Daled Amos: Stephen Walt: What Arab Lobby?

Monday, December 13, 2010

Stephen Walt: What Arab Lobby?

Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states have no meaningful lobby in Washington
Stephen Walt

Jeffrey Goldberg and Stephen Walt are going at it on the issue of the Arab lobby.

In the latest give-and-take, Goldberg points out the millions that the Arab countries pay to lobbyists, consultants and public relations specialists over the past ten years.

Walt counters with the apparent ineffectiveness of the Arab lobby in getting what it wants.

If we are going to discuss the Arab lobby, I suppose you could do worse than to listen to the man who wrote the book on the subject--literally: The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America's Interests in the Middle East.

According to the review of the book on Amazon:

Today the Arab states influence American policy through numerous hidden and informal channels, including former members of Congress, subsidized think tanks, paid media spokesmen, academics who hold chairs endowed by Arab money, human rights organizations, assorted UN agencies, European diplomats, and Christian groups hostile to Israel. A number of former ambassadors, university professors, and think tank experts routinely opine on Middle Eastern affairs, but never reveal these conflicts of interest.

The most powerful member of the Arab lobby is Saudi Arabia, which has a nearly eighty-year relationship with the United States. From the earliest days, when American companies first discovered oil in the Arabian Peninsula, the Saudis have used a variety of tactics, including threats and bribes, to coerce U.S. policy makers to ignore their human rights abuses, support of terrorism, and opposition to American interests.

Today, Bard shows, the Arab lobby's goals include feeding America's oil addiction, obtaining more sophisticated weaponry, and weakening our alliance with a democratic Israel. It also seeks to influence public opinion through a well-funded publicity campaign, and by injecting distorted views of the Middle East into high school and college textbooks.

But Walt will still claim that this is irrelevant because the Arab Lobby does not have the power that the Israel Lobby does--in other words, Walt will not claim that no such thing exists, he will just say that since it does not have the power, it is irrelevant.

Perhaps Walt has heard of Barak Obama?

In an article for the Middle East Quarterly, Mitchell Bard writes that Obama himself is a one-man argument for the effectiveness of the Arab Lobby:

Walt and Mearsheimer cavalierly dismissed the possibility that U.S. policy might be subject to countervailing influences by those who believe the national interest is best served by distancing the United States from Israel and cultivating ties with the Arab states. They are not alone. Many analysts have ignored or belittled the notion that an Arab lobby exists or has any influence. Yet one need only look at the first year of the Obama administration to reject Walt and Mearsheimer's case. How can Obama's solicitous policy toward the Arabs and hostility toward Israel be understood if the Israel lobby is so omnipotent or if pro-Arab forces are nonexistent? While The Israel Lobby came out before Obama took office, one could as easily look to the hostility displayed toward Israel by the Eisenhower administration after the 1956 Suez War to see the fallacy of the hypothesis.

Another point we need to take into account is that Walt is selectively defining Arab Lobby power basically in terms of Israel:

In short, despite the money that some Arab countries spend on PR firms, the "Arab lobby" is not a meaningful political force when it comes to the broad thrust of U.S. Middle East policy, and certainly not on issues affecting Israel.

As far as "the broad thrust of U.S. Middle East policy," Walt is apparently not taking into account weapons--or Obama's adoption of the Saudi peace plan, for that matter.

And Walt mentions the word "oil" only once--and even then only in the last paragraph and only parenthetically. On the other hand, Bard makes the point that Walt ignores--that the Arab lobby has two issues:

Most lobbies focus predominantly on a single issue—for example, the National Organization of Women on abortion rights and choice, the National Rifle Association on second amendment rights and gun control—but the Arab lobby really has two issues, which occasionally overlap. One is based on oil, is pro-Saudi, and is represented primarily by representatives of that government, and corporations with commercial interests in the kingdom, including weapons-related firms. Even before an Israel lobby was organized, an Arab lobby that included American missionaries, State Department Arabists, and small organizations of Arab and non-Arab Americans had evolved to build ties with the Arab world and, following the discovery of oil in the region, to secure access to that resource.

The power of the Arab lobby becomes clear when seeing that Saudi interests do not always coincide with the interests of the US:

The most powerful part of the Arab lobby is represented almost exclusively by Saudi Arabia and the corporate—especially oil companies—and diplomatic interests that view Saudi well-being as paramount to U.S economic and security concerns...

The Saudis put their own interests first even if these interests are in direct conflict with America's national interests. Saudi Arabia's overriding concern has always been the survival of the House of Saud. Everything else—the weakening of Israel, the spread of radical Islam—is secondary. Since the 1930s, the Saudis have succeeded in convincing Washington that its access to oil would be endangered if the U.S. government did not keep the house of Saud happy. Over the years, the threats from Riyadh have changed. Prior to World War II, the Saudis played on U.S. fears that the British would poach their petroleum concessions; after the war, they used the Cold War to their advantage; today, it is the threat from Iran.

In other words, when Walt writes "Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states have no meaningful lobby in Washington," he means: