Bush’s Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security (Iran)
David Kay, Washington Post: One year ago I told the Senate Armed Services Committee that I had concluded "we were almost all wrong" at the time of the Iraq war about that country's activities with regard to weapons of mass destruction -- and never more wrong than in the assessment that Iraq had a resurgent program on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. I testified about what I saw as the major reasons we got it so wrong, and I urged the establishment of an independent commission to examine this failure and begin the long-overdue process of adjusting our intelligence capabilities to the new national security environment we face. It is an environment dominated by too-easy access to weapons of mass destruction capabilities and to the means of concealing such capabilities from international inspection and national intelligence agencies…
There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war. The International Atomic Energy Agency has announced that while Iran now admits having concealed for 18 years nuclear activities that should have been reported to the IAEA, it is has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Iran says it is now cooperating fully with international inspections, and it denies having anything but a peaceful nuclear energy program.
Vice President Cheney is giving interviews and speeches that paint a stark picture of a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran and declaring that this is something the Bush administration will not tolerate. Iranian exiles are providing the press and governments with a steady stream of new "evidence" concerning Iran's nuclear weapons activities. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has warned that Iran will not be allowed to use the cover of civilian nuclear power to acquire nuclear weapons, but says an attack on Iran is "not on the agenda at this point." U.S. allies, while saying they share the concern over Iran's nuclear ambitions, remain determined to pursue diplomacy and say they cannot conceive of any circumstance that would lead them to use military force. And the press is beginning to uncover U.S. moves that seem designed to lay the basis for military action against Iran.
Now is the time to pause and recall what went wrong with the assessment of Iraq's WMD program and try to avoid repeating those mistakes in Iran. Five steps are essential:
First, accept the fact that the past cannot be undone. Iran has, by its own admission, engaged for at least 18 years in clandestine nuclear activities that now give it the basis, if it chooses, to pursue nuclear weapons. That knowledge cannot be eliminated, so it is nonsense to talk about eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities short of war and occupation. The goal, and one that is reachable, is to craft a set of tools and transparency measures that so tie Iran's nuclear activities to the larger world of peaceful nuclear activities that any attempt to push ahead on the weapons front would be detectable and very disruptive for Iran.
Ray McGovern, www.tompaine.com: Quick! Anyone! Who can put the brakes on Vice President Dick Cheney before we have another war on our hands? Current and former intelligence analysts are reacting with wonderment and apprehension to his remarks last week in an interview with Don Imus. Cheney made questionable claims about Iran's nuclear program and resuscitated his spinning on why attacking Iraq was the prudent thing to do.
There he goes again, they say—trifling with the truth on Iraq and now taking off after Iran. Does he really have the temerity to reach into the same bag of tricks used to convince most Americans that Iraq was an immediate nuclear threat? Will his distinctive mix of truculence and contempt for the truth succeed in rationalizing attacks against Iran on grounds that U.S. intelligence may have underestimated the progress in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program 15 year ago?
At this point, the focus is no longer on the bogus WMD rationale used to promote the attack on Iraq, intelligence analysts say. It’s the claims the vice president is now making regarding Iran’s nuclear capability—and, given the deliberate distortions on Iraq, whether anyone should believe him…
At this point, British officials, who have had a front-row seat for all this, are worried that Cheney is now driving administration policy on Iran, according to a recent article in The Times of London. Adding to London’s concern is the fact that the Pentagon seems to be relying heavily on “alarmingly inconclusive” satellite imagery of Iranian installations…
Someone needs to tell Cheney that “diplomatic mess” trivializes the lasting damage to the United States that such an attack would inevitably bring. Not only can his attitude be read as a green light for Israeli pre-emption, but it would undoubtedly be read as proof of U.S. complicity, should the Israelis attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. And the queues at Al Qaeda recruiting stations—already lengthened by Abu Graib and Fallujah—would now stretch out longer than the lines at the polls in the minority precincts of Ohio.
And so we are back to the key question: Can anyone put the brakes on the vice president? It would normally be the job of CIA analysts to point out to the president and his senior advisors the manifold problems that would accrue from an Israeli attack (or, worse still) a U.S., or joint U.S.-Israeli, attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. But Seymour Hersh’s recent report that the White House is weeding out the apostates from the true believers among CIA analysts, together with the current dearth of courage in senior Agency ranks, suggest that those remaining analysts who still subscribe to the old Agency ethos of speaking truth to power will continue to choose to resign and look for honest work.
This will leave the field to the kind of “slam-dunk” sycophants who conjured up “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and then passed their reporting off as intelligence analysis. What can we expect of them this time on Iran?
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon.com: The morning after, the Iraqi state received the nod of legitimacy from other governments, but it is no more capable than before of providing security or basic public services. It remains utterly dependent on "the occupation" for the indeterminate future. Nor is this democracy any more protective of liberal values. Just days before the election, Human Rights Watch reported that the Iraqi government engages in systematic torture of detainees, including children.
The Shiite victory was also a quiet victory for Iran, whose leaders, unlike Bush, did not claim credit. The Iranian Shiite government has invested more than $1 billion in Iraqi Shiite political parties, organizations and media. The Qods Force, the extraterritorial arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has trained Shiite militias, and its intelligence agents have honeycombed the Iraqi government and Shiite parties.
Before the election, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a "Shiite crescent" dominated by Iran, stretching through Iraq to southern Lebanon. Though Abdullah subsequently praised the balloting in Iraq, his anxiety about Iranian influence in Iraq is shared by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The Iraqi election is the culmination of the long Iran-Iraq war -- which Iran has now won without lifting a finger. Its deadly neighbor has been replaced by a Shiite ascendancy atop a weak state that cannot threaten it but is subject to its influence in a thousand and one ways. When the mist of elation lifts, the shadow of Iran looms.
