When I first heard about Chas Freeman’s being named to head the National Intelligence Council (and certainly after reading what Charles Kestenbaum wrote about him at that link), I knew he’d continue to draw any amount of neocon fire — as indeed he has.
At Rev. Moon’s Washington Times, Eli Lake spent four pages reporting that an inspector general will investigate Freeman’s ties with Saudi Arabian and Chinese organizations — causing Andrew Sullivan to speculate, “One suspects he’s toast. … I sure hope some members of the foreign policy establishment in Obama’s team have some realist sensibilities.” Matt Yglesias observed,
If Freeman goes down it won’t, unfortunately, be because a brave new era of good government and clean dealings has arisen; it’ll be a politically motivated neocon hit job. But as I say, if they have the goods they have the goods.
Though at this point we don’t know whether there are truly-significant “goods” to be had, the decibel-level has certainly climbed (the National Review calling Freeman “savage,” “shameless,” and a “rabid Israel-hater,” while Chuck Schumer put in a phone call to Rahm Emanuel “about Freeman’s positions on the Middle East”).
What has them so het-up? In a fall 2007 speech to the Pacific Council on International Policy, Freeman said:
“In retrospect, Al Qaeda has played us with the finesse of a matador exhausting a great bull by guiding it into unproductive lunges at the void behind his cape. By invading Iraq, we transformed an intervention in Afghanistan most Muslims had supported into what looks to them like a wider war against Islam. We destroyed the Iraqi state and catalyzed anarchy, sectarian violence, terrorism, and civil war in that country. Meanwhile, we embraced Israel’s enemies as our own; they responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies. We abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel’s efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations. We wring our hands while sitting on them as the Jewish state continues to seize ever more Arab land for its colonists.”
Excuse me — yes, Freeman’s criticism is blunt, but is it not precisely what we’ve seen happen over the Bush years? Now with the Israeli hard right freshly back in power, and just as leading American neocon Charles Krauthammer predicts, “We have to prepare ourselves for an Israeli attack [on Iran] by the end of this year,” here’s conservative blogger Daniel Larison:
My guess is that it is Freeman’s reported aversion to groupthink and moralistic cant that led him to be critical of Israel in the first place, and that this inclination probably became stronger as time has gone by. I am also inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt inasmuch as I am rather familiar with how one posting or one statement can be taken out of a much larger body of work and be made to stand in for your entire worldview.
There does seem to be some considerable overlap between those making the most noise about Freeman and those preoccupied with the “Iranian threat.”
Although James Fallows says he doesn’t know Freeman personally,
very recently I met with a friend who had worked years ago with Freeman — on China, not the Middle East — and was upset about what he called the “self-lobotimization” of US foreign policy that the campaign to discredit Freeman represented. As I’ve looked into it, I’ve come to agree. …
[What Fallows' friend said] was that Freeman’s longstanding contrarian inclination to challenge conventional wisdom of any sort, far from being an embarrassing liability, was exactly what a president needed from the person in this job. …
[A]s head of the National Intelligence Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right. While he would have no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to raise provocative questions, to ask “What if everybody’s wrong?”, to force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic known as “groupthink.” As Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatch wrote in an item that called Freeman “A One-Man Destroyer of Groupthink,”
He has… spent a goodly part of the last 10 years raising questions that otherwise might never get answered — or even asked — because they’re too embarrassing, awkward, or difficult.
For him to be put in charge of what [Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy] calls “the intelligence community’s primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates” is about the most emphatic statement the Obama Administration could possibly make that it won’t succumb to the kind of submissive intelligence-community groupthink that preceded the war in Iraq.
Fallows makes the point that embarrassing-question askers who say inconvenient things may not be your favorite company in an organization. “The truth is, you don’t like them when they do that. You may not like them much at all. But without them, you’re cooked.”
So to the extent this argument is shaping up as a banishment of Freeman for rash or unorthodox views, I instinctively take Freeman’s side — even when I disagree with him on specifics. This job calls for originality, and originality brings risks. Chas Freeman is not going to have his finger on any button. He is going to help raise all the questions that the person with his finger on the button should be aware of.
