May 19, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 34
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« February 2006 |
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From the Associated Press:
Chertoff: U.S. would have been safer with Dubai company at ports
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. missed an opportunity to make its shores safer when it drove away a Dubai-based company poised to operate cargo terminals at several American seaports, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Chertoff said the international shipping firm DP World could have helped implement stronger security at many ports where the U.S. now has limited influence.
"We could (have) actually built in some additional assurances, which would have given us more security in the wake of the deal than we had before the deal," Chertoff said. "The oddity of this, the irony of this, is that had the deal gone forward, we would have had greater ability to impose a security regime worldwide on the company than we have now."
DP World, the world's third-largest ports company, got a role in loading and unloading cargo from ships in at least 20 U.S. ports when it purchased the British company Peninsular & Oriental. The Bush administration defended the deal, but under pressure from Congress, the company said this month that it will sell its U.S. businesses to an American buyer.
The decision followed a month of attacks by critics who said they did not trust a government-owned company from the Arabian Peninsula to be given a sensitive role handling cargo at U.S. ports. DP World is owned by the Emirate of Dubai, which is part of the United Arab Emirates.
Chertoff, however, said DP World has a good track record with U.S. authorities and has long been trusted to help move U.S. military materiel and personnel.
Jerry Kilgore lost his bid to succeed the prospective 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner. Though as Election Day drew near, the Kilgore camp believed they had an issue that would put them over the top -- illegal immigration. It didn't work and may be a harbinger of things to come for Republicans if, as the Wall Street Journal editorializes today, the party of Reagan morphs into the party of Tom Tancredo. Just after Kilgore's defeat Fred Barnes noted in the Weekly Standard that Republicans had lost their grip on what had been two solidly Republican counties in Northern Virginia.
From the governor's election in Virginia last week, there's a bit of evidence that the Republican grip on the exurbs may be loosening.... [T]he outcome in Loudoun and Prince William should be alarming to Republicans. Located west of Washington, Loudoun is the second fastest-growing county in the country. Kilgore lost Loudoun by 51 percent to 46 percent. A year earlier, Bush did 10 points better.... The numbers in Prince William, south of Washington, were slightly better. Kilgore was defeated by 50 percent to 48 percent, slipping five points below Bush....
I think there are two better explanations for the Republican retreat in the two exurban counties. First, there's the immigration issue. Late in the campaign, Kilgore played up his opposition to government aid for illegal immigrants. He did so in TV ads and speeches, criticizing Kaine for supporting taxpayer-financed services for illegals and their families. The tagline in his TV spots was: "What part of 'illegal' does Tim Kaine not understand?"
The question is not whether Kilgore was indulging in blatant immigrant-bashing. He wasn't. The question is whether his emphasis on illegals might have been seen as unfriendly to immigrants, especially by the large immigrant communities in the two counties....
"They overplayed the immigrant issue," says Mark Rozell, professor of public policy at George Mason University in northern Virginia. "They may have caused a counter-mobilization by people who were offended by the ads."
Rozell says he was "stunned" when he heard a Kilgore radio ad on illegal immigrants on a classical music station in Washington. "Is that the demographic their ads were supposed to appeal to?" he says. In all likelihood, Rozell says, the ads appealed only to Republicans already committed to vote for Kilgore.
Loudoun and Prince William were not as vote-rich for Bush last year as many other exurbs. Of the 100 fastest-growing counties, according to Brownstein and Rainey, "Bush took 70 percent or more of the vote in 40 of them and 60 percent or more in 70 of them. In all, Bush won 63 percent of the votes in these 100 counties."
So Loudoun and Prince William aren't quite typical in yet another way: They're not landslide Republican counties. But the fact that Kilgore fell far short of the president's showing in the two Virginia exurbs is bound to be a matter of concern to Republicans as they focus on 2006 and 2008.
President Bush opposes the House-passed immigration bill because it isn't "comprehensive" and has asked for everyone involved in the debate to keep it "civil." Of course, he was talking to House Republicans. Having successfully run STATEWIDE in Texas and twice NATIONALLY, the president may have a better grasp on how to maintain Republican majorities than those from overwhelmingly safe districts who appear to be the most vocal on the immigration issue.
Also see "Social Conservatives, Sen. Sam Brownback and Immigration Reform."
From AFP:
US to test 700-tonne explosive
The US military plans to detonate a 700 tonne explosive charge in a test called "Divine Strake" that will send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defense official said.
"I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Tegnelia said the test was part of a US effort to develop weapons capable of destroying deeply buried bunkers housing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
"We have several very large penetrators we're developing," he told defense reporters.
We also have -- are you ready for this - a 700-tonne explosively formed charge that we're going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada," he said.
"And that represents to us the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem," he said.
Go ahead and make the house-passed immigration bill law, writes George Will in today's Washington Post:
And conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status "amnesty." Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France. The House-passed bill, making it a felony to be in the country illegally, would make 11 million people permanently ineligible for legal status. To what end?
The good news is that Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader Boehner are coming around to Will's arguments.
Social conservatives couldn't have a better friend on Capitol Hill than the Senator from Kansas. On the cultural divide, he stands as far away from Sen. Kennedy as Pluto is from Mars. Yet, Brownback was instrumental in getting the immigration bill out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Upon passage, he noted the bill, which also tightens border security, isn't "amnesty," which some conservative critics have falsely claimed in much the same way liberals did in accusing Republicans of "cutting" programs when, in fact, they were just slowing the rate of spending growth. It's an effective rhetorical device but deeply misleading. Said Brownback:
I am pleased that we were able to report out a bill that makes positive strides toward a guest-worker program and strong enforcement at the border and on the employer....Committee passage is a big step, but not the final step. Workable immigration reform is one of the biggest issues facing the country today and in the future, and we struck a good balance. We need to continue to work on this bill from the floor of the Senate to ensure that we don’t make the mistakes of the 1986 amnesty bill or the 1996 enforcement-only bill, which together led to an explosion of the illegal immigrant population.
David Brooks in today's New York Times also argues (Times Select, unfortunately) that social conservatives should speak up in support of the Brownback-backed immigration bill and not let opponents claim the moral high ground. Some highlights:
The facts show that the recent rise in immigration hasn't been accompanied by social breakdown, but by social repair. As immigration has surged, violent crime has fallen by 57 percent. Teen pregnancies and abortion rates have declined by a third. Teenagers are having fewer sexual partners and losing their virginity later. Teen suicide rates have dropped. The divorce rate for young people is on the way down.
