[Peace-discuss] Jane Harman Weighs In on Israel's Hold Over Congress

[Robert Naiman]

Economists have a concept they call "revealed preferences." The basic
idea is that it's one thing to ask someone how much they value
something. It's another thing to watch the economic choices that they
make, from which you can draw inferences about what their true
preferences are, regardless of what they say.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the question of to what degree the
Israeli government has the ability to make the U.S. Congress do
things. The exact truth is hard to know, partly because U.S. foreign
policy is also awful in areas of the world where the Israel Lobby is
presumably not weighing in as much, so it's assess exactly what the
Israel Lobby's specific contribution is to the particular awfulness of
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. And because there are
particular reasons that have nothing to do with Israel for U.S. policy
to be worse in the Middle East than it is in other areas. And also
because a lot of folks clearly have incentives to overstate or
understate the influence of the Lobby.

What I find most fascinating about the Jane Harman-AIPAC-Gonzales-FISA
scandal is what it suggests Representative Jane Harman's actual
working model was of how Congress works.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/21/204018/671

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/jane-harman-weighs-in-on_b_189803.html


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Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org