“A lobby,” Steve Rosen confided in an AIPAC internal memo, “is like anight flower; it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”
by Pat Buchanan
03/17/2009 DuringNixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, his interpreter and I, free fora few hours, conscripted a driver to take us on a tour of Beijing.Somewhere in my files are photos from that day we toured the grim cityof Chairman Mao in the time of the Great Proletarian CulturalRevolution.
The interpreter: Charles Freeman — the sameCharles Freeman Adm. Dennis Blair chose to chair the NationalIntelligence Council that prepares National Intelligence Estimates oncritical national security issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.
Educatedat Yale and Harvard Law, Freeman has served his country in Delhi,Taipei, Bangkok and Beijing. He was Ronald Reagan’s deputy assistantsecretary of state for Africa and Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary ofdefense for international security affairs. George Bush I named himambassador to Saudi Arabia. Freeman was our man in Riyadh when Gen.Norman Schwarzkopf and 500,000 U.S. troops arrived to evict the army ofSaddam Hussein from Kuwait.
In 1997, Freeman succeeded George McGovern as president of the Middle East Policy Council — and he began to speak out.
He opposed the bombing of Serbia and said aloud what few privately deny: Reflexive support for Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people is high among the reasons America is no longer seen as a beacon of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world.
Freeman echoed the Obama of yesterday, who bravely blurted, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
At MEPC, however, Freeman committed a great crime. He published “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, which went onto the New York Times best-seller list — and put Freeman on AIPAC’s enemies list.
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