This week, after withering pressure from a wide range of critics, Charles W. Freeman Jr. withdrew his name after President Obama nominated him to serve as head of the National Intelligence Council. This opening paragraph in the lead editorial of the Washington Post sums up the problems that lead to Freeman’s withdrawal:
Former ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. looked like a poor choice to chair the Obama administration’s National Intelligence Council. A former envoy to Saudi Arabia and China, he suffered from an extreme case of clientitis on both accounts. In addition to chiding Beijing for not crushing the Tiananmen Square democracy protests sooner and offering sycophantic paeans to Saudi King “Abdullah the Great,” Mr. Freeman headed a Saudi-funded Middle East advocacy group in Washington and served on the advisory board of a state-owned Chinese oil company. It was only reasonable to ask—as numerous members of Congress had begun to do—whether such an actor was the right person to oversee the preparation of National Intelligence Estimates.
Later in the editorial the Post denounces certain “crackpot tirades” of Mr. Freeman who pins the blame on the nefarious influence of the “Israel Lobby.”
Over on the op-ed page, however, David Broder bemoans the withdrawal of Freeman as, ” The Country’s Loss “: “The country has lost an able public servant in an area where President Obama has few personal credentials of his own—the handling of national intelligence.” Broder complains that the blogs were flooded with statements by Freeman that were were fed to reporters. “He once referred to a clash between Tibetan demonstrators and Chinese guards as a ‘race riot’,” admits Broder, “and talked about Israeli efforts ‘to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.’”
Unlike the Post editors, Broder does not suggest this sort of “rhetoric” is “crackpot”; his preferred term is “inflammatory.” But Freeman gets a pass from Broder because he had breakfast with the former ambassador and reached the conclusion that “Freeman in person is low-key, thoughtful and obviously smart as hell.” Among other things, Broder is really impressed that Freeman’s creative ideas for the intelligence community include turning America’s foreign intelligence analysts “loose on even ‘domestic questions’ such as ‘If we are 38 th in the world in health, what could we learn from the other 37.”
Right! We live in a world in which Iran is on a path to achieving a nuclear weapon, with the accompanying prospect of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East—not to mention to possibility of a nuclear exchange with Israel. An American ally, Israel, is threatened by Hezbollah and Hamas both radical Islamist terrorist organizations who also happen to be Iranian proxies. Authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes can keep radical Islamists at bay only through draconian oppressive measures which in turn only feeds the Islamist beast. Jihadist ideology and the imposition of Sharia law is expanding in sub-Sahara Africa and being introduced into Europe. Fervent anti-American dictators in Latin America are developing strategic partnerships with Iran. We got a shooting war in Afghanistan with feckless NATO allies. We have a long term military presence in Iraq. China remains a medium-to-long term threat. All this, and more, and this genius—this “thoughtful and obviously smart as hell” guy—tells Broder that he wanted to put the foreign intelligence community to work not on the role canonical Islamic beliefs might play in inspiring terror, not to study how the failure of the Islamic world to defend and promote religious liberty might have something to do with the failure of democracy, and not for a whole host of other worthy investigations but rather to focus on . . . American health care?
You just can’t make this stuff up!
The good news is that by all reports Obama threw Freeman under the bus after his “crackpot” or “inflammatory” past statements came to light. The bad news is that Obama nominated this guy in the first place. How’s that for change we can believe in?
