Charles W Freeman Jr Says the US Has Not Cauterized MidEast Problems But Metastasized Them

Thoughts of Charles W Freeman Jr

http://en.wikipedia.org/

"Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman, Jr., (born March 2, 1943) is an American diplomat, author, and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years, with the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs calling his career "remarkably varied". Most notably, he worked as the main interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 China visit and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, where he dealt with the Persian Gulf War.

He is a past president of the Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council. In February 2009, unnamed sources leaked that Freeman was Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair's choice to chair the National Intelligence Council in the Obama administration. After several weeks of criticisms from prominent supporters of Israeli policy, he withdrew his name from consideration and charged that he had been the victim of a concerted campaign by what he called “the Israel lobby”."

Charles W Freeman speaking before an audience of the Carnegie Council For Ethics In International Affairs on Nov 20, 2014 or from an Oct 28 2014 conference.

http://itunes.carnegiecouncil.org/carnegie/audio/20141120_Freeman.mp3

http://chasfreeman.net/the-collapse-of-order-in-the-middle-east/

The wars of the US have not cauterized problems but metastasized them.

The US policy toward Israeli leadership can be compared to giving our car keys to a drunk.

Because of the dysfunctionality of our government we have been unable to exercise leadership.

Clearly our policies are based not on values but on (economic) interests.

Diplomacy isn't even tried by the US. Diplomacy is not coercion. It is essentially a process of suasion. Our system is declaratory. We condemn. We express outrage. We are selfrigteous. We impose sanctions. Sanctions shift the cost onto the private sector not the politicians who impose them. Generally they harden the other side and unite it against those imposing sanctions.
We go to war not to adjust matters in dispute but to destroy the enemy. Then we say 'repent... be saved', armed evangelism.

We often have faithbased rather than factbased policy analysis.

We’re once again down to the wire in our decade-long negotiations with Iran to cap its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. There is no evidence that sanctions have had any effect at all on Iran’s policies. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t have the nuclear weapons program our politicians say it has. Our intelligence agencies tell us there’s no evidence it does. No matter.

We are the only country which staffs our embassies through the spoils process... the size of the wallets (of the ambassador candidates).

...the so-called “Islamic State” – which is as Islamic as the Ku Klux Klan is Christian

So far the Shiite coalition of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi and Syrian governments has been and remains the main force arrayed against Da`ish (ISIS) on the ground outside the Kurdish domains. This has exposed the awkward fact that Iran has the same enemies as the United States,

Da'ish (ISIS) wants to erase the states that Western colonialism imposed after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It regards them as illegitimate entities that could not survive without continuing support from the West. The major contributors to the US-led military coalition opposing Da`ish are the former colonial powers. These are Western, predominantly Christian nations, some of them with reputations in the region for recent sacrilegious mocking of Muslim piety.

Muslims – whether Shiite or Sunni or Arab, Kurd, Persian, or Turk – now have an expanding piece of Hell in their part of the Earth,

Most of us don't vote.

(In response to a woman who said Israel is a democracy ).. Israel is a democracy for its Jewish inhabitants but only some of 4 million Palestinians. Some have the vote. Others live under military occupation in the West Bank. Still others are under constant siege in Gaza.

Despite decades of trying, American diplomacy has also definitely failed to reconcile Palestinians to indefinite existence as disenfranchised captives of Israel’s Jewish democracy

(They have) played us with the finesse of a matador exhausting a great bull by guiding it into unproductive lunges

When people of a country have elected democratically someone our government has not liked, that person has been removed.

The United States government has 48 times cast vetoes in the Security Council to protect Israel from its own actions and has shielded Israeli Leaders (Netanyahu, Ben Gurion, Sharon etc.) from the consequences of their actions.

It is the taxpayers of the U.S. who have paid for arms to Israel, who have paid for the actions Israelis have taken against the people of Gaza.

China has continued diplomacy even after wars have begun. In the war with India in 1962, China did not close its embassy.

If we say to Israel, no matter what you do, we'll back you, we have no influence.

From 1880 to 2000, the US was the world's biggest economic power. But no more.

I reject ideologically based foreign policy.

We have been killing people around the world for 13 years. Now we are killing them with robots.

Saudi Arabia as the epicenter of 1.6 billion Muslims is important.

Sanctions against Japan in 1940 including the oil embargo resulted in Pearl Harbor.

As John Quincy Adams said
"We should be the champions of liberty everywhere, but the vindicators only of our own."

In China recently I rode a 200 mph train. A glass of water by me did not waver while our bridges are in need of repair.

Freeman quoted Obama's speechwriter: "Our military has no peer but just because we have the best hammers doesn't mean every problem is a nail. "

(In answer to a question about rockets penetrating Israel) These are always in response to Israeli attacks.

We have a militaristic approach to other countries. We have become cheerleaders for the military.

Iran has always been willing to talk. We are the ones who said "We won't talk until you come out with your hands up."

Countries have their own national security games. For Russians it is chess. They think several moves ahead.. In the UK it is cricket, In S Africa, rugby, in the US baseball and football. Football is a tactical game without strategy.

Empathy is very different from sympathy. Empathy involves understanding, intuition.

Will Rogers once observed that “when you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.” It’s a good deal more than 5.000 miles to Baghdad or Damascus from here. And, boy, have we gotten into trouble!

We are trying to cope with the cumulative consequences of multiple failures. Just about every American project in the Middle East has now come a cropper. There is a new velcro-backed military campaign morale patch commemorating this. It is available through Amazon.com for $7.45. The patch bears an escutcheon with a logo that, in the interest of decorum, I will not read out. It sounds like Operation Enduring FlusterCluck.

If at first we don’t succeed, we do the same thing again harder, with better technology, and at greater expense.

Israel’s cruelty to the Palestinians has become just another outrage that Muslim extremists cite to justify terrorist reprisals against the West.

During Israel’s recent rubbling of Gaza, its deputy minister of defense threatened Palestinians there with a “Holocaust.” Not to be outdone, a senior figure in the HaBeyit HaYehudi party, which is part of the governing coalition in Israel, called for the destruction of “the entire Palestinian people . . . , including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” And a deputy speaker of the Knesset called for the forced depopulation of Gaza.

Killing Palestinians Is Popular In Israel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJUPRcZZB_0

Charles Freeman on Obama's foreign policy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wYRfmLvY7Q

Charles Freeman Another AIPAC Victim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMD3Zcy5C30

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Wikipedia:

"The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916.

The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence. The terms were negotiated by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes. The Russian Tsarist government was a minor party to the Sykes–Picot agreement, and when, following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks exposed the agreement, "the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted. (Poster's note: Kuwait and its borders were created by a petroleum engineer of Anglo Iranian Oil (now BP) who drew lines around the richest oil reserves of Iraq.)"

Poster's footnote: Some remarked that whenever there was a peace talk scheduled there would be a suicide bombing in Israel and wondered if Ariel Sharon was arranging some of these. Even now to whose advantage have been the hideous actions against pilots through decapitation and burning. One wonders if 1 or 2 of them have been black ops.

(article written by poster while listening to his question and answer session... if anything not verbatim, it is paraphrased and the fault of the poster)

Freeman in the November talk avoided the question of who caused the WTC bombing.
See also:
http://4fb26 http://itunes.carnegiecouncil.org/carnegie/audio/20141120_Freeman.mp3
http://chasfreeman.net/the-collapse-of-order-in-the-middle-east/