Monday, June 16, 2003
I'm finally back. Good thing. Today I have a few articles to post, which I found interesting and wish to share:
U.S.: However Impolitic, Rumsfeld's Remarks May Reflect NATO Readjustment
By Jeremy Bransten
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stoked divisions in NATO anew yesterday. He said Washington may have to stop funding the construction of new NATO headquarters in Brussels and stop sending U.S. officials and soldiers to Belgium unless the country changes its controversial war crimes legislation. Belgium today replied that there is no need to alter the law since it has already been adequately amended. At a time when the alliance has been trying to repair divisions caused by the Iraq war, do Rumsfeld's words signal that effort is failing?
Prague, 13 June 2003 (RFE/RL) -- With characteristic bluntness, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has blasted Belgium for a controversial law that allows the country to prosecute war crimes suspects, regardless of their residence or citizenship. And he warned that Belgium could pay a heavy price unless it abolishes the measure.
Rumsfeld, speaking yesterday in Brussels, said lawsuits based on Belgium's universal competence law are "absurd." The law gives Belgian courts the authority to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, regardless of the crimes' connection to Belgium or the accused's presence on Belgian soil.
He added that the existence of the law calls into question Belgium's ability to host NATO headquarters.
The U.S. defense secretary went one step further, announcing that Washington is suspending funding for the construction of a new NATO building in Brussels.
"Until this matter is resolved, we will have to oppose any further spending for construction for a new NATO headquarters here in Brussels until we know with certainty that Belgium intends to be a hospitable place for NATO to conduct its business, as it has been over so many years," Rumsfeld said.
The disputed law has already led to lawsuits against former U.S. President George Bush Sr., Vice President Dick Cheney, and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, dating from the 1991 Gulf War, and more recently against General Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander in Iraq this year.
Confusion has now emerged in Belgium as to how the country will respond.
Earlier today, Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel noted that a recent amendment to the law limits its powers, allowing for cases to be sent to the defendants' country of origin, if that nation is deemed to have a fair and democratic legal system. That is what Belgium did in the case against Franks last month, although the other suits are still pending.
Michel said there is no reason to change the law any further or to abolish it.
But Andre Flahaut, Belgium's defense minister, said a further change in the law might be subject to negotiation.
One thing appears certain. Rumsfeld's comments will open further divisions at a time when NATO is trying to mend internal relations disrupted by the Iraq war. Although he is known for his frequent undiplomatic remarks, there is evidence that the U.S. defense secretary was not speaking off-the-cuff.
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a little-noticed amendment that asks the U.S. Defense Department to research the potential costs and logistics of moving NATO's military headquarters out of Belgium.
With the administration of President George W. Bush giving increased emphasis to NATO's newer members, such as Poland, some argue that the alliance should move its center eastward to reflect new realities. Many others ask whether NATO could, in fact, survive such a move.
Military analyst Timothy Garden of Britain's Royal Institute for International Affairs points out that since NATO works by consensus, reaching unanimous agreement on moving the alliance's headquarters out of Belgium would be nearly impossible. Garden believes that if the United States seriously pursues this goal, it could endanger the alliance's very viability.
"There are lots of strains in NATO and the threat either to push the headquarters presumably to the East -- which would be re-centering, if you like, the American perception of the 'new Europe' or interfering, as it would be seen, in the internal affairs of a NATO member, that is Belgium, trying to get it to change its laws to suit the United States -- either of those looks as though they would be intensely damaging to what already is a very bruised organization," Garden says.
Despite the increasingly high-profile role of countries like Poland in NATO, Garden says that if you look at the facts, Rumsfeld's so-called "new Europe" is big on enthusiasm but low on the military capabilities and financial resources that it can contribute to the alliance.
"The new European members that have come into NATO are, although very willing to give vocal support to U.S. policy, very limited [in their capabilities]. They may have some niche capabilities. If we take the example of the Polish proposal for looking after a sector of Iraq, the Poles during the Iraq conflict provided 200 support troops in a conflict which needed 200,000. And now that they're going into the post-conflict period, they're saying that they would welcome taking the headquarters role for this small sector, but they can only provide about 2,000 troops. And yet, the numbers that are needed are much greater than that," Garden says.
Aside from Britain, he says France and Germany continue to form essential military pillars for NATO and that will not change for quite some time.
"If you look now in Afghanistan, the biggest contribution is from Germany, and France has expeditionary capabilities. So, freezing them out is in nobody's interest because they have real capabilities that are useful to NATO, to the U.S. and to international stability, however it is flagged," he says.
Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, an independent think tank devoted to international affairs and trans-Atlantic relations. He agrees that the likelihood of NATO moving its headquarters out of Brussels in the near future is very slim. But he says Rumsfeld's statement -- however undiplomatic -- reflects the fact that a certain readjustment is taking place both within Europe and between certain countries of Europe and the United States and that this will have a long-term impact on NATO.
"This is an alliance which is in flux. The Cold War, we could say, is really, really, really over now, and I think we're at the beginning of asking the hard questions in a practical sort of way. To answer your question: I don't think NATO is moving anytime soon. But I think issues are going to be raised, not only about cost but strategic relevance, proximity to regions where we're going to be operating in the next 10, 20, 30 years, the interests of the West Europeans and the interests of the Central and East Europeans," Gedmin says.
Gedmin notes that the impetus for redefining the trans-Atlantic relationship comes as much from the United States as it does from countries like Germany and France, which are seeking to create pan-European structures that will give the continent a new, more robust political identity and likely change long-term ties with Washington.
"We're both in the process of renegotiating this relationship. It doesn't mean full-blown strategic divorce, but it's not the same kind of tightly integrated unit that we used to have," he says. "It's different now. And I think people are poking around and tapping around, sometimes even in the dark, trying to find out what is still relevant and in what ways. If we look at a map of Europe, we see that Western Europe is fixed, Central and Eastern Europe is being fixed and the likeliest hot spots and conflicts of the next 10 and 20 and 30 years will not be where I'm sitting here today in Berlin. And maybe it does make sense to contemplate moving some of our structures, institutions, and forces elsewhere, where they are closer to those regions."
If that happens, then perhaps Rumsfeld's words will be remembered as prescient -- not just impolitic.
More from the NYT:
June 14, 2003
The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz
By BILL KELLER
e're now up to Day 87 of the largely fruitless hunt for Iraq's unconventional weapons. Allegations keep piling up that the Bush administration tried to scam the world into war by exaggerating evidence of the Iraqi threat. One critic has pronounced it "arguably the worst scandal in American political history." So you might reasonably ask a supporter of the war, How do you feel about that war now?
Thanks for asking.
One easy answer is that between the excavation of mass graves, which confirms that we have rid the world of a horror, and President Bush's new willingness to engage the thankless tangle of Middle East diplomacy, which raises the hope that Iraq was more than a hit-and-run exercise, the war seems to have changed some important things for the better. This is true, but not quite enough.
Another easy answer is that it's not over yet. Just as we have yet to prove that we can transform a military conquest into a real Mission Accomplished, we have yet to complete our search of a country that, as Californians must be very tired of hearing, is the size of California. This is also true, but likewise inadequate.
I supported the war, with misgivings about the haste, the America-knows-best attitude and our ability to win the peace. The deciding factor for me was not the monstrosity of the regime (routing tyrants is a noble cause, but where do you stop?), nor the opportunity to detoxify the Middle East (another noble cause, but dubious justification for a war when hardly anyone else in the world supports you). No, I supported it mainly because of the convergence of a real threat and a real opportunity.
The threat was a dictator with a proven, insatiable desire for dreadful weapons that would eventually have made him, or perhaps one of his sadistic sons, a god in the region. The fact that he gave aid and at least occasional sanctuary to practitioners of terror added to his menace. And at the end his brazen defiance made us seem weak and vulnerable, an impression we can ill afford. The opportunity was a moment of awareness and political will created by Sept. 11, combined with the legal sanction reaffirmed by U.N. Resolution 1441. The important thing to me was never that Saddam Hussein's threat was "imminent" — although Sept. 11 taught us that is not such an easy thing to know — but that the opportunity to do something about him was finite. In a year or two, we would be distracted and Iraq would be back in the nuke-building business.
Even if you throw out all the tainted evidence, there was still what prosecutors call probable cause to believe that Saddam was harboring frightful weapons, and was bent on acquiring the most frightful weapons of all. The Clinton administration believed so. Two generations of U.N. inspectors believed so. It was not a Bush administration fabrication that Iraq had, and failed to account for, massive quantities of anthrax and VX nerve gas and other biological and chemical weapons. Saddam was under an international obligation to say where the poisons went, but did not.
