To give an example of sloppiness - the treatment of Israel in the Cold War. M&W suggest that Israel was the biggest beneficiary of US help among its client states. Really? - I'd say the scale of US engagement on behalf of South Korea and South Vietnam was quite a bit larger. Same goes for Western Europe. The claim might be true if one only counts direct financial aid, but that is a disingeuously narrow definition.
Tendentiousness - In discussing the US arms lift to Israel in the 1973 war they note the costs of that action - i.e. the oil embargo. What they don't mention is the flip side - that if Israel were facing imminent catastrophic defeat by the the Egyptian and Syrian forces they would have most likely acted according to the standard policy of nuclear armed states in such a situation - turn the enemy into mushroom clouds. Also not a particularly satisfying outcome.
Another example is in making the case that Israel commits crimes - well yes, but it's not like that has been a hindrance to America in its support for other countries, particularly during the Cold War. Or afterwards - America rushed a half million troops to fight on behalf of Saudi Arabia in 1991-1992.
Straight out stupidity - The idea that the Jewish vote is a key factor. As the paper itself notes Jews make up only three percent of the population, and the majority disagree with the AIPAC line. Furthermore, they are concentrated in a few, mostly solidly blue areas.
Monocausality - M&W see the US pro-Israel policy as self-evidently bad for US national interests (something I agree with). But they attribute far too great a role to this far flung 'Lobby' and discount other factors, e.g. ideology, lack of any significant constituency that cares deeply about the Palestinians, strategic concerns, oil, etc. They address each of those issues, say that they cannot explain US policy on their own, and then discount them as irrelevant - completely illogical. National policies have multiple causes.
Realist paradox - The two scholars are both 'realists' - that is they believe that states have foreign policy interests that are objectively clear and which they will always pursue. Domestic political concerns and ideological biases are not factors in determining foreign policy. Here they have found an exception to their model - US Middle East policy is not in its national interest. As ideology and error are not possible explanations, the only one that makes sense to them is that the US is being misled by those who place another state's interests over their own - hence the all-powerful Lobby. (So what's their explanation for Vietnam?) Catch is, they also mention that the policy being supported isn't in Israel's interests either. So what we're left with in their own terms is a nonsensical situation - a superpower led astray by a group of its own citizens, primarily defined by their ethnicity, who are acting against the interests of their own country in favour of the country of their co-ethnics, except that they're also acting against the interests of that country. Furthermore the majority of their co-ethnics and of the rest of the population doesn't support them.
Borderline racism. They note a claim that in presidential contests Dem candidates get as much as sixty percent of their money from Jewish sources. But how many of those donors are Likudnik types, how many are Meretz types? No idea but rather obviously both exist, yet the implication is that 'Jewish money' is monolithic.
The Larry Summers analogy
I've mentioned before that I see political correctness in its soft, non administratively or legally enforced form, as a good thing. Among other things that means applying a very strict standard when it comes to playing with racist, sexist, or homophobic stereotypes. If a scholar wishes to play with such issues - e.g. black crime or poor school performance, lack of women in science, or all powerful Jewish conspiracies, he or she should be extra careful about the quality of the work, and avoid making exaggerated claims about the truth of such stereotypes. And if they do the reverse, they should be condemned. Mearsheimer and Walt are no Charles Murray, there is no pattern of racism in their lives. There is also no clear pattern of sexism with Larry Summers. But both M&W and Summers offered support for noxious stereotypes without sufficient evidence. I have no sympathy for them when they ended up burned.
The two scholars are both 'realists' - that is they believe that states have foreign policy interests that are objectively clear and which they will always pursue.
