Freeman’s Saudi Million

There is a famous anecdote from the Suez Crisis in 1956 in which John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, privately laments Israel as “the millstone around our necks.” This was something close to the orthodox view of the Jewish state during the era of the State Department Arabists, and it has experienced a revival in recent years among those who are inclined, for example, toward the Walt-Mearsheimer hypothesis: the only thing preventing the smooth development of good relations between the United States and the Arab/Muslim world is the intransigent interloper in the Middle East, Israel. 

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?