May 19, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 34
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In the foreword to the just released "National Intelligence Strategy of the United States," the Director of National Intelligence says democracy promotion is the "stoutest pillar" in strengthening U.S. national security. And far from enhancing U.S. security, realist notions, where stability trumps democracy, promote "international instability."
Negroponte writes:
But even though the future holds dangerous challenges both within our borders and beyond, it also presents us with opportunities to support the spread of freedom, human rights, economic growth and financial stability, and the rule of law.
We must identify these opportunities for democratic transformation because autocratic and failed states are breeding grounds of international instability, violence, and misery. For US national security, democracy is that stoutest pillar of support.
The Strategy document itself lists five "Mission Objectives," including:
1. Defeating terrorists at home and aboard by disarming their operational capabilities and seizing the initiative from them by promoting the growth of freedom and democracy. (page 6)
And:
3. Bolster the growth of democracy and sustain peaceful democratic states. We have learned to our peril that the lack of freedom in one state endangers the peace and freedom of others and that failed states are a refuge and breeding ground of extremism. Self-sustaining democratic states are essential to world peace and development.
One pundit recently described realist foreign policy as "clear and sober," and Brent Scowcroft argued much the same in a recent New Yorker profile. But Charles Krauthammer sees it a bit differently here.
For example, Rich writes:
Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with ''crucial documents,'' including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. ''evidence'' to the U.N. on the eve of war.
Rich, like other liberals, are desperately trying to get the nation to believe that the pre-war intelligence on Iraq was manufactured by a small band of zealots in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, including Cheney himself. Last week, Iraq opponents like Rich were abuzz over the remarks of Lawrence Wilkerson who called the relationship between Rumsfeld and Cheney "a cabal" during a speech in Washington. This week it's the Waas piece. But Wilkerson's other remarks in the same speech combined with the Waas piece actually undermine the "zealots made the wmd up" line.
For instance, Waas, a contributor to the American Prospect, writes:
…whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research [INR], the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction…
His phrase "programs to develop weapons of mass destruction" leaves the clear impression that INR dissented not only on the nuclear issue (for the record, DOE believed Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program) but also on chemical and biological weapons . But that is not true, according to Wilkerson. Here's what Secretary Powell's chief of staff Wilkerson said the same "cabal" speech:
…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….
According to Wilkerson, most, if not all, of the content in Secretary Powell's address -- a speech, Waas writes, that deputy CIA director John McLaughlin told Congress was reviewed to take "out material…that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable" -- to the UN was believed to be "the truth" by British, German and French intelligence. And INR, Wilkerson states, was "right there with the chems and the bios."
So Powell's speech didn't include the "Libby-written" passages, yet British, French and German intelligence believed it to be "the truth," and INR was "right there" with Powell on "the chems and bios."
Boy, that's quite a conspiracy the vice president engineered.
More on the Murray Waas piece may be found here and Wilkerson's "cabal" speech here.
Sunday's frontpage article by Elizabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt is a classic -- essentially an editorial masquerading as news. Naturally, Lawrence Wilkerson is quoted but only the nasty ones about "the cabal." His other remarks made in the same "cabal" speech aren't quoted. Guess they don't quite fit in with the liberal talking points on the war.
And what's with the "rid Iraq of Mr. Hussein" line? "Mr. Hussein," well, that's one way to characterize the butcher of Baghdad. Here's an alternative the Times may want to consider next time. How about the vice president's
longtime desire to rid Iraq of a onetime poison-gas-making, biological-weapons-manufacturing, mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring, serial war-starting, UN-obstructing, Security Council resolution-violating dictator?
And, it wasn't only Cheney's "longtime desire." Regime change was official US government policy going back to 1998 when President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act sponsored by Senators McCain and Lieberman, to name a few.
Gee, it must have been pure hell for Joe Wilson doing that glamorous photo spread in Vanity Fair
Yesterday, the National Journal publicized an "online exclusive" on the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence claims. Last night, Chris Matthews cited the Murray Waas piece and today its contents are pinging around the blogosphere. But the piece has one passage, in particular, that doesn't quite square with the public record.
For instance, Waas, a frequent contributor to the American Prospect, writes:
…whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research [INR], the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction…
His phrase "programs to develop weapons of mass destruction" leaves the clear impression that INR dissented not only on the nuclear issue but also on chemical and biological weapons. But here's what Secretary Powell's chief of staff said just the other day:
…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….
So, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, most, if not all, of the content in Secretary Powell's address -- a speech that deputy CIA director John McLaughlin told Congress was reviewed to take "out material…that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable" -- to the UN was believed to be "the truth" by British, German and French intelligence. And INR, Wilkerson states, was "right there with the chems and the bios."
Wilkerson's comment on INR reflect what was released publicly in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).
In that document, for example, INR concluded that “Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes is central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, but INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors.” INR cited the Department of Energy's judgment that the tubes were “poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment” and other factors to conclude that “the tubes are not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapon program.”
But the Department of Energy, which presumably only had a role in the nuclear assessment, apparently did not dissent from the Estimate's broader judgment on Iraq’s nuclear program. The “Key Judgments” section of the NIE stated that
DOE agrees that reconstitution of the nuclear program is underway but assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the program.
INR also stated in its “Alternative View” that “the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.” But INR still concluded “that Saddam continues to want nuclear weapons and that available evidence indicates that Baghdad is pursuing at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapons-related capabilities.”
But what did U.S. intelligence tell the Clinton administration on the reconstitution issue?
Well, Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration, commented in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly on what U.S. intelligence believed regarding Iraq's nuclear program:
The U.S. Intelligence Community’s belief toward the end of the Clinton Administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons....
And, he also wrote:
In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: Did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece today on the "realism" of Brent Scowcroft.
Even today Scowcroft says, ``I didn't think that calling the Soviet Union the `evil empire' got anybody anywhere.'' Tell that to Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents for whom that declaration of moral -- beyond geopolitical -- purpose was electrifying, and helped galvanize the dissident movements that ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.
It was not brought down by diplomacy and arms control, the preferred realist means for dealing with the Soviet Union. It was brought down by indigenous revolutionaries, encouraged and supported by Ronald Reagan, a president unabashedly dedicated not to detente with evil, but its destruction -- i.e., regime change.
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal a short time ago, the French ambassador to the US wrote, "Opposing a military intervention in Iraq at a time when U.N. inspections were working and Iraq was not an imminent threat to peace was a decision my country is proud of, one based on principles and shared by many other nations. The behavior of my country and the French diplomatic approach toward Iraq deserve respect, not insults or innuendoes."
From an Associated Press piece today on the massive oil-for-food scandal:
Tracing the politicization of oil contracts, the report said Iraqi leaders in the late 1990s decided to deny American, British and Japanese companies allocations to purchase oil because of their countries' opposition to lifting sanctions.
At the same time, it said, Iraq gave preferential treatment to France, Russia and China, which were perceived to be more favorable to lifting sanctions and were also permanent members of the Security Council.
Here is another example of bogus information on the issue of Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger that is circulating on liberal web sites that may make its way into some sloppily researched editorial. The web posting claims the following:
It’s [the British government's July 2004 review of intelligence on wmd] review of prewar intelligence included the claim was unfounded. Here’s the relevant bit (pg. 124):
'Based on through [sic] analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger, are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.'
But as most who read page 124 of the British report will immediately grasp, the "relevant bit" quoted above is the conclusion of the IAEA, NOT the British government. In fact, the British report flatly states that the president's uranium reference in his 2003 State of the Union address was "well-founded" and based on intelligence having nothing to do with the forged documents cited by the IAEA. Here are the "relevant" bits, on pages 123 and 125:
We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that:
'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa'
was well-founded.
