Israel Matzav

State Department Arabists rush to defend one of their own

Matt Yglesias quotes a letter published in the Wall Street Journal from a group of State Department Arabists who have rushed to the defense of one of their own: Chas Freeman (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

A number of statements have appeared objecting to the appointment of Ambassador Charles “Chas” Freeman as head of the National Intelligence Council based on his political views (”Obama’s Intelligence Choice,” by Gabriel Schoenfeld, op-ed, Feb. 25). We, the undersigned former U.S. ambassadors, have known Chas Freeman for many years during his service to the nation in war and peace and in some of our most difficult posts. We recognize that Chas has controversial political views, not all of which we share. Many individuals with strong and well-known views have, and are being asked, to serve in positions of high responsibility.

The free exchange of political views is one of the strengths of our nation. We know Chas to be a man of integrity and high intelligence who would never let his personal views shade or distort intelligence assessments. We categorically reject the implication that the holding of personal opinions with which some disagree should be a reason to deny to the nation the service of this extremely qualified individual. We commend President Obama and Admiral Dennis C. Blair for appointing Ambassador Freeman to such an important position.

The authors are Thomas Pickering (ambassador to Jordan, then Nigeria, then El Salvador, then Israel, then the United Nations, then India, then Russia before serving as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs) and Ronald E. Neumann (Ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain who George W. Bush made Ambassador to Afghanistan) and is also signed by Samuel W. Lewis (various ambassadorships and head of Policy Planning at State), Ronald Spiers, Nicholas A. Veliotes, Brandon Grove, William C. Harrop, Robert E. Hunter, Thomas D. Boyatt, Roscoe S. Suddarth, Harry G. Barnes, Jr, Avis Bohlen, Howard B. Schaffer, Edward M. Rowell, Robert V. Keeley, James R. Jones, and Patricia Lynch-Ewell.

Yglesias views this letter as 'proof' that "a broadly realist orientation is pretty widespread among military, intelligence, and diplomatic professionals."

What the letter proves (again) is that State Department professionals are guilty of a group-think that is detached from morality and American values. This Foggy Bottom phenomenon - which finds its most prominent expression in State's Arabist bent - was documented by Robert Kaplan in a seminal article published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1992. That article, which is much longer than the quotes below, depicts the State Department Arabists as being afflicted with a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in which they fall in love with - and become representatives of - the countries to which they are posted. Read the quotes below for a flavor, and if you haven't before, please consider reading the whole thing. For you young people who need some background, the article was written as a post-mortem attempt to discover why the US had totally misread Saddam Hussein's intentions just prior to his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait - an act that eventually perpetrated the first Gulf War in January 1991. Listen to how these diplomats talk and their cold, amoral calculations. By the way, although I did not cite any of his quotes, Chas Freeman is quoted several times in the article.

Seelye's views regarding Israel may grow out of this collision. He belongs to a post-Second World War breed of U.S. diplomat that Peter Rodman, a longtime associate of Henry Kissinger's, labels "aggrieved area experts." This breed is perhaps best understood through the career of the late Loy Henderson. Henderson, along with George F. Kennan and Charles Bohlen, was a Kremlinologist whose reports from Moscow before and during the Second World War painted an extremely gloomy picture of Soviet life and Stalin's long-range intentions—a picture that ran counter to the rosy image of the Soviet Union entertained by many Americans back then. As a consequence, Henderson was ejected from the Soviet bureau at State. He wound up in the division for Near Eastern and African affairs, where he rose to become director at the time of Israel's creation—something he was dead set against. Henderson perceived Israel as an oil-less impediment to good relations with the oil-rich Arab world at a time when the United States was entering a long, difficult struggle with the Soviet Union. This was not anti-Semitism but just a cold-blooded exposition of what Henderson saw as U.S. interests. It happened to be a sentiment that fit snugly with the life experiences of Arabists of Seelye's generation. Older Arabists like to compare themselves to the Kennan-Bohlen-Henderson school of Kremlinologists. They argue that whereas those Soviet experts of yore were victimized for daring to report the negative aspects of the Russian reality, Arabists are victimized for daring to report the positive aspects of the Arab one.

