{"id":966,"date":"2009-03-24T04:05:24","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T12:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=966"},"modified":"2009-03-24T04:05:24","modified_gmt":"2009-03-24T12:05:24","slug":"mearsheimer-on-charles-freeman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/mearsheimer-on-charles-freeman\/","title":{"rendered":"Mearsheimer on Charles Freeman"},"content":{"rendered":"

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To stay with Israel\/Palestine matters: back here in the good old USA it looks very much as if Obama’s policies in regard to Palestine are & will remain the same old AIPAC-directed blind pro-Israel stuff. In the current London Review of Books<\/strong>, John Mearsheimer publishes an excellent analysis of the Freeman debacle, but he also has some sense that the AIPAC front my be ever so slightly breached \u2014 not because of White House or Congress policies, or due to major media (NYT or WP) efforts, however. This brach, writes Mearsheimer,\u00a0is due to “a vigorous, well-informed and highly regarded array of bloggers [who] defended Freeman at every turn and would probably have carried the day had Congress not tipped the scales against them.”\u00a0\u00a0You can read the whole piece here<\/a>, & the opening paragraphs below:<\/p>\n

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Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America\u2019s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that \u2018as 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.\u2019 Words like these are rarely spoken in public in Washington, and anyone who does use them is almost certain not to get a high-level government position. But Admiral Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, greatly admires Freeman: just the sort of person, he thought, to revitalise the intelligence community, which had been very politicised in the Bush years.<\/p>\n

Predictably alarmed, the Israel lobby launched a smear campaign against Freeman, hoping that he would either quit or be fired by Obama. The opening salvo came in a blog posting by Steven Rosen, a former official of Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, now under indictment for passing secrets to Israel. Freeman\u2019s views of the Middle East, he said, \u2018are what you would expect in the Saudi Foreign Ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship\u2019. Prominent pro-Israel journalists such as Jonathan Chait and Martin Peretz of the\u00a0New Republic<\/em>, and Jeffrey Goldberg of the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>, quickly joined the fray and Freeman was hammered in publications that consistently defend Israel, such as the\u00a0National Review<\/em>, the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em> and the\u00a0Weekly Standard<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The real heat, however, came from Congress, where Aipac (which describes itself as \u2018America\u2019s Pro-Israel Lobby\u2019) wields enormous power. All the Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee came out against Freeman, as did key Senate Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman and Charles Schumer. \u2018I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him,\u2019 Schumer said, \u2018and I am glad they did the right thing.\u2019 It was the same story in the House, where the charge was led by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Steve Israel, who pushed Blair to initiate a formal investigation of Freeman\u2019s finances. In the end, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, declared the Freeman appointment \u2018beyond the pale\u2019. Freeman might have survived this onslaught had the White House stood by him. But Barack Obama\u2019s pandering to the Israel lobby during the campaign and his silence during the Gaza War show that this is one opponent he is not willing to challenge. True to form, he remained silent and Freeman had little choice but to withdraw.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To stay with Israel\/Palestine matters: back here in the good old USA it looks very much as if Obama’s policies in regard to Palestine are & will remain the same old AIPAC-directed blind pro-Israel...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[133,231,440,491],"class_list":["post-966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine","tag-aipac","tag-charles-freeman","tag-john-mearsheimer","tag-lrb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}