Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Yellowcake controversy continues. I wish the administration would stop shifting the blame for this single case and confronted the real issue: What are the REAL resaons that drove the President to invade Iraq? We now know all the fake ones, we are missing a debate on the real ones....
"Democratic National Committee spokesman Tony Welch said: "First they blamed the Brits. Then, CIA Director George Tenet walked the plank. Now, the Bush White House is dragging former Cheney aide and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley forward to take the fall for the president's bogus claim in this year's State of the Union address."
Welch added: "Apparently, at the Bush White House, the buck stops everywhere but the president's desk." "
"Democratic National Committee spokesman Tony Welch said: "First they blamed the Brits. Then, CIA Director George Tenet walked the plank. Now, the Bush White House is dragging former Cheney aide and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley forward to take the fall for the president's bogus claim in this year's State of the Union address."
Welch added: "Apparently, at the Bush White House, the buck stops everywhere but the president's desk." "
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Speculation about Usay & Quday on the wires...
The American Enterprise Institute proudly offers this on its website today. A real piece of news...
Dreams of empire guide Washington
By George Brandis
Posted: Monday, July 21, 2003
ARTICLES
The Age (Washington)
Publication Date: July 20, 2003
On Thursday afternoon in Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair - much more popular in the United States than he is at home - addresses a joint session of Congress. Across town, it is standing room only at a seminar at the American Enterprise Institute - widely acknowledged to be pre-eminent among the many conservative ‘‘think tanks’’ in this city and, by repute, the home of the so-called ‘‘neoconservative’’ movement.
The seminar takes the form of a debate between two scholars - Oxford’s Niall Ferguson and the American Robert Kagan (introduced as ‘‘the sexiest trans-Atlantic intellectual today’’), whose just-published book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order is required reading among the chattering classes. The topic they are debating is ‘‘That the United States is, and should be, an empire’’.
Note the unironical use of those three words - ‘‘and should be’’. American imperialism was once a standard mantra of the left. No further comment was required - the mere utterance was a denunciation. Now, in Washington, there is neither self-consciousness about American power nor defensiveness about its use. This state of mind is not just a reaction to 9/11 (as the terrorist strikes are universally referred to here). Those events catalysed - and, in the view of its proponents, justified - a more aggressive foreign policy. But they were not its source.
Many people will tell you that the progenitor of the ideas that inform American foreign policy today was the late Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, paradoxically, a Democrat. A number of important players today - Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Richard Perle, now a fellow of the institute, are former Democrats who fell under his influence as young politicos a quarter of a century ago. Gary Schmitt, the executive director of an institution called ‘‘The Project for the New American Century’’, even speaks of this (with apologies to Arthur Schlesinger) as ‘‘the new age of Jackson’’.
The core of this view of American policy lies not merely in the belief that, in Kagan’s words, ‘‘America does have the critical role as the sole pillar maintaining liberal democracy’’, but that the US should aggressively (pre-emptively?) evangelise those values. There are many sub-themes: impatience with the United Nations; devotion to the state of Israel (a large number of the neoconservatives are Jewish); disillusionment with traditional NATO allies other than Britain; an embrace of the emerging Eastern European democracies (‘‘new Europe’’); and, most importantly, a deep - even reverent - sense that this is a moment of historic opportunity for the expansion of liberal democracy, which must not be lost by a retreat either to isolationism or to Kissinger-like balance-of-power pragmatism. There are no latter-day Metternichs among the neocons.
None of this came from George Bush. His speeches during the 2000 campaign suggested that his foreign policy would be one of essentially orthodox pragmatism.
The same is true of Dr Condoleezza Rice, who published an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in early 2000 that is seen as an early glimpse of what a Bush foreign policy would look like. No world-changing evangelism there.
September 11 changed all that. Gary Schmitt uses a metaphor to explain the embrace by the Administration of much of the neocon agenda. Before then, he says, there were three foreign policy ‘‘dishes’’ on the table, from which Bush might choose: isolationism (generally associated more with the Republicans than the Democrats); Kissinger-style managerialism; or the neocon world view. After September 11 the last one was the only one that seemed to make sense. And a frightened and bewildered public was prepared to embrace it. So threat was transmuted into opportunity, as Bush defined his presidency and foreign policy along broadly neoconservative lines.
This has had important consequences for domestic politics. In particular, it has both divided and galvanised the left, as the Democrats approach the primary season. Those such as Senator Joseph Lieberman, who strongly supported Mr Bush’s position on Iraq, are fading into the distance, as the patriotic euphoria is replaced by a sober realisation of the war’s consequences. Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate last week that the occupation force of 149,000 was ‘‘about the right number’’ and would remain at that strength ‘‘for the foreseeable future’’.
The unlikely front-runner who has suddenly blitzed the field is a man hardly heard of even three months ago - Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, the earliest and sharpest critic of the war.
The debate between Kagan and Ferguson dissolves into a verbal quibble: Kagan resists the word empire, but is happy to embrace the term hegemony. The great success of US foreign policy, he claims, is that ‘‘because it was known that the United States did not wish to be an empire, its hegemony was accepted’’. Ferguson ridicules this as a euphemism: America, he asserts, is an ‘‘empire in denial’’; that although Americans ‘‘find the ‘E word’ impossible to utter, one cannot help but detect at least intonations of a transition from a republic to an imperial order’’.
The seminar began, tongue-in-cheek, to the strains of Britannia Rules the Waves. As we rise to leave, the soundtrack from The Empire Strikes Back is piped through the loudspeakers.
Dreams of empire guide Washington
By George Brandis
Posted: Monday, July 21, 2003
ARTICLES
The Age (Washington)
Publication Date: July 20, 2003
On Thursday afternoon in Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair - much more popular in the United States than he is at home - addresses a joint session of Congress. Across town, it is standing room only at a seminar at the American Enterprise Institute - widely acknowledged to be pre-eminent among the many conservative ‘‘think tanks’’ in this city and, by repute, the home of the so-called ‘‘neoconservative’’ movement.
The seminar takes the form of a debate between two scholars - Oxford’s Niall Ferguson and the American Robert Kagan (introduced as ‘‘the sexiest trans-Atlantic intellectual today’’), whose just-published book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order is required reading among the chattering classes. The topic they are debating is ‘‘That the United States is, and should be, an empire’’.
Note the unironical use of those three words - ‘‘and should be’’. American imperialism was once a standard mantra of the left. No further comment was required - the mere utterance was a denunciation. Now, in Washington, there is neither self-consciousness about American power nor defensiveness about its use. This state of mind is not just a reaction to 9/11 (as the terrorist strikes are universally referred to here). Those events catalysed - and, in the view of its proponents, justified - a more aggressive foreign policy. But they were not its source.
Many people will tell you that the progenitor of the ideas that inform American foreign policy today was the late Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, paradoxically, a Democrat. A number of important players today - Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Richard Perle, now a fellow of the institute, are former Democrats who fell under his influence as young politicos a quarter of a century ago. Gary Schmitt, the executive director of an institution called ‘‘The Project for the New American Century’’, even speaks of this (with apologies to Arthur Schlesinger) as ‘‘the new age of Jackson’’.
The core of this view of American policy lies not merely in the belief that, in Kagan’s words, ‘‘America does have the critical role as the sole pillar maintaining liberal democracy’’, but that the US should aggressively (pre-emptively?) evangelise those values. There are many sub-themes: impatience with the United Nations; devotion to the state of Israel (a large number of the neoconservatives are Jewish); disillusionment with traditional NATO allies other than Britain; an embrace of the emerging Eastern European democracies (‘‘new Europe’’); and, most importantly, a deep - even reverent - sense that this is a moment of historic opportunity for the expansion of liberal democracy, which must not be lost by a retreat either to isolationism or to Kissinger-like balance-of-power pragmatism. There are no latter-day Metternichs among the neocons.
None of this came from George Bush. His speeches during the 2000 campaign suggested that his foreign policy would be one of essentially orthodox pragmatism.
The same is true of Dr Condoleezza Rice, who published an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in early 2000 that is seen as an early glimpse of what a Bush foreign policy would look like. No world-changing evangelism there.
September 11 changed all that. Gary Schmitt uses a metaphor to explain the embrace by the Administration of much of the neocon agenda. Before then, he says, there were three foreign policy ‘‘dishes’’ on the table, from which Bush might choose: isolationism (generally associated more with the Republicans than the Democrats); Kissinger-style managerialism; or the neocon world view. After September 11 the last one was the only one that seemed to make sense. And a frightened and bewildered public was prepared to embrace it. So threat was transmuted into opportunity, as Bush defined his presidency and foreign policy along broadly neoconservative lines.
This has had important consequences for domestic politics. In particular, it has both divided and galvanised the left, as the Democrats approach the primary season. Those such as Senator Joseph Lieberman, who strongly supported Mr Bush’s position on Iraq, are fading into the distance, as the patriotic euphoria is replaced by a sober realisation of the war’s consequences. Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate last week that the occupation force of 149,000 was ‘‘about the right number’’ and would remain at that strength ‘‘for the foreseeable future’’.
The unlikely front-runner who has suddenly blitzed the field is a man hardly heard of even three months ago - Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, the earliest and sharpest critic of the war.
