Shame on Tom

Cotton smear undermines real fight

You’ve sunk pretty low when you accuse a respectable foreign-policy think tank of anti-Semitism. That’s how low Sen. Tom Cotton has sunk.

Cotton, according to Jewish Insider, attacked the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft as a place where anti-Semitism “festers.” Contrary to all evidence, he called Quincy Institute “an isolationist ‘blame America first’ money pit for so-called ‘scholars’ who’ve written that American foreign policy could be fixed if only it were rid of the malign influence of Jewish money.”

Every word of that charge is wrong.

The real reason that Cotton dislikes Quincy Institute is clear—it opposes what he likes: America’s 21st century Middle East policy of endless-war-as-first-resort.

To be sure, two of Quincy Institute’s affiliated experts, Professors Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy School and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, wrote a book documenting the proIsrael lobby’s noticeable influence over America’s repeated and misguided intervention in the Middle East, which has exacerbated conflict there for decades. Reasoned criticism of Israel and its reflexive American supporters (Jewish and non-Jewish), however, is not anti-Semitism, and no honest, clear-headed person thinks it is.

With respect to the Palestinians and its neighbors, Israel has much to answer for. Thus a growing number of Americans of Jewish background (including me) criticize the lobby and are increasingly irritated by Israel’s claim to be the “nation-state of the Jewish people” everywhere, regardless of their citizenship in other countries.

Cotton can’t properly critique Walt and Mearsheimer’s work, so he resorts to a vile smear against the think tank that associates with them. Shame on Cotton.

But he’s certainly not the first to resort to that smear. The Israel lobby has achieved much of its influence by promiscuously suggesting its opponents hate Jews as Jews. Fortunately, the smear has lost much of its force.

The Quincy Institute started last year with broad-based money from, among others, the Charles Koch Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Its officers and staff include respected and sober foreign-policy analysts and journalists such as retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, Trita Parsi, Jim Lobe, and Eli Clifton. Besides Mearsheimer and Walt, well-credentialed foreign-policy authorities Paul Pillar, Gary Sick, and Lawrence Wilkerson (who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell) are also affiliated with Quincy Institute.

This is indeed a distinguished team of foreign-policy realists who warn against America’s penchant for aggravating conflict in the Middle East though open-ended wars.

Named for John Quincy Adams— who as secretary of state declared that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy”— Quincy Institute “promotes ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace. … The U.S. military exists to defend the people and territory of the United States, not to act as a global police force. The United States should reject preventive wars and military intervention to overthrow regimes that do not threaten the United States. Wars of these kinds not only are counterproductive; they are wrong in principle.”

So of course Cotton is upset. Take away war and what’s he got in his toolbox? Zilch. He certainly doesn’t want to see the American public turn against war before he gets his wish for an attack on Iran, which would be disastrous, or before he’s had his shot at higher office, say, secretary of state, secretary of defense, CIA director, or even the presidency.

Cotton may feel satisfied with his defamation of an eminent group of foreign-policy analysts, but he misses the big picture. Those who are so quick to slander Israel’s or its American supporters’ critics as anti-Semites actually undermine the worthy fight against real anti-Semitism—for nothing feeds such bigotry as the campaign to inhibit good-faith criticism of Israel and its American champions for that country’s undeniably bad conduct.