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News :: International Relations |
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Analysis: Anatomy Of A Quack-Mire |
Current rating: 0 |
by Jim Lobe
(No verified email address) |
13 Jul 2003
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How could such smart people get so much wrong? |
How could such smart people get so much wrong?
”I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators,” U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney declared on television just as U.S. troops were massing along the border between Kuwait and Iraq on the eve of Washington's march to Baghdad.
”Wildly off the mark,” declared Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, when asked by senators just before the war whether he agreed with then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's estimate that more than 200,000 troops would be needed as an occupation force after the war.
”I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common knowledge between (al Qaeda and Iraq) was involved” in the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, former Central Intelligence Agency chief and Defense Policy Board member James Woolsey testified before a federal court just before the war.
”We know where they are,” Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld assured television viewers about the location of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at the end of March, two weeks into the war. ”They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
”The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” declared President George W. Bush in his late-January State of the Union address.
”We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization,” asserted Cheney on the war's eve.
Now, three months after U.S. troops consolidated control over Iraq, not only has the White House admitted that neither it nor the British ever had solid--as opposed to obviously forged--evidence that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa; no WMD have been discovered; the notion of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda has been officially dismissed by a special U.N. panel; and public sentiment in Iraq--at least as registered by even the compliant U.S. press--appears ever more doubtful about its ”liberation,” to say the least.
That last observation is bolstered by the fact the administration is engaged in a major debate over whether significantly more troops than the 145,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now are needed to secure the country. Washington has asked no less than 70 countries to contribute troops or police--at mostly U.S. taxpayers' expense--to an occupation that is increasingly open-ended.
Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers, including growing numbers of Republicans, have become distinctly uneasy about the situation in Iraq, as the gap between the confident predictions made at the start of the war by top U.S. officials and the grim reality of the actual situation--in which U.S. allied and soldiers are facing an average of 13 violent attacks each day--appears to be moving toward guerrilla warfare.
”The problem here is that Americans are unsure about the future of our involvement in Iraq,” Republican Sen. John McCain, an Iraq hawk before the war, gently told an increasingly defensive Rumsfeld at a hearing Wednesday as Democrats called openly for the administration to swallow its pride and ask NATO, if not the U.N., to take over. ”So what you need to do, in my view, is give...a concrete plan as much as you can.”
The 'Q' word--for quagmire--not to mention the 'V' word, for Vietnam--is back in mainstream discourse as each day appears to bring the killing of at least one more U.S. or British soldier, and U.S. troops and officers in Iraq tell television cameras that they are stretched far too thinly to impose order on a country the size of California with a population that grows less and less appreciative of their presence, and appears to be harboring people who actually want them dead.
”The Army is getting bogged down in a morale-numbing 4th Generation War in Iraq that is now taking on some appearances of the Palestinian Intifada,” according to a comment late last month on an all-military website, while even some conventional media have suggested that Iraq could turn into a U.S. Chechnya.
”Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated,” the Christian Science Monitor reported this week. The Monitor quoted from one letter by an Army soldier: ”Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home.” An officer from the same Division: ”Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom.”
U.S. Middle East experts, particularly former diplomats and intelligence officers and academic analysts, had long warned that defeating Iraq militarily would be the easy part. The key question was, what about the morning after? These were the same specialists who also questioned the administration's assertions about Iraq's links to al Qaeda, its reconstitution of a nuclear program, and the more extravagant claims about the quantity of chemical and biological weapons it had at its disposal.
But their views were systematically ignored, even in Congress where most Democrats, eager not to be seen as ”soft” on Saddam post-9/11, were reluctant to be seen as calling into question the words of a popular president.
Just as evidence--such as the CIA's conclusion that the ”British” reports about Iraqi uranium purposes were forged--was diverted or deep-sixed before it could affect policy-making, so it is clear that those who actually knew something about the Middle East were excluded from policy-making circles.
