In the past, I've demolished Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's claim that Israel and its friends drove the United States to war with Iraq. I did it when they published their article, and did it again when they published their book, The Israel Lobby. It's a conspiracy theory, pure and simple. And because Walt is a conspiracy theorist, he does what they all do: he rips evidence out of context. Here's his latest grasp at a straw: his claim that Tony Blair has "revealed" that "Israel officials were involved in those discussions" on Iraq held between Blair and George Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. Walt brings as evidence this quote from Blair's testimony to the U.K. commission investigating the Iraq war:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Walt's conclusion: "Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation, and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning for the war." Walt goes on to declare that "more evidence of their influence [of Israel and the Israel lobby] on the decision for war will leak out," and that "Blair's testimony is evidence of that process at work."

When people who don't know much about the Middle East, like Stephen Walt, pose as experts, they make basic mistakes of chronology. So let me remind him of exactly what coincided with the Crawford meeting of April 6-7, 2002.

Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank on March 29. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon ordered the operation in response to a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings. Its objective was the reoccupation of West Bank cities, dismantling the infrastructure of terror, and laying siege to Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah HQ. On April 2, Israeli forces battled their way into Bethlehem and secured Jenin city, and on April 3, they began to clear out the Jenin refugee camp. When Bush and Blair sat down in Crawford, Israel was laying siege to terrorists holed up in the Church of the Nativity, and the Battle of Jenin was in full swing. The Arab propaganda mills exploited the fog of war to make the operation seem like Sabra and Shatila redux, replete with massacres and mass graves. Arab leaders bombarded Bush and Blair with demands for action to stop Israel.

Bush succumbed to the mounting pressure, and on April 4 told Sharon to pull Israeli forces out of West Bank cities. On April 6, the first day of the Crawford meeting, Bush sharpened that message in a press conference with Blair, calling on Israel to withdraw "without delay." He said the same in a 20-minute phone call to Sharon that very day. It was the lowest point in Israeli-American relations during the Bush years, and a crisis of massive proportions. Here is the chronology.

So Blair was right to recall that at Crawford, "the Israel issue was a big, big issue," and that there were conversations with the Israelis. But these weren't "active consulting" over plans for the Iraq war (and nothing in Blair's testimony suggests they were). They were urgent negotiations about an ongoing war in the West Bank, and consisted of full-court pressure on Israel to end it. That Walt doesn't say so—that "April 2002" doesn't immediately trigger a mention of the historical context—is evidence either of ignorance or deception. Take your pick.

And while we're on straws, Walt grasped at another one which left me smiling. Walt:

Consider that former President Bill Clinton told an audience at an Aspen Institute meeting in 2006 that "every Israeli politician I knew" (and he knows a lot of them) believed that Saddam Hussein was so great a threat that he should be removed even if he did not have WMD.

I never trust Walt to represent a source accurately (see past example), so I checked it. The quote was reported by James Bennet, who puts it in context:

[Clinton] segued into a discussion of Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman's position in favor of going to war, noting how it squared with the view of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others that Saddam Hussein was such a menace he should be removed regardless of whether he had WMD. Then, out of the blue, came this: "That was also the position of every Israeli politician I knew, by the way."

So Clinton attributed the idea that Saddam should be removed regardless of WMD to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Lieberman, and "others"—all of the usual suspects—and only then to Israeli leaders, "by the way." As far as Walt's thesis, this proves... well, what does it prove, Professor Walt? The amusing sequel comes when Bennet notes that even "I knew some Israeli politicians with doubts about the war," and then relays this explanation:

One longtime and acute observer of Clinton, whom I won't name here, suggested to me that, as is his tendency, Clinton was looking to please people he spotted in the crowd before him—in this case, seated in the front rows, several representatives of Arab nations, including Queen Noor of Jordan.

So Clinton wasn't just speaking to "an audience" in Aspen. He had Queen Noor in the front row! Could Bill Clinton have been pandering? Naw, couldn't be.

You get six minutes at the Herzliya Conference to say something memorable (and there is a clock ticking away at your feet, facing the audience). So I made a memorable argument for the role of population growth in radicalization, a clip of which is embedded below. It's memorable—but not at all original. I first encountered the idea in the stimulating work of Gunnar Heinsohn (here is one example of many).

There is also one error in my popularized recycling of his thesis. Heinsohn's rule of thumb is that when 30 percent or more of the total male population is between 15-29 (fighting age), violence ensues. In my talk, I added that I would put it higher, at 40 percent. But that 40 percent should be of the total adult male population (15-64). I doubt that in any of the countries of the region, the 15-29 range accounts for 40 percent of total male population. Heinsohn is right.

An excellent compendium of demographic data on age structure in the Middle East, and a valuable discussion of it, may be found in the Stanford Center for Longevity's "Critical Demographics of the Greater Middle East: A New Lens for Understanding Regional Issues" (here).

If you can't see the embedded clip, click here.

I've been reading through the part of the Goldstone Report treating the economic impact of Operation Cast Lead—a part that hasn't gotten much attention. It's largely a crib of a March 2009 report compiled by the Palestinian Federation of Industries, whose deputy general-secretary, Amr Hamad, was interviewed three separate times by the mission. The mission deemed both the report and Hamad's testimony to be "reliable and credible."