The debate between Kagan and Ferguson dissolves into a verbal quibble: Kagan resists the word empire, but is happy to embrace the term hegemony. The great success of US foreign policy, he claims, is that ‘‘because it was known that the United States did not wish to be an empire, its hegemony was accepted’’. Ferguson ridicules this as a euphemism: America, he asserts, is an ‘‘empire in denial’’; that although Americans ‘‘find the ‘E word’ impossible to utter, one cannot help but detect at least intonations of a transition from a republic to an imperial order’’.
The seminar began, tongue-in-cheek, to the strains of Britannia Rules the Waves. As we rise to leave, the soundtrack from The Empire Strikes Back is piped through the loudspeakers.
How conservative is conservative? Is this Administration what people think it is, or is it a bunch of radical revolutionaries in disguise?
From the LAT today:
Is Bush Conservative Enough?
By Sam Tanenhaus, Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Whittaker Chambers: A Biography" (Modern Library, 1998). He's at work on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
Just how conservative is the Bush administration? This is a question liberals have no trouble answering. They point to many items on an agenda long associated with the activist wing of the Republican Party: a parade of ideologically driven judicial nominees, a tax plan that rewards the rich even as the working poor are being lopped off employment rolls and, above all, a go-it-alone America-first foreign policy.
But one notable group of critics has serious doubts about the administration's commitment to conservative ideals: American conservatives. For months now, a chorus on the right, growing in volume and clarity, has been challenging the White House's motives and aims. You can hear it in the pages of the American Conservative, Patrick Buchanan's new magazine. Its critiques of the Bush administration's overseas adventurism and "Wall Street socialism" have sharpened with each issue.
You can hear it too in the back and forth on the conservativenet listserv, an Internet discussion group in which scholars, most of them conservatives and many of them historians, have been dissecting the philosophical foundations of policymakers in the Bush administration who seem wedded to an American gigantism starkly at odds with the movement's core principles.
And I got an earful of it this spring when I spoke to 150 members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — a national organization of student conservatives who immerse themselves in classic political and philosophical writings.
The war in Iraq was going well. And they were pleased. But they wondered why some conservatives, like the editors of the Weekly Standard, were squelching debate about the war and throwing around scare words like "appeasement."
What alarms these conservatives, young and old, is not so much the specific policies of the Bush administration as its appetite for an ever-enlarging, all-powerful government, a post- 9/11 version of statism, the bête noire of conservatism and the subject of one of the movement's founding texts, Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, the State."
Published in 1935, this manifesto analyzes centralization in the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with its expanding bureaucracies and new entitlements. In Nock's view, the New Deal bore disturbing resemblances to new dictatorships arising overseas. The connection seemed remote, because FDR was so genial and because Americans were "the most un-philosophical of beings," immune to doctrines of the kind espoused by Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
But Americans suffer from a different weakness, Nock said. Our national temper is that of "an army on the march." Susceptible to grandiose crusades, we respond with emotion rather than thought and are easily swayed "by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquette, flags, music, uniforms, decorations and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie."
Nock had in mind World War I — a war he opposed. But his description also applies to the mood created by the Bush administration since 9/11.
The ringing call for an all-encompassing yet ill-defined war on terror; the paraphernalia of a massive new Homeland Security Department; the showy drama of the president's Hollywood-style landing aboard the U.S. carrier Abraham Lincoln; the decorative images of Bush's features framed against the rocky visages on Mt. Rushmore — all of it backed by stern reminders from the White House that criticism of administration policies may undermine our camaraderie, our national zeal.
For the moment, few elected conservatives seem concerned about Bush-style statism. There have been some grumblings about the ballooning budget, larded with entitlements. But most point contentedly to the president's handsome poll numbers and to the satisfying results of the off-year elections.
But modern conservatism, at its most serious, never tied itself to party loyalty. On the contrary, as the postwar movement took shape, conservative intellectuals were as tough on Republicans as on Democrats.
National Review, the magazine William F. Buckley Jr. started in 1955, was formed partly to organize resistance to Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican to occupy the White House since Herbert Hoover.
A hero of the right like Ohio Sen. Robert Taft was a powerful legislator but constantly battled with his party's own establishment — and as a result was repeatedly denied the presidential nomination.
And today, middle-aged conservatives fondly recall the 1976 presidential campaign and how the insurrectionist Ronald Reagan, the sworn enemy of Washington politics, nearly wrested the nomination from the moderate incumbent Gerald Ford.
These same conservatives are well aware that the current administration boasts holdovers from the Ford years, most prominently Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. This alone invites suspicion. Not because Ford Republicans aren't "real" Republicans but because Cheney and Rumsfeld have been comfortably perched for many years now within the Beltway establishment — "the imperial bureaucracy," as Nock called it.
And Nock's brand of conservatism, rooted in ideas and fiercely contrarian, fears most the "monocrat" at home in either party.
"The exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power," Nock wrote, "are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another."
These are words some conservatives are pondering today as they observe an administration that is avowedly Republican but is not, perhaps, truly conservative — at least not if judged by the lights of the movement that did so much to revitalize American politics during the last 50 years.
From the LAT today:
Is Bush Conservative Enough?
By Sam Tanenhaus, Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Whittaker Chambers: A Biography" (Modern Library, 1998). He's at work on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
Just how conservative is the Bush administration? This is a question liberals have no trouble answering. They point to many items on an agenda long associated with the activist wing of the Republican Party: a parade of ideologically driven judicial nominees, a tax plan that rewards the rich even as the working poor are being lopped off employment rolls and, above all, a go-it-alone America-first foreign policy.
But one notable group of critics has serious doubts about the administration's commitment to conservative ideals: American conservatives. For months now, a chorus on the right, growing in volume and clarity, has been challenging the White House's motives and aims. You can hear it in the pages of the American Conservative, Patrick Buchanan's new magazine. Its critiques of the Bush administration's overseas adventurism and "Wall Street socialism" have sharpened with each issue.
You can hear it too in the back and forth on the conservativenet listserv, an Internet discussion group in which scholars, most of them conservatives and many of them historians, have been dissecting the philosophical foundations of policymakers in the Bush administration who seem wedded to an American gigantism starkly at odds with the movement's core principles.
And I got an earful of it this spring when I spoke to 150 members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — a national organization of student conservatives who immerse themselves in classic political and philosophical writings.
The war in Iraq was going well. And they were pleased. But they wondered why some conservatives, like the editors of the Weekly Standard, were squelching debate about the war and throwing around scare words like "appeasement."
What alarms these conservatives, young and old, is not so much the specific policies of the Bush administration as its appetite for an ever-enlarging, all-powerful government, a post- 9/11 version of statism, the bête noire of conservatism and the subject of one of the movement's founding texts, Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, the State."
Published in 1935, this manifesto analyzes centralization in the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with its expanding bureaucracies and new entitlements. In Nock's view, the New Deal bore disturbing resemblances to new dictatorships arising overseas. The connection seemed remote, because FDR was so genial and because Americans were "the most un-philosophical of beings," immune to doctrines of the kind espoused by Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
But Americans suffer from a different weakness, Nock said. Our national temper is that of "an army on the march." Susceptible to grandiose crusades, we respond with emotion rather than thought and are easily swayed "by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquette, flags, music, uniforms, decorations and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie."
Nock had in mind World War I — a war he opposed. But his description also applies to the mood created by the Bush administration since 9/11.
The ringing call for an all-encompassing yet ill-defined war on terror; the paraphernalia of a massive new Homeland Security Department; the showy drama of the president's Hollywood-style landing aboard the U.S. carrier Abraham Lincoln; the decorative images of Bush's features framed against the rocky visages on Mt. Rushmore — all of it backed by stern reminders from the White House that criticism of administration policies may undermine our camaraderie, our national zeal.
For the moment, few elected conservatives seem concerned about Bush-style statism. There have been some grumblings about the ballooning budget, larded with entitlements. But most point contentedly to the president's handsome poll numbers and to the satisfying results of the off-year elections.
But modern conservatism, at its most serious, never tied itself to party loyalty. On the contrary, as the postwar movement took shape, conservative intellectuals were as tough on Republicans as on Democrats.
National Review, the magazine William F. Buckley Jr. started in 1955, was formed partly to organize resistance to Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican to occupy the White House since Herbert Hoover.
A hero of the right like Ohio Sen. Robert Taft was a powerful legislator but constantly battled with his party's own establishment — and as a result was repeatedly denied the presidential nomination.
And today, middle-aged conservatives fondly recall the 1976 presidential campaign and how the insurrectionist Ronald Reagan, the sworn enemy of Washington politics, nearly wrested the nomination from the moderate incumbent Gerald Ford.
These same conservatives are well aware that the current administration boasts holdovers from the Ford years, most prominently Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. This alone invites suspicion. Not because Ford Republicans aren't "real" Republicans but because Cheney and Rumsfeld have been comfortably perched for many years now within the Beltway establishment — "the imperial bureaucracy," as Nock called it.
And Nock's brand of conservatism, rooted in ideas and fiercely contrarian, fears most the "monocrat" at home in either party.
"The exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power," Nock wrote, "are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another."
These are words some conservatives are pondering today as they observe an administration that is avowedly Republican but is not, perhaps, truly conservative — at least not if judged by the lights of the movement that did so much to revitalize American politics during the last 50 years.
Monday, July 21, 2003
Could the vanishing WMDs be the fruit of a sadly confused, mixed-up and fear laden culture?