And all that convinces me more than ever to hope that what AIPAC calls the “goods” on Chas Freeman test out too weak for Obama to consider. We’ve suffered much too deeply for much too long the lack of ornery question-posers in the White House. And if Krauthammer’s prediction is right, this is the worst possible time for the American president to be without one.
Freeman’s comments about the massacre in Beijing were quite enough for me to satisfy myself that he should not have this job. I hope Mr. Obama will choose someone more qualified.
What comments, MSlawyer?
Wow. A friend just directed me to this WashingtonNote post on Chas Freeman by his (very Republican, in fact BushCo) son. Quite something to see.
I recently read two books about the Middle East in general and the relationships between the US and Israel in particular. Both were eye openers. Both were sobering. I recommend them to anyone interested in this part of the world.
“The Great War for Civilization: Conquest of the Middle East” by Robert Fisk
This is a powerful overview of the relationship between the Western World and the Muslim World. Fisk is a British journalist who has lived in Labanon for the past three decades. The book is long, difficult, and often unpleasant. It was worth every ounce of effort it took to finish it.
“A World of Trouble” by Patrick Tyler
This book traces the relationships between the United States and Israel from the cold war to the second Bush administration. Relationships (plural) because each adminsitration has adopted a different stance on the issues surrounding Israel, and each administration has layered its own policies on all those that have gone before.
While there is very little in the Middle East to suggest that hope for peace and stability is anywhere on the horizon, the citizens of this county can benefit from learning more about what has occurred there over the past century. There are many good books on the region, and I count these among them. Read some about the region, then form (or reform) your opinions.
The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk is a must read for understanding the debacle in the Mid-East and how it came to be. After being censored by the Times he currently writes for the Independent.
Be prepared for some hard truths about the western nations after the Balfour conference and the Iraqi Great Mistake.
I’m a Fisk fan too, via his reporting for The Indy. The Great War has been on my to-do list too long already — thanks for the reminder, Outsider and Enigma.
Mr. Freeman’s comments were widely reported at the time and have been repeated recently.
It has been reported that Freeman, who once worked at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, apologized for the communist regime’s bloody crackdown on young Tiananmen demonstrators. If anything, it was “overly cautious,” he said.
“I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government,” he added.
Got a link for that, MSlawyer? “It has been reported” doesn’t get us far, does it?
In the meantime, I’ve found one for you, with lots of discussion too: Col. Pat Lang and commenters.
Lotus, the Fallows blog post you link refers to the quote MSLawyer references. Fallows notes that Freeman had made a statement that the government had no choice but to crack down at Tieneman Square.
Try the Reason site. This is all over the internet, from an email Freeman wrote, apparently. Reason quotes it:
>>
I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. 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 tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo’s response to the mob scene at “Tian’anmen” stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior 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. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ “Bonus Army” or a “student uprising” on behalf of “the goddess of democracy” should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government’s normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang’s dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.
I await the brickbats of those who insist on a politically correct — i.e. non Burkean conservative — view.
<<
Thanks, NMC. “Apparently” is the hang-up. Yes, I saw Fallows’ reference, but so far I haven’t seen a reliable attribution (which the Weekly Standard isn’t) to the complete text. Maybe Freeman said that, maybe he didn’t. The WashTimes’ account of it, for instance, is very hedged.
But if he did write exactly that message, it’s just as advertised in Fallows and Lang’s discussions: a “realist’s” assessment, not comfortable reading to moralists, but very valuable to a decision-maker needing to understand an opponent’s mindset: exactly what I want the POTUS to get in his mix of daily intell.
Yeah, he is just what we need. The voice of reason.
“Uh, Mr. President if we honor our treaties to defend the The Republic of China then the ChiComs will feel that they have to act in an overly cautious manner and stop buying our T-bills and secrets.”
You asked for a link, you got one, plus a confirmation of it in your own source. I’d say the ball is in your court to produce a link saying it’s a fabrication, not just to insinuate that it is.
Put another way: This email has been widely reported, but those defending Freeman have not suggested it’s not real, which I would think would have happened right out of the gate if it were a fabrication.
I don’t have a problem with the things I’ve seen Freeman say about the Middle East. I think those sorts of thought ought to be in the mix, as you say. The comments about Tienanmen, on the other hand, are the sort of “realism” that reminds me of Henry Kissinger’s similar views.
Good morning, NMC. I’ve just made you a 1,455-word response.