By Simon Barber

BusinessDay- 20/03/2009

ARE you now or have you ever been an Arabist? Is this the signature phrase of a post-Cold War McCarthyism that poisons Washington’s ability to deal rationally with the Middle East and sometimes makes it al-Qaeda’s best recruiter? The admirers of Charles Freeman certainly think so, though few who seek advancement in this town have what it takes to say so publicly.

Freeman, who is arguably one of the most talented US diplomatists of his generation, was to have come out of a busy retirement to be chairman of President Barack Obama’s National Intelligence Council (NIC). Last week, under bipartisan fire from Israel’s — or, more accurately, Likud’s — staunchest defenders in Congress, he stepped aside.

The White House failed to come to his aid, evoking this from the Washington Post’s David Broder, the down-the-middle doyen of America’s political commentators: “The Obama administration has just suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the lobbyists the president vowed to keep in their place, and their friends on Capitol Hill. The country has lost an able public servant in an area where President Obama has few … credentials of his own, the handling of national intelligence.”

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