Obama nominee departs with blistering volley at 'Israel Lobby'

WASHINGTON:Chas Freeman's withdrawal was far more newsworthy than his initial appointment

WHEN FORMER ambassador Chas Freeman was picked last month to chair the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which prepares intelligence evaluations for the White House, few US newspapers reported the appointment. Freeman’s withdrawal this week was front page news, however, not least because of his blistering parting volley at the “Israel Lobby” he claimed had brought him down.

“The libels on me and their easily traceable e-mail trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East,” he wrote in a message to supporters.

“The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonour and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the wilful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods and an utter disregard for the truth.

“The aim of this lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favours.”

A former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia who served as assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs under Bill Clinton, Freeman has long criticised US support for Israel’s policies in the occupied territories. In common with many of President Barack Obama’s national security advisers, he is a foreign policy realist who approaches international relations on the basis that states are essentially self-interested, rational actors.

The campaign against Freeman’s appointment was fought almost exclusively on the blogosphere, with neoconservative commentators denouncing what they described as his anti-Israeli rhetoric and pointing out that his think tank, the Middle East Policy Council, received some funding from the Saudi government.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, said publicly that it had no position on Freeman’s appointment but its spokesman admitted this week to briefing journalists on an unattributable basis. The blogger who led the campaign against Freeman was Steve Rosen, a former Aipac official who is on trial for allegedly passing classified US government information to Israel. Freeman’s neoconservative critics cited numerous comments they characterised as hostile to Israel, including a speech in which he declared that, although the Jewish state excelled at war, it had shown no talent for peace.

“For almost 40 years, Israel has had land beyond its previously established borders to trade for peace. It has been unable to make this exchange except when a deal was crafted for it by the United States, imposed on it by American pressure and sustained at American taxpayer expense,” he said. “For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favoured to stabilise its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbours, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.”

Freeman’s views on Israel would sit comfortably within the mainstream debate in Europe but his comments on China’s suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations might raise some eyebrows, even among the most unsentimental foreign policy realists. “I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, ie that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than – as would have been both wise and efficacious – to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquillity to Beijing and other major urban centres in China,” he wrote in an e-mail in 2006.

“In this optic, the Politburo’s response to the mob scene at Tiananmen” stands as a monument to overly cautious behaviour on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action. For myself, I side on this – if not on numerous other issues – with Gen Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be.”

During her visit to Asia last month, secretary of state Hillary Clinton said that US pressure on China over human rights “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises”. Human rights activists fear that, in turning his back on the moral posturing of his predecessor’s foreign policy, Obama risks embracing a cold-hearted realism driven by a narrow view of national self-interest. The “Israel Lobby’s” campaign to fell Freeman has been an unattractive spectacle but progressives have little reason mourn his loss in a battle between two conservative visions of US foreign policy.