Laura Rozen at ForeignPolicy.com is reporting that Chas W. Freeman Jr., a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, will be the chairman of the National Intelligence Council. That is not making Steve Rosen happy. The former top AIPAC staffer and current AIPAC trial defendant, who last week gave President Obama solid marks for his Middle East-related appointments, calls Freeman a "profoundly disturbing appointment, if the report is correct." Writes Rosen on his blog:
Freeman is a strident critic of Israel, and a textbook case of the old-line Arabism that afflicted American diplomacy at the time the state of Israel was born. His views of the region are what you would expect in the Saudi foreign ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship, not the top CIA position for analytic products going to the President of the United States.
What would be Freeman’s role? Rozen writes:
Freeman has told associates that in the job, he will occasionally accompany Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair to give the president his daily intelligence briefing. His predecessor, Thomas Fingar, wore a second hat as deputy director of national intelligence for analysis (a job held since December by Peter Lavoy); sources thought it unclear whether Freeman would have that title as well.
Rosen quotes some recent Freeman statements about Israel and the Middle East:
Here is a sample of his views on Israel, from his Remarks to the National Council on US-Arab Relations on September 12, 2005: "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. Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands is inherently violent. …And as long as such Israeli violence against Palestinians continues, it is utterly unrealistic to expect that Palestinians will stand down from violent resistance and retaliation against Israelis. Mr. Sharon is far from a stupid man; he understands this. So, when he sets the complete absence of Palestinian violence as a precondition for implementing the road map or any other negotiating process, he is deliberately setting a precondition he knows can never be met."
Here is another example from 2008: "We have reflexively supported the efforts of a series of right-wing Israeli governments to undo the Oslo accords and to pacify the Palestinians rather than make peace with them. … The so-called "two-state solution" – is widely seen in the region as too late and too little. Too late, because so much land has been colonized by Israel that there is not enough left for a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel; too little, because what is on offer looks to Palestinians more like an Indian reservation than a country."
