The speech was remarkable because Leverett once worked alongside Pollack at Brookings. Sort of like Anatol Lieven, who had to parachute out of Carnegie when they didn't want to hear what he had to say about Israel. "People at the thinktanks have courage somewhere between a seaslug and sheep-guts," Lieven told me earlier this year. What a pleasure to watch the war-party delaminate.

But how amazing is it that Pollack maintains credibility? "Now he's doing it on Iran," Leverett notes, pointing to a Dec. 8 Op-Ed in the Times. And at a CFR event not long ago, Pollack was all-but-praising neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht's burn-down-the-house option for Iran.

I find it's wise to keep a copy of Perle's book An End to Evil (penned with fellow AEIer David Frum three years ago), close at hand. Has helped me through many a crisis.

Just how wrong were the gloomsayers?

While we're on provocative matters, let's talk about Robert Satloff, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Kenneth Pollack, of Brookings's Saban Center, holding forth on television about Syria. Satloff all but dismisses the idea of engaging Syria. Pollack says (with his usual indirection), There will be a high price for the U.S. to pay.

Syria may finally be the Elian Gonzalez moment I've been waiting for on the Israel lobby—the moment when U.S. interests and Israeli interests part sharply, for all to see. It is now a commonplace to hear Republican congressmen saying We should talk to Syria. I.e., any idiot knows we should be talking to Syria, to try and save lives in Iraq.

It may not be in Israel's interest to talk to Syria. That is, Israel has time and again declined Syria's overtures in the last few years. For whatever reason, foolish arrogant or visionary, because they don't want to part with the Golan, or think they have pulverized Hezbollah, Israel's leaders don't want to talk to Syria. Their call.

This is a good line in the sand: Israel doesn't want to talk to Syria, the U.S. maybe does. Where do you stand, Ken Pollack, of the Saban Center (a thinktank funded by an Israeli)? And Satloff of WINEP, hirer of Israeli generals? Are Israeli and American interests always congruent? Now that's a good question for public broadcasting.

Of course many observers of the race regard the Lamont groundswell as drawing life from subterranean criticism of Israel. Some supporters of Lieberman are angered by this, and point to what they see as antisemitic comments on Kos. The one statement Horowitz quotes is inflammatory—all about Lieberman's Israel "graft"—but it does touches on what is central to understanding the Israel issue in American politics: money. This issue should not be dismissed as antisemitic; it should be dealt with head-on, because it is so important. Here, for instance, is Harvard Professor Steven Walt, till lately a dean at the Kennedy School of Government, talking about money in his 2005 book, Taming American Power:

That comparatively-wealthy group has sometimes addressed the money issue directly itself:

1. In his 1991 book Chutzpah, Alan M. Dershowitz says of friends of Israel, "We became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy."

2. Lately in The New Republic, Martin Peretz, sore over the "anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus" that he thinks helped to exile Larry Summers, baldly describes money as a way of punishing Harvard: "...[M]y own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous... I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey."

3. Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard's Hillel center, brought up the money issue to me, unprompted, when I interviewed him for an article in the Nation
on the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby, a paper whose association with the Kennedy School at Harvard made Steinberg livid. He said, "I talked to someone in Harvard development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, 'It's been seismic.'"

These men were all talking openly about a real force in American politics. Here are two statements from the Walt-Mearsheimer paper (written by two leading professors) that underscore that point.

I know a little about the thinktanks from having reported on them. They stocked the Bush Administration with neocons, who jumped out of their cubicles after 9/11 and put on their capes. Thinktanks depend on generous gifts; and the climate is very pro-Israel. For instance, I was told that scholars who had criticized Israel at the Cato Institute, a libertarian nest, were last year told to pull in their horns. They found this ominous. Even as American Enterprise Institute was paying Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., $96,000 a year for three years as a fellow when the guy was living in Israel and the association was nowhere on AEI's website (the figure was collected in federal filings by Guidestar.org).

Or here is the brilliant young Anatol Lieven, formerly of the Carnegie Institute, talking to me again for the Nation: "I did not wite a line about [Israel] until 9/11... I knew bloody well it would bring horrible unpopularity." Then 9/11 happened and Carnegie asked him to look into the Mideast. Lieven had been a regular at the Aspen Institute. "I got kicked out... In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.' I have never been asked back."

In 2004 Lieven published a book, America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had subordinated its interests to Israel. "I became a pariah at the Carnegie with many colleagues. Nor have I enjoyed being told by a number of people with respect to various jobs, to forget it... "

Last year Lieven left the Carnegie for the New America Foundation. He is rather amusing on the issue of intellectual independence among the tankers:

"When you spend your whole professional life bent over double, you can't stand up straight again, much less have a spine. People at the thinktanks have courage somewhere between a seaslug and sheep-guts... People have spoken out before [on the Mideast] and the surface has closed over them with hardly a ripple. People as serious as Fulbright.... Life is very difficult if you can't get published in the New York Times or Washington Post."

