.S. government than any of the other 10 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a total of $6.6 million since mid-2003.

All told, the Saudi government and companies within the kingdom have hired 11 lobby shops and public relations firms to plead their case before official Washington and the American public, the Center for Public Integrity has found.

Business spiked on K Street soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Saudis have spent more than $20 million on lobbying and public relations efforts in the United States since the terrorist attacks, according to foreign lobbying disclosure filings with the U.S. Department of Justice.

So Frankel cites $300,000 in donations over 16 years, while another sources cites over $20 million from one source – the Saudi government – from 2002 to 2004. Over to the post…]