What the Bush administration did was gild the lily — disseminating information that ranged from selective to preposterous. The president himself gave credence to the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, a story that (as Seymour Hersh's investigations leave little doubt) was based on transparently fraudulent information. Colin Powell in his February performance at the U.N. insisted that those famous aluminum tubes Iraq bought were intended for bomb-making, although the technical experts at the Department of Energy had made an awfully strong case that the tubes were for conventional rocket launchers. And as James Risen disclosed in The Times this week, two top Qaeda planners in custody told American interrogators — one of them well before the war was set in motion — that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Saddam. That inconclusive but potent evidence was kept quiet in the administration's zeal to establish a meaningful Iraqi connection to the fanatical war on America.
The motives for the dissembling varied. The hawks hyped the case (profusely) to prove we were justified in going to war, with or without allies. Mr. Powell hyped it (modestly) in the hope that the war, which he knew the president had already decided to wage, would not be a divisive, unilateral exercise. The president either believed what he wanted to believe or was given a stacked deck of information, and it's a close call which of those possibilities is scarier.
Those who say flimflam intelligence drove us to war, though, have got things backward. It seems much more likely that the decision to make war drove the intelligence.
The origins of this may be well intentioned. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the most dogged proponent of war against Iraq, is also a longtime skeptic of American institutional intelligence-gathering. He has argued over the years, from within the government and from outside, that the C.I.A. and its sister agencies often fail to place adequate emphasis on what they don't know, and that they "mirror-image" — make assumptions about what foreign regimes will do based on what we would do.
One tempting solution has been to deputize smart thinkers from outside the intelligence fraternity — a Team B — to second-guess the analysis of the A Team professionals. Mr. Wolfowitz was part of a famous 1976 Team B that attacked the C.I.A. for underestimating the Soviet threat. These days the top leadership of the Defense Department is Team B. Mr. Wolfowitz and his associates have assembled their own trusted analysts to help them challenge the established intelligence consensus.
Who would argue that the spooks' work should not stand up to rigorous cross-examination? But in practice, B-Teaming is often less a form of intellectual discipline than of ideological martial arts.
Here's how it might have worked in the Bush administration:
The A Team (actually, given the number of spy agencies that pool intelligence on major problems, it's more like the A-through-M team) prepares its analysis of, let's say, the Iraqi nuclear program. The report is cautious, equivocal and — particularly since U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 — based on close calls about defector reports, commercial transactions and other flimsy evidence.
The B Team comes in with fresh eyes, and fresh assumptions. One assumption, another Wolfowitz mantra, is that more weight should be given to the character of the regime — in Saddam's case, his transcendent evil and megalomania. While the C.I.A. may say that we have insufficient evidence to conclude that Saddam has reconstituted his nuclear program, Team B starts from the premise that it is just the kind of thing Saddam would do, and it is dangerous to assume he didn't.
Then Team B dips into the raw intelligence and fishes out information that supports its case, tidbits that the A Team may have rejected as unreliable. The Pentagon takes this ammo to an interagency review, where it is used to beat the A Team (the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency) into submission. Maybe the agencies put up a fight, but (1) much of their own evidence is too soft to defend with great conviction, and (2) by this time the president has announced his version of the facts, and the political tide is all running in one direction.
When Team B seems to have the blessing of the boss, it goes from being a source of useful dissent to being an implement of intimidation. As formidable a figure as Mr. Powell, who resisted pressure to include the most arrant nonsense in his U.N. briefing, still ended up arguing a case he told confidants he did not entirely believe, specifically on the questions of Iraq's nuclear program and connections with Al Qaeda.
By the time a Team B version of events has been debunked, it has already served its purpose. That 1976 Team B, by assuming the most dire of Soviet intentions and overlooking the slow collapse of the Soviet economy, came up with estimates of Soviet military strength that we later learned to be ridiculously inflated. But the cold warriors who ran it succeeded in setting back détente and helped to elect Ronald Reagan. The 2003 Team B seems to have convinced most Americans that Saddam had nuclear arms and was in bed with Osama bin Laden.
But the consequences of crying wolf — and the belief is widespread among the dispirited spies of the A Team that the administration did exactly that — are grave. Honest, careful intelligence is our single most important weapon in the global effort against terrorism. It is also critical to winning the support of allies against nuclear proliferation, most urgently in North Korea and Iran. Already rather compelling evidence of Iran's development of nuclear weaponry is being dismissed as just more smoke from the Bush propaganda machine.
So far, the passion to investigate the integrity of American intelligence-gathering belongs mostly to the doves, whose motives are subject to suspicion and who, in any case, do not set the agenda. The pro-war Democrats are dying to change the subject to the economy. The Republicans are in no mood to second-guess a victory. Just when we really need some of that Team B spirit, the hawks have chickened out.
