That's the charge Fred Kaplan levels against Chas Freeman's critics:
Chas Freeman is a high-profile figure. He became one by his own design, through public speeches, some of them deliberately provocative. Making him NIC chairman would-unjustly but unavoidably-hurl all intelligence, and all policy based on intelligence, into the fray of fractious politics. However, this is where Freeman's foes misplayed their hand. Had they let Freeman step into the job, they could have used him as the whipping boy for all foreign-policy measures they don't like-especially those involving the Middle East and China-and it might have been easier for them to rally opposition. But now it will be indisputably clear that the president is the one making policy. They're left with Barack Obama as their target-and one thing that's clear, so far, is that those who sling mud at Obama wind up hitting themselves.
It's rare that Fred Kaplan charges his ideological opponents with not being cynical enough -- in this case allowing a lunatic to run the NIC so that we might score political points down the road -- but I'll take it as a compliment. Even more troubling Kaplan seems to think that the NIC chair is a largely irrelevant position simply because he doesn't know what the job entails or who's held it in the past:
Can anyone name the last two or three NIC chairmen? (I can't.) They aren't high-profile figures, and there's a reason for that.
One of the great ironies of this whole saga is that the previous NIC chair, Thomas Fingar, was responsible for the 2007 NIE that claimed Iran had halted its nuclear program. Few would dispute that the document was written specifically to undermine President Bush's ability to credibly threaten the use of force against Iran -- that is, Fingar politicized intelligence to affect policy. Bush, despite being in the thrall of the "Israel Lobby" according to so many of his critics, got rolled by an NIC chair who's views are not all that different from Freeman's. Fingar also supported Freeman's appointment to succeed him. If Kaplan is really unaware of all this, he's not as good at his job as he thinks he is. But there should be no doubt that the NIC chair holds an important job, and it also seems relevant that the last NIC chair -- despite Freeman's famed "contrarianism" -- seems to share with Freeman a similar worldview. Kaplan concludes that after reading the deranged rant Freeman released after he withdrew his name from consideration, "President Obama must have heaved a sigh of relief that he'd sidestepped a serious shit storm." I expect that's right, but perhaps Freeman's critics were more concerned with the country sidestepping a serious shit storm than helping Obama stay out of political trouble.