Matt Yglesias

On the Bus With Chas Freeman

Conor Clarke ran into Chas Freeman on the 42 bus this morning:

I introduced myself and told him I was sorry that he resigned. He recoiled only slightly when I mentioned I worked for the Atlantic, then smiled broadly. “Shit happens.” He added a little wistfully: “I wasn’t so eager to go back to the government, anyway.”

I asked him what he thought of his critics. “I don’t pay much attention to the blogosphere. But I did read Jim Fallows. Fallows actually seemed to have read what I said.”

The woman next to me suddenly pieced it together. “Now I know who you are!” She hesitated for a second. “I still disagree with you.” Others on the bus started to look confused, even a little worried.

Freeman smiled again, and laughed. “I guess now I’m a notorious personality.” He went back to reading his novel. A few stops later, he got off the bus.

And, indeed, shit does happen.

Chas Freeman Out

Chas Freeman is withdrawing himself from consideration for the National Intelligence Council job. Chinese human rights activists everywhere are now high-fiving.

Today in Chas Freeman Blogging

Another good post from James Fallows on the Chas Freeman issue. A taste:

The two people whose views I quote below have absolutely unquestionable standing to speak on this subject. One is Sidney Rittenberg, who first went to China with the US Army in 1945 and end up spending 35 years there, 16 of them in solitary confinement for alleged espionage and disloyalty to the Mao regime. The other is Jerome A. Cohen, of NYU Law School and Paul Weiss, who has been tireless in his efforts for legal reform in China and was instrumental in freeing John Downey, who had been held in Chinese prison for two decades after the Korean War.

Both of them strongly support the expansion of individual liberties and civil society in China. Both of them strongly support Chas Freeman and his candidacy for his now-disupted job.

You’ll have to click the link to read the actual letters. Then see Josh Marshall on this. Josh has personal beef with Freeman over an unrelated issue that led Freeman to tag him as a purveyor of “slime journalism.” But also says that “the whole effort strikes me as little more than a thuggish effort to keep the already too-constricted terms of debate over the Middle East and Israel/Palestine locked down and largely one-sided.” You can see Andrew Sullivan’s timeline for more on this.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein observes that whether or not Freeman gets the job in the end, the message has been sent:

But for Freeman’s detractors, a loss might still be a win. As Sullivan and others have documented, the controversy over Freeman is fundamentally a question of his views on Israel. Barring a bad report from the inspector general, Chas Freeman will survive and serve. But only because his appointment doesn’t require Senate confirmation. Few, however, will want to follow where he led. Freeman’s career will likely top out at Director of the NIC. That’s not a bad summit by any means. But for ambitious foreign policy thinkers who might one day aspire to serve in a confirmed capacity, the lesson is clear: Israel is off-limits. And so, paradoxically, the freethinking Freeman’s appointment might do quite a bit to silence foreign policy dissenters who want to succeed in Washington.

Still, I would say that would-be government officials have already internalized the lesson that drawing outside the lines on the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the way to get jobs. But the Obama administration has already put in place quite a few officials—James Jones, Samantha Power, George Mitchell—who didn’t exactly come with the kosher stamp of approval.

Fallows on Freeman

James Fallows has a characteristically judicious take on the Chas Freeman situation:

Again, I don’t know Freeman personally. I don’t know whether the Saudi funding for his organization has been entirely seemly (like that for most Presidential libraries), which is now the subject of inspector-general investigation. If there’s a problem there, there’s a problem. [...] So to the extent this argument is shaping up as a banishment of Freeman for rash or unorthodox views, I instinctively take Freeman’s side — even when I disagree with him on specifics. This job calls for originality, and originality brings risks. Chas Freeman is not going to have his finger on any button. He is going to help raise all the questions that the person with his finger on the button should be aware of.

To offer another word, I think it’s fair that people who don’t like Freeman’s views on Israel are going after him with the kitchen sink—comments about China, vague allegations of financial improprieties, etc. Politics ain’t beanbag and you go after your enemies with what you can find. But the habit of turning around and acting indignant when people point out that what’s motivating this fight is Freeman’s views on Israel is really pretty silly. When you hear that indicted former AIPAC director Steve Rosen, The New Republic, Commentary, Eli Lake, and Chuck Schumer are spearheading opposition to something you don’t say to yourself “they must be concerned about the human rights situation in China!” This is an organization dedicated to human rights in China and this is a good government group, and they don’t seem very interested one way or another in Freeman. You don’t need to read the minds of the individual members of the anti-Freeman coalition, or question the sincerity of any individual person’s statements on any particular issue, to see that Israel is what’s driving and uniting the coalition as a whole.

An IG for Chas Freeman

Chas Freeman, designated head of the National Intelligence Council, has all the right enemies. And his enemies are going after him because they don’t like the fact that he’s criticized Israel in strong terms in the past. But that said, just because his enemies are bad people delving into his financial ties to China and Saudi Arabia in bad faith doesn’t mean that his enemies don’t have the goods. Apparently there’s going to be an independent Inspector General looking into some of the financing behind the Middle East Policy Council and Freeman’s service on the board of a Chinese oil company. I’m not thrilled to see things take this turn, but at the same time I don’t think this is the hill I want to die on. Randy Scheunemann’s foreign lobbying was a problem, the lack of transparency around the Clinton Global Initiative’s finances was a problem, and I think it’s legitimate to see problems in Freeman’s relationships, too.