The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.
U.S.: However Impolitic, Rumsfeld's Remarks May Reflect NATO Readjustment
By Jeremy Bransten
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stoked divisions in NATO anew yesterday. He said Washington may have to stop funding the construction of new NATO headquarters in Brussels and stop sending U.S. officials and soldiers to Belgium unless the country changes its controversial war crimes legislation. Belgium today replied that there is no need to alter the law since it has already been adequately amended. At a time when the alliance has been trying to repair divisions caused by the Iraq war, do Rumsfeld's words signal that effort is failing?
Prague, 13 June 2003 (RFE/RL) -- With characteristic bluntness, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has blasted Belgium for a controversial law that allows the country to prosecute war crimes suspects, regardless of their residence or citizenship. And he warned that Belgium could pay a heavy price unless it abolishes the measure.
Rumsfeld, speaking yesterday in Brussels, said lawsuits based on Belgium's universal competence law are "absurd." The law gives Belgian courts the authority to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, regardless of the crimes' connection to Belgium or the accused's presence on Belgian soil.
He added that the existence of the law calls into question Belgium's ability to host NATO headquarters.
The U.S. defense secretary went one step further, announcing that Washington is suspending funding for the construction of a new NATO building in Brussels.
"Until this matter is resolved, we will have to oppose any further spending for construction for a new NATO headquarters here in Brussels until we know with certainty that Belgium intends to be a hospitable place for NATO to conduct its business, as it has been over so many years," Rumsfeld said.
The disputed law has already led to lawsuits against former U.S. President George Bush Sr., Vice President Dick Cheney, and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, dating from the 1991 Gulf War, and more recently against General Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander in Iraq this year.
Confusion has now emerged in Belgium as to how the country will respond.
Earlier today, Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel noted that a recent amendment to the law limits its powers, allowing for cases to be sent to the defendants' country of origin, if that nation is deemed to have a fair and democratic legal system. That is what Belgium did in the case against Franks last month, although the other suits are still pending.
Michel said there is no reason to change the law any further or to abolish it.
But Andre Flahaut, Belgium's defense minister, said a further change in the law might be subject to negotiation.
One thing appears certain. Rumsfeld's comments will open further divisions at a time when NATO is trying to mend internal relations disrupted by the Iraq war. Although he is known for his frequent undiplomatic remarks, there is evidence that the U.S. defense secretary was not speaking off-the-cuff.
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a little-noticed amendment that asks the U.S. Defense Department to research the potential costs and logistics of moving NATO's military headquarters out of Belgium.
With the administration of President George W. Bush giving increased emphasis to NATO's newer members, such as Poland, some argue that the alliance should move its center eastward to reflect new realities. Many others ask whether NATO could, in fact, survive such a move.
Military analyst Timothy Garden of Britain's Royal Institute for International Affairs points out that since NATO works by consensus, reaching unanimous agreement on moving the alliance's headquarters out of Belgium would be nearly impossible. Garden believes that if the United States seriously pursues this goal, it could endanger the alliance's very viability.
"There are lots of strains in NATO and the threat either to push the headquarters presumably to the East -- which would be re-centering, if you like, the American perception of the 'new Europe' or interfering, as it would be seen, in the internal affairs of a NATO member, that is Belgium, trying to get it to change its laws to suit the United States -- either of those looks as though they would be intensely damaging to what already is a very bruised organization," Garden says.
Despite the increasingly high-profile role of countries like Poland in NATO, Garden says that if you look at the facts, Rumsfeld's so-called "new Europe" is big on enthusiasm but low on the military capabilities and financial resources that it can contribute to the alliance.
"The new European members that have come into NATO are, although very willing to give vocal support to U.S. policy, very limited [in their capabilities]. They may have some niche capabilities. If we take the example of the Polish proposal for looking after a sector of Iraq, the Poles during the Iraq conflict provided 200 support troops in a conflict which needed 200,000. And now that they're going into the post-conflict period, they're saying that they would welcome taking the headquarters role for this small sector, but they can only provide about 2,000 troops. And yet, the numbers that are needed are much greater than that," Garden says.
Aside from Britain, he says France and Germany continue to form essential military pillars for NATO and that will not change for quite some time.
"If you look now in Afghanistan, the biggest contribution is from Germany, and France has expeditionary capabilities. So, freezing them out is in nobody's interest because they have real capabilities that are useful to NATO, to the U.S. and to international stability, however it is flagged," he says.
Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, an independent think tank devoted to international affairs and trans-Atlantic relations. He agrees that the likelihood of NATO moving its headquarters out of Brussels in the near future is very slim. But he says Rumsfeld's statement -- however undiplomatic -- reflects the fact that a certain readjustment is taking place both within Europe and between certain countries of Europe and the United States and that this will have a long-term impact on NATO.
"This is an alliance which is in flux. The Cold War, we could say, is really, really, really over now, and I think we're at the beginning of asking the hard questions in a practical sort of way. To answer your question: I don't think NATO is moving anytime soon. But I think issues are going to be raised, not only about cost but strategic relevance, proximity to regions where we're going to be operating in the next 10, 20, 30 years, the interests of the West Europeans and the interests of the Central and East Europeans," Gedmin says.
Gedmin notes that the impetus for redefining the trans-Atlantic relationship comes as much from the United States as it does from countries like Germany and France, which are seeking to create pan-European structures that will give the continent a new, more robust political identity and likely change long-term ties with Washington.
"We're both in the process of renegotiating this relationship. It doesn't mean full-blown strategic divorce, but it's not the same kind of tightly integrated unit that we used to have," he says. "It's different now. And I think people are poking around and tapping around, sometimes even in the dark, trying to find out what is still relevant and in what ways. If we look at a map of Europe, we see that Western Europe is fixed, Central and Eastern Europe is being fixed and the likeliest hot spots and conflicts of the next 10 and 20 and 30 years will not be where I'm sitting here today in Berlin. And maybe it does make sense to contemplate moving some of our structures, institutions, and forces elsewhere, where they are closer to those regions."
If that happens, then perhaps Rumsfeld's words will be remembered as prescient -- not just impolitic.
More from the NYT:
June 14, 2003
The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz
By BILL KELLER
e're now up to Day 87 of the largely fruitless hunt for Iraq's unconventional weapons. Allegations keep piling up that the Bush administration tried to scam the world into war by exaggerating evidence of the Iraqi threat. One critic has pronounced it "arguably the worst scandal in American political history." So you might reasonably ask a supporter of the war, How do you feel about that war now?
Thanks for asking.
One easy answer is that between the excavation of mass graves, which confirms that we have rid the world of a horror, and President Bush's new willingness to engage the thankless tangle of Middle East diplomacy, which raises the hope that Iraq was more than a hit-and-run exercise, the war seems to have changed some important things for the better. This is true, but not quite enough.
Another easy answer is that it's not over yet. Just as we have yet to prove that we can transform a military conquest into a real Mission Accomplished, we have yet to complete our search of a country that, as Californians must be very tired of hearing, is the size of California. This is also true, but likewise inadequate.
I supported the war, with misgivings about the haste, the America-knows-best attitude and our ability to win the peace. The deciding factor for me was not the monstrosity of the regime (routing tyrants is a noble cause, but where do you stop?), nor the opportunity to detoxify the Middle East (another noble cause, but dubious justification for a war when hardly anyone else in the world supports you). No, I supported it mainly because of the convergence of a real threat and a real opportunity.
The threat was a dictator with a proven, insatiable desire for dreadful weapons that would eventually have made him, or perhaps one of his sadistic sons, a god in the region. The fact that he gave aid and at least occasional sanctuary to practitioners of terror added to his menace. And at the end his brazen defiance made us seem weak and vulnerable, an impression we can ill afford. The opportunity was a moment of awareness and political will created by Sept. 11, combined with the legal sanction reaffirmed by U.N. Resolution 1441. The important thing to me was never that Saddam Hussein's threat was "imminent" — although Sept. 11 taught us that is not such an easy thing to know — but that the opportunity to do something about him was finite. In a year or two, we would be distracted and Iraq would be back in the nuke-building business.
Even if you throw out all the tainted evidence, there was still what prosecutors call probable cause to believe that Saddam was harboring frightful weapons, and was bent on acquiring the most frightful weapons of all. The Clinton administration believed so. Two generations of U.N. inspectors believed so. It was not a Bush administration fabrication that Iraq had, and failed to account for, massive quantities of anthrax and VX nerve gas and other biological and chemical weapons. Saddam was under an international obligation to say where the poisons went, but did not.
