Chas Freeman on “the Lieberman lobby”
If you’ve been following the Chas Freeman saga, you’ll certainly want to check out the former nominee’s interview with The Nation‘s Robert Dreyfuss. In the interview, Freeman addresses the blistering e-mail message that The Cable‘s Laura Rozen featured on Tuesday: The only thing I regret is that in my statement I embraced the term ‘Israel ...
If you've been following the Chas Freeman saga, you'll certainly want to check out the former nominee's interview with The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss. In the interview, Freeman addresses the blistering e-mail message that The Cable's Laura Rozen featured on Tuesday:
If you’ve been following the Chas Freeman saga, you’ll certainly want to check out the former nominee’s interview with The Nation‘s Robert Dreyfuss. In the interview, Freeman addresses the blistering e-mail message that The Cable‘s Laura Rozen featured on Tuesday:
The only thing I regret is that in my statement I embraced the term ‘Israel lobby.’ This isn’t really a lobby by, for or about Israel. It’s really, well, I’ve decided I’m going to call it from now on the [Avigdor] Lieberman lobby. It’s the very right-wing Likud in Israel and its fanatic supporters here. And Avigdor Lieberman is really the guy that they really agree with. And I think they’re doing Israel in.
Freeman also says he wasn’t too surprised by the unproductive conversations he had on Capitol Hill:
Well, they didn’t go badly. But I’m one guy talking to one or two people, and they’re quite a number of people and they’re feeding all sorts of disinformation in, and they have established channels and they also have clout. So there wasn’t much hope on my part that I could get many people to stand up and support me, because the down side of doing that is so obvious. Because if you go against this group, they either curtail your contributions or they arrange to contribute to an opponent. So it’s not realistic to expect courage on the Hill. And I didn’t.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
More from Foreign Policy

Saudi-Iranian Détente Is a Wake-Up Call for America
The peace plan is a big deal—and it’s no accident that China brokered it.

The U.S.-Israel Relationship No Longer Makes Sense
If Israel and its supporters want the country to continue receiving U.S. largesse, they will need to come up with a new narrative.

Putin Is Trapped in the Sunk-Cost Fallacy of War
Moscow is grasping for meaning in a meaningless invasion.

How China’s Saudi-Iran Deal Can Serve U.S. Interests
And why there’s less to Beijing’s diplomatic breakthrough than meets the eye.