And,
From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.
d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.
Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, unleashed lots of vitriol in his Los Angeles Times piece yesterday, which was inspired, he says, by the speech have gave last week in Washington, DC. But what Wilkerson left out of his Times piece was the answer he gave during the Q&A following the speech. He said that French and German intelligence believed what Powell presented to the UN was "the truth" and that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) also believed Powell was "right" on Saddam's chemical and biological weapons. Wilkerson's revelation doesn't quite square with the "cabal made it up" theme peddled by anti-Bush liberals -- which probably explains why the media ignored it.
…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….
When you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical weapons ASP – Ammunition Supply Point – with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the U.N. inspectors wheeling in in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP and everything is changed, everything is clean. None of those signs are there anymore.
But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [then deputy DCI] was convinced that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate….
Wilkerson also said that French intelligence believed the aluminum tubes were designed for centrifuges.
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
Today, Senator Kerry called for the president to begin the withdrawal of troops from Iraq "over the course of the holidays." Military historian Fredrick Kagan explains why Kerry has it exactly wrong here, and Senator John McCain is expected to soon deliver an address on Iraq that will respond, in part, to the war's critics on the left.
Yesterday, Democratic Senators Byrd, Kennedy and Leahy took to the Senate floor to honor the sacrifice US troops have made in Iraq by launching a broad assault on the Bush administration. Invoking Vietnam repeatedly, Vermont's Leahy offered the most detailed attack that touched on all the talking points of the war's opponents. But Leahy added a twist reminiscent of Congress' actions during the Vietnam era -- the cut-off of funds for US forces.
Without answers -- real answers, honest answers -- to these questions, I will not support the open-ended deployment of our troops in a war that was based on falsehoods and justified with hubris.
In the past, Leahy has been a reliable weather vane pointing in the direction Senate liberals are headed. The bigger question for Senators like Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman is whether they allow Senators such as Byrd, Kennedy, Leahy and Durbin to define where the Democratic party stands on Iraq and other major foreign policy challenges facing the nation.
Senator John McCain today:
I would hope that the sacrifice made by young Americans would not be used for political reasons…. I still believe they have sacrificed in a noble cause, and I believe that they and their family members, the majority of them, believe so as well…. But to somehow use the tragic loss of…brave young American[s] as a way to criticize the conduct of the war, I would hope they [critics] would find a more appropriate vehicle. (Congressional Quarterly transcripts)
MoveOn.org's fundraising pitch today:
MoveOn.orgPolitical Action
"How Many More?" TV Ad
Today, we received grim news: 2000 American soldiers have now died in Iraq. Their caskets have been hidden from view, and the news of their deaths has receded to the back pages. But the men and women who died in recent days were no less brave or less honorable than those who died in the first days of the war. It's time for us to honor them—to remind the public that they're dying every day in the quagmire of Iraq—and ask, "How many more?" Can you help put this ad on the air?
You can also donate by check.
Weekly Standard contributor Dan Twining offers his insight on the push for democracy east of the Black Sea:
In the new 'Great Game' underway in the Caucasus and Central Asia pitting the United States, Russia, and China in a bid for strategic influence and access to natural resources, not only America's power but its democratic ideals give it a decisive advantage against the designs of regional countries' great power neighbors. In this Washington Post piece on the upcoming elections in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan -- both autocracies, both oil-rich, and both keenly interested in moving closer to America strategically and economically -- Jackson Diehl highlights the welcome price the Bush Administration is setting for strategic partnership with Washington: a commitment to free and fair elections. Democratic revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan -- as in Eastern Europe in 1989 -- demonstrate that people free to choose, choose to partner with America. The crushing of the popular uprising in Uzbekistan, and consequent rupture in U.S. strategic relations with Tashkent, demonstrates the danger of alliance with fickle autocrats. The West has a lot to offer transitional and emerging democracies, and we should be confident in the power of our values to attract them to our cause, not insecure that our values handicap us in any geopolitical contest. Holding leaders in Baku and Astana to democratic standards is not only right; it is good policy.