From The New Republic:
The Vanishing
by Bob Drogin
Post date: 07.14.03
Issue date: 07.21.03
muthanna, iraq
Dr. Alaa Saeed is an affable man with a shy smile and a thinning thatch of wispy white hair above thick, gold-rimmed glasses. He wears short-sleeved white shirts and permanent-press gray slacks. He has the polite, self-effacing manner of a small-town pharmacist. You wouldn't suspect that the 51-year-old, British-trained chemist helped found and direct Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program.
I met Saeed one recent morning in Baghdad as he and two-dozen other former Iraqi weapons scientists and military officials waited their turn to be questioned by "John," the head of an American interrogation team. The Americans refused to identify themselves or their agency. The British spooks, by contrast, were more polite. Saeed already had been grilled by "Miss Rebecca,'' who told him she came from MI-6, London's foreign intelligence service. After chatting a bit, I invited Saeed to lunch. We met twice that week for coffee, and ultimately I asked him to take me to his former workplace.
The next day, we drove 60 miles northwest to the Muthanna State Establishment. Muthanna was built by a French company in 1978, ostensibly as a pesticide plant. Instead, Muthanna became the heart of Saddam's chemical weapons program. By the mid-'80s, more than 1,000 people were secretly producing thousands of tons of nerve and blister agents at Muthanna, as well as running a pilot anthrax and botulinum biowarfare project. The secret was not well-kept. Muthanna was heavily bombed in the 1991 Gulf war and was literally the first stop for U.N. inspectors sent to Iraq after the 1991 cease-fire to supervise what they expected to be a brief disarmament effort.
Muthanna is desolate now. Portions remain of the front gate, an arched pair of yellow concrete scimitars, but garish murals of Saddam have been destroyed. Empty roads shimmer in the furnace-like heat, and a few skinny trees somehow survive in the roadside grit. But mostly there is devastation. Saeed tells my driver to stop every few hundred yards so he can play tour guide. "This is P-7, the production plant for sarin and tabun," he says, getting out so we can climb through a heap of concrete slabs, broken tiles, and crumpled pipes. He points to another bombed-out ruin. "On the right is P-8, where we made mustard gas." We stop again, and he nods at a dun-colored building that was the "animal house" for donkeys, dogs, rabbits, rats, and guinea pigs. "We tied them up in inhalation chambers and released the agents," he explains. "Blood would run from their eyes, noses, and mouths, and they would convulse." Scientists, he says, were kept under the watchful eyes and guns of a secret police detachment camped next door.
Saeed first came to Muthanna in 1980 with a half-dozen other military scientists to set up Project 922, which was dedicated to the covert production of chemical weapons. With a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Baghdad and a membership card in Saddam's Baath Party, Saeed was appointed chief of quality control, responsible for certifying every production run. He already had served eight years in the army's chemical defense corps, which helped train and protect Iraqi soldiers against chemical attacks from Iran, Iraq's chief enemy at the time. Now he and his colleagues were on offense. Their first success was mustard gas, a World War I blister agent that causes debilitating injuries to the eyes, lungs, and skin. After a few test runs, Muthanna soon was churning out 900 tons of mustard gas per year. Then, in 1983, Saeed and his colleagues began producing more lethal nerve agents--first tabun, then sarin and cyclosarin, which are absorbed through the skin or respiratory tract and can cause death within a few minutes. The purity of the nerve agents varied widely, but Iraq used thousands of chemical-filled bombs, rockets, and artillery shells during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. U.N. investigators estimated they caused up to 80,000 Iranian casualties. Baghdad also used Muthanna's blister and nerve agents against Kurds in northern Iraq. Saeed left Muthanna for three years in 1985 to get a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in England. He liked the dowdy seaside town of Brighton and briefly considered staying and joining a real estate firm there. "I was very tempted, but I have a big family--two sisters and six brothers--and [regime officials] told my parents, 'If your son does not return, we will kill you,'" he says.
When he got back in 1988, Muthanna was bustling. We drive down a gravel road so he can show me the rubble-filled site where he focused his work for the next three years. "We called this the Dhia'a Plant. It is where we made VX," Saeed says. VX, first developed by British scientists in the 1950s, paralyzes the nervous system and is dozens of times stronger than sarin. The four-stage VX production process is difficult, but the Muthanna scientists reverseengineered the recipe from a list of controlled chemicals issued by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. Saeed says he supervised production of his last two batches of liquid VX in April 1990 but that they failed to achieve his goal of 50 to 60 percent purity, and they deteriorated within a week. "It couldn't be used as a weapon," he insists.
Concerns about VX were central to the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) presented an imminent threat. In the early '90s, Iraqi officials repeatedly denied developing VX. After U.N. inspectors found proof of VX in 1995, Baghdad acknowledged producing 3.9 tons but insisted it was never deployed as a weapon. U.N. inspectors weren't so sure. In 1998, they found VX products in a missile warhead. More important, they warned that Iraq could still be hiding enough precursor chemicals to produce up to 200 tons of VX. Iraq consistently denied possessing those chemicals, however, and their existence was never proved. Saeed claims the VX dispute was based on a misunderstanding. In 1991, he says senior Iraqi officials ordered him to destroy his records and to deny producing VX in order to bring a quick end to U.N. inspections. He says he tried to tell the truth after 1995 but that his previous lies undermined his attempts to come clean. "When the U.N. inspectors first came, my superior told me, 'Because you did not succeed in producing VX, why tell them about it? It takes too much time. So forget about it.' I had to tear up or burn our documents. So we hid the VX program from 1991 to 1995. After that, of course, they did not believe us. But that is the real story."
The idea that Saddam did not secretly continue building chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons directly contradicts White House claims. But the Iraqi scientists I met insist that the combination of U.S. bombing, U.N. inspections, disarmament efforts, unilateral destruction by Iraqi officials, and stiff U.N. sanctions had indeed eliminated Saddam's illicit weapons by the mid-'90s. At the same time, however, Saddam's efforts to hide or destroy documents hindered efforts to ultimately resolve scores of questions about the disposition of missing materials and equipment. In addition, fear of Saddam kept many scientists from telling the dictator the truth about their WMD programs. Ultimately, the scientists and others say, Saddam may have feared that admitting his WMD were gone would have shown a weakness that could have threatened his hold on power. These overlapping theories may not fully explain why American forces have not found WMD in Iraq. But, for now, they're the best we have.
n 1998, the United Nations withdrew its weapons inspectors from Iraq before a series of U.S. and British bombing raids. The final report from the U.N. inspectors in January 1999 focused chiefly on questions about unaccounted-for raw materials, documents, and equipment related to WMD programs. The Bush administration went to war this year on the assumption that those unaccounted for materials--such as VX precursor chemicals--were still present in Iraq. But, according to Iraqi scientists, some of those chemicals had never existed or had been destroyed by U.N. inspectors, by Iraqi authorities, or by the passage of time. "A lot of projects were just ink on paper," a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer tells me over coffee one morning in Baghdad.
So why did Saddam's regime deceive U.N. inspectors for twelve years? Why did it organize traffic jams, lock doors, hide documents, bus in jeering crowds, and do everything else it could to frustrate the U.N. weapons teams between 1991 and 1998? Why did Saeed, appointed deputy minder to the U.N. inspectors after 1991, help author all three of Iraq's bogus chemical weapons declarations to the U.N. Security Council, including large parts of the 12,000-page document handed over last December? An honest report might have prevented war. Instead, like its predecessors, it was quickly rejected as inaccurate and incomplete.
When I ask him, Saeed says he doesn't know exactly why Saddam continued deceiving the world. Back in 1991, he says, his supervisor, Hussam Mohammed Amin (who was taken into U.S. custody in April), ordered him to destroy all his original notes and records in an attempt to cover up Iraq's pre-Gulf war chemical weapons programs. When it came time to write the first chemical weapons report to the Security Council in 1994, he says, "We had to do it mostly from memory. We worked day and night for six months. Maybe we could collect a piece of paper here and there or check labels on some equipment. Maybe some numbers were not right." Without the original records, he says, his follow-up reports were just as bad. U.N. inspectors were convinced the inaccuracies were deliberate, in part because they kept finding evidence--from shipping records to chemical residue--proving that Iraq's WMD programs in the '80s were much more extensive than it had admitted.
In some cases, fear of Saddam prevented the scientists from revealing to the dictator that the WMD programs had failed or been destroyed. "People were afraid to tell Saddam," the intelligence officer says. After all, in a land ruled by torture and terror, what official would admit that he did not achieve 100 percent of his assigned production? Even correcting the numbers later was dangerous. "Because then we will look like liars," the intelligence officer explains. "And that will make Iraq look bad [to the world]. And people will lose their heads." Indeed, agents from at least three branches of Saddam's ruthless security services spied not only on the inspectors but also on the inspectors' minders. "They are watching us always. Are we saying too much? Are we whispering?" Saeed pauses. "Even if I go out on Friday, the day of rest, if I go to Arasat Street [the commercial center of Baghdad] and I see a U.N. inspector and he comes up and says, 'Hello,' I am very scared. Because I know he is being followed by the Mukhabarat [the secret police], and, if they see us together, they will think I am helping them. So I just say very quickly, 'Hello, I'm sorry, I must go. Goodbye, goodbye.'" He stares down at the ground, and his voice suddenly sounds angry. "The Mukhabarat. I hate them."