The most important sentence in this section of the Goldstone Report is this one: "Mr. Amr Hamad indicated that 324 factories had been destroyed during the Israeli military operations at a cost of 40,000 jobs" (paragraph 1005). I did a double-take when I read that: 40,000 would be astonishing in an economy like Gaza's. This is what Hamad said in his testimony (June 28, Goldstone in the chair):

The industrial sector that was destroyed, for example, the 324 factories that were destroyed, that we[re] destroyed used to employ four-hundred thous-, uh, 40,000 workers. And these have lost their uh, jobs, uh, forever.

So that's the source of the number. But if you return to the report of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, it puts the job losses at these 324 factories not at 40,000, but at 4,000. That's an order-of-magnitude misrepresentation by Hamad of his own organization's findings. The Goldstone Mission should have wondered at the figure, checked Hamad's testimony against the Palestinian Federation of Industries report, detected the discrepancy, and gotten it right. But it didn't. Perhaps the mission members, hearing the word "factories," thought that 40,000 jobs sounded credible. In fact, more than a quarter (88) of these 324 "factories" employed five people or less, and over half (189) employed from five to twenty people (Federation report, p. 12). The vast majority of these "factories" should really be described as "workshops." Only three employed a hundred or more people.

Of course, that 40,000-lost-jobs figure has made its way to numerous websites, and might eventually surface in an op-ed in a major newspaper. (That sort of thing has happened before.) So it would behoove the mission to issue a correction, and post a corrected version of its report. After all, this isn't a matter of interpretation.

And as you ponder all those figures in the Goldstone Report, just keep in mind that it contains at least one order-of-magnitude error regarding a very basic statistic. The report isn't just biased. It's shoddy.

My Columbia lecture has been published in the Middle East Papers series of Middle East Strategy at Harvard. My core argument is that the Obama administration is thwarting itself, by seeming reluctant to uphold American primacy in the region. More troops in Afghanistan are unlikely to change the Middle Eastern perception that the United States is something less than it was. That's because Iran is seen as the true test of American resolve. Download the paper here.

This is how I opened my lecture on U.S. Middle East policy to the Columbia University International Relations Forum on November 16.

As some of you may know, I've been a long-time and often sharp critic of certain decisions made by Columbia University. There's a saying, that honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. In other words, it doesn't much matter, but for what it's worth, my criticism hasn't been that of a stranger. I've commented as a professional academic, as a Columbia alumnus, and as a Columbia University Press author, who remembers this great university as a place of diverse approaches and the highest standards.

The standards I recall were personified by the late J.C. Hurewitz, with whom I studied here almost thirty-five years ago. For the younger of you in this audience, that name will mean very little, perhaps nothing. But for many years, Hurewitz dominated the teaching of the Middle East at Columbia, for which he set a very high bar. I took my first course with Hurewitz along with fellow student Lisa Anderson, who later succeeded him as director of the Middle East Institute and went on to serve as dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. She precisely and elegantly described Hurewitz in these words:

The motif in J.C. Hurewitz's professional life has been a belief in the possibility and desirability of fairness.… His commitment to an abstract notion of fairness as a value, both moral and pragmatic, was particularly striking in worlds—Middle Eastern politics, academics, government—where the primacy of personal bias or political inclination has been far more common.… There were, of course, those who believed the effort to be misguided, who said and continue to say that objectivity is impossible and dispassion irresponsible. Hurewitz did not say he was trying to be objective in any absolute or scientific sense, however: indeed, epistemological questions are of no interest to him and he has great respect for the passions of others. He strove to be fair.

This is not the occasion to ask whether Columbia still elevates those who strive to be fair. I do want to take the opportunity to note that my best recollections of Columbia are the moments when J.C. Hurewitz seemingly floated above partisanship to achieve a higher insight on some highly contentious issue. This is a standard that's not easy to maintain, and I sometimes fail to maintain it myself. But I learned enough here to know that partisanship, while sometimes a personal imperative, is never a scholarly virtue, and certainly should never be mistaken for scholarship. For that distinction, learned at a different Columbia at a different time, I'm still grateful.

For those who have Columbia University ID's, I will be lecturing on Monday evening, November 16, on "How Not to Fix the Middle East" at the invitation of the Columbia University International Relations Forum (CUIRF). The lecture will take place at the Roone Arledge Lerner Cinema on the Columbia campus, 2920 Broadway, at 8pm. It's to be preceded by a reception at 7:15pm.

In the CUIRF web announcement, I was surprised to see it suggested that I and Prof. Jack Snyder, my moderator, "may also discuss his [Kramer's] critique of the MEALAC program at Columbia." At the Columbia Bwog, this grows larger in the telling: "Martin Kramer will also most likely be discussing the Joseph Massad tenure, and his critique of other MEALAC Professors at Columbia."

It is not likely. I intend to adhere to my lecture topic.

Update: Here is a rough-and-ready summary of my appearance at Columbia, from the Columbia Spectator. My thesis, a bit muddled here, is that Obama's Middle East policy is plagued by a contradiction. The administration undercuts its own ambitious agenda, by its own ambivalence about U.S. dominance. (Obama: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.") If the Mideast thinks U.S. power is waning, no one will comply. And they haven't.