In the latest New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg has a revealing profile of Brent Scowcroft in which the former national-security advisor defends his foreign policy "realism," which, Goldberg writes, holds that "America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are secondary at best." Scowcroft is highly critical of the current president's foreign policy precisely because it places too much emphasis on moral considerations and the promotion of democracy. But as Richard Cohen laments in today's Washington Post, Scowcroft's "realist" critique of the Bush administration has been adopted by too many Democrats "who often speak the cold language of realism." He notes:
Both JFK and FDR were Democrats, of course, and the party has always been associated with internationalism. Somehow, though, that moralism -- that urge to do good abroad -- has drifted over to the GOP. It is Republicans, particularly neocons, who talk the language of moralism in foreign policy and who, weapons of mass destruction aside, wanted to take out Saddam Hussein because he was a beast. It mattered to them that he killed and tortured his own people. It says something about the Democratic left that it cheered Michael Moore's infantile "Fahrenheit 9/11" even though the film made no mention of Hussein's depredations, not even his gassing of Kurdish villages.
Former Clinton administration official Richard Holbrooke expressed similar sentiments in the New Yorker piece.
A good foreign policy…ought to "marry idealism and realism, effective American leadership and, if necessary, the use of force."
…Democrats like Holbrooke take issue with Republican realists. "Support for American values is part of our national-security interests, and it is realistic to support humanitarian and human-rights interventions."
Frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard Tom Joscelyn sends along this piece, "Report alleges rebels trained in Venezuela," from Sunday's Miami Herald:
An Ecuadorean military intelligence report alleges that leftists from Ecuador and seven other Latin American nations received guerrilla training in Venezuela this year from backers of President Hugo Chávez.
The report does not link Chávez personally to the training in explosives, weapons and urban guerrilla tactics. But it notes that part of the training took place in two Caracas military bases, one used by the army reserves and another that houses the Defense Ministry….
The report's key assertion of guerrilla training could not be verified independently by The Herald. But a senior civilian government official here with access to intelligence information verified the existence of the report and described its contents as ''undeniable.'' Several military intelligence personnel here also told The Herald that the report was indeed the work of their agency.
Saturday's Post ran this piece under the headline, "Hughes Misreports Iraqi History Envoy Vastly Overstates Fact in Justifying War to Indonesian Students." Unfortunately, such vigilance by the Washington Post to keep its readers well informed doesn't apply here or here or here. Of course, the Post isn't alone. Somehow, I doubt the New York Daily News corrected this one.
Reuters
France said on Monday it was too early to seek sanctions against Syria, whose officials have been implicated by a U.N. report in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.
Nowhere in Frank Rich's column yesterday or Bob Herbert's today will you find these comments made by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, last week. He said that French and German intelligence believed what Powell presented to the UN was "the truth" and that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) also believed Powell was "right" on Saddam's chemical and biological weapons.
…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….
When you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical weapons ASP – Ammunition Supply Point – with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the U.N. inspectors wheeling in in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP and everything is changed, everything is clean. None of those signs are there anymore.
But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [then deputy DCI] was convinced that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate….
Wilkerson also noted that French intelligence concluded that the aluminum tubes were for centrifuges.
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
Wilkerson's INR comment is also quite interesting because critics like Rich like to pretend that State's intelligence varied widely from the general consensus presented in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. It didn’t, according to Wilkerson. [T]hey were right there with the chems and the bios…."
To be continued…
USA Today reports that
six months after announcing a plan to give $3 million to promote democracy in Iran, the State Department has yet to spend the money….
Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, said the delay is bureaucratic. "There are no outside political considerations affecting these decisions," he said.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who put the $3 million in the budget, expressed frustration with the delay. "This money should be made available immediately for those seeking to express their opposition to the hard-line Islamic government and to promote internationally recognized human rights," he said.
