The World

President Obama’s decision to nominate Charles Freeman as head of the National Intelligence Council is really interesting. Freeman is an experienced diplomat, a “realist” with particular experience in China and the Arab world. He is also willing to criticise Israel openly and is a brilliant, polemical writer – neither of which are qualities that usually mark you out for promotion in Washington.

Freeman has attacked Israel for its “efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful co-existence and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.”

In 2006, he wrote a savage and rather brilliant attack on the neo-cons, which I quoted at the time. In the light of the current controversy about his appointment, it’s worth reading again: “It was before we panicked and decided to construct a national-security state that would protect us from the risks posed by foreign visitors or evil-minded Americans armed with toenail clippers or liquid cosmetics. It was before we decided that policy debate is unpatriotic and realized that the only thing foreigners understand is the use of force. It was before we replaced the dispassionate judgments of our intelligence community with the faith-based analyses of our political leaders. It was before we embraced the spin-driven strategies that have stranded our armed forces in Afghanistan, marched them off to die in the terrorist ambush of Iraq, and multiplied and united our Muslim enemies rather than diminishing and dividing them.”

Unsurprisingly, Freeman’s nomination has drawn howls of outrage from conservatives and the harder-line pro-Israel lobbyists. Steve Walt, co-author of a controversial and critical book on the “Israel Lobby”, has leapt to Freeman’s defence, which may do him more harm than good.

During the campaign, Obama went out of his way to avoid antagonising the Israel lobby - notoriously chucking Robert Malley, an adviser, “under the bus”, rather than let his views on the Middle East peace process excite further controversy.

So what was Obama thinking in nominating an outspoken and controversial figure like Freeman to such an important job? It could just have been an oversight – but I rather doubt that. More likely, now that he is an office Obama is now prepared to risk antagonising interest groups that he could not take on as a candidate. Freeman, like all mainstream Americans, is committed to Israeli security – but, on occasions, he has taken on openly cynical view of Israeli government policy.

I doubt, however, that this is the main signifcance of his nomination. It seems to me that the most important thing is that Freeman is an out-and-out “realist” – who is prepared to deal with all sorts of foreign regimes to secure American interests.