More AIPAC Mischief?

Reviving suspicions that AIPAC exercises undue influence on US policy, a new report by Time magazine claims that the FBI is investigating a possible political deal between the pro-Israel lobbying organization and Rep. Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Whatever the truth of the allegations, new polls by Zogby International reveal that nearly half of Americans surveyed believe that the Lobby was improperly involved in the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. With American sentiment increasingly turning against the war as a money pit and a quagmire in the making, how will voters view the Lobby's tendency to conflate Israeli and American interests in the Middle East? And just as troublingly, how clearly will Americans be able to distinguish the Lobby and its motives from the interests of American Jews at large, especially when AIPAC and its Jewish organizational allies so often claim -- falsely, but seductively -- that they represent the views of the American Jewish community (as if that community were, despite all evidence to the contrary, a monolithic entity)?