Neocons Wage War on a 'Realist'
By Robert Parry
March 6, 2009
In a normal world, people in Washington might welcome the hiring of a “realist” to oversee the production of U.S. intelligence analyses, with the hope that even if the truth doesn’t set you free, it at least might be the foundation for sound policies.
But that is not the world in which the United States finds itself. In today’s Washington, the city’s preeminent newspaper publishes a neoconservative attack on President Barack Obama’s choice to oversee intelligence analyses because the person is a “realist.”
Despite having lost standing with the American people for leading them into the Iraq War and other disasters, the neocons still have a strong beachhead in the national news media and are using it to wage a nasty rear-guard battle against Obama’s appointment of former U.S. Ambassador Chas W. Freeman to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which vets National Intelligence Estimates on threats facing the United States.
Freeman’s chief offense, according to The New Republic’s Jon Chait in a Washington Post op-ed, is that the appointee is “an ideological fanatic” because Freeman believes excessively in “realism” and fails to apply a moral filter when looking at the world.
In Chait’s neocon critique, “realism” is not simply a hard assessment of what today's challenges are; it is an “ideology” – and thus open to dismissal as simply a competitive way of understanding the world.
“Realist ideology pays no attention to moral differences between states,” Chait wrote in a Feb. 28 article entitled “Obama’s Intelligence Blunder.” He added: “As far as realists are concerned, there's no way to think about the way governments act except as the pursuit of self-interest.”
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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/030609.html
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