Today, on NBC's Meet the Press, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said that he did not regret having voted for the Iraq War resolution.
Tim Russert: Based on what you now know today, do you regret having voted for the war?
Sen. Schumer: Well, no, Tim, because my vote was seen and I still see it as a need to say we must fight a strong and active war on terror.
Yesterday, in an address at Tufts University, former UN inspection chief Hans Blix harshly criticized the Bush administration over Iraq and then added something quite interesting and very much at the heart of the debate over the March 2003 decision to remove Saddam from power. According to the Boston Globe,
Blix said, 'We did not say there aren't any weapons of mass destruction, partly for being cautious.' But, he said, the inspectors had been to more than 700 sites in 500 places in Iraq, and 'we didn't find anything.'
The "anything" Blix is referring to includes the unaccounted for weapons of mass destruction -- the anthrax, VX, chemical & biological precursors, chemical rockets & shells, etc. -- that UN inspectors knew Saddam had produced but could not verify had been destroyed. The inspection regime agreed to by the Security Council was never about the number of inspections completed. It was about Saddam's regime actively engaging in disarmament and providing "verifiable evidence" to the Security Council that it had. The UN insistence on this "verifiable evidence" standard began in 1995 when Iraq was caught in a massive deception campaign to hide the scope of its weapons programs from the inspectors. From then on, the UN inspection team's conclusions on the state of Iraq's disarmament were to be solely based on "obtaining verifiable evidence including physical materials or documents; investigation of the successful concealment activities by Iraq; and, the thorough verification of the unilateral destruction events." In other words, Saddam had to prove he got rid of the stuff to ensure that he did not just stash it away somewhere beyond the eyes of the UN. Clinton Defense Secretary Cohen explained it this way in 1998:
[Inspectors] have to find documents, computer disks, production points, ammunition areas in an area that size [California]. Hussein has said, 'we have no program now.' We're saying, 'prove it.' He says he has destroyed all his nerve agent. [W]e're asking 'where, when and how?'"
Here's what Hans Blix said on the verification standard in late January 2003 –– though somehow I doubt he reminds today's audiences of what he said back then.
Resolution 687 (1991), like the subsequent resolutions I shall refer to, required cooperation by Iraq but such was often withheld or given grudgingly. Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance—not even today—of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.
As we know, the twin operation “declare and verify,” which was prescribed in resolution 687 (1991), too often turned into a game of “hide and seek.” Rather than just verifying declarations and supporting evidence, the two inspecting organizations found themselves engaged in efforts to map the weapons programmes and to search for evidence through inspections, interviews, seminars, inquiries with suppliers and intelligence organizations.
Blix also gave some concrete examples of the difficulty in verifying Iraq's disarmament without the active help of Saddam's regime. For instance,
January 27, 2003
The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions…. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
March 6, 2003
The result, so far, is that no underground facility of special interest has been found. Although they may be easier to find than mobile facilities, they are still a difficult target and it is always possible that inspectors have missed a hidden entrance. Like mobile facilities, any dedicated underground CW or BW facility could also have been dismantled prior to inspection. UNMOVIC does not dismiss the possibility that such facilities exist and will continue to investigate reports as appropriate. Given the vast number of potential underground “sites” capable of hosting CW or BW production or storage facilities in Iraq, inspections in this area will have to be dynamic and rely on specific intelligence information….
The long list of proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved disarmament issues was neither shortened by the inspections, nor by Iraqi declarations and documents.
The fact the Saddam Hussein never complied with UN disarmament resolutions led Defense Secretary William Cohen to state on CNN one month AFTER coalition forces entered Iraq:
I am convinced that he has them. I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out. I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. We will find them.
And, according to the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the French and the Germans believed Saddam had the weapons.
Apparently, opponents of the president's decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power are doing their own twisting of the truth when it comes to the historical record on Iraq.
But will the Security Council Act ?