”It is fairly incredible that the civilians in the Pentagon inhaled their own propaganda about the welcome that U.S. forces would receive from the Iraqis,” said retired ambassador Chas Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council, a group of former U.S. officials and analysts who specialize in the region. ”No one who knew anything about the region ever bought the notion that U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators, but no one who knew anything about the region was invited to take part in policy discussions.”
The result, however, is that the ideologues, particularly those clustered around Cheney and Rumsfeld, simply reinforced each other's assumptions and attacked everyone, including the real experts, who disagreed with them.
The professionals were seen by the hawks as apologists for Arab dictators, Israel-haters, Saudi-lovers, shills for Big Oil, intellectually incurious, and slaves to traditional thinking. As Rumsfeld once complained about U.S. intelligence, ”We tend to hear what we expect to hear, whether it's bad or good. Human nature is that way. Unless something is jarring, you tend to stay on your track and get it reinforced rather than recalibrated.”
So certain was Rumsfeld that the professionals were wrong, that he set up his own shop to ”recalibrate” the intelligence, staffing it with people hand-picked by and ideologically compatible with Wolfowitz. At the same time, Cheney and his deputy, I. Scooter Libby, made frequent visits to CIA headquarters in what was taken as an effort to intimidate the analysts (and presumably CIA director George Tenet). It never occurred to the hawks, of course, that they might be as susceptible to human nature's failings as the professionals.
When the professionals argued in the administration's inner councils that U.S. troops would face as much apprehension and hostility as gratitude from key sectors of the Iraqi population, the hawks replied that they underestimated the attraction and political skills of a man like Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), who told them of his far-reaching secret network of informants and supporters inside Iraq.
Indeed, it was ”defectors” who were ”recruited” by the INC who provided the information that made the ideologues so confident about the existence of WMD, the ties between Baghdad and al Qaeda, and the rapturous greeting U.S. soldiers would get in Baghdad and on the way there.
”Why was the Pentagon so unprepared for the Day After?” asked Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs analyst for The Philadelphia Inquirer. ”Back in November,” she wrote last week, ”Wolfowitz told me he believed that the London-based Iraqi opposition (headed by Ahmed Chalabi) would return to Baghdad and assume the reins of power, just as Gen. Charles de Gaulle and the Free French returned triumphantly to postwar France.”
The hawks thus saw westernized Chalabi, who had not been in Baghdad since he was a teenager, as the man of destiny whom U.S. military forces had merely to install in the capital. The professionals, who had worked with him in the early 1990s, on the other hand, saw him as a confidence man.
”What he did was pander to the dreams of a group of powerful men, centered in the Pentagon, the Defense Policy Board, the vice president's office, and various think tanks scattered around Washington,” according to Thomas Engelhardt, a New York writer who produces a daily web log on the war.
”The thing that needs to be grasped here is that since 1991 these men have been dreaming up a storm about reconfiguring the Middle East, while scaling the heavens (via various Star Wars programs for the militarization of space), and so nailing down an American earth for eternity. Their dreams were utopian and so, by definition, unrealizable. Theirs were lava dreams, and they were dreamt, like all such burning dreams, without much reference to the world out there. They were perfect pickings for a Chalabi.”
Of course, the fact that Chalabi is now scarcely mentioned as a possible political force in Iraq is barely acknowledged by the hawks who still insist, albeit with less conviction, that things are going their way and that there is no reason to panic.
Copyright 2003 Inter Press Service
http://www.ips.org/%20 |
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Bush Team Split As CIA Becomes The Fall Guy |
by Tim Reid
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Jul 2003
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ONE BY ONE, all the President’s men rounded on George Tenet yesterday, forcing the CIA Director to issue a resounding mea culpa that is likely to bring his career to an abrupt end.
The first salvo in what degenerated into open warfare within the Bush Administration was fired by the President himself, blaming the CIA for the inclusion of a false claim about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program in his State of the Union address last January.
The extraordinary public blame Mr Bush heaped upon the agency was underscored by Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser, who summoned reporters covering Mr Bush’s Africa tour to tell them that the CIA had “cleared the speech in its entirety”.
Their finger-pointing exposed the bitter blame game raging within the Administration as the issue of Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction finally caught fire in Washington.