Over the past decade we've seen the beginnings of a moral revival, and some of the most important work has been done by Catholic and evangelical immigrant churches.... This is evident in everything from divorce rates (which are low, given immigrants' socioeconomic status) to their fertility rates (which are high) and even the way they shop.... By the second generation, most immigrant families are middle class and paying taxes that more than make up for the costs of the first generation. By the third generation, 90 percent speak English fluently and 50 percent marry non-Latinos.... Right now...government pushes immigrants into a chaotic underground world. The Judiciary Committee's bill...would tighten the borders, but it would also reward virtue. Immigrants who worked hard, paid fines, paid their taxes, stayed out of trouble and waited their turn would have a chance to become citizens. This isn't government enabling vice; it's government at its best, encouraging middle-class morality....
Here are two pieces worth reading on the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the "Israel Lobby" in the U.S.
From Max Boot in the LA Times (reg. req'd):
IN HIS CLASSIC 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," the late Richard Hofstadter noted: "One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality that it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed." As examples, he cited a 96-page pamphlet by Joseph McCarthy that contained "no less than 313 footnote references" and a book by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch that employed "one hundred pages of bibliography and notes" to show that President Eisenhower was a communist.
For a more recent instance of the paranoid style, a modern-day Hofstadter could consult "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy," a "working paper" by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. With 83 pages of text and 211 footnotes, the Mearsheimer-Walt essay (part of which appeared in the London Review of Books) is as scholarly as those of Welch and McCarthy — and just as nutty.
And from Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.
Walt and Mearsheimer are not the first to wade into these swamps. In March 2003, US Representative James Moran inveighed against Jews at an antiwar rally: ''If it was not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq," the Virginian Democrat fumed, ''we would not be doing this." It was at about the same time that Professor Edward Said of Columbia University was writing, ''Wherever you look in the Congress there are the tell-tale signs either of the Zionist lobby, the right-wing Christians, or the military-industrial complex, three inordinately influential minority groups who share . . . unbridled support for extremist Zionism." A year earlier it had been South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, lamenting that ''the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal" in the United States; no one dares oppose Israel ''because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful."
The following is President Reagan's letter accepting the resignation of Caspar Weinberger as Secretary of Defense and thanking him for his great service to our nation:
THE WHITE HOUSE
November 5, 1987
Dear Cap:
It is with the deepest regret that I accept your resignation as Secretary of Defense, effective upon the appointment and qualification of your successor.
Nearly 20 years ago, I had the good fortune to have you serve as my Director of Finance for the State of California. Your exceptional performance in that post as well as in subsequent positions with the Federal Government -- among them, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare -- left me no doubt that you would make an outstanding Secretary of Defense. Not only was I correct in my judgment, but I am confident that you will be remembered as the most distinguished and effective Secretary of Defense in our Nation's history.
For the past seven years, you have worked tirelessly to help restore both America's military strength and its self-confidence. You have always recognized that the mantle of liberty carries with it responsibility and leadership. You've been indispensable in upgrading our military preparedness by promoting the B - 1 bomber, overseeing expansion of our Navy to 600 ships, and eloquently advocating the Strategic Defense Initiative -- the most important technological breakthrough in defense strategy in our lifetime. You have successfully enhanced the quality of our military personnel and improved morale, so that today the percentage of high school graduates among enlistees in our armed services is the highest in our Nation's history. You have also set an example in cracking down on waste and abuse in Pentagon spending, ensuring American taxpayers that their hard-earned monies are being properly and efficiently utilized.
I know well that you are an ardent admirer of Winston Churchill and an astute observer of history. As Secretary of Defense, you have demonstrated time and again the vision, the passion, the sound judgment, and the ability to inspire which Churchill possessed in such full measure. You recognize, as he did, that we live in a dangerous time when the survival and triumph of freedom are not self-evident. If freedom is to endure and expand, it will only be because we understand the lessons of history and the nature of the implacable enemy that confronts us globally. Having immersed yourself in these issues, you have helped this Nation apply these lessons to the many crises that we have faced together. As a result, the United States has been able to conduct itself in the 1980s in a way befitting a great Nation and the leader of the free world. Cap, you have my heartfelt gratitude for your incomparable service to our Nation. I know that as you return to the private sector, you will continue to champion the public policies that have kept our Nation strong, prosperous, and free.
Nancy joins me in offering you and Jane, and your loved ones, our warm best wishes for every future happiness. May God bless and keep you.
Reagan's words -- "we live in a dangerous time when the survival and triumph of freedom are not self-evident. If freedom is to endure and expand, it will only be because we understand the lessons of history and the nature of the implacable enemy that confronts us globally" -- still ring true today.
From Wired.com:
Dozens of Iranian bloggers have faced harassment by the government, been arrested for voicing opposing views, and fled the country in fear of prosecution over the past two years.
In the conservative Islamic Republic, where the government has vast control over newspapers and the airwaves, weblogs are one of the last bastions of free expression, where people can speak openly about everything from sex to the nuclear controversy. But increasingly, they are coming under threat of censorship....
To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter internet content of any country in the world -- second only to China....
Outright political bloggers have an even tougher time.
Hanif Mazroui was arrested in 1994 and charged with acting against the Islamic system through his writings. He was jailed for 66 days and then acquitted....
Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian journalist and blogger, was arrested and charged with insulting the country's leader, collaborating with the enemy, writing propaganda against the Islamic state and encouraging people to jeopardize national security.
He had been in jail for 60 days when he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He appealed, and was released on bail. Although his sentence has been reduced to three years, he still faces charges of insulting the leader and writing propaganda.
Another, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been in prison since February 2005. He was first arrested in November 2004 for speaking out against the arrest of three colleagues. According to the Committee to Protect Bloggers, Saminejad's website was hacked into by people linked to the Iranian Hezbollah movement.
After his release, he launched his blog at a new address, which led to his second arrest in February 2005. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and then given an extra 10 months for inciting "immorality."
Despite the crackdown, most Iranian bloggers say the government is not interested in eliminating blogging. Instead, they believe authorities want to use blogging to further their own goals.
Farid Pouya, a Belgian-based Iranian blogger, notes the government has just launched a competition for the best four blogs. The subjects: the Islamic revolution and the Quran.
"The government has observed carefully and learned that blogs are important ... and they want to capitalize on that," she said. "They want to lead the movement, they want to control it."
(See here and here.)
Posted on March 21, 2006:
It would be interesting to know whether the NSA program helped snag Babar and his buddies across the Atlantic. From the BBC:
Seven British citizens had acquired "most of the necessary components" to launch a bombing campaign in the UK, the Old Bailey has heard.
Prosecutor David Waters QC said "pubs, nightclubs and trains" were discussed as potential targets, but police moved in before the plot "reached fruition"....
