In one of my many “careers” I was the lead seaman on the Block Island ferry, a shallow drafted car carrier making a two and a half hour trip from New London, Connecticut out to this low lying workingman’s Martha’s Vineyard. So it was with some wonder that I ran across this interesting report of center-of-the world stuff in the Block Island Times.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, you may remember, published an article in the London Review of Books a month or so ago, raising the question of whether Israel and the U.S. Israel lobby had too much influence in Washington D.C. Folks in some quarters weren’t satisfied with calling for them to be ridden out of town on a rail; tar and feathers would have been better. Alan Dershowitz labled the mere asking of the question as anti-Semetic.

As it turns out the two men were invited panelists to the 57th Current Strategy Forum at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. For a few details read here. What is interesting however, is that Mearsheimer wound up his contribution by recalling his student days at West Point, the United States Military Academy.

An English professor had assigned his class to read French existentialist Albert Camus’ “The Plague.” The instructor explained that he was using the book as an allegory for what was happening in Vietnam: the plague came and went of its own accord – and humans “operated under the illusion that they could affect the plague one way or another.” Mearsheimer said he saw a similar dynamic afoot in Iraq.

“There are forces that we don’t have control over that are at play, and they will determine the outcome. I understand that’s very hard for Americans to understand, because Americans believe that they can shape the world in their interests.

“But I learned during the Vietnam years when I was a kid at West Point, that there are some things in the world that you just don’t control, and I think that’s where we’re at in Iraq.”

It was the end of the panel, and the predominately military audience broke out in applause.

Hat tip to War and Piece.