It capped one of the worst weeks Mr Bush has endured since the September 11 attacks and put the normally sure-footed White House on the defensive as it struggled to protect the President from allegations that he he may have knowingly lied to the American public.The Oval Office’s attack on the CIA caused a sensation on Capitol Hill, and brought calls from Democrats for a congressional investigation. The internal warfare was triggered by last week’s White House admission that Mr Bush was wrong to have claimed in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa. That claim was based on intelligence reports that Saddam sought nuclear material from Niger.
After it emerged that the CIA and State Department were told 11 months before the speech that the claim was bogus, congressmen demanded to know why Mr Bush repeated the allegation.
In anonymous briefings to the US media on Thursday CIA officials insisted that the agency explicitly told the White House that the claim was false before the speech. They also said they had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the British Government on this.
That triggered yesterday’s furious White House counter-attack, with Mr Bush saying: “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.”
Dr Rice also insisted that the CIA cleared the speech in its entirety. “If the CIA — the Director of Central Intelligence — had said ‘Take this out of the speech’, it would have been gone.” She added that Mr Tenet was a “terrific” Director, but in Washington her words were seen as devastating.
Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also weighed in. Mr Roberts, a Republican, said that ten days before the speech the CIA was still standing behind the Niger claim. “If the CIA had changed its position, it was incumbent on the Director of Central Intelligence to correct the record and bring it to the immediate attention of the President. It appears that he failed,” Mr Roberts said. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, fueled the row by saying that he had not included the uranium-from-Africa claim in his presentation to the United Nations a week after Mr Bush’s speech because he doubted its veracity. John McCain, a Republican senator, said that there should be an investigation to determine how the bogus information made its way into the address. Dick Durbin, a senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: “Somebody in the White House knew. This really calls into question the leadership in the White House and our intelligence agencies.”
Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender, raised Watergate’s famous refrain: “We need to know what the President knew and when he knew it.” He demanded the resignation of any official who failed to tell Mr Bush the information was false.
“The only other possibility, which is unthinkable, is that the President of the United States knew himself that this was a false fact and he put it in the State of the Union anyhow. I hope for the sake of this country that did not happen,” he said. Democrats had begun taking the offensive even before yesterday’s developments, exploiting growing disquiet over mounting casualties in Iraq and over rising unemployment at home.
Mr Bush will arrive back from Africa today facing, for the first time since he took office, questions about his honesty, and looking vulnerable on foreign policy and national security — issues that until now he has successfully used to divide Democrats and unite the public behind him.
The President continues to enjoy an enviable 60 per cent approval rating — at this stage in their presidencies Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were 42 per cent and 47 per cent respectively — but a Gallup poll showed that public approval for Mr Bush’s stewardship of Iraq has fallen from almost 90 per cent in May to 58 per cent now.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, admitted this week that the monthly cost of the occupation is $3.9 billion (£2.75 billion), nearly double the Pentagon’s previous estimate.
Public and congressional disquiet also mounted after General Tommy Franks, the recently retired coalition commander, said US troops may have to remain in Iraq for up to four years.
Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Ltd
http://www.timesonline.co.uk |
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CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut In October; Why Bush Cited It In January Is Unclear |
by Walter Pincus and Mike Allen
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Jul 2003
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More and more, it is looking like the White House has ordered George Tenet and the CIA to take the blame to deflect attention from the president's manipulation of the facts (or non-facts.)
WASHINGTON - CIA Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior administration officials.
Tenet argued personally to White House officials, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used because it came from only a single source, according to one senior official. Another senior official with knowledge of the intelligence said the CIA had doubts about the accuracy of the documents underlying the allegation, which months later turned out to be forged.
The new disclosure suggests how eager the White House was in January to make Iraq's nuclear program a part of its case against Saddam Hussein even in the face of earlier objections by its own CIA director. It also appears to raise questions about the administration's explanation of how the faulty allegations were included in the State of the Union speech.