Mr Waters told the jury they would be hearing from an American citizen, Mohammed Babar, who conspired with the defendants.
Babar has pleaded guilty to terrorism offences in the US and, according to the prosecutor, "has an insight as an insider into the events and plans which an outsider could not have".
It is claimed Babar met several of the defendants in England and in Pakistan, where many of them have family connections.
Mr Waters said the defendants' "principal purpose" in travelling to Pakistan was "to acquire expertise in relation particularly to explosives".
It was during a meeting with Babar that 24-year-old defendant Omar Khyam, from Crawley in West Sussex, allegedly told Babar his targets could include pubs, nightclubs and trains....
The prosecutor said Mr Khyam and co-defendant Salahuddin Amin, 31, from Luton in Bedfordshire, both told Babar they worked for a man who they claimed was "number three in al-Qaeda".
From Asharq Al-Awsat:
Beirut- Informed sources have revealed told Asharq al-Awsat that the international commission investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri received the transcript of a phone call conversation between a Lebanese official and his Syrian counterpart in which the former confirmed to the latter that the assassination had taken place.
The sources alluded to what was mentioned in commission chief Judge Serge Brammertz's report on achieving a major breakthrough, and cited sources in the international commission that "the breakthrough came about by finding solid proof that periodic meetings were held between Lebanese and Syrian security officials and officials in a Lebanese group known for its allegiance to Syria, in addition to analyzing scores of phone calls held between security officials in that group, the Syrian intelligence center in Beirut, and an important official head office which German Judge Detlev Mehlis referred to in his first report.
The sources confirmed that "analysis of the phone calls, which began on the evening of Sunday 13 February 2005 and continued until 4 pm the following day--in other words, four hours after the crime took place--showed that most of the conversation revolved around the crime. In addition, the commission received the text of a very important phone call held between a high-ranking Lebanese official and his Syrian counterpart in which the former confirmed to the latter that the assassination had taken place and Al-Hariri had in fact been killed."
I usually agree with the editors of the New York Post, but not this paragraph from today's editorial
Forced repatriation, also under consideration, is a drastic - and politically explosive - option. But it needs to be part of the debate, if only to underscore the gravity of the current debate.
Do Republicans really want to go down this road? This blogger makes some interesting points, while this one, I believe, is unfair and doesn't make much sense. Why would a potential GOP presidential candidate take such a position if it were just about "ambition"? And where in the Senator's quote does he exclude tougher border enforcement? He doesn't. Also, President Bush generally supports the bill that came out of the Judiciary Committee, so is he somehow weakening his credentials as a hawk "in the GWOT"? I don't think so. I do have a prediction, though. An immigration bill won't come out of conference until after the November election.
There is an effort afoot to discredit any material that may undermine the narrative that "Bush lied us into war" and that Saddam's connection to al Qaeda was tenuous at best. Consider this quote from an AP wire story today:
[John] Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute, dismissed the documents: "The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it's not there."
Prados knows "it's not there," even if he hasn't read all the documents -- the vast majority of which haven't been made public let alone translated. Of course, he has a book out saying Bush lied us into war, so there CAN'T be anything that contradicts the book he already wrote.
The same holds for Peter Bergen, who informs us that only "Bush administration defenders, right-wing bloggers and neoconservative publications are crowing about Iraqi documents newly released by the Pentagon that, they say, prove that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in league." We learn from Bergen that, "the 9/11 commission found no 'collaborative relationship' between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam Hussein...." Well, one of those 9/11 commissioners, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, said recently that the documents are a "very significant set of facts" and "tie [Saddam] into a circle that meant to damage the United States." It's unclear what Republican box Bergen would put the onetime Democratic presidential candidate in. Like Prados, Bergen has invested a lot of time and effort in one particular Iraq war story line. "It's long been known that Iraqi officials were playing footsie with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's," he writes, "but these desultory contacts never yielded any cooperation."
And then there's the ubiquitous Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official who pops up in a silly and dismissive front-page piece on the documents in today's New York Times. He notes that "there's no quality control" when you just throw a bunch of documents out into the public domain. Another U.S. intelligence official is quoted anonymously as saying that "our view is there's nothing in here [the documents already released] that changes what we know today." There's no doubt that some documents may be fraudulent and that a few may wildly over interpret the meaning of some the documents. But to dismiss all of them -- leaving aside that fact the most haven't been reviewed -- is a bit rich and arrogant considering how clueless U.S. intelligence was on what was going on inside Iraq and al Qaeda. Consider these two congressional reports, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (pp. 90, 91), and the Report on U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (pp. 322, 323, 351, 355):
“The U.S. Intelligence Community was not able to penetrate al Qaeda’s inner circle successfully before September 11, despite the fact that human penetration of that organization was considered a priority.”
“According to senior CTC [Counterterrorist Center] officials, CIA had no penetrations of al Qaeda’s leadership and never obtained intelligence that was sufficient for action against Usama bin Laden.”
“CIA acknowledged the poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda leadership.”
“CIA stated it did not have specific intelligence reports that revealed Saddam Hussein’s personal opinion about dealing with al Qaeda.”
“There was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until the fall of 2002.”
“Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collection that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime’s possible links to al Qaeda.”
“The CIA had no…sources on the ground in Iraq providing reporting specifically on terrorism.”
Let's recap. The US intelligence consensus was that Saddam wouldn't invade Kuwait in 1990. They were totally unaware that Saddam was operating a "Manhattan Project"-sized nuclear weapons program until after the 1991 Gulf War. They were a bit off on the status of Saddam's wmd programs in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Imagine if they also blew it on the extent of the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda.
All of the above pretty much encapsulates the current media view. Because they cannot even entertain the possibility that they may have been wrong, there isn't any new evidence that can possibly be produced.
To be continued....
This issue is not a subject of debate on Capitol Hill by either side in the immigration divide, but it should be. Nearly three years ago, John Fonte, the director of the Hudson Institute's Center for American Common Culture, wrote an interesting article on the "need for a patriotic assimilation policy" in the U.S. "It makes no sense to discuss immigration without talking about assimilation," Fonte wrote, "nor does it make sense to develop an immigration policy without an assimilation policy."
But today on Capitol Hill [and in the White House for that matter] that is exactly what is happening. You hardly hear a peep about it. The House-passed immigration bill ignores the topic, while Senate Majority Leader Frist will likely sponsor a similar enforcement-only bill in the Senate. Sen. Specter's Judiciary Committee-passed bill will likely have nothing on "patriotic assimilation" and even Sen. McCain's "earned citizenship" bill says little on the issue. The same holds for the bill sponsored by Sens. Kyl and Cornyn.