It's worth considering the career of a man who has repeatedly been published in the Times, Kenneth M. Pollack, the most important liberal hawk in the runup to the Iraq war. Pollack published his war manifesto, The Threatening Storm, in 2002, just as he joined the Saban Center at Brookings. Every time Pollack refers to the Israel/Palestine situation as a source of anger in the Arab world in that book, he uses phrases like "violence between Arabs and Israelis." Or "upheaval." Or: "trouble in the Arab-Israeli arena taps into the huge pool of Arab anger and resentment..." All this, mind you, when he is trying to look at it from the Arab perspective: but he never uses the word occupation. I just searched the book on Amazon: it uses the word occupation seven times, almost always to refer to the upcoming U.S. occupation of Iraq. Not once about the West Bank. This is, quite simply, circumlocution. Even fellow-war-drum-banger Chris Hitchens says on Slate, "Almost everybody... concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe." Well not everybody Chris; Pollack can't even say the word occupation. I have to wonder whether Pollack's signing up with a center funded by an Israeli turned his mind into sheepguts.

One answer to all that I've said is, This is not Jewish money; this is the subset of rightwing, pro-Israel money. There is, after all, George Soros. Or the brave Israel Policy Forum(though even here I would note that IPF's National Scholar, Steven Spiegel, said fatuously on the Diane Rehm show that the lobby doesn't have to push Israel to policymakers because the same way "kids like ice cream cones, Americans like Israel").

Fair enough: but these are exceptions to the rule, and that rule is that big Jewish money is hawkish because it is concerned with Israel's security. Even the Jewish Ledger agrees in its coverage of Lamont-Lieberman: "Jewish fund-raisers canvassed by JTA said they favored Lieberman -- even those who profoundly disagree with him on Iraq. Democrats in general are missing the bigger picture, said Alan Solomont, a Boston-based Jewish fund-raiser who headed funding for John Kerry's 2004 bid for the presidency.
and who supported the Geneva Accord.
"The left in our party who favor a different approach to Iraq are turning their fury on Joe in a way that I don't think is particularly helpful," Solomont said. "I differ with Lieberman on Iraq but I don't think Democrats can afford to break ranks right now in the face of extreme right-wing control of the entire federal government." And Solomon is on the executive committee of what is close to the left of the Israel supporters in this country, the

There is sadness and tragedy here. The tragedy is the effect on American independence. As Lieven says, had there been such a lobby during the 70s with respect to China, could Nixon have made his creative leap? No way. Look at the Israeli occupation and settlement program. As Hitchens says, everyone (but Ken Pollack) understands what a horror this has proved to be. Even unabashed supporters of Israel understand that. Well, several American presidents actually tried to put on the brakes. In 1992, George H.W. Bush held up loan guarantees aimed at helping Soviet emigres move to Israel because he didn't want Israel to build another settlement. The lobby went crazy. Bush backed down.

In a forthcoming paper on Israel policy by the realist scholar Michael Desch, the former President Bush says at Texas A&M U that he believes he lost the '92 presidential race to Clinton because of his stand on the settlements.

Is that the sort of power we want anyone to have in this country? Did that serve America or Israel? Recent events in the Mideast demonstrate, the U.S. must play an independent role.

What is the sadness? It is that Jews are so taken up in a narrative of their own powerlessness that I don't think they are aware of how much power their tremendous advances in the last generation have granted them.

This touches on the LA Times articleI mentioned a couple days back that says that neoconservatism is not limited to the Bush Administration, that neocons are a significant part of the Democratic Party braintrust. By neoconservatism, I mean here the belief that using force to change regimes in the Arab world is a good thing, and essential to establishing stability in the Mideast. This doctrine is widely held among even Dems who call themselves liberals, from Lieberman to Berman. It's important to identify this strain of thinking because if you have any hope of winning political campaigns based on an antiwar policy, or a liberal internationalist realist policy (the various antimilitarist ideas that are in the air, from Fukuyama to Lieven), you have to attack this thinking and offer an alternative.

Put simply, more than half the country has come around to the dovish position that the Iraq war was a mistake. Who will address that majority constituency? And how? If the Democratic party is going to do it, it will have to sort out those who favor the use of force to change regimes from those who don't. This is hard political work. Especially if you believe, as I do, that it means stating forcefully: we must have a more evenhanded approach to Israel/Palestine. Howard Dean tried to say that two years ago and then quailed because of the pro-Israel lobby.

