Description: Lemann thinks that Mearsheimer and Walt could've made a far more subtle - and stronger - point.

Question: Did the Israel lobby take us into Iraq?

Transcript: Well I know them both. I know Walt better. If they had sought my advice about the book, I would have said to them, “You should write a book that says U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is too far tilted toward Israel, and we wanna make a case that it should be tilted away, and why that would be in America’s interest.” That’s the stronger part of their book. When you then take the step of calling the book “The Israel Lobby”, and sort of saying that . . . that . . . that the reason that is so is there is one group that has a sort of nefarious, somewhat mysterious, extra large force in American politics, it starts making me uncomfortable, and it also starts getting very hard to prove. You know the idea . . . It’s a pretty flat statement they make – “no Israel lobby, no war in Iraq” – I don’t think that’s true, if you asked me a straight up yes-no, but it’s very hard to prove. You know the war in Iraq in that setup is what social scientists would call a “dependent variable”. And the Israel lobby is one of a number of possible independent variables. And when you’re studying questions of social science, you’re taught there’s never one independent variable that is 100 percent responsible for the independent variable. Causation almost never works that way, and there’s always sort of a multitude of causes of anything. So I think even Walt and ________ don’t really . . . It’s not really fair to them to say . . . They don’t really say in the book APEC specifically caused the war in Iraq. They do say if there had been no Israel lobby – you know this is sort of a counterfactual, which they define more broadly – there would have been no war in Iraq, and I tend not to agree with that. I would say that’s not true. Most of the people they are calling the Israel lobby were for the war in Iraq. But you know there’s a whole bunch of questions, such as if . . . Even those people weren’t for war in Iraq before 9/11. They had a sort of slightly different program in mind. And why at this moment did that group’s views become dispositive when they hadn’t been before since is another question that needs to be answered.

Question: Would you invite them to speak at Columbia?

Transcript: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And of course they have spoken at Columbia. But . . . but yeah I would. I’m on the side . . . We had . . . at this event at ___________, we had an interesting sort of debate about that question. And all the other panelists said, “I would never debate them. I would never invite them anywhere.” And I don’t agree with that.

I believe in the marketplace of ideas. And you know one of the panelists at this thing at ___________ was Danny ___________, and he has a legitimate position. He says look, I’m a historian of Nazi Germany. I just don’t believe in the marketplace of ideas. Sorry. You know there are cases where I just think that really dangerous and pernicious ideas, if they’re given open expression and put out for debate, are gonna win. And I tend not to believe that. And I also think, you know, they’re not anywhere near the category of Nazis. So you know yeah, I would . . . I believe that it’s good to debate these things.

And also it makes you sound like, you know, they’re really right and, you know, we don’t really have a position or an argument to make against them. It’s just . . . it’s just . . . it’s just we . . . that’s why we won’t debate them, you know?