It's a fairly good bet that a bill will get through the Senate. What the final legislation will look like when [and IF] it emerges from the House-Senate conference committee is anyone's guess. Though, what is certain is that most immigrants will continue to come to the U.S. because of the opportunity our nation offers for a better life. Agree or disagree with him, Fonte makes some points worthy of debate and consideration by our elected representatives.
From Fonte's May 14, 2004 piece, "We Need a Patriotic Assimilation Policy":
For more than two hundred years, immigrants to America and their children have been successfully assimilated into what has been called the American way of life. This civic or patriotic assimilation of immigrants into the American constitutional regime did not happen naturally. Patriotic assimilation was the end result of a sometimes explicit (and other times implicit) long-range vision formulated by America’s leaders. From the days of George Washington continuing through the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and supported in the past decade by such public figures as Barbara Jordan, this strategic vision has helped to define immigration-assimilation policy by articulating two interconnected ideas: (1) welcoming immigrants and (2) assimilating those immigrants into the mainstream of American civic life....
Closer to our own time, in a 1995 New York Times oped entitled “The Americanization Ideal,” the late Texas Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan wrote, “Immigration imposes mutual obligations. Those who choose to come here must embrace the common core of American civic culture,” but the native-born must “assist them” in learning about America, and, at the same time, must oppose prejudice and “vigorously enforce” laws against discrimination.
In different ways, Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Jordan all advocated what I have called patriotic assimilation....
Patriotic assimilation occurs when a newcomer essentially adopts American civic values and the American heritage as his or her own. It occurs, for example, when newcomers and their children begin to think of American history as “our” history, not “their” history. To give a hypothetical example, imagine an eighth-grade Korean-American female student studying the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Does she think of those events in terms of “they” or “we”? Does she envision the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia as something that “they” (white males of European descent) were involved in two hundred years before her ancestors came to America, or does she imagine the Constitutional Convention as something that “we” Americans did as part of “our” history?
“We” implies successful patriotic assimilation. If she thinks in terms of “we,” she has done what millions of immigrants and immigrant children have done in the past. She has adopted America’s story as her story, and she has adopted America’s Founders—Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, et al.—as her ancestors. (This does not mean that she, like other Americans, will not continue to argue about our history and our heritage, nor that she will ignore the times that America has acted ignobly.)
... A successful patriotic assimilation project would have two phases: (1) setting the terms of the debate by shaping the national conversation on immigrant assimilation in American life and (2) offering concrete programs to assist the project. Strategically, the Bush administration could do, in broad terms, what the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations did in the early twentieth century.
First, Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson used the White House “bully pulpit” to promote an “Americanization” project that would bring newcomers into the mainstream of American life. For example, on July 4 and 5, 1915, President Wilson, cabinet members, and prominent public figures such as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis gave speeches at citizenship ceremonies in 150 cities around the nation as part of “National Americanization Day”....
The mandate of the Office of Citizenship [in the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services] should be to assist our new fellow citizens in understanding the serious moral commitment that they are making in taking the Oath and in swearing true faith and allegiance to American liberal democracy.
Because we are a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious country, our nationhood is not based on ethnicity, race, or religion, but instead on a shared loyalty to our constitutional republic and its liberal democratic principles. If immigration to America is going to continue to be the great success story that it has been in the past, it is essential that newcomers have an understanding of, and attachment to, our democratic republic, our heritage, and our civic principles.
In sum, it is time to launch a national initiative aimed at promoting the civic and patriotic assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream of American life. Today as in the past, patriotic assimilation is a necessary component of any successful immigration policy. This does not mean that we should blindly replicate all the past Americanization policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, some of which would be inappropriate today, but it does mean that we have much to learn from our great historical success in civic assimilation. In the final analysis, it means that we should draw on a usable past, exercise common sense, and develop a patriotic assimilation policy that will be consistent with our principles and effective in today’s world.
Blair, in a speech to the Australian parliament:
"But the strain of frankly anti-American feeling in parts of European politics is madness when set against the long-term interests of the world we believe in," he said....
"The danger with America today is not that they are too much involved. The danger is that they decide to pull up the drawbridge and disengage. We need them involved. We want them engaged."
Blair's right. And judging from the activity on Capitol Hill the last few months, he should be worried.
These two editorials are worth a read.
The Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon, a centrist Democrat, argues in today's Washington Post that the best way to prevent a large-scale civil war is to not repeat what happened in Baghdad in April 2003. Back then, unchecked small-scale looting eventually spiraled out of control.
Administration officials have been right in recent weeks to argue that there is no large-scale civil war underway in Iraq....
But if the political process continues to falter and the risk of civil war looms larger, we will also need a military plan for quelling it. Much of the American debate has been asking how to handle an all-out conflict in which Iraq has already fractured and violence is rampant. But the more important question is how to quell violence in the early stages, before such a scenario develops fully....
On this point, initial indications are that American thinking is on the wrong track. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stated that U.S. forces would not become heavily involved in any civil strife, leaving it instead to Iraqis to sort out the problem. This approach, which mirrors the relatively passive approach U.S. troops took to the reprisal violence after the Feb. 22 bombing, has an understandable appeal. But it is akin to our decision to stand aside and allow wanton looting after Saddam Hussein fell in April 2003, and it could have comparably disastrous consequences....
Civil wars with a heavy ethnic dimension do not typically begin as full-blown conflicts but rather develop an internal dynamic in which hate, rage and fear increasingly influence the actions of a growing number of people.
In such a situation, stemming violence early is critical. Checkpoints need to be manned, curfews enforced, vigilantes arrested or shot, mosques and schools and hospitals protected.
Yes, Iraqi forces can do many of these things and should. And, yes, many of them will. But Iraqi security forces are at present politically untested. Most units are dominated by one group or another. If the country begins to descend toward civil war, the temptation of many will be to take sides in the sectarian strife rather than stop it.
The foreign coalition can do a great deal to discourage this. By deploying with Iraqi police and army troops on the streets, it can provide enough manpower to do the labor-intensive work required to restore order as anarchy begins to spread.... It can act as a glue, helping to hold them together by working with them and providing an example worthy of emulation.
In his statements about letting Iraqis handle their own civil strife, perhaps Rumsfeld was trying to drive home to Iraqis the message that they should not count on the distant American superpower to bail them out if civil war begins. This message is grounded in a sound logic; Iraqis do need to step up to the plate and solve more of their own problems. But as a full indication of what our military plans would be for any incipient civil war, it is not the right strategy. Now is the time to reassess.
And in the current Weekly Standard, Frederick Kagan and William Kristol make a similar point.