But, if the WMD were gone, why didn't Saddam cooperate in the '90s, if only to get the United Nations off his back so he could resume building his weapons? Why didn't he cooperate last year in order to appease the White House and avoid a war that would topple his regime? The prevailing theory among former U.N. inspectors and current American, British, and Australian weapons-hunters interviewed for this story is that Saddam was too proud to concede that he no longer possessed WMD. To admit this point would have meant bowing to the West. He would have appeared weak, and weakness would have threatened his hold on power at home and his vainglorious self-image as a leader of the Arab world. Instead, Saddam thought he could bully his way through this crisis, as he had in previous standoffs with the United States and its allies. The inspectors say Saddam believed that uncertainty about WMD could again serve as a deterrent to American forces. After all, in the wake of the 1991 war, U.N. inspectors learned Saddam had told aides that coalition ground forces had not pressed on to Baghdad because they were afraid of his chemical and biological weapons.
Of course, the possibility that Saddam no longer possessed WMD does not mean that he no longer wanted to possess them. The former senior intelligence officer, a barrel-chested brigadier general who still wears a large watch with Saddam's portrait etched in gold on the face, insists that no chemical or biological weapons were produced in Iraq after the mid-'90s. But he does not pretend Saddam suddenly went legit. Indeed, the officer says he helped manage a maze of overseas trading companies run by Iraqi intelligence operatives and designed to support Iraq's sanctions-busting procurement schemes. He made seven overseas trips after the mid-'90s to help buy and ship spare parts, raw materials, and other supplies for Saddam's conventional weapons programs. On his last trip, in April 2001, he went to Jordan, Cyprus, Morocco, South Africa, and Argentina, using phony passports from neighboring Arab nations, to help arrange the secret purchase of $57 million worth of cannons, artillery fuses, calibrating instruments, and other weapons parts. As on previous trips, he also helped buy and smuggle "dual-use" items, such as medical laboratory equipment, which might someday be used to build chemical and biological weapons if the United Nations declared Iraq WMD-free and lifted sanctions. Indeed, he says that, in 1996, Saddam ordered his intelligence services to create a series of secret cells of Iraqi scientists and technicians. The groups--each with about four or five members--met regularly in Baghdad basements and did small experiments in underground laboratories. Their goal was not to build weapons. It was to formulate plans on how to build them when the United Nations lifted sanctions. "We could start again anytime," the intelligence officer says. "It's very easy. Especially biological."
hould we believe Saeed when he says Iraq has no hidden weapons today? He has lied before, and he and every other Iraqi I met are absolutely convinced that Saddam is alive--a viewpoint reinforced by the recent audiotape, allegedly by Saddam, broadcast on Al Jazeera. Many scientists are convinced that thugs from Saddam's regime will retaliate against anyone who cooperates with the U.S. military occupation. Saeed is clearly terrified. His voice drops and his hands began to tremble when he describes how the dictator's aides suddenly appeared at his office in late 1997. They ordered him into a car with shades drawn and drove him to an unknown location. Saddam was waiting inside. "He thanked me for my work," he recalls. "But I am still shaking."
Saeed also admits he might not have known if the Mukhabarat or other Iraqi intelligence organizations were conducting their own WMD programs. The weapons procurement and production efforts were so compartmentalized that, even as Saeed advanced--he was promoted to brigadier general after he began working with the U.N. inspectors--he still had only a limited view of the other programs. He was aware, for example, that the Mukhabarat had special laboratories in and around Baghdad but says he never saw them or knew of their purpose. On the other hand, any serious effort to produce chemical or biological agents would have required scores of scientists, engineers, technicians, drivers, and others. And American officials in Baghdad have offered a $200,000 cash reward and political asylum or a new identity outside Iraq to anyone who can provide proof of Iraq's forbidden weapons. If the weapons really exist, it is hard to understand why no one has grabbed that prize. Yet no one has produced the goods.
Facing this failure, the Pentagon announced with great fanfare in late April that it would overhaul the WMD hunt. Instead of just searching sites using outdated intelligence, the newly created Iraq Survey Group would seek new clues by analyzing hundreds of thousands of captured documents and by finding and interrogating anyone, from top scientists to office clerks, who might know about them. But the new operation has been slow to start. Having run out of valid targets, most of the weapons-hunting teams were sidelined for much of June as they awaited new orders. It took American intelligence two weeks to find Saeed and his colleagues, and they were hardly hiding. Hoping the Americans would come to pay their back salaries, they gathered each morning outside a looted office building that once was home to the National Monitoring Directorate (NMD), the agency set up by Saddam's regime to work with U.N. inspectors. American officials would not allow me to observe any of the interrogations at the NMD building or at Camp Slayer, a former palace complex that now is home to the weapons-hunters and U.S. intelligence operations. But it is not hard to figure out what the Americans are asking. "Their questions are the same as yours," Saeed tells me. "'Do you know of any documents or inventory of chemical agents? Any stockpiles? Any production programs? Any filled munitions?' ... I am ready to give them all the information I have. But the answer is always the same, 'No, no, no.'"
Outside the NMD building, I hear the same kind of answers from General Jamil Raad, a large, bullnecked man whose face appears set in a permanent scowl, and from other scientists. Raad was director general of the Salahaldeen factory, which produced radar, military communications, and electronics equipment at Al Dour, near Tikrit. He points to a knot of ten men whom he says he brought to meet the Americans. All had worked for the Military Industrialization Company (MIC), the vast network of arms and trading companies responsible for most of Iraq's weapons production and procurement, and are willing to speak with the American interrogators--though, they insist, they had no information to offer. "I told them we are all ready to cooperate with any of the questions they have," Raad says. "But there are no hidden weapons." Nearby is Dr. Mahmoud Dagher, the former acting director of the MIC. He sighs and studies my business card closely when I ask about his interrogation. "They ask the same questions every day," he says. "I told them, 'We gave [the U.N. inspectors] everything, and nothing was kept.'" He says he too had turned down the $200,000 offer. "The money is nothing. The truth is the truth."
ruth, of course, is in short supply in Iraq. The CIA complains that high-profile captives are sticking to a party line, which some CIA people believe may be untrue. "They all say the same thing," a CIA official told me. "'We don't know anything about WMD, we don't know about POWs, we never met Saddam. Sorry, can't help you.'"
Yet U.S. tactics haven't helped the search. The American occupation forces have not clearly explained whether the scientists who cooperate will be treated as heroes or as criminals. In June, Mahdi Obeidi, a former senior Iraqi nuclear scientist, voluntarily led the CIA to his rose garden in Baghdad, where they dug up parts of a gas centrifuge machine as well as a two-foot-high stack of blueprints, manuals, and other documents that he had buried. Obeidi told the CIA that Saddam's nuclear weapons program had been destroyed by Allied bombing and U.N. inspectors in the '90s but that Saddam still hoped to restart it. Indeed, Obeidi told the CIA that, if the United Nations had lifted sanctions, Iraq could have used the centrifuge parts as templates to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. But, two days after Obeidi turned his cache in to the CIA, the U.S. military broke down his front door and arrested him on suspicion that he was hiding other material as well. The CIA ultimately got him out of jail and moved Obeidi and his nine family members to Kuwait. But the episode is unlikely to encourage other Iraqi scientists to come forward.
Nor, in most cases, have American forces disclosed who they have detained or why, though word--and fear--spreads quickly. The day before I met Saeed and his colleagues, for example, "John" and his team had arrived with a handwritten list with the words "Taha-7" on top. It named six top aides to Dr. Rahib Rashid Taha, a dour, British-trained microbiologist known as Dr. Germ who was arrested after the war. In the '80s, Taha had supervised production of vast quantities of anthrax, botulinum, aflatoxin, and other lethal pathogens. "John" found three bioweapons experts from the list that day and took them away in his van, promising he would bring them back in an hour. By the time I left Iraq two weeks later, their families still had no idea where they were or when they might be released. Not surprisingly, the snatch didn't go down very well with their colleagues. The NMD building was deserted when I went back for a final visit.
In my last meeting with Saeed, I ask if he ever regretted producing chemical weapons for Saddam. He seems surprised. "In Iraq, we obey an order. We have no choice." What about the thousands of casualties and deaths they had caused? "It is not my responsibility to think how they might be used," he says. After I press him several times, he finally admits that perhaps he has one regret. "I wish I'd taken the estate agent job" in Brighton, he concedes. "I understand the property market has done very well."
From The New Republic:
The Vanishing
by Bob Drogin
Post date: 07.14.03
Issue date: 07.21.03
muthanna, iraq
Dr. Alaa Saeed is an affable man with a shy smile and a thinning thatch of wispy white hair above thick, gold-rimmed glasses. He wears short-sleeved white shirts and permanent-press gray slacks. He has the polite, self-effacing manner of a small-town pharmacist. You wouldn't suspect that the 51-year-old, British-trained chemist helped found and direct Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program.
I met Saeed one recent morning in Baghdad as he and two-dozen other former Iraqi weapons scientists and military officials waited their turn to be questioned by "John," the head of an American interrogation team. The Americans refused to identify themselves or their agency. The British spooks, by contrast, were more polite. Saeed already had been grilled by "Miss Rebecca,'' who told him she came from MI-6, London's foreign intelligence service. After chatting a bit, I invited Saeed to lunch. We met twice that week for coffee, and ultimately I asked him to take me to his former workplace.
