Freeman speaks out on his exit

From NewMajority.com
March 12, 2009

Chas Freeman's Ugly Goodbye

--Noah Pollak

Two thoughts on the demise of Chas Freeman, the first on the way we debate Israel, and the second on the claim by many of Freeman’s defenders that being a “realist” was his true sin.

The Freeman episode solidified what had been inchoate in previous Israel-related debates, such as over the recent Gaza War and the emergence of the left-wing lobbying group J Street. The true fallout from Walt and Mearsheimer seems not to be the exposure of a conspiracy that manipulates American policy – it is the provision to one side of the debate of a ready-made excuse for its political failure and an inflammatory argument against its opponents.

The new Israel Lobby paradigm is very simple: when Israeli actions, such as Operation Cast Lead, are condemned, or a public figure who has harshly criticized Israel is defended, the democratic legitimacy of the opposing side is called into question. Instead of debating them on the merits, Chas Freeman’s critics have been portrayed as ruthless enforcers of orthodox opinion about Israel; they are not participants in a controversy, but illiberal destroyers and silencers of debate, not to mention treasonous advocates for foreign interests.

This method has the added benefit of being impervious to refutation: having cast opposition to Freeman as Israel-obsessed, his rejection can be dismissed as another example of the Lobby’s ability to manipulate American politics. Of course, Freeman’s comments on Israel have nothing whatsoever to do with the financial investigation he faced which seems to have been an important factor in his withdrawal, or the outrage of those who could be said to be members of the China Lobby over his statements about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. But saying that you were scalped by the Israel Lobby is so much more dramatic and ennobling than the pedestrian embarrassment of having to admit that your financial dealings with foreign interests disqualified you from sensitive work, or that an array of people disputed your appointment for a variety of reasons.

And then there is the claim that Freeman’s true sin was being a foreign policy realist, putting him in the crosshairs of the neocons. But since when has realism involved the outright admiration of despots? It turns out that the people who are most conspicuous in apologizing for tyrants tend to also be most conspicuous in their condemnations of the Jewish state, a thriving democracy in the heart of a region dominated by autocracies. It is interesting that the very things the Chas Freemans of the world find perfectly justifiable in Saudi Arabia and China form the basis of their condemnation of Israel: that Israel mistreats minorities, that it abuses its power, that its behavior is too self-interested, that it refuses -- in defiance of its superior regional power, as any realist would acknowledge -- to submit itself to the demands of the Arabs.

Would Chas Freeman apply his Tiananmen Square principle to the Palestinian intifada? Can anyone imagine him lauding “Bibi the Great” (he once called the Saudi king “Abdullah the Great”) because of the accomplishment of some superficial reform?

The claims that Freeman was attacked for his “realism” are self-serving. They are an attempt to apply a sheen of doctrinal sophistication to what are simply a set of ugly opinions. Freeman isn’t actually a realist about Saudi Arabia and China -- he is an admirer of their successful thuggery and despotism. And he certainly isn’t a realist about Israel, an American client whose military power put an end to the decades of state-versus-state wars that culminated in an Arab oil embargo in 1974, a dire challenge to American interests. If they care at all about protecting the reputation of their school of foreign policy, realists should not allow Chas Freeman to portray himself as a martyr to their cause.

© 2009 NewMajority.com

http://www.newmajority.com/ShowScroll.aspx?ID=64f610eb-2719-4b75-b3e1-e4062e94f6b1

The National (Abu Dhabi)
March 19, 2009

The Middle East Shouldn’t Fret About Charles Freeman’s Exit

By Michael Young

When the former American ambassador Charles “Chas” Freeman last week decided not to accept his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, many people, particularly in the Middle East, put this down to the workings of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Mr Freeman, in a departing salvo, substantiated that interpretation. However, his Arab defenders paid little attention to the ambassador’s observations of how the Chinese authorities dealt with the Tiananmen “incident” (Mr Freeman’s words) in 1989, and what this said about how political “realists” like him approach American policy in the Arab world.

In comments on the Chinese government’s repression of the student protests posted to an e-mail list in 2006, Mr Freeman argued that the government’s error was to have wasted too much time before clearing Tiananmen Square. The ambassador wrote, “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 dispatch [sic] from the ground they occupy.”

Political realists like Mr Freeman pride themselves on being able to dispassionately assess national interests, and pursue them with relative amorality, so that the advancement of values and human rights are important only in their impact on reasons of state. That explains his affixing quotation marks around the words “goddess of democracy” in his e-mail, a way of ridiculing the symbol held up at the time by students, whose “propaganda” demanding a more open Chinese system was distasteful for having disrupted “the normal functions of government”.

Oddly, the ambassador’s smugness prompted his supporters to maintain that he was ideal to head the National Intelligence Council, because he could “think outside the box”. In fact the template of his foreign policy judgments remains not only squarely “inside the box”, it is also dated and in some ways reactionary. For whether Mr Freeman likes it or not, in the past decade and a half, concepts like democracy, liberal internationalism, human rights and humanitarian intervention have become mainstays of foreign policy thinking, even when they are hypocritically implemented.

This raises a broader question of how American realists should tackle the Middle East. For over half a century, Mr Freeman was very much a by-product of the mainstream view in Washington that it was not up to the United States to concern itself with the internal conduct of its Arab allies. If a leader useful to Washington repressed his own people, then that was his business. The attitude was grim, certainly, and the US had dozens of useless programmes to bolster Arab civil society and democracy to mitigate any criticism of its selfishness, but realpolitik authorised it.