The flipside is that you have Jamie Kirchick persecuting Freeman in bad faith while deeming it “contemptible” to have raised questions about Scheunemann. Ultimately, if Freeman goes down it won’t, unfortunately, be because a brave new era of good government and clean dealings has arisen; it’ll be a politically motivated neocon hit job. But as I say, if they have the goods they have the goods.

Gates: Obama Makes Sure He Hears From Everybody in the Room

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was clearly reluctant to answer David Gregory’s question about the contrasting leadership styles between President Bush and President Obama. But when pressed he explained that Obama is “more analytical” and goes further out of his way to hear from diverse viewpoints:

GATES: I think that probably President Obama is somewhat more analytical, and he makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue. And if they don’t speak up, he calls on them.

Q: A marked difference from his predecessor?

GATES: President Bush was interested in hearing different points of view but didn’t go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke if they hadn’t spoken up before.

This is a reminder of a point that I think’s been difficult to fully articulate in the Chas Freeman debate. I think there’s truth to the criticisms of Freeman’s hard-bitten strain of realpolitik. But no administration is monolithic, and given the disastrous consequences of our 2002-2006 flirtation with total irrealism I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all to have some Freeman-style ballast on the ship. If Obama seemed to be assembling an entire administration that was unconcerned with human rights abroad, that would be another thing, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Chas Freeman’s In

Ben Smith reports that congress has been officially notified that Chas Freeman now chairs the National Intelligence Committee, thus indicating that the effort by Israel hawks to spike his nomination has definitively failed.

I doubt Freeman will be making any particularly crucial contributions to Israel policy. But, like the brushoff of the earlier, less-vigorous, campaign against George Mitchell, it’s an indication of where the administration’s head is politically—not that scared of Steve Rosen and Marty Peretz.

The War on Chas Freeman

I haven’t given perhaps all the attention I should to the ongoing campaign to undo the appointment of Chas Freeman to be Chair of the National Intelligence Council. Laura Rozen sums it up:

Reports from Politico and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, along with commentary and blog posts from The New Republic’s Marty Peretz, the Witherspoon Institute’s Gabriel Schoenfeld (in the Wall Street Journal), and former AIPAC official Steve Rosen have conveyed the charge that, in the judgment of some pro-Israel activists in the United States, Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, is too sympathetic to Riyadh’s worldview and has frequently spoken outside the traditional Washington discourse on Israel.

Recently there was some discussion online of whether or not it’s actually true that angering the “pro-Israel” establishment is bad for one’s career. The fact that Steven Walt and other commentators who’ve made some very aggressive comments are doing just fine came up. And that’s quite true. But things are very different for people who are interested in working in the government. Just ask Robert Malley or Zbigniew Brzezinski. Or now Freeman. I’m not sure whether or not the Obama administration will ultimately stand behind Freeman. I hope they will. But whether or not they do, I think it’s very clear that the lesson here is that if you’re a veteran policy hand who hopes to return to government one day and you believe something that you think AIPAC wouldn’t approve of, that the smart thing to do is to keep those views to yourself.

And I think you’d have to judge the anti-Freeman campaign to be more about trying to maintain a chilling effect on the overall discourse and extract a pound of flesh than about any particular policy issue. The post in question is not especially important in the scheme of things, and has no particular relationship to Israel. Despite fairly heated disagreements about the substance of the conflict, I think we can pretty much all agree that the Israel-Palestine conflict doesn’t hinge on intelligence issues. And I don’t think anyone could seriously deny that Freeman has the basic experience and qualifications to do the job. Meanwhile, that the anti-Freeman charge would be led by Rosen, who’s a “former AIPAC official” because he was charged with espionage crimes, is slightly bizarre.

AIPAC vs. Chas Freedman

This sure is weird:

But former AIPAC Policy Director Steve Rosen sounded a more strident tone yesterday at Laura Rozen’s report of a new head for the National Intelligence Council, calling the reported choice of Chas Freeman “alarming.”

He, disapprovingly, quotes Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, saying, “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” and decrying the consequences of “Israeli violence against Palestinians.”

If this is all they’ve got on Freeman, that’s absurd. Of course, I imagine their real objections run deeper than that. The Middle East Policy Council where Freeman works offers, as I understand it, something of an Arabist take on Middle East issues rather than the usual tussle between hawkish Jews and dovish Jews represented by me and Jamie Kirchick furiously blogging against each other. But clearly Freeman is right about the inadvisability of unconditional financial aid to Israel and also about the fact that Israeli violence has regrettable consequences. Freeman’s point of view, as far as I know, isn’t exactly mine but it seems to be well within the range of perspectives that one might want to have access to.