But let's return to the ideas. Here I'd like to point specifically at Kenneth M. Pollack, the head of research at the Saban Center at the "liberal" Brookings Institution. Pollack served in the National Security Council for Bill Clinton. His argument for invading Iraq in 2002, in the book, The Threatening Storm, was hugely influential, and Pollack appeared again and again on the Op-Ed page of the Times in the runup to the war, offering the centrist Democratic bloc to Bush's coalition of the willing. Pollack was influential because he seemed so reasonable, arguing that we needed to invade Iraq to lower the temperature in the Middle East. He was a liberal Establishment type, he had grown up on the Upper East Side and graduated from Yale and served on the Council of Foreign Relations. Also Pollack writes very clearly and thoughtfully—and he's mediawise (married to Ted Koppel's daughter).

I am going to highlight an argument from that 2002 book. I understand that Pollack's thinking has changed somewhat since that book, but I don't believe that he has come to terms publicly with what he wrote here.

Toward the end of the book, Pollack argued that the U.S. should not conduct a "pragmatic," efficient invasion—removing Saddam and then getting out of there. It should reconstruct Iraq and build a stable, inclusive new Iraqi political system. By following this expensive "Reconstruction Approach," the U.S. would "transform its reputation in the Arab world," and transform the Arab world. The emphasis here is all mine.

I told you he was a good writer. I certainly couldn't have put it better myself.

Now here is Pollack's response, two pages on, to those crazy critics.

I believe that Pollack's defense of these statements would be along the lines: I was for doing it completely differently from Bush, with a wider coalition. Etc. Similar arguments are now heard widely. There is a giant unfolding Chinese menu with pictures of the way we should have invaded Iraq. These people are rearranging the deck chairs. The invasion was a bad idea, America knows that, and our leaders lined up behind it and the best and the brightest promoted it. Progressives need to come up with better ideas.

Sean Penn needs to read this book. So do Mike Farrell, George Clooney and all the protesters who marched and chanted against an American-led war on Iraq in cities across the world last weekend. (Patti Smith, who kept on singing "People Have the Power" at the rally in Washington, D.C., could benefit just from skimming page 123, which briefly visits Saddam Hussein's eye-gouging, bone-crushing, acid-soaking policies toward his people when they touch-or are deliriously imagined to touch-a hair on the head of his power.) If, in their eyes, Kenneth Pollack fails to make the case for a full-scale invasion, he will have made an awfully strong argument-an argument that opponents of the war must confront, in all its depth, breadth and detail, if they do not wish to be patted on their heads and sent out to play with their placards.

The book's capital-O ominous title is a clear play on Winston Churchill's words on the gathering storm before World War II. Its body, however, bears more comparison to Churchill's famous pronouncement on democracy. As treated here, war really is the absolute worst-case scenario, except for all the other remotely realistic case scenarios-which Mr. Pollack, a former military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, lays out with due respect, if not more.

Ironically enough for a book that makes the Bush administration's Iraq argument much more cogently than the administration has yet dreamt of doing, this one achieves its authority by virtue of its total refusal to paint the question in Bush-tones of black and white. Start to finish, Mr. Pollack keeps the terms of debate to dark and darker: the bad versus the worse, Saddam now versus Saddam later. Then again, any other terms are fiction. At this moment, it's still possible to hope for a shockingly satisfying disposal of the current United Nations weapons inspections-or even for the dictator's opting to pack up his delusions of himself as avenging Arab angel and make for Riyadh.

Barring such felicities, however, the choice at hand is not a choice between war and peace. The options are not a) engaging in a terrible, variously costly, internationally dreaded war, or b) leaving the people of Iraq to their own oil, the rest of the world to its own beeswax, and the United Nations to its vaguely alleged task of more patiently mitigating the eclectic horrors of this regime. Rather, the options are a) engaging in a terrible, variously costly, internationally dreaded war, or b) leaving Iraq to its own misery, the world to the ramifications of a militarily resurgent and politically triumphant Saddam, and the United Nations in a state of even less ability and inclination to do a thing about him.

No question, it's an excruciating dilemma, and there are valid reasons to come down on the antiwar side of it. But people of conscience must first do the work of facing the facts, and the facts are clearly and calmly laid out here.

Not, it bears noting, that opponents of the war ought to be confused automatically with people of conscience. As the "no-blood-for-oil" crowd sometimes forgets to mention, there is no shortage of brutally self-interested doves, and they presumably will greet everything in this book with the same " feh !" with which they've greeted every other proof of treachery that Saddam has offered since he was ordered to disarm after the Persian Gulf War. More thoughtful readers, however, will note that many-not all, but many-of what pass for antiwar arguments are not arguments at all, but assumptions. It is these assumptions that this book is most useful in flattening.

