[Jewish Zionist historian. Held position at
Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Currently on The Chilcot Inquiry (Iraq
war, UK) even though he was a foreign
policy adviser to Tony Blair and
wrote his 1999 war speech!]
Sir Lawrence Freedman
Zionism
[Jewish Zionist historian. Held position at
Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Currently on The Chilcot Inquiry (Iraq
war, UK) even though he was a foreign
policy adviser to Tony Blair and
wrote his 1999 war speech!]
See: Professor Frederick Lindemann Sir Martin Gilbert
[2010 Jan] The Chilcot Inquiry: Britain’s 9/11 Commission Michael Crick, pointed out, “Critics of the war might argue Sir Lawrence was himself one of the causes of the war!” Crick was referring to a Freedman memo which formed the basis of Tony Blair’s 1999 Chicago speech, “The Doctrine of the International Community.” In what became known as the “Blair Doctrine,” Freedman had offered an answer to the specious question: “When was military action justified for liberal, humanitarian reasons?”
[2003] Lawrence Freedman: America needs a wider coalition, however difficult (During the Iraq invasion) “Another familiar refrain in Washington is that the US has long since given up expecting to be loved but is content to be respected. Even if it takes time to dislodge Saddam's regime, the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East. For them the key question will be whether, having carried so much of the burden of the war effort, they can also carry the post-war effort without much wider international support, and the extent to which they are prepared to share influence to obtain it. The problem of coalition formation will not stop with the war's end.”
[Jan 2010] Richard Ingrams’s Week: Get the inquisitor
to answer a few questions A strange
situation developed at an early stage of Tony Blair's inquisition at the Chilcot
inquiry yesterday. He was being questioned at some length by Sir Roderic Lyne
about a speech he made in Chicago in 1999 making the case for military
intervention in foreign states where nasty things were going on.
But the man who had actually
written that speech, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, was sitting opposite Blair
as one of his five inquisitors. Sir Lawrence was wisely keeping quiet about his
involvement, just as he had done earlier in the week when Foreign Office
officials described how Blair had ignored their legal objections to the Iraq
war. In his 1999 speech Freedman had listed a number of criteria to justify
intervention, but at no point did Freedman/ Blair address the tricky question of
whether military intervention could be justified legally.
In this respect Freedman's position
was little different from that of the American neocons who even then were
proposing US military intervention to bring about a new-look Middle East. The
legality or not of waging war on this alarming scale simply did not arise. In
his recent book, A Choice of Enemies, Freedman describes as "conspiratorial"
those of us who have accused the neocons of a pro-Israel agenda in promoting the
Iraq war.
His fellow panellist, the historian
Sir Martin Gilbert, went even further this week, accusing me and former
ambassador Oliver Miles of anti-Semitism for raising the Zionist sympathies of
himself and Freedman. Anyone who criticises the state of Israel and its
supporters is used to being libelled as a racist. It's a novel experience for me
to be attacked in this way by an eminent academic when speaking, appropriately,
on a radio station from one of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank (or
Judea and Samaria, as Professor Freedman prefers to call it in his book).
Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature.
2009 Award Winner