Over at Reason, Michael Moynihan notes that “Freeman seems not to have too deep an understanding of the history of the Middle East. For instance, after the first Gulf War, Freeman told the left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn that the prospect of an Iraq fractured by sectarian warfare was unlikely because, after all, the Shia and Sunni are actually pretty close pals.” He then unearths this doozy of a quote from Chas Freeman, speaking after the first Gulf War:

The behavior of the Iraqi Shia in the Iran-Iraq war convinced the Saudis that the Shia were not Iranian surrogates. Washington was obsessed by that idea, and attributed it to the Saudis. I don’t know where all this panic about the breakup of Iraq came from. After all, Mesopotamia has been there for quite a while-about six thousand years. Iraq is not a flimsy construction.

And as a bonus, Moynihan tells us which notable Freeman defender used to be the Middle East editor of Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review.