The speech delivered yesterday by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, got a lot of press attention. But while all these reports highlighted the negative remarks he made about the Bush White House, they didn't mention Wilkerson's other seemingly newsworthy comments. Take the Washington Post's Dana Milbank and Brian Knowlton of the New York Times. Apparently, they couldn't find space in their "reporting" pieces for stuff like this:
Wilkerson confirmed that the US and other foreign intelligence agencies believed that what Powell presented to the UN was "the truth" and that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research also believed Powell was "right" on Saddam's chemical and biological weapons.
…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….
When you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical weapons ASP – Ammunition Supply Point – with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the U.N. inspectors wheeling in in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP and everything is changed, everything is clean. None of those signs are there anymore.
But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [then deputy DCI] was convinced that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate….
Wilkerson also said that French intelligence believed the aluminum tubes were designed for centrifuges.
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
There's another lesson in the Wilkerson coverage. Relying solely on the news media to be informed of what's in all the publicly available speeches and reports produced before and after March 2003 on Iraqi WMD is a mistake. Here and here and here and here are just some examples.
The BBC has an interesting piece on China's "village elections."
China's tough handling of recent protests by villagers in Taishi, southern Guangdong province, has thrown into fresh doubt its claims to be introducing genuine democracy "from the bottom up".
The media distortions and outright falsehoods just keep on coming. For example, the New York Daily News claims that Joe Wilson
debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa…. When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.
Actually, Wilson had no role in identifying the forgeries. As Stephen Hayes points out,
Wilson's trip to Niger took place in February 2002, some eight months before the U.S. government received the phony Iraq-Niger documents in October 2002. So it is not possible, as he told the Washington Post, that he advised the CIA that "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." And it is not possible, as Wilson claimed to the New York Times, that he debunked the documents as forgeries.
And the Senate's 2004 bipartisan Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq concluded:
Page 45
The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article…which said, "among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'" Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.
The Daily News' assertion that Wilson "debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush" is just plain old bunk. Most intelligence analysts believed his trip "lent more credibility" to reports that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, and the CIA continued to approve the use of the Iraq-Niger-Uranium language "in Administration publications and speeches, including the State of the Union." The same Senate report states:
Conclusion 13 (page 73)
The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be wiling or able to sell uranium to Iraq.
Conclusion 12 (page 72)
Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained the forged foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and other available intelligence.
Conclusion 19 (page 77)
Even after obtaining the forged documents and being alerted by a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analyst about problems with them, analysts at both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) did not examine them carefully enough to see the obvious problems with the documents. Both agencies continued to publish assessments that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa. In addition, CIA continued to approve the use of similar language in Administration publications and speeches, including the State of the Union.
Here's what the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell had to say yesterday at a Washington, DC think-tank:
When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions on us out of the blue on that bureaucracy, you can’t expect that bureaucracy to carry your decision out very well….
Remember what I said about the bureaucracy if it’s going to implement your decisions having to participate in those decisions….
What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made….
So you’ve got this collegiality there between the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President. And then you’ve got a President who is not versed in international relations. And not too much interested in them either.
And so it’s not too difficult to make decisions in this, what I call Oval Office cabal….
Let's see. Voters elect a president and vice president. Once in office, the president and vice president attempt implement the principles and policies they campaigned on. They direct the unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch to carryout those policies, including those who disagree with those polices. This process apparently meets the definition of a "cabal" in the mind of the former chief of staff. Of course, others may characterize a group of unelected bureaucrats who act in an insubordinate manner and decide not to carryout the decisions made their elected leaders as a "cabal."