The next day, we drove 60 miles northwest to the Muthanna State Establishment. Muthanna was built by a French company in 1978, ostensibly as a pesticide plant. Instead, Muthanna became the heart of Saddam's chemical weapons program. By the mid-'80s, more than 1,000 people were secretly producing thousands of tons of nerve and blister agents at Muthanna, as well as running a pilot anthrax and botulinum biowarfare project. The secret was not well-kept. Muthanna was heavily bombed in the 1991 Gulf war and was literally the first stop for U.N. inspectors sent to Iraq after the 1991 cease-fire to supervise what they expected to be a brief disarmament effort.
Muthanna is desolate now. Portions remain of the front gate, an arched pair of yellow concrete scimitars, but garish murals of Saddam have been destroyed. Empty roads shimmer in the furnace-like heat, and a few skinny trees somehow survive in the roadside grit. But mostly there is devastation. Saeed tells my driver to stop every few hundred yards so he can play tour guide. "This is P-7, the production plant for sarin and tabun," he says, getting out so we can climb through a heap of concrete slabs, broken tiles, and crumpled pipes. He points to another bombed-out ruin. "On the right is P-8, where we made mustard gas." We stop again, and he nods at a dun-colored building that was the "animal house" for donkeys, dogs, rabbits, rats, and guinea pigs. "We tied them up in inhalation chambers and released the agents," he explains. "Blood would run from their eyes, noses, and mouths, and they would convulse." Scientists, he says, were kept under the watchful eyes and guns of a secret police detachment camped next door.
Saeed first came to Muthanna in 1980 with a half-dozen other military scientists to set up Project 922, which was dedicated to the covert production of chemical weapons. With a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Baghdad and a membership card in Saddam's Baath Party, Saeed was appointed chief of quality control, responsible for certifying every production run. He already had served eight years in the army's chemical defense corps, which helped train and protect Iraqi soldiers against chemical attacks from Iran, Iraq's chief enemy at the time. Now he and his colleagues were on offense. Their first success was mustard gas, a World War I blister agent that causes debilitating injuries to the eyes, lungs, and skin. After a few test runs, Muthanna soon was churning out 900 tons of mustard gas per year. Then, in 1983, Saeed and his colleagues began producing more lethal nerve agents--first tabun, then sarin and cyclosarin, which are absorbed through the skin or respiratory tract and can cause death within a few minutes. The purity of the nerve agents varied widely, but Iraq used thousands of chemical-filled bombs, rockets, and artillery shells during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. U.N. investigators estimated they caused up to 80,000 Iranian casualties. Baghdad also used Muthanna's blister and nerve agents against Kurds in northern Iraq. Saeed left Muthanna for three years in 1985 to get a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in England. He liked the dowdy seaside town of Brighton and briefly considered staying and joining a real estate firm there. "I was very tempted, but I have a big family--two sisters and six brothers--and [regime officials] told my parents, 'If your son does not return, we will kill you,'" he says.
When he got back in 1988, Muthanna was bustling. We drive down a gravel road so he can show me the rubble-filled site where he focused his work for the next three years. "We called this the Dhia'a Plant. It is where we made VX," Saeed says. VX, first developed by British scientists in the 1950s, paralyzes the nervous system and is dozens of times stronger than sarin. The four-stage VX production process is difficult, but the Muthanna scientists reverseengineered the recipe from a list of controlled chemicals issued by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. Saeed says he supervised production of his last two batches of liquid VX in April 1990 but that they failed to achieve his goal of 50 to 60 percent purity, and they deteriorated within a week. "It couldn't be used as a weapon," he insists.
Concerns about VX were central to the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) presented an imminent threat. In the early '90s, Iraqi officials repeatedly denied developing VX. After U.N. inspectors found proof of VX in 1995, Baghdad acknowledged producing 3.9 tons but insisted it was never deployed as a weapon. U.N. inspectors weren't so sure. In 1998, they found VX products in a missile warhead. More important, they warned that Iraq could still be hiding enough precursor chemicals to produce up to 200 tons of VX. Iraq consistently denied possessing those chemicals, however, and their existence was never proved. Saeed claims the VX dispute was based on a misunderstanding. In 1991, he says senior Iraqi officials ordered him to destroy his records and to deny producing VX in order to bring a quick end to U.N. inspections. He says he tried to tell the truth after 1995 but that his previous lies undermined his attempts to come clean. "When the U.N. inspectors first came, my superior told me, 'Because you did not succeed in producing VX, why tell them about it? It takes too much time. So forget about it.' I had to tear up or burn our documents. So we hid the VX program from 1991 to 1995. After that, of course, they did not believe us. But that is the real story."
The idea that Saddam did not secretly continue building chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons directly contradicts White House claims. But the Iraqi scientists I met insist that the combination of U.S. bombing, U.N. inspections, disarmament efforts, unilateral destruction by Iraqi officials, and stiff U.N. sanctions had indeed eliminated Saddam's illicit weapons by the mid-'90s. At the same time, however, Saddam's efforts to hide or destroy documents hindered efforts to ultimately resolve scores of questions about the disposition of missing materials and equipment. In addition, fear of Saddam kept many scientists from telling the dictator the truth about their WMD programs. Ultimately, the scientists and others say, Saddam may have feared that admitting his WMD were gone would have shown a weakness that could have threatened his hold on power. These overlapping theories may not fully explain why American forces have not found WMD in Iraq. But, for now, they're the best we have.
n 1998, the United Nations withdrew its weapons inspectors from Iraq before a series of U.S. and British bombing raids. The final report from the U.N. inspectors in January 1999 focused chiefly on questions about unaccounted-for raw materials, documents, and equipment related to WMD programs. The Bush administration went to war this year on the assumption that those unaccounted for materials--such as VX precursor chemicals--were still present in Iraq. But, according to Iraqi scientists, some of those chemicals had never existed or had been destroyed by U.N. inspectors, by Iraqi authorities, or by the passage of time. "A lot of projects were just ink on paper," a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer tells me over coffee one morning in Baghdad.
So why did Saddam's regime deceive U.N. inspectors for twelve years? Why did it organize traffic jams, lock doors, hide documents, bus in jeering crowds, and do everything else it could to frustrate the U.N. weapons teams between 1991 and 1998? Why did Saeed, appointed deputy minder to the U.N. inspectors after 1991, help author all three of Iraq's bogus chemical weapons declarations to the U.N. Security Council, including large parts of the 12,000-page document handed over last December? An honest report might have prevented war. Instead, like its predecessors, it was quickly rejected as inaccurate and incomplete.
When I ask him, Saeed says he doesn't know exactly why Saddam continued deceiving the world. Back in 1991, he says, his supervisor, Hussam Mohammed Amin (who was taken into U.S. custody in April), ordered him to destroy all his original notes and records in an attempt to cover up Iraq's pre-Gulf war chemical weapons programs. When it came time to write the first chemical weapons report to the Security Council in 1994, he says, "We had to do it mostly from memory. We worked day and night for six months. Maybe we could collect a piece of paper here and there or check labels on some equipment. Maybe some numbers were not right." Without the original records, he says, his follow-up reports were just as bad. U.N. inspectors were convinced the inaccuracies were deliberate, in part because they kept finding evidence--from shipping records to chemical residue--proving that Iraq's WMD programs in the '80s were much more extensive than it had admitted.
In some cases, fear of Saddam prevented the scientists from revealing to the dictator that the WMD programs had failed or been destroyed. "People were afraid to tell Saddam," the intelligence officer says. After all, in a land ruled by torture and terror, what official would admit that he did not achieve 100 percent of his assigned production? Even correcting the numbers later was dangerous. "Because then we will look like liars," the intelligence officer explains. "And that will make Iraq look bad [to the world]. And people will lose their heads." Indeed, agents from at least three branches of Saddam's ruthless security services spied not only on the inspectors but also on the inspectors' minders. "They are watching us always. Are we saying too much? Are we whispering?" Saeed pauses. "Even if I go out on Friday, the day of rest, if I go to Arasat Street [the commercial center of Baghdad] and I see a U.N. inspector and he comes up and says, 'Hello,' I am very scared. Because I know he is being followed by the Mukhabarat [the secret police], and, if they see us together, they will think I am helping them. So I just say very quickly, 'Hello, I'm sorry, I must go. Goodbye, goodbye.'" He stares down at the ground, and his voice suddenly sounds angry. "The Mukhabarat. I hate them."
But, if the WMD were gone, why didn't Saddam cooperate in the '90s, if only to get the United Nations off his back so he could resume building his weapons? Why didn't he cooperate last year in order to appease the White House and avoid a war that would topple his regime? The prevailing theory among former U.N. inspectors and current American, British, and Australian weapons-hunters interviewed for this story is that Saddam was too proud to concede that he no longer possessed WMD. To admit this point would have meant bowing to the West. He would have appeared weak, and weakness would have threatened his hold on power at home and his vainglorious self-image as a leader of the Arab world. Instead, Saddam thought he could bully his way through this crisis, as he had in previous standoffs with the United States and its allies. The inspectors say Saddam believed that uncertainty about WMD could again serve as a deterrent to American forces. After all, in the wake of the 1991 war, U.N. inspectors learned Saddam had told aides that coalition ground forces had not pressed on to Baghdad because they were afraid of his chemical and biological weapons.