WITHIN HOURS OF THE BOMBING of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra on February 22, the media were filled with warnings that Iraq is sinking into civil war. Of course, almost any insurgency is, in a sense, a civil war, and sectarian violence has marked this insurgency from the very beginning. But the fact is that we are not facing a civil war in Iraq, with large-scale military formations fighting one another along ethnic and sectarian lines. Moreover, we can very likely prevent this outcome, and, even better, make real progress toward victory....
U.S. forces have trained the Iraqis in how to set up checkpoints and search houses. And they have spent many hours teaching them that their loyalty is to the government and not their sect; that they must treat prisoners with respect; that they must behave professionally at all times. The continuing presence of U.S. soldiers is critical to the Iraqis' performance. The Iraqi army is holding together as well as it is because it is backed up and supported, materially and psychologically, by the U.S. Army--and by a sense that the U.S. Army will be there for quite a while to come. It is this simple: No stable and energetic U.S. Army presence--no successful Iraqi army. And without an Iraqi army, expect civil war.
Iraq is at a critical turning point, and U.S. forces are essential to helping the Iraqis get past it. Reducing the U.S. presence in the near future makes no sense, and constantly talking about reducing our forces is counterproductive and enervating. If U.S. force levels are (at least) kept steady while reliable Iraqi forces continue to increase--and the U.S. Army and Marines continue to join with the Iraqis in aggressively fighting the insurgents--the overall level of force that can be brought to bear against the insurgency, and in support of a political process that can hold the country together, will increase. And victory will then be achievable.
Ignore this advice,
"When we conduct this debate it must be done in a civil way," Mr. Bush said after meeting with groups that support legalizing illegal aliens. "It must be done in a way that doesn't pit one group of people against another."
and adopt rhetoric like this,
Illegal immigrants are "a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation" [Rep. Tancredo (R-CO) says.
From today's Los Angeles Times:
Iran's Nuclear Steps Quicken, Diplomats Say
VIENNA — With efforts to halt its nuclear program at an impasse, Iran is moving faster than expected and is just days from making the first steps toward enriching uranium, said diplomats who have been briefed on the program.
If engineers encounter no major technical problems, Iran could manufacture enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb within three years, much more quickly than the common estimate of five to 10 years, the diplomats said....
According to one non-Western official who closely follows Iran's progress, engineers at a pilot plant in Natanz are likely to start crucial testing in the next couple of days to ensure that the centrifuges and the pipes connecting them are properly vacuum sealed. They are likely to begin feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into a series of 164 connected centrifuges within about two weeks, the official said.
Diplomats and experts say Iran has forgone usual testing periods for individual centrifuges and small series of linked centrifuges, instead apparently trying to put together as many as possible, as quickly as possible.
They said Iran also was likely to begin assembling more centrifuges in mid-April to put together additional cascades of linked centrifuges. The pilot plant can hold up to six cascades of 164 centrifuges each. It could take many months to complete that work, the diplomats said.
The U.S. and its British, French and German allies believe Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, and must be stopped before learning how to enrich uranium. They view the ability to operate a series of centrifuges as a technological tipping point.
"If you can do one centrifuge, you can do 164," said Emyr Jones Parry, British envoy to the U.N. "If you can do 164, you probably can do many more. That means you have the potential to do full-scale enrichment. If you can do enrichment up to 7%, you can do 80%. If you can do 80%, you can produce a bomb"....
The three-year time frame for Iran to produce a bomb cited by diplomats is the same as an estimate by former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright.
In a paper that will be released Monday by the Institute for Science and International Security, which Albright founded, he and a colleague give a detailed description of how, under a best-case scenario, Iran would be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a crude nuclear device in three years. Albright cautioned, however, that Iran faces many technical hurdles it might find difficult to overcome....
The European Union and the Americans want to exert vigorous pressure on Iran. They insist on a reinstatement of a total moratorium on uranium enrichment that Iran had voluntarily put in place in late 2004 while negotiating with the EU. The U.S. and EU are willing to use a U.N. procedure that gives Security Council resolutions the force of law, and to impose sanctions.
The Russians and the Chinese, mindful of the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq three years ago, fear that taking too hard a line would lead to an escalation of tensions that could result in military action against Iran. They believe that sanctions and other measures might push Iran to abandon the nonproliferation treaty, which keeps international inspectors in the country.
Russia and China would be willing to allow Iran to retain a small cascade of centrifuges for research purposes....
"We're getting to the point where this fundamental difference between the U.S. and EU position and that of the Russians is being overtaken by Iran's … putting new facts on the ground," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who previously worked for the U.S. State Department on nuclear issues. "Iran is closer and closer to enrichment, so the effort to deny them the capability is rapidly failing."
Let's hope our intelligence on the status of Iran's nuclear program is better than we had on Saddam's in 1991.
From a Worldwide Standard post, January 13, 2006:
Saddam Came Close to Having a Nuke in '91; Today, Iran Follows Saddam's Nuclear Procurement Playbook
It's easy to forget that the resolution authorizing force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait barely passed Congress. It's easy to forget that Iraq had passed frequent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections designed to ensure its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or that its Manhattan Project-sized nuclear program went undetected by US intelligence. It's also easy to forget just how skilled Saddam became at deception post-Osirak.
Some history --
Iraq ratified the NPT in 1969. Twelve year later, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. According to the June 22, 1981 Newsweek,
[t]he Osirak reactor was theoretically only for research purposes—but Iraq twice refused a French offer to supply it with low-enriched uranium, insisting instead on weapons-grade, 93 per cent enriched fuel. Iraq was also operating an Italian-built “hot cell” lab for extracting plutonium, and had arranged to buy large quantities of uranium from Brazil, Portugal and Niger—all without any investment in a nuclear-energy program.
In his 2002 book, The Threatening Storm, Clinton NSC official Kenneth Pollack wrote that Osirak “was the key to Saddam’s nuclear weapons program and ... was due to go online within a matter of weeks.” The bombing set Iraq’s “nuclear bomb program back by several years,” but it also “taught the Iraqis an important lesson. Thereafter, Saddam ordered a redoubling of the Iraqi program...camouflaged against detection.” (Pollack would subsequently note this regarding Saddam's nuclear program.)
After the Osirak attack, Iraq would pursue a secret nuclear weapons program that had gone undetected by Western intelligence and the IAEA until after the 1991 Gulf War. As former U.N. inspector David Kay wrote in a 1995 Washington Quarterly piece, Iraq would pursue this program while maintaining “its status as a full member” of the NPT because it was “the desire of the military and security services not to attract any undue attention to Iraq’s developing nuclear program that would complicate procurement and development efforts.”
