Judgement, Not Loyalty

Larison weighs in on the Israel and Iraq debate:

The problem is not one of divided loyalties, as if Israeli interests are being put first and American interests second, but the mistake of seeing the interests of both states as largely or entirely complementary and almost identical.  When Anglophiles made this mistake in 1917 and plunged the U.S. into WWI, they were not exhibiting “divided loyalties,” but had a fundamentally mistaken understanding of what the American interest was.  Talk of “divided loyalties” comes up because the interests of any two states are not nearly so close or complementary, and those who conflate the interests of two states can end up making poor judgements about what the national interest of their country really is.  In the case of the Iraq war, you did have people, including neoconservatives of various backgrounds, making such a poor judgement because they misunderstood what was in the interest of both the United States and Israel.  It is not a question of loyalty, but of judgement.  Having first misunderstood and then identified the interests of the two states too closely, they ended up harming both.  The real issue is not motives, but the effects of terrible policies.