On the peace process, Obama made these ideas the basis of his approach. He got tough with Israel and made settlements the centerpiece of the conflict while refusing to ever criticize or pressure the Palestinians.

So the peace process has quickly fallen apart, and now, just as this reality is setting in — that Obama mishandled it from day one, in thrall to bad ideas — we get Wikileaks, which is quickly obliterating the Gulf-side Middle East worldview of the leftist-realists.

They said the Palestinians are the key to pleasing the Arabs — but in private, we now know that the Arabs barely ever mention Palestine. They said that the Israelis manipulate our foreign policy — but we now know that the Arabs were the ones openly calling for the U.S. to start a war with Iran. They said that America’s closeness with Israel alienates the Arabs — but we now know that what’s really alienating the Arabs is America’s reluctance to use its power to confront Iran and enforce a security architecture in which Israel is America’s most capable client.

In both halves of the Middle East — Levant and Gulf — the realist-leftists have gotten their way for the past few years. And the collapse of the peace process plus Wikileaks shows that their way is a fantasy that is scaring the daylights out of our allies and risking catastrophe.

As I see it, the meaning of Wikileaks is that we are at a moment when a bookend is being placed on a brief period of ascendancy for the realist-leftist foreign policy movement. It’s going to be a bruising downhill ride for these guys from here on out. (I hope.)

The Freeman episode solidified what had been inchoate in previous Israel-related debates, such as over the recent Gaza War and the emergence of the left-wing lobbying group J Street. The true fallout from Walt and Mearsheimer seems not to be the exposure of a conspiracy that manipulates American policy – it is the provision to one side of the debate of a ready-made excuse for its political failure and an inflammatory argument against its opponents.

The new Israel Lobby paradigm is very simple: when Israeli actions, such as Operation Cast Lead, are condemned, or a public figure who has harshly criticized Israel is defended, the democratic legitimacy of the opposing side is called into question. Instead of debating them on the merits, Chas Freeman’s critics have been portrayed as ruthless enforcers of orthodox opinion about Israel; they are not participants in a controversy, but illiberal destroyers and silencers of debate, not to mention treasonous advocates for foreign interests.

This method has the added benefit of being impervious to refutation: having cast opposition to Freeman as Israel-obsessed, his rejection can be dismissed as another example of the Lobby’s ability to manipulate American politics. Of course, Freeman’s comments on Israel have nothing whatsoever to do with the financial investigation he faced which seems to have been an important factor in his withdrawal, or the outrage of those who could be said to be members of the China Lobby over his statements about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. But saying that you were scalped by the Israel Lobby is so much more dramatic and ennobling than the pedestrian embarrassment of having to admit that your financial dealings with foreign interests disqualified you from sensitive work, or that an array of people disputed your appointment for a variety of reasons.

And then there is the claim that Freeman’s true sin was being a foreign policy realist, putting him in the crosshairs of the neocons. But since when has realism involved the outright admiration of despots? It turns out that the people who are most conspicuous in apologizing for tyrants tend to also be most conspicuous in their condemnations of the Jewish state, a thriving democracy in the heart of a region dominated by autocracies. It is interesting that the very things the Chas Freemans of the world find perfectly justifiable in Saudi Arabia and China form the basis of their condemnation of Israel: that Israel mistreats minorities, that it abuses its power, that its behavior is too self-interested, that it refuses — in defiance of its superior regional power, as any realist would acknowledge — to submit itself to the demands of the Arabs.

Would Chas Freeman apply his Tiananmen Square principle to the Palestinian intifada? Can anyone imagine him lauding “Bibi the Great” (he once called the Saudi king “Abdullah the Great”) because of the accomplishment of some superficial reform?

The claims that Freeman was attacked for his “realism” are self-serving. They are an attempt to apply a sheen of doctrinal sophistication to what are simply a set of ugly opinions. Freeman isn’t actually a realist about Saudi Arabia and China — he is an admirer of their successful thuggery and despotism. And he certainly isn’t a realist about Israel, an American client whose military power put an end to the decades of state-versus-state wars that culminated in an Arab oil embargo in 1974, a dire challenge to American interests. If they care at all about protecting the reputation of their school of foreign policy, realists should not allow Chas Freeman to portray himself as a martyr to their cause.

In the heyday of the Arabists, liberals were champions of plucky, socialist Israel. Today they are not, preferring to merge their sensitivity to alleged victimhood with the old-school Arabist obsession with the depredations that the existence of Israel allegedly causes Arabs. President Obama’s apparent choice for head of the National Intelligence Council, which oversees the production of the National Intelligence Estimate — the primary consensus-forming document in the intelligence community — is a man named Chas Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a forthright Arabist.

Freeman holds a set of opinions about the Middle East that are straight out of a John Mearsheimer or Pat Buchanan treatise: Israel is responsible for creating Palestinian terrorism and Arab hatred; Hamas is misunderstood and unfairly demonized, and should be brought into negotiations; the United States plays the role of enabler of Israel’s destructive behavior; and, most gratuitously, because of “our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies” of Israel, he declared in 2006, “Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home. We are now paying with the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on battlefields in several regions of the realm of Islam.” 

Freeman has said many such things about Israel. They are harsh words. They are also words that have been subsidized by the largesse of the Saudi monarchy – for Freeman’s appointment represents another violation of President Obama’s pledge to keep lobbyists out of his administration.

In 2006, Freeman was paid $1 million by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for his services in a Saudi public-relations campaign.  It should raise eyebrows in the Senate that a publicity agent for the Saudi state would be appointed to the single most sensitive intelligence position in the US government. 

There is only one potential silver lining in the Freeman appointment: as someone whose sensitivities to Arab interests are finely-tuned, Freeman might emerge as an administration figure who takes the Iranian nuclear challenge seriously. Other than Israel, the Middle East country which finds the prospect of an Iranian bomb most harrowing is Saudi Arabia, followed closely by the U.S.-aligned Sunni states. Dare we hope that Freeman’s closeness to the Saudis means he understands that the real millstone around our necks will be an Iranian bomb?