The following is a short, unedited excerpt from the transcript of an interview today with Chas Freeman, senior U.S. diplomat, by EIR’s Mike Billington. The full interview will appear next week, in EIR weekly; and more excerpts will appear through the EIR Daily Alert soon.
Mike Billington: Good morning. This is Mike Billington with the Schiller Institute and Executive Intelligence Review. I’m joined today by Chas Freeman. Chas is well known for his role as the interpreter for President Nixon during his groundbreaking visit to China in 1972. He then served in several positions in both the Defense Department and the State Department and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first war with Iraq. He was also appointed director of the National Intelligence Council in 2009, but the appointment was undermined. Would you like to add anything on your career?
Ambassador Chas Freeman: No. I’m just happy to be free of 30 years of service to the government and the American public and no longer subject to the constraints of toeing the official line.
Billington: Well, you’re certainly not guilty of toeing the official line! I have two areas of questions that I want to bring up. One, on the war danger between Russia and the U.S. and NATO, and the other on the situation in Asia. But let me begin with a question regarding the situation in the Middle East. The Schiller Institute is sponsoring a rally at the Congress on Wednesday [Oct. 11] this week, demanding “No Funding for Ukraine, No War on Russia.” However, we have learned that the neocons are sponsoring a counter-rally demanding funding for two wars! So let’s begin by asking your view on the new Israeli war on Hamas, and perhaps also with Iran.
Freeman: We are seeing a disturbing tendency in our press to invent Iranian direction of this war, that somehow Iran put Hamas up to the attacks it has carried out. I think that is completely wrong and very dangerous, because it could be used to justify an Israeli or an American attack on Iran, as indeed we have threatened for years. The fact is that Palestinians have come to the point where many of them feel they have nothing to lose. This attack was an act of desperation and it came out of the blue. I analogize it to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which achieved objectives that no one had imagined. Namely, it convinced the public at large that the existing policies toward Vietnam were doomed to fail. And it ultimately produced a withdrawal from Vietnam by the United States. I think Hamas will lose decisively on the battlefield, but it may win the war, especially if Israel carries out its threat to reduce Gaza to the dimensions of Dresden in World War Two. I think that genocidal act would mobilize a lot of people against Israel who’ve been sitting on the fence. So this is a very important moment in the history of the Middle East and in U.S. policy toward it. It’s quite clear that neither Israel nor the United States have any answer to the resistance by the Palestinians to their humiliation, eviction from their homes and the attempted erasure of their presence from their homeland.
I might add that, unfortunately, this war in the Middle East probably greatly increases the risk of Donald Trump winning the 2024 election, because it is yet another evidence of the ineptitude of the Biden administration in foreign affairs. It will also probably increase the prospects for an end to U.S. support for Ukraine. And while you may applaud the notion that the war would then end, it will end in a way that parallels the end of the war in Vietnam, where we basically encouraged a fight to the death and then walked away from it, leaving the Vietnamese to their fate. Not an act of great responsibility on our part. No accountability whatsoever for our withdrawal, as more recently, there has been none for our actions in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the difference in the third decade of the 21st century is that during the Cold War, countries, allies, friends, faced a choice between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet system with all its brutality was so unattractive that that really was no choice at all. And now the world is not organized that way. It’s not bipolar. Countries do have the option of distancing themselves from Washington and they may well do so. In fact, they’re already doing it. But it may be that this accelerates the process. So many political implications yet unexamined. I think it will play into the partisan divisions in the United States in such a way as to increase the prospect that aid to Ukraine will end, which of course is a very real prospect given the turmoil in the Congress and Republican opposition to that aid, which will probably strengthen now.