The fact that Hussein was able to conceal his nuclear program was even more remarkable given that: 1) as the Washington Post noted in October 1991, the “scope and sophistication” of its program “resembled the Manhattan Project, the American effort that produced the first atomic bomb”; and 2) Iraq had passed regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
On August 11, 1991, the Post reported that:
International inspectors...unearthed one of the most important—and disturbing—finds of the post-Cold War era: a huge assembly line for the covert manufacture of equipment to make an Iraqi bomb.
The location of the sophisticated, secret factory for manufacturing hundreds of uranium gas centrifuges was unknown to any foreign intelligence agency despite intense scrutiny and untouched by five weeks of severe aerial bombardment during the Gulf War that supposedly eviscerated the Iraqi nuclear project. As such, it is a monument to the world’s ignorance about what a determined bomb-builder such as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein can do.
The factory was a key component in Iraq’s elaborate highly redundant and largely secret network of physics, chemistry and metallurgical laboratories, industrial mines, metalworking factories, electrical power generators, nuclear research reactors and radioactive waste processing sites—all aimed at swiftly putting a nuclear weapon in the hands of one of the world’s most ruthless leaders.
The Post also reported:
Despite repeated warnings and Saddam’s own public statements, Western experts consistently underestimated Iraq’s scientific and technical capabilities. Inspection officials now believe Iraq was only 12 to 18 months from producing its first bomb, not five to 10 years as previously thought.
Kay wrote that Iraq hid its program by keeping it “heavily compartmentalized” and employing a variety of deception techniques. For example, Iraq created a network of front companies to import nuclear-related materials “in quantities that were below the size that triggered controls.” Equipment was imported ostensibly for civilian purposes but was diverted to the nuclear program as well. (see here for UNMOVIC May 2003 report on Iraq's attempt to "conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks" for missiles, chems & bios)
The Iraqis, Kay continued, had an “accurate understanding of the limitations of U.S. technical collection systems...” and exploited these vulnerabilities through various methods, including:
construction of buildings within buildings...
hiding power and water feeds to mislead as to facility use...
diminishing value of a facility by apparent low security and lack of defenses...
moving critical pieces of equipment at night....
Apparently, Iran has taken a page out of Saddam's nuclear weapons procurement book.
(Though Somalia gets little media attention these days, it remains a battleground for radical Islamists. From Reuters:
MOGADISHU - Heavy fighting between rival Somali militia linked to Islamic courts and a new "anti-terror" alliance has killed about 90 people in the last three days in the capital, Mogadishu, residents and local radio said on Friday.
The United States is also concerned that a small number of Somalis may be providing a safe-haven for these foreign terrorists inside Somalia, which undermines the efforts of those seeking to establish peace in Somalia and threatens the stability of the Horn of Africa," the statement added.)
Posted on February 20, 2006:
Since the early 1990s, al Qaeda has targeted Somalia. Back then, American forces and U.N peacekeepers were the target. Today, as in other regions of the world, they are also increasingly aiming their gun sights on moderate Muslims. From the BBC:
The fighting pits a new group, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, against the Islamic Courts' militia....
Our correspondent says at least five warlords-cum-ministers in the transitional government are behind the new alliance, which is battling the Islamic Courts.
The courts have set up Mogadishu's only judicial system in parts of the capital but have been accused of links to al-Qaeda.
Their critics accuse the courts of being behind the killing of moderate Muslim scholars.
(From AP: "Russia had a military intelligence unit operating in Iraq up through the 2003 U.S. invasion and fall of Baghdad, a Russian analyst said Friday. A Pentagon report said Russia provided Saddam Hussein with intelligence on U.S. military movements and plans. The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing two captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians collected information from sources "inside the American Central Command" and that battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad."
Posted on January 30, 2006:
From Stephen Hayes:
A follow-up on Dan McKivergan’s post on Russia and Iran. Dan wrote of the worrisome prospect of the U.S. putting its trust in Putin on Iran: “We better have a Plan B if Moscow's recent past is prologue. “ The examples he and Mort Zuckerman provide are deeply disturbing. There are more. Russian intelligence services, for instance, trained Iraqi intelligence operatives as late as September 2002, even as Putin and his cronies spoke publicly of a “common goal” on Iraq between the U.S. and Russia.
It’s September 2002. President Bush gives a speech to the UN making clear that his administration would hold Iraq to account for its defiance of UN resolutions. The Russian government, which for years had carried Iraq’s water on the UN Security Council, announced that it would not send troops in the event of war in Iraq and fought hard against U.S. and British efforts to confront Saddam Hussein.
Nonetheless, Russia eventually endorsed UN Resolution 1441, which threatened “serious consequences” that would result from Iraq’s continued flouting of previous UN resolutions. Putin’s government spoke of its partnership with the U.S. on the war on terror. Putin spokesman Sergei Prikhodko declared: "Russia and the United States have a common goal regarding the Iraqi issue" – disarmament. And Russian Foreign Minister Boris Malakhov proclaimed that the U.S. and Russia “are partners in the anti-terror coalition.”
Not quite.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Robert Collier wrote a series of articles in April 2003 on Russian double-dealing on Iraq. The articles provide a stark reminder of the perils in working with Putin’s Russia and of the need to expedite the exploitation of 2 million documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan:
A Moscow-based organization was training Iraqi intelligence agents as recently as last September -- at the same time Russia was resisting the Bush administration's push for a tough stand against Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi documents discovered by The Chronicle show.
The documents found Thursday and Friday in a Baghdad office of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, indicate that at least five agents graduated Sept. 15 from a two-week course in surveillance and eavesdropping techniques, according to certificates issued to the Iraqi agents by the "Special Training Center" in Moscow.
The Russian government, which has expressed intense disagreement with the U.S.-led war on Iraq, has repeatedly denied giving any military or security assistance to the Hussein regime. Any such aid would violate U.N. sanctions that have severely limited trade, military and other relations with Iraq since 1991.
U.S.-Russian relations have been strained by the split over Iraq. It is unclear whether these revelations, coming on top of U.S. charges that Moscow has been supplying other forms of forbidden assistance to Baghdad, may damage them further.
The “Moscow-based organization,” it turns out, was the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
Russian intelligence officials have confirmed that Iraqi spies received training in specialized counterintelligence techniques in Moscow last fall -- training that appears to violate the United Nations resolution barring military and security assistance to Iraq.
A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Boris Labusov, acknowledged that Iraqi secret police agents had been trained by his agency but said the training was for nonmilitary purposes, such as fighting crime and terrorism.
Said Labrusov: "The SVR does not refuse cooperation with secret services of different countries in the areas of counter-terrorism and war, fighting drug traffic and investigating the illegal trade of weapons.”