Where the realist paradigm broke down, however, was when the region’s despots, to enhance their standing at home, broke out of their borders and destabilised the region. That is what Saddam Hussein did in 1989, for example, when he invaded Kuwait. The administration of George HW Bush decided to reverse the assault, denying Iraq any supremacy over US allies in the Gulf, above all Saudi Arabia, where Mr Freeman happened to then be serving. Yet Mr Bush could not persuasively justify his decision to deploy American soldiers on the grounds of defending US national interests – for no one wanted to shed blood for oil – so he explained that the US was establishing a “new world order”. As we might recall, that only lasted until the old order returned when the US looked the other way as the Baathists crushed the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings.

That textbook illustration of realistic amorality came just before the arrival of the Clinton administration, which presided over a substantial change in the vernacular of international relations. The new American president was no liberal internationalist, and in places such as Rwanda, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Bill Clinton showed that he could be as craven or indifferent as the realists. However, there were two wars that the president, for domestic reasons, could not avoid, those in Bosnia and Kosovo; and in order to validate American involvement in them, Mr Clinton had to publicly embrace principles of humanitarian intervention.

This time, the principles stuck better. Success in the Balkans, but also the lingering guilt over the apathy in Rwanda, showed that more aggressive humanitarianism could pay off. The subsequent trial of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, seemed a further nail in the realist coffin. Leaders could now be held accountable for domestic abuses, laying a new, if shifting, foundation for international legal standards of behaviour.

With George W Bush, this trend continued, albeit haphazardly, particularly in the Middle East. His administration removed Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, ending the most sinister of dictatorships and installing a pluralist order on its ruins. In Lebanon, the US played an essential role in sponsoring the first United Nations investigation ever of a political murder, when the Security Council set up a commission in 2005 to look into the assassination of Rafiq Hariri. And when hundreds of thousands of people occupied the heart of Beirut for weeks, demanding a Syrian withdrawal, Mr Bush did not urge the authorities to clear Martyrs Square because this impaired the normal functions of government.

Mr Bush’s detractors accused him of duplicity, but they missed the point. It has become increasingly difficult for leaders of Western democracies to avoid mentioning human rights and democracy in rationalising their overseas behaviour. Political realism will not die. States won’t suddenly become moral Leviathans. However, the stripped down realism of a Mr Freeman, without an ounce of human sympathy or humour, is a thing of the past – as he himself, and much to our relief, has become.

Michael Young is the opinion editor of The Daily Star in Lebanon

© Copyright of Abu Dhabi Media Company FZLLC.

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090319/OPINION/548101536/1080

There is no Fight Club.

Or of the Israeli Lobby? There is no Israeli Lobby.

As is common with those who grew up near power-lines, the notion that there are some elected officials who believe the U.S. and Israel share 100% of interests is a bit hard to swallow. And yet, when Chuck "Where's the Camera?" Shumer boasts that Freeman gave the wrong answer on Israel - we can't point it out.

Were responding to a partial e-mail taken out of its proper context used as red herring by the true opponents of Amb. Freeman. They were dupes in this one.

American Jews do not equal Israelis, and the Israel Lobby is not just a Jewish lobby. Christian Zionists are as electorally important (because, if you look at the numbers, Jewish votes in NY and FL will ALWAYS vote Democratic, but evangenlical turnout can be important.) JStreet (an lefty alternate to AIPAC) recently did a study that found that fewer than 50% of the American Jewish population supports AIPAC's agenda. Don't conflate the American Jewish population with the AIPAC base; they're not the same.

Mr. Freemans statement is hardly over the top. As is usual with him it is straightforward and honest. I can't find anything about his statement that is over the top.

No one believes these lies anymore and the only question that remains is why the distributors of these willful lies are spreading them? Anyone who takes the time to look into these statements, as I did, quickly see that they are lies. So are you spreading them because you are too lazy to seek the truth or do you just want to try to silence someone you don't agree with? I think I know the answer - and you will not succeed in the long term.

Its interesting to note the hysterical tone so many Israel firsters use on the internet. Rush Limbaugh rhetorics, lack of argumentation, declarative sentences without sourcing of claims and swarms of anonymous bloggers. The republican armchair brigade seems to refuse to accept that their perception of reality must be contrasted with other perceptions. They quite simply do not understand the concept of decisions reached though inteligent pro and contra views. To them, anyone who thinks differently than them is the enemy. Its disturbing to see that the friends of Cheney still have the power to force the president of the United States to his knees.

I am still waiting for some Freeman supporter to defend his statements about China:

For example here he is talking about Mao: "Mao Zedong had a force and energy which none but men of equally great spiritual conviction could withstand. His animal appetites, we now know, matched his intellectual vigor. He was an object of adulation to his subjects and of mingled admiration and dread to his subordinates and intimates. While Mao lived, the brilliance of his personality illuminated the farthest corners of his country and inspired many would-be revolutionaries and romantics beyond it.

Few indeed loved Chairman Mao's style of governance, but all but a few of those who despised it most loved the People's Republic he had founded more and hated him less than they feared him."

Go ahead, put this in context. And before you claim it is descriptive, Mao did not possess intellectual vigor, and while he was charismatic did not possess such a brilliant personality. What there was was manufactured by the party machinery, akin to what we see in North Korea, and no one says Kim Il Jung has a brilliant personality. This article looks like it could have been drafted by the Chinese Communist party. And most importantly, whatever caused him to say this. I lived in China for 7 years and never came close to uttering such dreck whenever I spoke with other Chinese people.

It is a sad day when a man like Freeman, who is in thrall of third world dictators, could even be considered for a posting.