The Christian Science Monitor is entitled to its views on the Mideast conflict. But in a staff-ed urging the Bush administration to take more involvement in the peace process, the Monitor tries bolstering its argument by quoting from a dubious source: the controversial paper on American-Israeli relations written by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. The Monitor writes:
But as a new paper by the academic dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Stephen M. Walt, and University of Chicago political scientist John J. Mearsheimer, points out: “Saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards. The United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel…. US support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one.”
Bush can hardly pretend to be the global terrorist fighter if he allows Israel’s separation barrier to take up an estimated 8 percent of the West Bank and also lets nearly 400,000 Jewish settlers leave Palestinian territory looking like Swiss cheese.
Mearsheimer and Walt have already been discredited; we blogged but a small handful of debunkings here.
