Yesterday, Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation issued a dire warning of a right-wing attack on the appointment of Charles (Chas) Freeman to the head of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), under Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence.
Freeman has been particularly critical about how Israel has conducted itself toward Palestine (not just the Palestinians, okay?). Neoconservatives are particularly alarmed that Freeman, a startlingly independent thinker given his establishment soakage, will for instance tilt the balance in favor of the Palestinians and attempt to deconstruct Israel's de facto one-state solution (while it preaches the more palatable two-state meme to moderates), and soften its militancy. His conclusions on Gaza should be really interesting as well.
Progressives are cheering, neocons are flaming, and some fear it could all go away.
Freeman swings some heavy timber cred in Middle East affairs. Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Worked in Reagan's Defense Department. President of the Middle East Policy Council. And now, NIC.
The NIC is the body that includes a host of analysts called national intelligence officers who are responsible for culling intel from sixteen US agencies and compiling them into so-called National Intelligence Estimates. It's a critical job, since NIE's -- often released in public versions -- can have enormous political and policy impact. Cases in point: the infamous 2002 Iraq NIE on weapons of mass destruction and the 2007 NIE on Iran that revealed that Tehran had halted its work on nuclear weapons.
Dreyfuss continues:
Freeman has developed over the years a startling propensity to speak truth to power, which is precisely what one would want in a NIC chairman. Over the last decade, he's excoriated Israel for its stubborn refusal to compromise with the Palestinians, he's accused George W, Bush and the "neocons" of having pushed America over a cliff in Iraq, and he's ridiculed the military-industrial complex for trying to tout China [Freeman is fluent in Chinese] as a bugaboo because, Freeman once told me, the Pentagon has suffered from "enemy deprivation syndrome" since the end of the Cold War.
The uproar is said to have first flamed up at a blog written by Steve Rosen at the Middle East Forum. Headlined "Alarming Appointment At The CIA", Rosen who is currently on trial for allegedly relaying classified information when he worked with AIPAC, expends a fair number of electrons on quotes by Freeman to make his case, calling him "a textbook case of the old-line Arabism that afflicted American diplomacy at the time the state of Israel was born."
Here is a sample of his views on Israel, from his Remarks to the National Council on US-Arab Relations on September 12, 2005: "As long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected. Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands is inherently violent. ...And as long as such Israeli violence against Palestinians continues, it is utterly unrealistic to expect that Palestinians will stand down from violent resistance and retaliation against Israelis."
Here is another example from 2008: "We have reflexively supported the efforts of a series of right-wing Israeli governments to undo the Oslo accords and to pacify the Palestinians rather than make peace with them. ... The so-called "two-state solution" - is widely seen in the region as too late and too little. Too late, because so much land has been colonized by Israel that there is not enough left for a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel; too little, because what is on offer looks to Palestinians more like an Indian reservation than a country."
Jim Lobe at Antiwar com/blog called it "stunning", and cheered that Freeman "doesn't pull his punches."
I came across some interesting commentary on the two-state argument, by Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy (FP)
Today, invoking the "two-state" mantra allows moderates to sound reasonable and true to the ideals of democracy and self-determination; but it doesn't force them to actually do anything to bring that goal about. Indeed, defending the two-state solution has become a recipe for inaction, a fig leaf that leaders can utter at press conferences while ignoring the expanding settlements and road networks on the West Bank that are rendering it impossible. Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is a perfect illustration: He has lately become an eloquent voice in favor of two states, warning of the perils that Israel will face if the two-state option is not adopted. Yet his own government continued to expand the settlements and undermine Palestinian moderates, thereby putting the solution Olmert supposedly favors further away than ever, and maybe even making it unworkable.
Next stop on the neocon trail of fire was the JTA, an Israeli news site, which informed us through Rosen that Freeman’s “views of the region are what you would expect in the Saudi foreign ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship, not the top CIA position for analytic products going to the President of the United States."
Frank Gaffney, speaking for Fox News, chimed in: "This is a really serious error on the part of Dennis Blair and the Obama administration. Both in government and certainly in the period since he left government, he has compromised the objectivity that one would want in the person whose job it is to oversee the production of National Intelligence Estimates."
The news of the announcement then turned up 2/24 at the Wall Street Journal in a hit piece by Gabriel Schoenfeld under the headline "The president picks a China apologist and Israel basher to write his intelligence summaries." GS hypothesises that, given Obama's vetting problems with cabinet appointees, might he be making a serious mistake with this loose cannon who has the propensity to tell the truth as he sees it, and rarely in Mister Schoenfeld's favor?
If someone with such extreme views has been appointed to such a sensitive position, is this a reflection of Mr. Obama's true predilections, or is it proof positive that the Obama White House has never gotten around to vetting its own vetters?
Either way, if those complaining loudest about politicized intelligence have indeed placed a China-coddling Israel basher in charge of drafting the most important analyses prepared by the U.S. government, it is quite a spectacle. The problem is not that Mr. Freeman will shade National Intelligence Estimates to suit the administration's political views. The far more serious danger is that he will steer them to reflect his own outlandish perspectives and prejudices.
Dreyfuss at The Nation is clearly worried. He frets that the White House of Israeli Army vet Rahm and the Senate of Feinstein and Lieberman will buckle under the coming Republican onslaught, and cautions
If the campaign by the neocons, friends of the Israeli far right, and their allies against Freeman succeeds, it will have enormous repercussions. If the White House caves in to their pressure, it will signal that President Obama's even-handedness in the Arab-Israeli dispute can't be trusted. Because if Obama can't defend his own appointee against criticism from a discredited, fringe movement like the neoconservatives, how can the Arabs expect Obama to be able to stand up to Israel's next prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu?
One can't say just how high the flames will grow, but some early pushback will signal that we're not going to concede ground to efforts to stop this important appointment.