".....In America, diaspora politics has long played a role, and it's not just about Israel.
Lawrence Eagleburger, a longtime American diplomat who briefly served as the first President Bush's secretary of state, once told me that ''American foreign policy -- more often than I think should be the case -- is affected . . . by ethnic politics. Some of the things we ended up doing or not doing in Cyprus, for example, were purely and simply because of the Greek lobby.'
Eagleburger said that there was no question that we ended up with a Cyprus policy quite different from what Henry Kissinger wanted. Cyprus had been an island divided between hostile Greek and Turkish communities when a Greek faction overthrew the government of Greek patriarch Archbishop Mikarios, setting off a chain of events that led to a Turkish invasion and occupation of the northern part of Cyprus in 1974.
''The Greeks created the mess, not the Turks,' Eagleburger told me, and in Kissinger's view US policy should have reflected that."
More:Playing ethnic politics - The Boston Globe