The Chronicle article continues:
However, it seems likely that the Iraqi agents who were trained at the Moscow center were using their skills for other purposes. Found in the same Mukhabarat office with their personnel files and graduation certificates were a host of other documents, including orders for wiretaps and for break-ins at such sites as the Iranian Embassy, the five-star al-Mansour Hotel and private doctors' offices.
Ronald Reagan’s famous aphorism about dealing with the Soviets was “Trust but Verify.” Perhaps it needs updating.
“Don’t Trust.”
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offers some foreign policy advice, "Good versus evil isn't a strategy," for the White House in today's Los Angeles Times. It's very nice of her. The sophisticated Clintonites weaved a world of stability and hope. They were problem solvers, not ideologues, you see. They enticed Pyongyang to "end" its nuclear weapons program with lots of goodies. They brokered Israel-Palestinian negotiations that brought both sides closer to peace. They reacted quickly to events in Rwanda and in the Balkans. They sent a message of strength and resolve following attacks on our forces in Mogadishu and in Dhahran, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and on the USS Cole. And because they acted against the Taliban, thousands upon thousands were prevented from graduating from the extensive network of al Qaeda terror training camps in Afghanistan and setting up shop in nations across the globe. They handed Bush a stable world in January 2001 and then September 11 hit and the ideologues took over, as Sec. Albright informs us. She also has an interesting take on regime change in Iran:
the Bush administration should disavow any plan for regime change in Iran — not because the regime should not be changed but because U.S. endorsement of that goal only makes it less likely. In today's warped political environment, nothing strengthens a radical government more than Washington's overt antagonism. It also is common sense to presume that Iran will be less willing to cooperate in Iraq and to compromise on nuclear issues if it is being threatened with destruction.
The odd thing here is that Sec. Albright was, I believe, the first senior American official to call publicly for the ouster of Saddam Hussein. She even compared Saddam to Hitler, noting that the world has not "seen, except maybe since Hitler, somebody who is quite as evil as Saddam Hussein." One of the lessons of history, Albright also lectured, is that "if you don't stop a horrific dictator before he gets started too far--that he can do untold damage" and "if the world had been firmer with Hitler earlier, then chances are that we might not have needed to send Americans to Europe during the Second World War. So, my lesson out of all this is deal with the problem at the time that you can and don't step away from it thinking that it'll go away. I think that's the lesson here."
But if "the Bush administration should disavow any plan for regime change in Iran — not because the regime should not be changed but because U.S. endorsement of that goal only makes it less likely," why did she champion regime change in Iraq? Why did President Clinton sign the Iraq Liberation Act, which specifically called for regime change in Iraq? Why did National Security Advisor Sandy Berger deliver a lengthy speech justifying the need for regime change in Iraq? Why did the Clinton administration call publicly for regime change in Iraq if doing so, according to Albright's own logic, not only made Saddam's ouster "less likely" but also strengthened his hold on power because of our "overt antagonism"?
Would Secretary Albright now like to say that she regrets the Clinton administration's comments about Saddam Hussein and the need to get rid of him?
From today's New York Sun:
CAIRO, Egypt - A former Democratic senator and 9/11 commissioner says a recently declassified Iraqi account of a 1995 meeting between Osama bin Laden and a senior Iraqi envoy presents a "significant set of facts," and shows a more detailed collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
In an interview yesterday, the current president of the New School University, Bob Kerrey, was careful to say that new documents translated last night by ABC News did not prove Saddam Hussein played a role in any way in plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Nonetheless, the former senator from Nebraska said that the new document shows that "Saddam was a significant enemy of the United States." Mr. Kerrey said he believed America's understanding of the deposed tyrant's relationship with Al Qaeda would become much deeper as more captured Iraqi documents and audiotapes are disclosed...
"This is a very significant set of facts," former 9/11 commissioner, Mr. Kerry said yesterday. "I personally and strongly believe you don't have to prove that Iraq was collaborating against Osama bin Laden on the September 11 attacks to prove he was an enemy and that he would collaborate with people who would do our country harm. This presents facts should not be used to tie Saddam to attacks on September 11. It does tie him into a circle that meant to damage the United States."
The document may be found here.
The other day the Powerline guys noted that NBC News managed to bury a legitimate scoop "beneath a grotesquely misleading headline." They wrote:
March 22, 2006
It Helps to Read Past the Headline...
...of this report by NBC on the CIA's secret source within Saddam's inner circle: Foreign Minister Naji Sabri. The headline and subhead read: "Iraqi diplomat gave U.S. prewar WMD details. Saddam’s foreign minister told CIA the truth, so why didn’t agency listen?
You have to read deep into the story to learn that Sabri told the CIA that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons:
Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had "poison gas" left over from the first Gulf War. Both Sabri and the agency were wrong.
So NBC had a legitimate scoop, and they buried it in a single sentence beneath a grotesquely misleading headline.
Obviously, if Saddam's Foreign Minister admitted that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and leftover poison gas, that would have been seen as the final confirmation of what everyone in the intelligence community already believed. And Sabri's statement that Saddam "desperately wanted a [nuclear bomb]" but would need more than a few months to a year to build one--bizarrely presented as exculpatory by NBC--would hardly have been reassuring.
It's worth noting, too, that NBC's story is based on leaks by anonymous intelligence officials, who, consistent with their usual practice, no doubt spun the story in as anti-Bush a direction as they could. We don't know exactly what Sabri told the CIA.
By rights, this should be the last nail in the coffin of the "Bush lied!" left. But of course it won't be; the "Bush lied!" theory has been deader than a doornail for a long time, but that hasn't prevented it from being retailed by the left.
Today's Washington Post adds new information to the NBC News piece but not until paragraphs five and six. We learn that Sabri told the CIA that Saddam was lying, that biological weapons research was underway, and that Saddam had dispersed chemical weapons to loyal tribes.
Publicly Sabri was insisting that Iraq had no prohibited weapons of mass destruction. Privately, the sources said, he provided information that the Iraqi dictator had ambitions for a nuclear program but that it was not active, and that no biological weapons were being produced or stockpiled, although research was underway.
When it came to chemical weapons, Sabri told his handler that some existed but they were not under military control, a former intelligence official familiar with the situation said. Another former official added: "He said he had been told Hussein had them dispersed among some of the loyal tribes."
To recap, on March 18, 2003, the day before ground forces entered Iraq, the president confronted a broad range of concerns regarding Saddam's weapons programs, his connections to terrorist organizations (see here for latest revelations), his history of aggressive behavior, his use of poison gas, and his failure to comply with the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire agreement and subsequent U.N. resolutions.