For starters, there's the assumption that the international policy of containment of Iraq was going along perfectly well, thank you, until the U.S.-mad as hell after Sept. 11-put its cowboy hat on and decided to ride roughshod over it. As Mr. Pollack is not the first to note, international efforts at containment have long been losing traction, and Saddam's efforts at circumvention have long been gaining it. Take the sanctions (please!). Particularly since 1996, when the establishment of the so-called "oil for food" program theoretically allowed Saddam to trade oil for humanitarian goods-and practically allowed him to do a lot more than that-well, the average sieve would be mortified to have half so many holes in it. It is bitterly hilarious that the so-called "world community" should plead for patience with the so-called "U.N. system" when members of that community have been doing everything possible to undermine that system for years.

It is fair, indeed essential, to examine what selfish motives-such as a lust for oil-may propel the U.S. in the direction of war. But it is preposterous to do so without also asking what is propelling the likes of France and Russia-which have brazenly traded Security Council favors to Iraq in exchange for lucrative contracts from Iraq-in the direction away from war. More to the point for those truly and primarily concerned about the suffering of Iraqis, the sanctions-even if they could be rendered effective-present a hideous choice within the hideous choice. Absent the convincing disempowerment of Saddam one way or another, there is the inhumanity of tightening them versus the insanity of lifting them.

Mr. Pollack raises, then razes, one commonly but mistakenly cited objection after another, explaining why, for purposes of threat assessment, it doesn't really matter whether or not Saddam had anything to do with Sept. 11; why a nice clean round of air strikes won't cut it; why some variety of coup can't be contracted out to a few good Shiites; why, in terms of establishing any sort of American claim to any sort of trust in the region, there may well be at least as much risk in backing down as there is in revving up.

He also disentangles the question of whether the U.S. is significantly to blame for Saddam's having obtained the damnable weapons in the first place (it is) from the question of whether the U.S. can now legitimately call for his ouster (why not?). This reveals another strong point: Although the book certainly examines the question in terms of American interests, it doesn't see the region through red-white-and-blue-colored glasses. There is a major difference between concluding that war in Iraq is the best of a bunch of bad options, and concluding that American foreign policy in the Middle East over the past five or six decades has been just ginger-peachy. Mr. Pollack doesn't try to deny or minimize the fact and impact of U.S. support for Saddam throughout and after his 1980-88 war with Iran, which was then viewed as American enemy No. 1 in the region. Nor does he try to pretend that America's involvement in Iraq can be seen in isolation from America's involvement or non-involvement elsewhere, most notably in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There are those who will argue that, even in hindsight, the pro-Iraqi tilt looks better than having risked the advancement of revolutionary Iran. But even the most resilient adherent to that position has got to wonder whether we had to be quite so gung-ho about it. Not even the coldest warrior can fail to bristle at the American non-response to the 1988 chemical massacre at the Kurdish city of Halabja. Not even the shiniest Yankee Doodle Dandy can fault the average Iranian, Arab or Kurd for having serious reservations about supporting the U.S., which must therefore appreciate the urgency and absoluteness of the imperative to communicate-and, indeed, have-decent, reality-based ideas about Iraq. All that said, such observations constitute an argument for conducting business better in the future. They constitute nothing like an argument against heading off the potentially dire consequences of the badly conducted business of the past.

As for the administration's firm commitment to the doing of squat vis-à-vis Israel and the Palestinians, Mr. Pollack states its most obvious failing: Neighboring powers want the administration to do something-and, like it or not, neighboring powers count. "Some on the far right complain that by agreeing to take actions on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute we are giving the moderate Arab states a veto over our actions," he writes. "What this claim misses is that the Gulf states do have a veto over whether or not we invade Iraq."

That sentence suggests something else to recommend this book: It is in English. Despite his life in bureaucracy, Mr. Pollack writes as if he has seen daylight and encountered normal people with some regularity. Chapter subheadings run along the lines of "What smart bombs do and don't do" and-after a careful but fanciful treatment of what would be required to invigorate the sanctions-"Why none of this will ever happen." Especially when the material moves into the technical, the text helpfully steers toward the conversational: "In ground war, being small doesn't make you quick and nimble; it makes you tentative." When it comes to military ins and outs, I am not the person to assess Mr. Pollack's assessments. But I can say that it took me only one read to be clear on what his assessments are.

This isn't War and Peace , any more than it is about war or peace. But for the well-meaning war critic, it is something to be read and refuted before the next round of chanting

Tish Durkin, a former political reporter for The New York Observer , now writes about the Middle East for a variety of publications.