A case in point: When Anwar Sadat came to power in Egypt, in 1970, Michael Sterner, one of Seelye's Arabist colleagues with experience in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt, predicted that, as Sterner told me in an interview, "the new guy will not be a facsimile of Nasser but will take things in a different direction"—a point of view that at the time was criticized by the Israeli government and many of its U.S. supporters. Sterner, whose opinion was based on a personal relationship with Sadat, continues to regret that neither the Israelis in the early 1970s, prior to the Yom Kippur War, nor, at first, the Nixon Administration trusted Sadat's overtures. He showed me a montage from a 1971 edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz (The Land), depicting himself, Murphy, and a handful of other State Department Arabists in Lawrence of Arabia costumes. "This is how the Israelis ridiculed us," he said with a laugh.

"But there really was lots of localitis back then," recalls Richard Parker, who was a contemporary of Seelye's and Sterner's. Parker admits that he refused an opportunity in the 1960s to learn Hebrew and serve in Israel, "because it might have had an adverse effect on my career as an Arabist." Parker is studying Hebrew now, however—in retirement.

...

Prominently displayed in Newton's office are color photographs of himself and April Glaspie—his successor as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq—in the presidential palace in Baghdad, both smiling as they introduce Saddam Hussein and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to a congressional delegation led by Senators Robert Dole and Alan K. Simpson. This was the occasion, a few months before the invasion of Kuwait, when Dole and Simpson apologized to Saddam Hussein for Voice of America broadcasts critical of his regime. "I keep these photos in the office as a teaching device: they fascinate my students," Newton told me. He seems to be a man completely at peace with himself, who talks easily and honestly about his mistakes.

"Saddam put a lot of emphasis on nation-building and the Westernization of the economy, which was popular. Because he had everybody scared, one would have thought that there was no reason for excess brutality. Obviously, the gassing of the Kurds [in March of 1988] affected my view. We worked on intuition, with very few sources."

"After the Kurds were gassed, why didn't you just pull out—close the embassy?" I asked, alluding to a conversation I had had some years back with Robert Keeley, a former ambasssdor to Greece who now heads the Middle East Institute, in Washington. Keeley shut the U.S. embassy in Uganda at the time of Idi Amin's reign of terror. "You maintain a diplomatic presence as long as you're effective," Keeley told me. "But in Uganda there came a point when we really were no longer able to have an effect. To be true to our own values, the only thing we could do was to leave, and scream about Amin from the outside."

Newton said, "That made sense for Uganda"—a landlocked country of no strategic or economic importance to the United States. "But it's naive to think you can just pull out of a militarily powerful and oil-rich developing country on the Gulf with which American companies were doing hundreds of millions of dollars of trade." What might have been accomplished in Iraq, according to Newton, was that over time, with U.S. help, "Iraq's level of repression could have been improved to that of Syria."

Arabist-bashers could have a lot of fun with that statement, reeking as it seems to of moral relativism. But it needs explaining. Despite several visits to Syria, I was shocked the first time I arrived in Iraq. In Damascus, I could walk into the telex room of the post office and punch out a story unsupervised. In Baghdad plate glass separated me from the telex machines. My copy was handed to an Iraqi on the other side of the window, and that was that. I could travel wherever I wanted to in Syria; in Iraq trying to would have landed me in prison. Going to Syria from Iraq was like coming up for air. Making a Syria out of an Iraq would be a minor human-rights miracle. "But appreciating this," notes Peter Bechtold, who runs the Middle East area-studies program at the Foreign Service Institute, "requires a frame of reference based on travel experience that not only most Americans lack, but so do people on the National Security Council."

...