American intelligence (which had evidently factored in Sabri's claims into its analysis) and other foreign governments concluded at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. On top of this were the findings contained in detailed U.N. reports. For example, on March 6, 2003, the United Nations issued a report on Iraq's "Unresolved Disarmament Issues." It stated that the "long list" of "unaccounted for" WMD-related material catalogued in December of 1998--the month inspections ended in Iraq--and beyond were still "unaccounted for." The list included: up to 3.9 tons of VX nerve agent (though inspectors believed Iraq had enough VX precursors to produce 200 tons of the agent and suspected that VX had been "weaponized"); 6,526 aerial chemical bombs; 550 mustard gas shells; 2,062 tons of Mustard precursors; 15,000 chemical munitions; 8,445 liters of anthrax; growth media that could have produced "3,000 - 11,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 6,000 - 16,000 litres of anthrax, up to 5,600 litres of Clostridium perfringens, and a significant quantity of an unknown bacterial agent." Moreover, Iraq was obligated to account for this material by providing "verifiable evidence" that it had, in fact, destroyed its proscribed materials (see more on Hans Blix and the "verifiable evidence" standard here).
The same report noted "a surge of activity in the missile technology field in the past four years" and that while 817 of the 819 Scud missiles Iraq had imported had been accounted for, inspectors did not know the number of missiles Iraq had indigenously produced or still possessed. Similarly, while inspectors had accounted for 73 of Iraq's 75 declared "special" warheads, doubts remained that Iraqi officials were truthful about how many had actually been manufactured. It acknowledged that inspectors had found a handful of 122mm chemical rocket warheads but noted that this discovery may only be the "tip of the iceberg" since several thousand, in the inspectors' judgment, were still unaccounted for. It also stated that no underground chemical facilities had been found but added that such facilities may exist given the size of Iraq and that future inspections in this area would have to rely on "specific intelligence." Finally, the report declared that there appears to be no "choke points" to prevent Iraq from producing anthrax at the same level it did before 1991, that large-scale Iraqi production of botulinum toxin "could be rapidly commenced," and that given Iraq's history of concealment, "it cannot be excluded that it has retained some capability with regard to VX."
A former ABC news employee I've known for many years, who worked in the same New York City headquarters as John Green, called to tell me that he's not surprised by Green's September 30, 2004 email. Bush had used the "mixed messages" line several times in attacking the Kerry's position on Iraq during their debate in Coral Gables, Florida. From Drudge:
ABC NEWS EXEC: 'BUSH MAKES ME SICK'; E-MAIL REVEALED
**Exclusive**
A top producer at ABC NEWS declared "Bush makes me sick" in an email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT.
John Green, currently executive producer of the weekend edition of GOOD MORNING AMERICA, unloaded on the president in an ABC company email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT.
"If he uses the 'mixed messages' line one more time, I'm going to puke," Green complained.
The blunt comments by Green, along with other emails obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT, further reveal the inner workings of the nation's news outlets.
The former ABC employee told me that the anti-Republican attitude was pervasive in the news division. One time, in particular, during the 2000 Florida recount, this person overheard (and will "never forget") a vice president of the news desk tell another senior news desk member in the hallway that, "I hate the f**cking Republicans."
I know. What a shock!
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes today on a "study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes ... at Harvard, that estimates the 'true costs' of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly even $2 trillion." Just so you know where the authors are coming from here's some material from the "study" that didn't make into Herbert's column:
"Many aspects of the Iraq venture have turned out differently from what was purported before the war: there were no weapons of mass destruction, no clear link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, no imminent danger that would warrant a pre-emptive war. Whether Americans were greeted as liberators or not, there is evidence that they are now viewed as occupiers. Stability has not been established. Clearly, the benefits of the War have been markedly different from those claimed."
"At the beginning of the War, there was a great deal of talk about winning the hearts and minds of those in the Middle East. Recent opinion polls reflecting public opinion in the Arab world show that exactly the opposite has happened. Some American businesses have even claimed that anti-Americanism spawned by the Iraq War has had an effect on their sales and profits. America’s credibility has been diminished: if some time in the future another American President were to claim that he had solid evidence based on intelligence that there was a threat, that evidence is more likely to be treated with skepticism. America has always prided itself in fighting for human rights; but America’s credentials have been tarnished by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. These are among the many costs of the Iraq War that we do not attempt to quantify, but which should clearly be counted in any assessment of the Iraq War."
"The bombings in Madrid and London have only exacerbated a growing sense of insecurity. Would matters have been even worse had there been no war? One of the stated objectives of the war was to enhance the sense of security (to make sure that the war on terrorism was fought there, not here.) It is conceivable that the Middle East would have been even more unstable than it is today. But especially on the basis of what we know today—Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and it did not have the capacities to develop them quickly – this seems unlikely, Contrary to the assertions before the War by the Administration, Iraq (with its highly secular regime) was not working with Al Qaeda, and was not a training ground for insurgency. Unfortunately, the disorder that has followed the war has provided a place where such training is going on today."
"The price of oil is significantly higher today than it was before the War in Iraq. Even as the country went to war, it was recognized that it might have effects on the global oil market. Some of the remarks of those in the Administration seem to suggest that it may have even been a factor driving the country to war. Larry Lindsey is reported to have said, “the best way to keep oil prices in check is a short, successful war on Iraq…”
The higher price of oil brings costs and benefits. Profits of the oil companies have increased enormously. It is the one group (besides certain defense contractors) that has clearly benefited from the war. (Though popular discussions of the still not-clear motives for going to war often focused on oil, there is so far no reason to suppose that these benefits to one of the President’s “constituencies” played an important motivation.)"
"Economists also think about the value of information. In this situation, postponing war might have allowed us to gather better information with which to judge whether Iraq posed a real threat. This is not, as Americans say, Monday morning quarterbacking: there were already strong suspicions regarding our sources of intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. More time would have enabled the verification of this evidence. The value of this information would have been enormous. The possibility of war later on would have still been an option. Tens of thousands of lives would have been spared, and hundreds of billions of dollars saved."
"All of this leads to economists’ constant urging that politicians undertake a cost benefit analysis before undertaking any project—especially one with as significant consequences as war."
"In response to accusations about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the connection with Al Qaeda, the Administration has been adamant that it did not intentional deceive the American people; it prefers charges of incompetence to those of malevolence."
"We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might actually have succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of those in the Middle East."
You get the picture. They would have left Saddam in power. They also urge politicians to "undertake a cost benefit analysis before undertaking any project—especially one with as significant consequences as war." Robert Kagan and Gerald Baker offer their own "cost benefit analysis" of following the advice of Stiglitz and Bilmes here and here.
Of course, the authors can write whatever they want but to consider this a serious academic "study" is like calling Fahrenheit 9/11 a balanced documentary.
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