By the way, Mearsheimer and Walt were not the first prominent academics to make that claim. Juan Cole takes pride of place. This is perhaps his crudest statement of the case:

In the build-up to the Iraq War, [Douglas] Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals visiting him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they sign in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a vocal advocate of a US war against Iraq, who "put pressure" on Washington about it. (If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why didn't he fight it himself instead of pushing it off on American boys?)

The illogic, the immoderation, the barely-concealed bigotry of this passage, show Cole at his darkest. He wants to be a Yale professor. You can spew these sorts of things after you break into the big three (e.g., Walt). But if you've said them before--well, you're an embarrassment just waiting to happen...