Of course, the possibility that Saddam no longer possessed WMD does not mean that he no longer wanted to possess them. The former senior intelligence officer, a barrel-chested brigadier general who still wears a large watch with Saddam's portrait etched in gold on the face, insists that no chemical or biological weapons were produced in Iraq after the mid-'90s. But he does not pretend Saddam suddenly went legit. Indeed, the officer says he helped manage a maze of overseas trading companies run by Iraqi intelligence operatives and designed to support Iraq's sanctions-busting procurement schemes. He made seven overseas trips after the mid-'90s to help buy and ship spare parts, raw materials, and other supplies for Saddam's conventional weapons programs. On his last trip, in April 2001, he went to Jordan, Cyprus, Morocco, South Africa, and Argentina, using phony passports from neighboring Arab nations, to help arrange the secret purchase of $57 million worth of cannons, artillery fuses, calibrating instruments, and other weapons parts. As on previous trips, he also helped buy and smuggle "dual-use" items, such as medical laboratory equipment, which might someday be used to build chemical and biological weapons if the United Nations declared Iraq WMD-free and lifted sanctions. Indeed, he says that, in 1996, Saddam ordered his intelligence services to create a series of secret cells of Iraqi scientists and technicians. The groups--each with about four or five members--met regularly in Baghdad basements and did small experiments in underground laboratories. Their goal was not to build weapons. It was to formulate plans on how to build them when the United Nations lifted sanctions. "We could start again anytime," the intelligence officer says. "It's very easy. Especially biological."
hould we believe Saeed when he says Iraq has no hidden weapons today? He has lied before, and he and every other Iraqi I met are absolutely convinced that Saddam is alive--a viewpoint reinforced by the recent audiotape, allegedly by Saddam, broadcast on Al Jazeera. Many scientists are convinced that thugs from Saddam's regime will retaliate against anyone who cooperates with the U.S. military occupation. Saeed is clearly terrified. His voice drops and his hands began to tremble when he describes how the dictator's aides suddenly appeared at his office in late 1997. They ordered him into a car with shades drawn and drove him to an unknown location. Saddam was waiting inside. "He thanked me for my work," he recalls. "But I am still shaking."
Saeed also admits he might not have known if the Mukhabarat or other Iraqi intelligence organizations were conducting their own WMD programs. The weapons procurement and production efforts were so compartmentalized that, even as Saeed advanced--he was promoted to brigadier general after he began working with the U.N. inspectors--he still had only a limited view of the other programs. He was aware, for example, that the Mukhabarat had special laboratories in and around Baghdad but says he never saw them or knew of their purpose. On the other hand, any serious effort to produce chemical or biological agents would have required scores of scientists, engineers, technicians, drivers, and others. And American officials in Baghdad have offered a $200,000 cash reward and political asylum or a new identity outside Iraq to anyone who can provide proof of Iraq's forbidden weapons. If the weapons really exist, it is hard to understand why no one has grabbed that prize. Yet no one has produced the goods.
Facing this failure, the Pentagon announced with great fanfare in late April that it would overhaul the WMD hunt. Instead of just searching sites using outdated intelligence, the newly created Iraq Survey Group would seek new clues by analyzing hundreds of thousands of captured documents and by finding and interrogating anyone, from top scientists to office clerks, who might know about them. But the new operation has been slow to start. Having run out of valid targets, most of the weapons-hunting teams were sidelined for much of June as they awaited new orders. It took American intelligence two weeks to find Saeed and his colleagues, and they were hardly hiding. Hoping the Americans would come to pay their back salaries, they gathered each morning outside a looted office building that once was home to the National Monitoring Directorate (NMD), the agency set up by Saddam's regime to work with U.N. inspectors. American officials would not allow me to observe any of the interrogations at the NMD building or at Camp Slayer, a former palace complex that now is home to the weapons-hunters and U.S. intelligence operations. But it is not hard to figure out what the Americans are asking. "Their questions are the same as yours," Saeed tells me. "'Do you know of any documents or inventory of chemical agents? Any stockpiles? Any production programs? Any filled munitions?' ... I am ready to give them all the information I have. But the answer is always the same, 'No, no, no.'"
Outside the NMD building, I hear the same kind of answers from General Jamil Raad, a large, bullnecked man whose face appears set in a permanent scowl, and from other scientists. Raad was director general of the Salahaldeen factory, which produced radar, military communications, and electronics equipment at Al Dour, near Tikrit. He points to a knot of ten men whom he says he brought to meet the Americans. All had worked for the Military Industrialization Company (MIC), the vast network of arms and trading companies responsible for most of Iraq's weapons production and procurement, and are willing to speak with the American interrogators--though, they insist, they had no information to offer. "I told them we are all ready to cooperate with any of the questions they have," Raad says. "But there are no hidden weapons." Nearby is Dr. Mahmoud Dagher, the former acting director of the MIC. He sighs and studies my business card closely when I ask about his interrogation. "They ask the same questions every day," he says. "I told them, 'We gave [the U.N. inspectors] everything, and nothing was kept.'" He says he too had turned down the $200,000 offer. "The money is nothing. The truth is the truth."
ruth, of course, is in short supply in Iraq. The CIA complains that high-profile captives are sticking to a party line, which some CIA people believe may be untrue. "They all say the same thing," a CIA official told me. "'We don't know anything about WMD, we don't know about POWs, we never met Saddam. Sorry, can't help you.'"
Yet U.S. tactics haven't helped the search. The American occupation forces have not clearly explained whether the scientists who cooperate will be treated as heroes or as criminals. In June, Mahdi Obeidi, a former senior Iraqi nuclear scientist, voluntarily led the CIA to his rose garden in Baghdad, where they dug up parts of a gas centrifuge machine as well as a two-foot-high stack of blueprints, manuals, and other documents that he had buried. Obeidi told the CIA that Saddam's nuclear weapons program had been destroyed by Allied bombing and U.N. inspectors in the '90s but that Saddam still hoped to restart it. Indeed, Obeidi told the CIA that, if the United Nations had lifted sanctions, Iraq could have used the centrifuge parts as templates to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. But, two days after Obeidi turned his cache in to the CIA, the U.S. military broke down his front door and arrested him on suspicion that he was hiding other material as well. The CIA ultimately got him out of jail and moved Obeidi and his nine family members to Kuwait. But the episode is unlikely to encourage other Iraqi scientists to come forward.
Nor, in most cases, have American forces disclosed who they have detained or why, though word--and fear--spreads quickly. The day before I met Saeed and his colleagues, for example, "John" and his team had arrived with a handwritten list with the words "Taha-7" on top. It named six top aides to Dr. Rahib Rashid Taha, a dour, British-trained microbiologist known as Dr. Germ who was arrested after the war. In the '80s, Taha had supervised production of vast quantities of anthrax, botulinum, aflatoxin, and other lethal pathogens. "John" found three bioweapons experts from the list that day and took them away in his van, promising he would bring them back in an hour. By the time I left Iraq two weeks later, their families still had no idea where they were or when they might be released. Not surprisingly, the snatch didn't go down very well with their colleagues. The NMD building was deserted when I went back for a final visit.
In my last meeting with Saeed, I ask if he ever regretted producing chemical weapons for Saddam. He seems surprised. "In Iraq, we obey an order. We have no choice." What about the thousands of casualties and deaths they had caused? "It is not my responsibility to think how they might be used," he says. After I press him several times, he finally admits that perhaps he has one regret. "I wish I'd taken the estate agent job" in Brighton, he concedes. "I understand the property market has done very well."
From the International Herlad Tribune:
Bush policy risks terminal strain in NATO
William Pfaff IHT
Monday, July 21, 2003
Europe and the United States
PARIS The trans-Atlantic alliance is under what may be terminal strain. George Robertson says NATO will provide no further help to the United States in Iraq - meaning that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's principal European members refuse to let the alliance do so.
NATO might survive the present crisis, but only as a structure providing U.S. bases in ex-Communist Europe. The United States is going in one direction, and NATO's European Union members in another, a rival direction.
This is a reluctant choice by the Europeans, but their perception of Washington has in the last two years changed dramatically. The United States is now seen in Europe as a threat to Europe's independence. The American side does not understand this.
During the last few weeks, I have been at a half dozen European conferences bringing together political specialists and policy analysts, as well as past or present officials from both sides of the Atlantic, to talk about current affairs and the future.
The declared subjects differed: Italian-American relations, European security, global financial and economic issues, questions of world order. In every case, wherever it started, discussion quickly turned into a debate about how to cope with the Bush administration's new America, seen as a disturber of world peace and a risk to the security even of its allies.
At these meetings, U.S. foreign policy found very few West European defenders. One or two half-hearted Brits. No Dutch, Germans, Italians or Scandinavians. Even the British said that Europe now has to have its own policy and its own security resources (although with Tony Blair's speech in Washington, the British government now seems unqualifiedly committed to American leadership). All said this without enthusiasm. No one likes the situation.
The Europeans simply no longer agree with the United States. They don't agree about the terrorist threat. They don't think Osama bin Laden is a global menace. They don't take Washington's view of rogue states. They don't agree about pre-emptive war, clash of civilizations, the demonization of Islam, or Pentagon domination of U.S. foreign policy.
Such views are interpreted in the United States as "anti-Americanism." The truth, as a leading (conservative) figure from ex-Communist "New Europe" said at one of these meetings, is that the Bush administration has turned America's friends into anti-Americans.
He said that throughout his political life he had been an admirer and defender of the United States against left-wing European critics, but now he has become what he calls a "new anti-American."