"April Glaspie [the American ambassador to Iraq in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. CiJ] was much more protective of radical Arabs than our policy justified," says a bureaucratic rival at the State Department. With respect to Iraq, Glaspie advocated everything possible to make the Iraqis feel comfortable to avoid a disruption in relations. A Capitol Hill staff member adds, "Her meeting with Saddam Hussein was the culmination of a failed policy line that she and [NEA Assistant Secretary John] Kelly had been tirelessly advocating since 1988." This same person indicates that Dole and Simpson's apology for the VOA broadcasts calling for democracy in Iraq was the result of a prior briefing by Glaspie, which "conditioned the senators for the cave-in." A second source, who accompanied the senators on the trip, is of the same opinion: "I am a hundred percent sure that the apology was the result of Ambassador Glaspie's briefing."

...

April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein one week before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Glaspie saw Hussein without a notetaker, because she had been summoned to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on short notice and did not know that she was about to meet the Iraqi President, with whom she had never had a private meeting during her two years in Baghdad. She wondered if this could be the beginning of an "opening," says a colleague of hers, and she obviously wanted the meeting to go well, especially as there was no time to get special instructions from Washington.

Glaspie told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at an open hearing that the Iraqi transcript of the meeting, which depicts her as acting in a fawning manner toward Saddam Hussein, and as appearing to indicate that the United States did not care how Iraq settled its border dispute with Kuwait, was doctored. But Senate staffers say that the Iraqi transcript and her own cable of the event "track almost perfectly." Glaspie, they and other observers conclude, was the ultimate staff person—obsessed with the diplomatic process to the point where she couldn't accept that sometimes it is better for the process to collapse than for it to continue.

Her performance turned out to be emblematic of the policy vacuum in Washington and of the pathetic political labors of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in the six years since relations had been re-established. Only after Iraq invaded Kuwait did Washington clearly enunciate its position, when George Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, belatedly decided that Kuwait was something we cared about.

Glaspie told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "by staying [in Iraq] we could undertake diplomatic activity," such as extracting a promise from the Iraqis after the Kurds were gassed "that they wouldn't do it again." Listen again to McCreary: "In an awful country the smallest victory, no matter how inconsequential, gives you an incredibly big boost." These are not unlike the rationalizations of hostages, who try to occupy the endless stream of days with uplifting activity. Rather than appeasers, our Foreign Service officers in Baghdad—in the absence of responsible guidance from Washington—became hostages to a professional idealism that blinded them to the obvious: by the late 1980s having diplomatic relations with Iraq was not an achievement but a concession.

But maintaining relations is an entrenched habit of mind, and not just among Arabists. The State Department's attitude, according to Robert Keeley, is "We open embassies; we don't close them." In March of 1973, when Keeley sent a cable advising Washington to "seriously consider" closing its Uganda embassy, because of security problems arising from the iniquities of Idi Amin, the State Department sent out an inspector to see if Keeley had taken leave of his senses. Regarding Iraq, having recently upgraded the interests section in Baghdad to full embassy status, after a lapse of seventeen years, the idea of downgrading it to an interests section once again, in order to show displeasure over the extermination of the Kurds, ran counter to the Foggy Bottom mindset that Eagleton explains: "Once you downsize re-lations, it's hard to upgrade again without a pretext, so you can't pull out an ambassador every time you get mad."

Richard Parker, Eagleton's longtime friend and Arabist colleague, politely but strongly disagrees. "We certainly should have lowered relations in 1988. We shouldn't even have re-established them in 1984. All it did was help massage Saddam's ego." One of Glaspie's subordinates in Baghdad admits, "We had absolutely no influence."

Sustained only by vague hopes, the Americans in Iraq, like the British a half century before, were destined to watch in disbelief as another farhoud unleashed its fury. This time Kuwaitis, not Jews, paid the price.

There is one Jewish country. There are twenty-two Arab countries. State Department officers who want to get ahead in the US foreign service look for postings in the Arab world. Because of that, they have to learn to 'get along,' and that often means fawning over Arab culture. The result is 'realists' like Chas Freeman. They may have their place in the diplomatic corps, but when they are as single-minded as Freeman, they have no place being the final arbiters of intelligence materials that are being passed on to the President.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:09 AM