Costs of War: The Israel Debate

When news of the plan to appoint Charles W Freeman, a former career diplomat and Reagan-era defense official with three decades of foreign service experience, first broke last month, there were immediate and entirely predictable howls of outrage from what has come to be known in Washington as the "Israel lobby" - although in reality its most vocal members support policies and positions that are associated with the settler right in Israel.

Eventually, Freeman was accused of being a stooge for Saudi Arabia - because he had once worked for a charity dedicated to educating Americans about the Middle East that accepted donations from a member of the Saudi royal family - and an apologist for Chinese authoritarians - because he had served on the international advisory board of a Chinese oil company.

But the first and most important criticism raised against Freeman was that he is, in the words of Steve Rosen, the man widely credited with stymieing his appointment, "an anti-Israel ideologue." It was his views on the Israel/Palestine issue - "what you would expect in the Saudi foreign ministry," according to Rosen - that made him unfit for office.

Over the next few weeks, others joined the critical chorus, including crucially many members of Congress from both parties.
In a statement, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, of New York, called Freeman "the wrong guy for this position," adding that he had "repeatedly urged the White House to reject him."

After other lawmakers called for an inspector general’s investigation into Freeman, and members of the House and Senate Intelligence committee vowed to scrutinize any analytic products the National Intelligence Council produced under his leadership for signs of anti-Israel bias, Freeman pulled out.

"I couldn’t function effectively in the job without the confidence of the intelligence committees," he told ISN Security Watch. Freeman continued: "It became clear" to him and the man who tapped him for the job, Director of National Intelligence Denis Blair "that rather than adding credibility [to the work of the council] as we had hoped, my appointment would subject everything [it produced] to a test of political correctness."

It was that same test that Freeman himself had failed, as the public pronouncements of his critics made clear. "His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration," said Schumer.

So what were these unacceptable views?

Two quotes in particular were cited by critics. On 12 September 2005, he told the National Council on US-Arab Relations that "Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands is inherently violent," adding that "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."

In February last year, he told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program, "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."

As Freeman noted in his interview with ISN Security Watch, several commentators in the Israeli media have pointed out that these views are "well within the boundaries of what is acceptable in Israel."

Moreover, the job for which they apparently made Freeman unacceptable is not even a policy position. "The assumption was that my appointment signaled a policy shift," Freeman told ISN Security Watch. "That is not the case at all."

The National Intelligence Council has been described as the official in-house think tank of the US intelligence community - as insiders call the country's sprawling and sometime fractious collection of 16 spy agencies. The Council produces documents - called National Intelligence Estimates - that reflect the views of the agencies’ analysts; defining areas of both consensus and disagreement and distilling their most important insights into a series of "key judgments."

Those estimates are likely to be crucial in a number of policy dilemmas the Obama administration faces from how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program to which posture to adopt towards some elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

For that job, Freeman’s outspoken iconoclasm, and willingness to swim against the current of conventional wisdom was, his supporters argued, a key qualification.

Intelligence officials in the new administration, including Blair, have repeatedly highlighted their determination to "speak truth to power," in the wake of the Iraq WMD debacle - widely seen as being at least partly the result of the intelligence community telling policymakers what they wanted to hear. But by allowing Freeman to be barred from his job because his views on Israel are out of step with the dominant consensus, Blair - and by extension the whole administration - has actually sent a very different message.

Freeman says the episode "raises some important issues for the country […]. The standard that has been established [by my critics] is the same as the one established by the Bush administration: Tell us what we want to hear."

His critics, he charges, "seem to regard intelligence not as information relevant to statecraft but rather as information […] to be mined for use in supporting political polemics from pre-determined positions."

Freeman says the episode has damaged the chances that the administration will be able to appoint anyone else with controversial views to such a post. What his critics seem to be demanding, he says, is "a vanilla personality who will dutifully articulate, in language as banal as possible, whatever the conventional thinking of the day happens to be."

Such an exercise, he argues, vitiates the very point of the post.

"If the answers (to policymakers’ questions) are pre-determined by politics, if only a politically correct answer is acceptable, why bother doing analysis at all?"