Crossing the Rubicon2 has gathered blogospheric reaction to the Walt-Mearsheimer paper I briefly criticized last week. Various commentators, especially James Taranto at OpinionJournal (see posts Monday and Tuesday, and a related one today) and Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky at The American Thinker, have really eviscerated this paper. In times past, a paper like this by a prominent Chicago professor and a Kennedy School dean would have gotten tremendous and largely uncritical play before other academics got around to refuting it, if ever. Today, anyone who cares can Google the authors’ names (or Technorati “AIPAC”) and finds tons of valid criticism, along with some rather lame defenses. You could also learn today, for example, via OpinionJournal and The American Thinker that Mearsheimer, rather than being some objective observer of American politics vis a vis Israel, is a long-time Israel-hater, having signed a letter in 2003 suggesting that Israel was prepared to use the distraction of the Iraq War to forcibly evict all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. Score one for An Army of Davids.
UPDATE: And here’s Harvard’s Marvin Kalb as quoted in the New York Sun:
“I do not regard this as a Kennedy School Research Paper, because it clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper,” Mr. Kalb, who is also the faculty chair for the Kennedy School’s Washington programs, told The New York Sun in an e-mail yesterday after reading the paper. “It is a rather sensational example of ‘realist’ journalism,” he continued. “My sense is that Dean Walt would be better advised to stick to scholarship and leave journalism to journalists, who generally check their ‘facts’ before publishing them.”
OUCH!
See also Ruth Wisse in the Wall Street Journal and this letter by Professors Jeffrey Herf and Andrei S. Markovits. And Drezner: It’s “piss-poor, monocausal social science.”
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