William Kristol writes:
Condoleezza Rice's testimony today could be a major step forward in the Administration's implementation of an Iraq victory strategy. It's certainly a major step forward in the presentation of that strategy –– as Gary Schmitt points out, the first comprehensive statement of a real counterinsurgency and nation-building plan by the administration. It represents a total (and, I trust, final) repudiation of the Rumsfeld doctrine of "as Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down." Instead, Rice outlined a victory strategy rather than an exit strategy, refused to speculate about reduced troop levels, spoke of Americans and Iraqis fighting side-by-side, and pledged a long-term commitment to success. If the administration's actions now match Rice's words, and if they can build on the success of the constitutional referendum and some of the military progress of the last few months, this could be an important milestone on the path to success in Iraq.
Commenting on Rice's testimony today, Gary Schmitt writes:
This is the first comprehensive statement made by a senior administration official that lays out a sensible counterinsurgency strategy and accepts the fact that we will be deeply involved in the business of helping build a state. For that reason alone, it is a major step forward. Now, of course, it has to be backed up with institutional support and a sound inter-agency process here in Washington. As we've come to learn over the past few years, the administration can have all the great ideas in the world but fall short in actually carrying them out in an effective manner. Nevertheless, if the deeds in fact match the words, then Secretary Rice's statement will be seen as a significant milestone on the war on terror and transformation agenda for the Middle East.
In testimony today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary Rice outlined a bold strategy to "break the back" of the insurgency. She rejected largely Democratic calls (like the one delivered this morning on the Senate floor by Sen. Durbin of Illinois) to soon begin troop withdrawals –– noting that the terrorists want us to "quit" and "believe we do not have the will to see this through."
In short, with the Iraqi government, our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold, and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions….
We know our objectives. We and the Iraqi Government will succeed if together we can:
* Break the back of the insurgency so that Iraqis can finish it off without large-scale military help from the United States.
* Keep Iraq from becoming a safe haven from which Islamic extremists can terrorize the region or the world.
* Demonstrate positive potential for democratic change and free expression in the Arab and Muslim worlds, even under the most difficult conditions….
Our strategy is to clear, hold, and build. The enemy’s strategy is to infect, terrorize, and pull down….
But their ultimate target is the coalition’s center of gravity: the will of America, of Britain, and of other coalition members. Let us say it plainly: The terrorists want us to get discouraged and quit. They believe we do not have the will to see this through….
Clear the toughest places -- no sanctuaries. As we enlarge security in major urban areas and as insurgents retreat, they should find no large area where they can reorganize and operate freely. Recently our forces have gone on the offensive. In Tall Afar, near the Syrian border, and in the west along the Euphrates valley in places like Al Qaim, Haditha, and Hit, American and Iraqi forces are clearing away insurgents....
As this strategy is being implemented, the military side recedes and the civilian part – like police stations and civic leaders and economic development -- move into the foreground. Our transition strategy emphasized the building of the Iraqi army. Now our police training efforts are receiving new levels of attention....
[W]e must build truly national institutions. The institutions of Saddam Hussein’s government were violent and corrupt, tearing apart the ties that ordinarily bind communities together. The last two years have seen three temporary governments govern Iraq, making it extremely difficult to build national institutions even under the best of circumstances. The new government that will come can finally set down real roots....
We are moving from a stage of transition toward the strategy to prepare a permanent Iraqi government for a decisive victory….
"China has reacted angrily to a decision by the internet search engine Google to stop calling Taiwan a Chinese province," reports the BBC.
Of course, the Google folks got off easy. In 1997, the Danish government sponsored a United Nations resolution calling attention to the poor human rights record of Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry countered, the Washington Post reported, by warning that
"relations with Denmark would be 'severely damaged in the political or economic and trade areas.' In case that was too subtle, China added that the human rights resolution would 'become a rock that smashes on the Danish government's head.'"
The same Washington Post frontpage article that pushed the "imminent threat" myth today also reports the following:
Before the war, he [Vice President Cheney] traveled to CIA headquarters for briefings, an unusual move that some critics interpreted as an effort to pressure intelligence officials into supporting his view of the evidence. After the war, when critics started questioning whether the White House relied on faulty information to justify war….