What the Bush administration did was gild the lily — disseminating information that ranged from selective to preposterous. The president himself gave credence to the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, a story that (as Seymour Hersh's investigations leave little doubt) was based on transparently fraudulent information. Colin Powell in his February performance at the U.N. insisted that those famous aluminum tubes Iraq bought were intended for bomb-making, although the technical experts at the Department of Energy had made an awfully strong case that the tubes were for conventional rocket launchers. And as James Risen disclosed in The Times this week, two top Qaeda planners in custody told American interrogators — one of them well before the war was set in motion — that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Saddam. That inconclusive but potent evidence was kept quiet in the administration's zeal to establish a meaningful Iraqi connection to the fanatical war on America.
The motives for the dissembling varied. The hawks hyped the case (profusely) to prove we were justified in going to war, with or without allies. Mr. Powell hyped it (modestly) in the hope that the war, which he knew the president had already decided to wage, would not be a divisive, unilateral exercise. The president either believed what he wanted to believe or was given a stacked deck of information, and it's a close call which of those possibilities is scarier.
Those who say flimflam intelligence drove us to war, though, have got things backward. It seems much more likely that the decision to make war drove the intelligence.
The origins of this may be well intentioned. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the most dogged proponent of war against Iraq, is also a longtime skeptic of American institutional intelligence-gathering. He has argued over the years, from within the government and from outside, that the C.I.A. and its sister agencies often fail to place adequate emphasis on what they don't know, and that they "mirror-image" — make assumptions about what foreign regimes will do based on what we would do.
One tempting solution has been to deputize smart thinkers from outside the intelligence fraternity — a Team B — to second-guess the analysis of the A Team professionals. Mr. Wolfowitz was part of a famous 1976 Team B that attacked the C.I.A. for underestimating the Soviet threat. These days the top leadership of the Defense Department is Team B. Mr. Wolfowitz and his associates have assembled their own trusted analysts to help them challenge the established intelligence consensus.
Who would argue that the spooks' work should not stand up to rigorous cross-examination? But in practice, B-Teaming is often less a form of intellectual discipline than of ideological martial arts.
Here's how it might have worked in the Bush administration:
The A Team (actually, given the number of spy agencies that pool intelligence on major problems, it's more like the A-through-M team) prepares its analysis of, let's say, the Iraqi nuclear program. The report is cautious, equivocal and — particularly since U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 — based on close calls about defector reports, commercial transactions and other flimsy evidence.
The B Team comes in with fresh eyes, and fresh assumptions. One assumption, another Wolfowitz mantra, is that more weight should be given to the character of the regime — in Saddam's case, his transcendent evil and megalomania. While the C.I.A. may say that we have insufficient evidence to conclude that Saddam has reconstituted his nuclear program, Team B starts from the premise that it is just the kind of thing Saddam would do, and it is dangerous to assume he didn't.
Then Team B dips into the raw intelligence and fishes out information that supports its case, tidbits that the A Team may have rejected as unreliable. The Pentagon takes this ammo to an interagency review, where it is used to beat the A Team (the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency) into submission. Maybe the agencies put up a fight, but (1) much of their own evidence is too soft to defend with great conviction, and (2) by this time the president has announced his version of the facts, and the political tide is all running in one direction.
When Team B seems to have the blessing of the boss, it goes from being a source of useful dissent to being an implement of intimidation. As formidable a figure as Mr. Powell, who resisted pressure to include the most arrant nonsense in his U.N. briefing, still ended up arguing a case he told confidants he did not entirely believe, specifically on the questions of Iraq's nuclear program and connections with Al Qaeda.
By the time a Team B version of events has been debunked, it has already served its purpose. That 1976 Team B, by assuming the most dire of Soviet intentions and overlooking the slow collapse of the Soviet economy, came up with estimates of Soviet military strength that we later learned to be ridiculously inflated. But the cold warriors who ran it succeeded in setting back détente and helped to elect Ronald Reagan. The 2003 Team B seems to have convinced most Americans that Saddam had nuclear arms and was in bed with Osama bin Laden.
But the consequences of crying wolf — and the belief is widespread among the dispirited spies of the A Team that the administration did exactly that — are grave. Honest, careful intelligence is our single most important weapon in the global effort against terrorism. It is also critical to winning the support of allies against nuclear proliferation, most urgently in North Korea and Iran. Already rather compelling evidence of Iran's development of nuclear weaponry is being dismissed as just more smoke from the Bush propaganda machine.
So far, the passion to investigate the integrity of American intelligence-gathering belongs mostly to the doves, whose motives are subject to suspicion and who, in any case, do not set the agenda. The pro-war Democrats are dying to change the subject to the economy. The Republicans are in no mood to second-guess a victory. Just when we really need some of that Team B spirit, the hawks have chickened out.
The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.
Comments:
Post a Comment
