One of the disgraces of the Chas Freeman case is that his enemies dare not speak their true agenda. As Steve Walt has pointed out, they are Israel-firsters; their litmus test is No pressure on Israel. Are they plain about this? No. Here is a long article attacking Chas Freeman for his "foreign ties," chiefly his China connections, by Eli Lake in the Washington Times yesterday. The word Israel appears 3 times, and twice it's Congressman Steve Israel! There's one glancing reference to Israel after that. Saudi Arabia plays a distant second to China.
Let's be clear. This is corruption. When people won't tell you what they really care about–and in Eli Lake's case, late of the New York Sun (I debated him on Al-Jazeera at last year's AIPAC policy conference), it's Israel, and I warrant, not dividing Jerusalem (who knows; does he ever say?). The same hidden agenda bedevilled the Iraq war mess; and the Jewish community is going to be sorting out that one for decades.
If Lake had to base his attack on Chas Freeman on the likelihood that Freeman will increase pressure on the Israelis to cut a deal, how would Americans line up? That's what Lake's afraid of–American public opinion on permanent war. The lack of transparency is hurting our discourse and yes, generating sharper resentment toward the Israel lobby among those who haven't been duped.
A smart friend says it's all about Iran: "Freeman's
importance–for people in the Obama administration who saw the way things were tending and did not like it–was that of an authority who could reject the bad intelligence and do so with maximum conviction. This can't be allowed to happen because the emergency case for an attack on Iran absolutely depends on cooked intelligence–with no one in place anywhere to challenge it."
