Jonah: I see your point, but still resist the association.

I don’t know anything about Jimmy Carter’s book. Having read one, I feel I’ve paid my dues, Carter-book-wise.

The Walt/Mearsheimer book seems, from a reading around it, to argue that lobbies on behalf of Israel are more powerful in Washington than lobbies for a foreign country ought to be, and have an undesirable influence on U.S. foreign policy. Those assertions are either true, or else they’re not. People with an interest in the matter should peruse Walt & Mearsheimer’s arguments, compare them with counter-arguments (which I can’t imagine are hard to find), and tell us their conclusions.

Osama bin Laden thinks Jews are evil, so it is not very surprising that the thesis of the Walt/Mearsheimer book appeals to him. What I resist is Peter’s implication that his endorsement tells us anything about the quality of the book’s arguments. It doesn’t.

You are of course right that it would be absurd to absolve Karl Marx of any responsibility for the existence of Marxism. To that degree you have a point. Even so, I don’t think that (for example) Pol Pot’s endorsement of Das Kapital tells us anything about the validity of Marx’s system. Arguments have to be studied, weighed, and compared with the facts of the world, not laughed out of court because some nutcase has endorsed them.