He defined new anti-Americans as "former anti-anti-Americans, now forced to become anti-American themselves." He said that in his own country, the U.S. ambassador behaves in the way the Soviet Union's ambassador did before 1989. This simply is unacceptable.
Washington and the U.S. policy community seem to have completely misunderstood what has happened. They blame the French, Germans and Belgians, and think they have explained the problem. They like to tell Europeans that Europe doesn't understand that 9/11 "changed everything" for the United States. They fail to realize that 9/11's aftermath has changed everything for Western Europe.
Neo-conservative officials from Washington who spoke at the conferences I attended celebrated American power and victory in Iraq, and demanded apologies from the Europeans for having failed to support the United States. They still were saying that if you didn't agree, you are "irrelevant."
Analysts from the universities and policy centers were too often implicitly condescending to their audiences, saying that Europe needed to "grow up" and face the terrorism threat (seemingly indifferent to or ignorant of the history of IRA, German and Italian Red Brigades, Basque ETA, PLO, and Algerian terrorist operations in Europe).
They talked about Venus and Mars – the Washington theory about passive, peace-obsessed Europeans, in need of realistic leadership from tough-minded Americans. The Europeans had heard it all before. This time they laughed, or walked out for a coffee.
However, they took the implications seriously. Every one of these discussions ended with the Europeans in a debate about what had to be done to put the so-called European common security and foreign policy on the road. Until now this has been a lackadaisical debate. Now, even the people from the most Atlanticist allied states, closest to the United States, shrug and say, "there's no choice."
Well meant appeals by American Atlanticists for U.S.-European reconciliation, such as the one issued a few weeks ago under the auspices of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, are politely received, but are irrelevant. We are past that point. That statement advised Europeans on what they should do to recapture America's confidence, and "make the U.S. feel welcome in Europe." It's the other way around. It's the Americans that have lost the Europeans' confidence. Unless the United States can recapture it, the alliance is finished. Tribune Media Services International
Bush policy risks terminal strain in NATO
William Pfaff IHT
Monday, July 21, 2003
Europe and the United States
PARIS The trans-Atlantic alliance is under what may be terminal strain. George Robertson says NATO will provide no further help to the United States in Iraq - meaning that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's principal European members refuse to let the alliance do so.
NATO might survive the present crisis, but only as a structure providing U.S. bases in ex-Communist Europe. The United States is going in one direction, and NATO's European Union members in another, a rival direction.
This is a reluctant choice by the Europeans, but their perception of Washington has in the last two years changed dramatically. The United States is now seen in Europe as a threat to Europe's independence. The American side does not understand this.
During the last few weeks, I have been at a half dozen European conferences bringing together political specialists and policy analysts, as well as past or present officials from both sides of the Atlantic, to talk about current affairs and the future.
The declared subjects differed: Italian-American relations, European security, global financial and economic issues, questions of world order. In every case, wherever it started, discussion quickly turned into a debate about how to cope with the Bush administration's new America, seen as a disturber of world peace and a risk to the security even of its allies.
At these meetings, U.S. foreign policy found very few West European defenders. One or two half-hearted Brits. No Dutch, Germans, Italians or Scandinavians. Even the British said that Europe now has to have its own policy and its own security resources (although with Tony Blair's speech in Washington, the British government now seems unqualifiedly committed to American leadership). All said this without enthusiasm. No one likes the situation.
The Europeans simply no longer agree with the United States. They don't agree about the terrorist threat. They don't think Osama bin Laden is a global menace. They don't take Washington's view of rogue states. They don't agree about pre-emptive war, clash of civilizations, the demonization of Islam, or Pentagon domination of U.S. foreign policy.
Such views are interpreted in the United States as "anti-Americanism." The truth, as a leading (conservative) figure from ex-Communist "New Europe" said at one of these meetings, is that the Bush administration has turned America's friends into anti-Americans.
He said that throughout his political life he had been an admirer and defender of the United States against left-wing European critics, but now he has become what he calls a "new anti-American."
He defined new anti-Americans as "former anti-anti-Americans, now forced to become anti-American themselves." He said that in his own country, the U.S. ambassador behaves in the way the Soviet Union's ambassador did before 1989. This simply is unacceptable.
Washington and the U.S. policy community seem to have completely misunderstood what has happened. They blame the French, Germans and Belgians, and think they have explained the problem. They like to tell Europeans that Europe doesn't understand that 9/11 "changed everything" for the United States. They fail to realize that 9/11's aftermath has changed everything for Western Europe.
Neo-conservative officials from Washington who spoke at the conferences I attended celebrated American power and victory in Iraq, and demanded apologies from the Europeans for having failed to support the United States. They still were saying that if you didn't agree, you are "irrelevant."
Analysts from the universities and policy centers were too often implicitly condescending to their audiences, saying that Europe needed to "grow up" and face the terrorism threat (seemingly indifferent to or ignorant of the history of IRA, German and Italian Red Brigades, Basque ETA, PLO, and Algerian terrorist operations in Europe).
They talked about Venus and Mars – the Washington theory about passive, peace-obsessed Europeans, in need of realistic leadership from tough-minded Americans. The Europeans had heard it all before. This time they laughed, or walked out for a coffee.
However, they took the implications seriously. Every one of these discussions ended with the Europeans in a debate about what had to be done to put the so-called European common security and foreign policy on the road. Until now this has been a lackadaisical debate. Now, even the people from the most Atlanticist allied states, closest to the United States, shrug and say, "there's no choice."
Well meant appeals by American Atlanticists for U.S.-European reconciliation, such as the one issued a few weeks ago under the auspices of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, are politely received, but are irrelevant. We are past that point. That statement advised Europeans on what they should do to recapture America's confidence, and "make the U.S. feel welcome in Europe." It's the other way around. It's the Americans that have lost the Europeans' confidence. Unless the United States can recapture it, the alliance is finished. Tribune Media Services International
Iraq and more Iraq. Even the death by suicide of a British scientist in the news today is Iraq related.
A thought provoking article by William Saffire on the NYT is also Iraq related:
Saddam's Guerrillas
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON
Saddam Hussein is waging "a classical guerrilla-type campaign," says Gen. John Abizaid, the new head of the U.S. Central Command, which is "getting more organized" every day.
What can the deposed dictator hope to accomplish? How can he, with a ragtag force of Baathist criminals and imported killers with nothing to lose, possibly defeat 170,000 occupying troops?
Saddam outfoxed one President Bush and intends to outfox and outlast another. Facing the likelihood that his army would disintegrate under direct assault, he probably decided that the mother of all battles against a democracy is a war of attrition. We may assume his current strategy to be based on some of these assumptions:
1. Troop losses drove Clinton out of Somalia, Eisenhower out of Lebanon, Johnson and Nixon out of Vietnam. In occupied Iraq, only one death a day — sustained for months with pictures of bereaved families on television — would, in Saddam's thinking, not only demoralize the occupiers but also increase political pressure in the U.S. and Britain to bring the troops home.
2. European and Muslim opinion, incensed at being ignored by a superpower, will continue to deny cooperation to the victors. Saddam assumes this would force Bush to turn over control of Iraq to the U.N., in which Kofi Annan has just said "democracy should not be imposed from the outside," and the blue helmets would run at the first Sunni uprising.
3. Patience is not an American virtue. Saddam anticipates that the antiwar minority — furious at the unexpected ease of the U.S. victory and shrugging off findings of mass graves of Saddam's victims — would turn a steady accretion of casualties among occupiers into dread visions of "quagmire."
4. Saddamist guerrillas, aided by terrorist allies in Syria and Iran, would hold out the fearsome possibility of the return to power of Saddam or his sons. A series of murders of "collaborators" would continue to intimidate Iraqi scientists and officers who know about W.M.D. and links to Al Qaeda and its related Ansar al-Islam.
5. He presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate.
6. Inside Iraq, with the Americans on the way out, the Shiite majority would split, and when the Sunni minority seizes power in Baghdad the troublesome Kurds would separate, thereby triggering a Turkish invasion of the north. In the ensuing anarchy, the strongman would emerge out of internal exile to exterminate the disloyal and lead the Arab world.
That's his comeback strategy. Is it a homicidal maniac's dream? If the taped voice is Saddam's, as we believe, it means he has worked out a means of secret production and clandestine transmission to cooperative broadcasters just as cunning as the concealment of damning documents or recent traffic across borders of money and terrorist helpers.
How best to deny Saddam's putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us?
Drop the premature conclusion that if we can't yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That's like saying because we haven't found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed.
Put sacrifice in perspective. The loss of one soldier's life is individual tragedy, but the loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator would be national tragedy. The purpose of our armed forces is to protect us and that's the costly mission our volunteers carry out every day.
Remember which nations had the courage to do right in timely fashion. Dissenters are free to argue about judgments of hard-to-read intelligence, but few will deny that the world is indisputably safer with the overthrow of a proven mass murderer and financier of suicide bombers.
This above all: to end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein and his ghostly crew. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.
Also from the NYT, a column the contents of which I believe should be thoroughly discussed:
Have Guns, Will Travel
By P. W. SINGER
WASHINGTON
It is often said that war is too important to be left to the generals. But what about the C.E.O.'s? The Pentagon's plan to hire a private paramilitary force to guard sites in Iraq may have surprised many Americans, but it was really just another example of a remarkable recent development in warfare: the rise of a global trade in hired military services.
