Although his public service career stretches back for nearly sixty years and he probably ranks as one of our most distinguished professional diplomats, until the last year or so I was only dimly aware of Charles W. “Chas” Freeman, Jr.
I had occasionally read some of his opinion columns and perhaps one or two of his articles, and those always seemed to provide good and sensible points about the foreign policy issues that he addressed. Every now and then I’d seen him quoted in news stories, usually regarding either the Middle East or China, and his brief remarks were cogent ones. Articles on the latter topic sometimes mentioned the striking detail that very early in his long career he had served as the personal interpreter for President Richard Nixon during the latter’s historic 1972 trip to China and his meetings with Mao. But aside from that, my awareness of Freeman’s history or his activities was fairly low.
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There was one notable exception to this. At the beginning of the first Obama Administration in February 2009, Freeman had been selected to serve as chair of our National Intelligence Council, tasked with assessing and assimilating reports from our 17 different intelligence agencies, then presenting the unified conclusions to the Director of National Intelligence and through him to the president. But although Freeman was eminently suited for that crucial American position, many members of the Israel Lobby regarded him as insufficiently loyal to the foreign country that they themselves served. So they mounted a fierce and very vocal lobbying campaign that successfully blocked his appointment, and I remembered reading about that unfolding controversy in my newspapers at the time.
One fatal black mark against Freeman had been that in 1997 he had succeeded former Sen. George McGovern as president of the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC). Although that organization possessed barely a sliver of AIPAC’s power and influence, Freeman declared that MEPC “strives to ensure that a full range of U.S. interests and views are considered by policy makers,” a goal that the Israel Lobby obviously viewed with extreme disfavor.
In 2006, Profs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt released their original working-paper version of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, and MEPC became the first American outlet to publish it. Freeman endorsed its conclusions, saying that “No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article, given the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it.” Such penalties were demonstrated a couple of years later when Freeman’s own top-level appointment was blocked.
These events had all taken place many years ago, so I refreshed my memory of the details by reading Freeman’s 6,000 word Wikipedia entry, which contained a large section devoted to that controversy. But everything in that coverage and the rest of the article was far more laudatory than I ever would have expected, suggesting that the former ambassador’s record was so exemplary that all efforts by agitated pro-Israel activists to blacken his name had completely failed. Indeed, upon the defeat of Freeman’s 2009 nomination, David Broder, the dean of DC correspondents, published a Washington Post column entitled “The Country’s Loss,” bemoaning the success of the Israel lobbyists in forcing the former ambassador’s withdrawal.
That same Wikipedia entry also described Freeman’s long and varied government career, noting that his legal research became “the intellectual basis for the Taiwan Relations Act” that has officially governed our policy with that island nation for the last half-century.
In 1986 Freeman was appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and played a key role in negotiating the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola along with the independence of Namibia. Appointed U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1989, he held that post for the next three years, including during the very crucial period of America’s Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and then served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs from 1993 to 1994. His professional stature led him to be selected as the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica‘s entry on “Diplomacy,” and he accumulated a long list of impressive awards and honors during his decades of government service:
In his thirty-year diplomatic career, Freeman received two Distinguished Public Service Awards, three Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, two Distinguished Honor Awards, the CIA Medallion, a Defense Meritorious Service Award, and four Superior Honor Awards.[10] He speaks fluent Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic and has a working knowledge of several other languages.[4]
Despite Freeman’s long and distinguished career, he only came to my direct attention during the last year after I began watching some of his interviews on a couple of the YouTube channels that I follow. These included his half-hour segments on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s channel and especially his hour-long appearances on Dialogue Works.
The various video platforms and social media distribution systems have now allowed the Internet to almost completely replace cable news shows and other electronic broadcast media for much of the public, including myself, and this helps explain the collapsing ratings of those traditional media outlets.
So whereas in the past, I would only see Freeman’s name in a news quote or on an op-ed once every year or so, I could now watch him thoughtfully expressing his views on major matters every week for thirty minutes or a full hour, doing so almost completely free of the traditional media gatekeepers who might have heavily filtered his message or even banned him entirely.
Matters had been very different during the early 2000s. Back then, top credentialed critics of our Iraq War were blacklisted from the media and therefore completely disappeared from the public debate. This befell my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, and after his passing a few years later, I described his plight.
- The Life and Legacy of Lt. Gen. William Odom
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • September 8, 2008 • 2,500 Words
By contrast these days the views of a figure such as Freeman are easily available to anyone interesting in hearing them, and his interviews often demonstrated the sort of candor and courage that would never be allowed to appear on CNN or MSNBC, let alone on FoxNews.
Freeman’s statements were always provided in the subdued, careful tones of a lifelong professional diplomat now in his early 80s and the depth and breadth of his knowledge greatly impressed me. For example, in his latest interview just a few days ago, he carefully reviewed developments in East Asia—China, South Korea, and Japan—then easily shifted to Syria, Lebanon, and the rest of the Middle East, finally closing with a discussion of Russia’s ongoing Ukraine war, always seeming to possess total command of the local details in each of those different regions.
Among other interesting points, he mentioned that Japan had spent many years quietly building military systems that could very quickly be transformed into a powerful independent deterrent capability. So if our country got itself into a hot war with the Chinese, Japan might well use that opportunity to suddenly disengage from its postwar American alliance and become fully independent once again.
Meanwhile, in a somewhat sad but completely matter-of-fact tone, Freeman suggested that the government and soldiers of Israel these days shared many characteristics with the fanatic and bloodthirsty terrorists of ISIS, and were just as unwilling to comply with international law or respect any agreements they had made. Such statements would be totally unimaginable on traditional electronic media.
Freeman’s previous interview a couple of weeks earlier was also very interesting. He began by discussing the ICC arrest warrant issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the latter’s vehement public denunciation in response, which Freeman described as “the most monumental list of lies,” declaring that our total support for Israel put us at war with international law, resulting in our isolation from the world. He also reviewed the European situation and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, with the entire segment being well worth watching.
In listening to many of Freeman’s long interviews and reading the texts of his public speeches, I never came across the slightest example of any non-mainstream or conspiratorial beliefs, and all of his ideas seemed firmly situated within our official narratives. Thus, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda militants were entirely responsible for the 9/11 Attacks and the Jewish Holocaust of World War II was one of history’s most horrific atrocities. From his personal perspective, racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia were some of the world’s worst moral evils, and one of our greatest international challenges was coping with the terrible threat of Climate Change.
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Given Freeman’s extreme courage on other matters, I’m sure he was entirely sincere and candid in expressing those positions, which have probably been almost universal among all of his professional colleagues and members of his personal circle. As someone born in 1943, his entire life has been lived within our conventional narrative framework, and he had already reached his 60s before the Internet became a significant source of alternate information, so he certainly cannot be faulted for never questioning any of this.
Freeman seems a perfect example of an important development in our ideological landscape. Over the last couple of decades and especially the last several years, control of American foreign policy has been seized by extremist forces once dismissed as fringe elements. As Col. Larry Wilkerson explained in one of his own interviews, during his first term of service as chief of staff to Colin Powell in the George H.W. Bush Administration, the Neocons had routinely been called “the crazies” by the national security and foreign policy establishments. But when he returned to government service a decade later in the George W. Bush Administration, those same Neocons soon successfully seized control of those establishments.
As a direct result of this process, many fully mainstream individuals, whether academic scholars such as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, and Ted Postol, or military and intelligence experts such as Col. Wilkerson, Col. Douglas Macgregor, and Ray McGovern, have been pushed into alternative circles. None of these figures changed their views, but the political spectrum underwent such a radical shift that merely by staying in place they became relegated to its margins.