It is unclear why Tenet failed to intervene in January to prevent the questionable intelligence from appearing in the president's address to Congress when Tenet had intervened three months earlier in a much less symbolic speech. That failure may underlie his action Friday in taking responsibility for not stepping in again to question the reference. "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency," he said in Friday's statement.
As Bush left Africa yesterday to return to Washington from a five-day trip overshadowed by the intelligence blunder, he was asked whether he considered the matter over. "I do," he replied. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters yesterday that "the president has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well."
But it is clear from the new disclosure about Tenet's intervention last October that the controversy continues to boil, and as new facts emerge a different picture is being presented than the administration has given to date.
Details about the alleged attempt by Iraq to buy as much as 500 tons of uranium oxide were contained in a national intelligence estimate (NIE) that was concluded in late September 2002. It was that same reference that the White House wanted to use in Bush's Oct. 7 speech that Tenet blocked, the sources said. That same intelligence report was the basis for the 16-word sentence about Iraq attempting to buy uranium in Africa that was contained in the January State of the Union address that has drawn recent attention.
Administration sources said White House officials, particularly those in the office of Vice President Cheney, insisted on including Hussein's quest for a nuclear weapon as a prominent part of their public case for war in Iraq. Cheney had made the potential threat of Hussein having a nuclear weapon a central theme of his August 2002 speeches that began the public buildup toward war with Baghdad.
In the Oct. 7 Cincinnati speech, the president for the first time outlined in detail the threat Hussein posed to the United States on the eve of a congressional vote authorizing war. Bush talked in part about "evidence" indicating that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. The president listed Hussein's "numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists," satellite photographs showing former nuclear facilities were being rebuilt, and Iraq's attempts to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes for use in enriching uranium for nuclear weapons.
There was, however, no mention of Niger or even attempts to purchase uranium from other African countries, which was contained in the NIE and also included in a British intelligence dossier that had been published a month earlier.
By January, when conversations took place with CIA personnel over what could be in the president's State of the Union speech, White House officials again sought to use the Niger reference since it still was in the NIE.
"We followed the NIE and hoped there was more intelligence to support it," a senior administration official said yesterday. When told there was nothing new, White House officials backed off, and as a result "seeking uranium from Niger was never in drafts," he said.
Tenet raised no personal objection to the ultimate inclusion of the sentence, attributed to Britain, about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa. His statement on Friday said he should have. "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," the CIA director said.
Bush said in Abuja, Nigeria, yesterday that he continues to have faith in Tenet. "I do, absolutely," he said. "I've got confidence in George Tenet; I've got confidence in the men and women who work at the CIA."
There is still much that remains unclear about who specifically wanted the information inserted in the State of the Union speech, or why repeated concerns about the allegations were ignored.
"The information was available within the system that should have caught this kind of big mistake," a former Bush administration official said. "The question is how the management of the system, and the process that supported it, allowed this kind of misinformation to be used and embarrass the president."
Senior Bush aides said they do not believe they have a communication problem within the White House that prevented them from acting on any of the misgivings about the information that were being expressed at lower levels of the government.
"I'm sure there will have to be some retracing of steps, and that's what's happening," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said. "The mechanical process, we think is fine. Will more people now give more, tighter scrutiny going forward? Of course."
A senior administration official said Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael J. Gerson, does not remember who wrote the line that has wound up causing the White House so much grief.
Officials said three speechwriters were at the core of the State of the Union team, and that they worked from evidence against Iraq provided by the National Security Council. NSC officials dealt with the CIA both in gathering material for the speech and later in vetting the drafts.
Officials involved in preparing the speech said there was much more internal debate over the next line of the speech, when Bush said in reference to Hussein, "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations, noted a disagreement about Iraq's intentions for the tubes, which can be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium. The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency had raised those questions two weeks before the State of the Union address, saying Hussein claimed nonnuclear intentions for the tubes. In March, the IAEA said it found Hussein's claim credible, and could all but rule out the use of the tubes in a nuclear program.
Staff writer Dana Milbank contributed to this report from Nigeria.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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