Al-Sijill
2009-03-19 19:22:38Last month I phoned Chas W. Freeman, a friend of mine, and asked him if he would read a draft chapter from a book I am writing about how US foreign policy has became militarized since the end of World War II. He graciously agreed and we chatted for awhile about his recent visit to Wenzhou, a Chinese coastal city known for its industrial and entrepreneurial fecundity. A former diplomat in Asia and a fluent Mandarin speaker - he was Richard Nixon's translator during his historic visit to China in 1972 - Chas knows the country well and I was eager for his thoughts about my subject.
The chapter focused on the plight of America's "China Hands" - the young diplomats who reported to the State Department about the conflict between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party and Mao Zedong's Communists. Chiang, they cabled Washington, was corrupt and unpopular. The US, they said, would do well to abandon him to his fate and engage Mao, who though a Marxist, enjoyed considerable good will among the people and was no Soviet stooge. It was sage advice; the Communists easily overran the Nationalists and by 1950, boycotted by the US government, allied with Moscow.
For their prophesy, the China Hands - Mandarin-speakers all, men who knew China more intimately that most Chinese - were not only ignored, they were destroyed by a confederacy of politicians, media barons, and Christian groups that zealously supported Chiang as both a Christian and an anti-Communist. The China Lobby, as it was known, would control America's East Asian policy until Nixon, a charter member of the group, established diplomatic relations with Beijing. Had President Harry Truman resisted the lobby's pressure and established relations with Mao, many historians agree, the Cold War would have been much shorter and far less violent. It is unlikely, for example that the US would have intervened in Vietnam.
A few days after our conversation, it was reported that Chas was slated to be the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the inter-agency group that prepares evaluations for the president and other top-level officials. It was an inspired choice; in addition to his Asia credentials, Chas, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, also knows the Middle East inside and out.
Chas is also known for his blunt appraisals and serrated wit. Unlike the timid rabbits that make up the Washington apparat, he has vocally criticized Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and the influence of Israel's own lobby on America's Middle East policy. To his credit, director of national intelligence Dennis Blair said he recruited Chas because of his willingness to stir up trouble, not despite of it. He praised Chas for his "inventive mind" and on-the-ground experience in two regions that will have enormous impact on global affairs well into the next generation.
I myself was buoyed by Chas's appointment as a sign that the Obama administration was more interested in thoughtful analysis of the world as it is - particularly in the Middle East - rather than the addled concoction of it that prevails in the Beltway. I was aware Chas had made powerful enemies with this defense of Palestinian rights but I assumed he was safe, particularly as the position did not require a potentially explosive Senate confirmation that might damage the White House on other fronts. If the Likudnik drones in Congress made a fuss, all Obama had to do was ignore it.
Like Blair, however, I was naïve. The knives quickly came out - among the foot soldiers. The big guns, namely the American-Israel Political Affairs Committee, publicly kept to the sidelines. A blogger named Steve Rosen was among the first to sound the tocsins, attributing to Chas strategically edited remarks that read like apologia for Beijing's 1989 massacre of student-demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. (Along with context, Rosen's onslaught was also absent of any reference to the fact that Israel, as one of China's most important sources of arms, is a guarantor of Beijing's autocracy.)
Speaking of context, the fact that Rosen is an ex-AIPAC official indicted for passing US intelligence to Israel in violation of the Espionage Act is all one needs to know about how perverted US-Israeli affairs can be. Rendering credibility to a character like Rosen would be like giving a fair hearing to an alleged spy from the Arab-American Political Action Committee who charges Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, with conflicted loyalty because he reportedly has duel citizenship with Israel.
And in fact, it was Emanuel who bore the brunt of Congressional outrage over Chas's appointment. Among other legislators, he was visited by a Democratic Representative named Steve Israel - as if this whole episode wasn't larded with enough irony - who told the Washington Post on March 10 that Blair's defense of Chas was "indefensible."
So it's come to this. A career politician and Beltway habitué from New York's 2nd District is telling a former chief of the US Pacific Command, a man who led a carrier battle group in both the Atlantic and Pacific and who served on the National Security Council, what's best for American security. (The White House kept out of the affair; according to the Post, Blair was told he was on his own in this fight.)
In 1950, journalist and China scholar Owen Lattimore responded to accusations by Senator Joe McCarthy that he was a high-level Communist spy:
"I say to you gentlemen, that the sure way to destroy freedom of speech and the free expression of ideas and views is to attach to that freedom the penalty of abuse and vilification. If officials of our government cannot consult people of diverse views without exposing themselves to the kind of attack that Senator McCarthy has visited upon officers of the State Department, our government policy will necessarily be sterile. It is only from a diversity of views fully expressed and strongly advocated that sound policy is distilled. He who contributes to the destruction of this process is either a fool or an enemy of this country."
Sadly, Lattimore's testimony resonates as strongly today as it did sixty years ago. Because of parochial politics, Americans have been deprived of a first-rate mind on issues vital to their security. Chas's lynching by functionaries with a pygmy-sized grasp of the Middle East and Asia proves that Washington has exchanged one totalitarian lobby for another.
Full Article (in Arabic) (.pdf)