With the barbarians clattering at the gate, the sad but probably inevitable end came yesterday to Chas Freeman’s bid to be seated as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Since we’ve covered this all before, there is no need to recap the particulars, but Freeman left no doubt as to his view of the playing field on his way out the door.
“The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East,” he wrote.
“The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.”
As is already being noted, this should serve as notice to anyone interested in elected office that business as usual is still the order of the day under the new administration. While Social Security has long been thought of as the “third rail” of domestic politics, Dave Schuler points out that Israel remains the “third rail of U.S. foreign policy.” In an update to the same post, James Joyner points to a previous article he published which predicted precisely this.
The Obama administration is, by American standards, quite to the left on Israel, with Jim Jones, Hillary Clinton, and others having been quite candid in the past about Israel’s need to make concessions on such controversial issues as Jerusalem and the settlements if a peace deal is to get done. But that’s a leftist position only insofar as American politicians seem to consider anything short of the Likudist position to be anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic.
This pretty much summarizes the current state of American foreign policy, unchanged through several presidential administrations regardless of party. The welfare of Israel will continue to be placed not only near the top of American priorities, but in fact ahead of the welfare of the United States. Anyone who questions the nature of this relationship or proposes a more neutral stance toward the combatants in the Middle East will continue to be tarred with the anti-Semitic brush and immediately marginalized. Of course, as long as this condition continues, the United States will never be taken seriously as an honest broker for peace in the region. Nor shall perceptions change in the Muslim world, where we are widely seen as “Israel’s big brother” and a target for their rage.
One might say that this is a lesson which Chas Freeman just learned in a very brusque fashion. In reality, of course, he probably knew it going in and wasn’t a bit surprised by the outcome. You can run through the Memeorandum Roundup of stories on this subject to find the full range of protests and cheers over Freeman’s abrupt departure.