Known as "privatized military firms," these companies are the corporate evolution of old-fashioned mercenaries — that is, they provide the service side of war rather than weapons. They range from small consulting firms that offer the advice of retired generals to transnational corporations that lease out battalions of commandoes. There are hundreds of them, with a global revenue of more than $100 billion a year, operating in at least 50 countries.
Even the world's most dominant military has increasingly become reliant on them. From 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon entered into more than 3,000 contracts with private military firms. Companies like Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, now provide the logistics for every major American military deployment. Corporations have even taken over much of military training and recruiting, including the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at more than 200 American universities. (Yes, private employees now train our military leaders of tomorrow.)
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the industry's growing role than the campaign against Iraq. Private employees worked on everything from feeding and housing coalition troops to maintaining weapons systems like the B-2 bomber. Indeed, there was roughly one private military worker in the region for every 10 soldiers fighting the war (as opposed to one for every 100 troops in the 1991 gulf war).
And companies will play an even greater role in the occupation. In addition to the proposed security force, the new Iraqi military will be trained by corporate consultants. Washington has also contracted DynCorp, whose pilots have long helped the Pentagon destroy coca fields in Colombia, to train the new police force.
In many cases, privatizing war has allowed for greater military capacities and cost efficiency. A problem, however, is that while the industry has developed at a breakneck pace, governments and global bodies have responded at a bureaucratic crawl. There are almost no international laws or national regulations that have significant bearing on the industry.
This mix of profit motive with the fog of war raises several concerns. First, the good of private companies may not always be to the public good. All the normal worries one has with contractors (overcharging, overbilling hours, poorly trained workers, quality assurance) raise their ugly head; but in this case one is not dealing with a new plumber — lives are at stake. For example, a former DynCorp employee has accused the company of cutting costs by hiring former waiters and security guards to work as mechanics on Army helicopters.
Second, just like lawyers, some military contractors work only for ethical clients while others choose to make money from less savory types. As a result, some companies have helped save democratic regimes and aided humanitarian groups while others have supported dictators, rebel groups, drug cartels and terrorists.
In addition, foreign and military affairs are the government's domain. Undertaking public policy through private means can mean that some initiatives that might not pass public approval — such as the increasing American involvement, outside Congressional oversight, in Colombia's civil strife — still get carried out.
Also, privatized operations do not always go as planned. In 1998 the Colombian Air Force, working from intelligence supplied by an American company, mistakenly bombed a village, killing 17. In 2001 a plane carrying missionaries was shot down over Peru after private workers under contract to the Central Intelligence Agency alerted the Peruvian military that the plane seemed suspicious.
International and national laws must be updated so that governments gain some control over whom military firms are allowed to work with and can be certain the companies can be held accountable when things go wrong. Likewise, as governments come to rely more on private help, they must become more business-savvy, establishing good competition and oversight in their outsourcing. This is the only way to ensure that the public, not just the industry, enjoys the benefits of military privatization.
P.W. Singer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry."
A thought provoking article by William Saffire on the NYT is also Iraq related:
Saddam's Guerrillas
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON
Saddam Hussein is waging "a classical guerrilla-type campaign," says Gen. John Abizaid, the new head of the U.S. Central Command, which is "getting more organized" every day.
What can the deposed dictator hope to accomplish? How can he, with a ragtag force of Baathist criminals and imported killers with nothing to lose, possibly defeat 170,000 occupying troops?
Saddam outfoxed one President Bush and intends to outfox and outlast another. Facing the likelihood that his army would disintegrate under direct assault, he probably decided that the mother of all battles against a democracy is a war of attrition. We may assume his current strategy to be based on some of these assumptions:
1. Troop losses drove Clinton out of Somalia, Eisenhower out of Lebanon, Johnson and Nixon out of Vietnam. In occupied Iraq, only one death a day — sustained for months with pictures of bereaved families on television — would, in Saddam's thinking, not only demoralize the occupiers but also increase political pressure in the U.S. and Britain to bring the troops home.
2. European and Muslim opinion, incensed at being ignored by a superpower, will continue to deny cooperation to the victors. Saddam assumes this would force Bush to turn over control of Iraq to the U.N., in which Kofi Annan has just said "democracy should not be imposed from the outside," and the blue helmets would run at the first Sunni uprising.
3. Patience is not an American virtue. Saddam anticipates that the antiwar minority — furious at the unexpected ease of the U.S. victory and shrugging off findings of mass graves of Saddam's victims — would turn a steady accretion of casualties among occupiers into dread visions of "quagmire."
4. Saddamist guerrillas, aided by terrorist allies in Syria and Iran, would hold out the fearsome possibility of the return to power of Saddam or his sons. A series of murders of "collaborators" would continue to intimidate Iraqi scientists and officers who know about W.M.D. and links to Al Qaeda and its related Ansar al-Islam.
5. He presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate.
6. Inside Iraq, with the Americans on the way out, the Shiite majority would split, and when the Sunni minority seizes power in Baghdad the troublesome Kurds would separate, thereby triggering a Turkish invasion of the north. In the ensuing anarchy, the strongman would emerge out of internal exile to exterminate the disloyal and lead the Arab world.
That's his comeback strategy. Is it a homicidal maniac's dream? If the taped voice is Saddam's, as we believe, it means he has worked out a means of secret production and clandestine transmission to cooperative broadcasters just as cunning as the concealment of damning documents or recent traffic across borders of money and terrorist helpers.
How best to deny Saddam's putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us?
Drop the premature conclusion that if we can't yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That's like saying because we haven't found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed.
Put sacrifice in perspective. The loss of one soldier's life is individual tragedy, but the loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator would be national tragedy. The purpose of our armed forces is to protect us and that's the costly mission our volunteers carry out every day.
Remember which nations had the courage to do right in timely fashion. Dissenters are free to argue about judgments of hard-to-read intelligence, but few will deny that the world is indisputably safer with the overthrow of a proven mass murderer and financier of suicide bombers.
This above all: to end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein and his ghostly crew. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.
Also from the NYT, a column the contents of which I believe should be thoroughly discussed:
Have Guns, Will Travel
By P. W. SINGER
WASHINGTON
It is often said that war is too important to be left to the generals. But what about the C.E.O.'s? The Pentagon's plan to hire a private paramilitary force to guard sites in Iraq may have surprised many Americans, but it was really just another example of a remarkable recent development in warfare: the rise of a global trade in hired military services.
Known as "privatized military firms," these companies are the corporate evolution of old-fashioned mercenaries — that is, they provide the service side of war rather than weapons. They range from small consulting firms that offer the advice of retired generals to transnational corporations that lease out battalions of commandoes. There are hundreds of them, with a global revenue of more than $100 billion a year, operating in at least 50 countries.
Even the world's most dominant military has increasingly become reliant on them. From 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon entered into more than 3,000 contracts with private military firms. Companies like Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, now provide the logistics for every major American military deployment. Corporations have even taken over much of military training and recruiting, including the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at more than 200 American universities. (Yes, private employees now train our military leaders of tomorrow.)
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the industry's growing role than the campaign against Iraq. Private employees worked on everything from feeding and housing coalition troops to maintaining weapons systems like the B-2 bomber. Indeed, there was roughly one private military worker in the region for every 10 soldiers fighting the war (as opposed to one for every 100 troops in the 1991 gulf war).
And companies will play an even greater role in the occupation. In addition to the proposed security force, the new Iraqi military will be trained by corporate consultants. Washington has also contracted DynCorp, whose pilots have long helped the Pentagon destroy coca fields in Colombia, to train the new police force.
In many cases, privatizing war has allowed for greater military capacities and cost efficiency. A problem, however, is that while the industry has developed at a breakneck pace, governments and global bodies have responded at a bureaucratic crawl. There are almost no international laws or national regulations that have significant bearing on the industry.
This mix of profit motive with the fog of war raises several concerns. First, the good of private companies may not always be to the public good. All the normal worries one has with contractors (overcharging, overbilling hours, poorly trained workers, quality assurance) raise their ugly head; but in this case one is not dealing with a new plumber — lives are at stake. For example, a former DynCorp employee has accused the company of cutting costs by hiring former waiters and security guards to work as mechanics on Army helicopters.
Second, just like lawyers, some military contractors work only for ethical clients while others choose to make money from less savory types. As a result, some companies have helped save democratic regimes and aided humanitarian groups while others have supported dictators, rebel groups, drug cartels and terrorists.
In addition, foreign and military affairs are the government's domain. Undertaking public policy through private means can mean that some initiatives that might not pass public approval — such as the increasing American involvement, outside Congressional oversight, in Colombia's civil strife — still get carried out.
Also, privatized operations do not always go as planned. In 1998 the Colombian Air Force, working from intelligence supplied by an American company, mistakenly bombed a village, killing 17. In 2001 a plane carrying missionaries was shot down over Peru after private workers under contract to the Central Intelligence Agency alerted the Peruvian military that the plane seemed suspicious.
International and national laws must be updated so that governments gain some control over whom military firms are allowed to work with and can be certain the companies can be held accountable when things go wrong. Likewise, as governments come to rely more on private help, they must become more business-savvy, establishing good competition and oversight in their outsourcing. This is the only way to ensure that the public, not just the industry, enjoys the benefits of military privatization.
P.W. Singer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry."
