[HCCN] fw: who controls the policy process

[Judy Robbins]

See also:  http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/ 
2009/03/200931113340555177.html

Published on Friday, March 13, 2009 by Inter Press Service
Freeman Affair Puts Israel Lobby in Spotlight

by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Although the successful campaign to keep Amb. Charles  
"Chas" Freeman out of a top intelligence post marked a surface  
victory for the pro-Israel hardliners who opposed him, the long-term  
political implications of the Freeman affair appear far more ambiguous.

Freeman's withdrawal has provoked growing - if belated - media  
scrutiny of the operations of the so-called "Israel Lobby", and  
aroused protests from a number of prominent mainstream political  
commentators who allege that he was the target of a dishonest and  
underhanded smear campaign that, among other things, accused him of  
shilling for the governments of Saudi Arabia and China.

For the neo-conservatives who led the charge against Freeman's  
appointment, his withdrawal may therefore prove to be both a tactical  
victory and a strategic defeat.

At the same time, the Freeman affair has highlighted the yawning  
disconnect between the career professionals in the intelligence and  
diplomatic communities, from whom Freeman enjoyed strong support, and  
political leaders in Congress and the White House, none of whom came  
to his defense publicly.

Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia who has been a vocal  
critic of Israeli policies in the occupied territories, withdrew from  
consideration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC)  
on Tuesday. He did not go quietly into the night, however, releasing  
a statement in which he struck back at his critics.

"I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function  
effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous  
people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political  
faction in a foreign country," Freeman wrote.

"There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard  
for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so  
clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign  
government - in this case, the government of Israel."

The motives for the anti-Freeman campaign are themselves a matter of  
debate. Virtually all of his chief attackers were neo-conservatives,  
whose views generally reflect those of the Israel's right-wing Likud  
Party, and other reflexive defenders of Israeli government policies.  
Many observers viewed it as self-evident that their hostility to him  
was based on his often bluntly-spoken belief that U.S. and Israel's  
interests in the Middle East were not necessarily convergent.

In the media, the campaign against Freeman was waged mainly by neo- 
conservative organs, such as the Weekly Standard and the National  
Review, and by The New Republic, a generally liberal weekly that,  
however, routinely attacks Israel's critics.

In Congress, it was led by politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer,  
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and Rep. Mark Kirk, all of whom have strong  
ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a  
powerful lobby group whose members range from far-right supporters of  
the militant settlement movement in Israel to more moderate factions  
sympathetic to the relatively centrist Kadima and Labor Parties.

Freeman's critics sought to portray their attacks on him as rooted  
not in his criticisms of Israel but in his allegedly compromising  
ties to Saudi Arabia and China, including his leadership of a think  
tank that was partially funded by a member of the Saudi royal family  
and his service on an advisory board of China's largest oil company.

In the mainstream media, however, few seemed to buy into these  
claims. The most widely read U.S. newspapers, which had all but  
ignored the controversy as it raged in the "blogosphere", attributed  
his withdrawal to the unacceptability of his views on Israel policy -  
in the process going further than ever before in putting the Israel  
lobby in the national spotlight.

The New York Times headlined its story "Israel Stance Was Undoing of  
Nominee for Intelligence Post", while the Washington Post confirmed  
that AIPAC, which had insisted it had no position on Freeman's  
appointment, had indeed quietly provided critical material about him  
to inquiring reporters.

A Los Angeles Times editorial explicitly referenced "the Israel  
lobby" as the force behind Freeman's withdrawal, adding, "We do not  
believe that Israel should be immune from criticism or that there is  
room for only one point of view in our government."

And while the Post's editorial page, like the neo-conservative Wall  
Street Journal, had hosted anti-Freeman op-eds early in the campaign  
against him, its veteran political columnist, David Broder - long  
viewed as the embodiment of Washington centrism - praised the former  
ambassador as "an able public servant" and wrote that "[t]he Obama  
administration has just suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands  
of the lobbyists the president vowed to keep in their place."

Broder was not the only prominent centrist to react harshly to the  
anti-Freeman campaign. Others included the Broder's fellow Post  
columnist, David Ignatius, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan (who called  
the campaign "repulsive"), Time's Joe Klein ("assassination"), and  
Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf ("lynching-by-blog"). Freeman has  
also been invited as the guest of Fareed Zakaria, a regular columnist  
for Newsweek and the Post, on his regular Sunday CNN program on  
foreign policy, "GPS."

In the end, the attempts by Freeman's critics to make the story about  
anything but Israel may have backfired. Instead, discussion of the  
role of the Israel lobby in forming U.S. foreign policy appears to  
have acquired more mainstream legitimacy than ever before.

The long-taboo subject became a matter of public debate in 2006, when  
two prominent political scientists, the University of Chicago's John  
Mearsheimer and Harvard University's Stephen Walt, published their  
article "The Israel Lobby", later expanded into a book. The two  
argued that a powerful lobby, centered on but not limited to AIPAC,  
exerts a "stranglehold" on U.S. foreign policy debates and stifles  
any criticism of Israeli policies, to the detriment of both the U.S.  
and Israel.

Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis was instantly controversial. Critics  
accused them of perpetuating age-old anti-Semitic tropes about the  
covert Jewish domination of politics. Mainstream critics of Israel  
have been reluctant to align themselves with the two, even when they  
have reached some of the same conclusions.

In the wake of the Freeman affair, however, Mearsheimer and Walt  
appear to be getting a new hearing. The Los Angeles Times went so far  
as to suggest that the attacks on them may have been overstated.

"[T]he battle over Freeman...seems to have exposed more sympathy for  
a Walt/Mearsheimer view of U.S.-Israel relations than one might have  
expected to be out there," wrote Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly  
Standard, one of Freeman's harshest critics. "People like Joe Klein  
and Andrew Sullivan are now fairly indistinguishable from Stephen Walt."

Goldfarb intended the comment as an insult, but it may nonetheless  
have contained a kernel of truth.

While the Freeman affair may have shifted the parameters of debate on  
Israel policy, it has also exposed fissures and resentments between  
the national security bureaucracy and the U.S. political leadership.

Some veteran observers, such as the "Nelson Report", an influential  
private newsletter, compared Freeman's treatment to the McCarthy era  
when long-time government Asia experts were deemed responsible for  
"losing China" to the Communists and hounded out of the foreign  
service by the so-called "China Lobby".

Col. Pat Lang, the former top Middle East analyst at the Defense  
Intelligence Agency who signed a letter of support for Freeman, told  
IPS that the saga had caused a "tentative feeling of disappointment"  
about the new administration within the intelligence community.

"It's very disheartening for people who viewed Freeman's appointment  
as the return to some standard of intellectual excellence or  
integrity", he said, adding that Director of National Intelligence  
(DNI) Adm. Dennis Blair, who went to the Senate and strongly defended  
his appointee, may be the next target for Freeman's antagonists as  
they push for alarmist intelligence on Iran.

"I'm concerned about what these characters are going to do about  
Blair, because Blair really stood up to them, and their general  
reaction to that is to wage a war of annihilation against people who  
do that," Lang said.

Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http:// 
www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/ .

Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service


Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/03/13-8
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