Deliberate or not, this statement strongly suggests that Cheney's visits to the CIA contributed to the "faulty information" used to "justify" the war. What's more, the Post apparently decided that the following conclusions from the Senate's 2004 bipartisan Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq were too insignificant to mention.
Conclusion 83 (p. 284)
The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
Conclusion 84 (p. 285)
The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.
In today's Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus write, "Cheney, a longtime proponent of toppling Saddam Hussein, led the White House effort to build the case that Iraq was an imminent threat because it possessed a dangerous arsenal of weapons."
This statement is not true and just one more example of media distortions related to Iraq. As Stephen Hayes has reported,
the case for war was built largely on the opposite assumption: that waiting until Iraq presented an imminent threat was too risky. The president himself made this argument in his 2003 State of the Union address:
Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans--this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
A Syrian national has been arrested in France in connection with the assassination of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik al-Hariri, and this week a UN report is "expected to implicate Syrian officials in [the] assassination that plunged Lebanon into its worst security crisis since a 1975-1990 civil war."
And Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute Berlin, reports that it's a good thing Syrian democracy is thriving–"in exile."
It is hard to say exactly where Syria's tipping point may be. It could be the Mehlis report--the inquiry by U.N. investigator Detlev Mehlis into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The hard-nosed investigator from Germany will publish a report, which many believe will implicate Damascus in the murder. The suicide (some claim liquidation) of Syria's interior minister Ghazi Kanaan on October 12 piques one's curiosity. Kanaan was responsible for security in Lebanon through 2003 and had just been interviewed by Mehlis. The Mehlis report is due any day, which makes me think that if Ghadry and his colleagues want a parliament in exile, maybe they had better hurry.
Today's Financial Times reports on "a scathing denunciation of the US portal Yahoo for its role in helping Communist authorities to prosecute an independent-minded local journalist, jailed for 10 years for 'leaking state secrets.'"
Courtesy of The History Channel
1989 East Germany and Hungary move toward democracy
On October 18, the Hungarian constitution was amended to allow a multiparty political system and free elections (which took place in 1990). Many of the state controls over the economy were removed and Hungary moved toward a limited free market system. Meetings of workers, students, and others across the nation issued statements denouncing past "crimes" committed by the communist regime.
The changes were perhaps even more dramatic in East Germany, where on October 18 the nearly 20-year rule of communist strongman Erich Honecker came to an end. Honecker had been the Communist Party General Secretary in East Germany since 1971, and had ruled as head of state since 1976. With vanishing support from the Soviet Union, the effective end of the Berlin Wall (through Hungary's action), and widespread criticism of his government from the East German population, Honecker fled to the USSR and was replaced by a more reform-minded regime.
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal today, the French ambassador to the US writes, "Opposing a military intervention in Iraq at a time when U.N. inspections were working and Iraq was not an imminent threat to peace was a decision my country is proud of, one based on principles and shared by many other nations. The behavior of my country and the French diplomatic approach toward Iraq deserve respect, not insults or innuendoes."
Someone at the Journal may want to point the ambassador to this report, which quotes extensively from United Nations inspection reports.
The onus is clearly on Iraq to provide the requisite information or devise other ways in which UNMOVIC can gain confidence that Iraq’s declarations are correct and comprehensive….
[T]he long list of proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved disarmament issues was not shortened either by the inspections or by Iraqi declarations and documentation….
Iraq was required to declare the import of dual-use items and supply UNMOVIC with details as to their origin. However, Iraq’s recent semi-annual monitoring declarations, starting with the 'backlog' of declarations since 1998 supplied to UNMOVIC in October 2002, showed a trend of withholding pertinent information....The biological imports were of a slightly more significant kind, and included the import of a dozen autoclaves, half a dozen centrifuges and a number of laminar flow cabinets.
Missile imports, however, were more substantial and could have contributed significantly to any missile development programme. One example was the importation of 380 Volga engines that Iraq planned to use in the production of the Al Samoud 2 missile, a missile s | | | |