The Bush policy consists of paralysis interrupted by fits of saber rattling. The responsibility for reining in Iran's development of nuclear weapons has been assumed by the United Nations and the European Union. Led by Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, the EU negotiated Iran's agreement to allow inspection of its facilities and to freeze its production of fissible material. For his good deed and for declaring before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration has attempted to oust ElBaradei…
Blinding bursts of triumphalism are characteristic of a march of folly and quicken its pace. True, just as paranoids have real enemies, so the euphoric can experience a high from genuine events. But the insistence on euphoria, as those who grapple with sober reality know, is symptomatic of a disorder that can dangerously swing in mood.
Ted Kahl, blog.democrats.com: Ever since the Khan Nuke scandal broke in Pakistan, I have suspected there may be a LOT more to it (see below).
But first...Seymour Hersh has exposed the latest twist in this festering scandal.
The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices - known as sniffers - capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.
Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, "They don't want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can't have two of those. There's no education in the second kick of a mule." The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its cooperation-American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, "confessed" to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. "It's a deal-a trade-off," the former high-level intelligence official explained. "'Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.' It's the neoconservatives' version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation."
The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons arsenal. "Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market," the former diplomat said. "The U.S. has done nothing to stop it."
Whenever I hear about US-Pakistan intrigue, it sparks my interest, especially stories about Pakistan's rogue nuke scientist A.Q. Khan. Back when this scandal first broke a year ago, it reminded me of Iran-Contra type shenanigans... especially when Greg Palast reported this at the time:
On November 7, 2001, BBC TV and the Guardian of London reported that the Bush administration thwarted investigations of Dr. A.Q. Khan who this week confessed selling atomic secrets to Libya, North Korea, and Iran. The Bush Administration has expressed shock at the disclosures that Pakistan, our ally in the war on terror, has been running a nuclear secrets bazaar. In fact, according to the British News Team's sources', Bush did not know of these facts because, shortly after his inauguration, his National Security Agency (NSA) defectively stymied the probe of Khan Research Laboratories. CIA and other agents could not investigate the spread of 'Islamic Bombs' through Pakistan because funding appeared to originate in Saudi Arabia... According to both sources and documents obtained by the BBC, the Bush Administration 'Spike' of the investigation of Dr. Khan's Lab followed from a wider policy of protecting key Saudi Arabians including the bin Laden Family"...
The point is that intelligence agencies under Clinton, based on many other leads as well, were following up on the Saudi connection until the Bush team interfered.
This made me wonder if the Saudis used BCCI in the '80's to finance this "spread of Islamic bombs", back when Khan started his career in the blackmarket? Then, after the BCCI scandal and dissolution, were money laundering networks patterned after BCCI used -- such as those that financed Al Qaeda?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021005A.shtml
Bush’s Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security (Iran)
Let's Not Make the Same Mistakes in Iran
By David Kay
The Washington Post
Monday 07 February 2005
One year ago I told the Senate Armed Services Committee that I had concluded "we were almost all wrong" at the time of the Iraq war about that country's activities with regard to weapons of mass destruction -- and never more wrong than in the assessment that Iraq had a resurgent program on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. I testified about what I saw as the major reasons we got it so wrong, and I urged the establishment of an independent commission to examine this failure and begin the long-overdue process of adjusting our intelligence capabilities to the new national security environment we face. It is an environment dominated by too-easy access to weapons of mass destruction capabilities and to the means of concealing such capabilities from international inspection and national intelligence agencies.
A year later we are still awaiting the independent commission's report. The discussion of intelligence reform has focused on reordering and adding structure on top of an eroded intelligence foundation. And now we hear the drumrolls again, this time announcing an accelerating nuclear weapons program in Iran.
There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war. The International Atomic Energy Agency has announced that while Iran now admits having concealed for 18 years nuclear activities that should have been reported to the IAEA, it is has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Iran says it is now cooperating fully with international inspections, and it denies having anything but a peaceful nuclear energy program.
Vice President Cheney is giving interviews and speeches that paint a stark picture of a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran and declaring that this is something the Bush administration will not tolerate. Iranian exiles are providing the press and governments with a steady stream of new "evidence" concerning Iran's nuclear weapons activities. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has warned that Iran will not be allowed to use the cover of civilian nuclear power to acquire nuclear weapons, but says an attack on Iran is "not on the agenda at this point." U.S. allies, while saying they share the concern over Iran's nuclear ambitions, remain determined to pursue diplomacy and say they cannot conceive of any circumstance that would lead them to use military force. And the press is beginning to uncover U.S. moves that seem designed to lay the basis for military action against Iran.
Now is the time to pause and recall what went wrong with the assessment of Iraq's WMD program and try to avoid repeating those mistakes in Iran. Five steps are essential.
First, accept the fact that the past cannot be undone. Iran has, by its own admission, engaged for at least 18 years in clandestine nuclear activities that now give it the basis, if it chooses, to pursue nuclear weapons. That knowledge cannot be eliminated, so it is nonsense to talk about eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities short of war and occupation. The goal, and one that is reachable, is to craft a set of tools and transparency measures that so tie Iran's nuclear activities to the larger world of peaceful nuclear activities that any attempt to push ahead on the weapons front would be detectable and very disruptive for Iran.
Second, acknowledge that dissidents and exiles have their own agenda -- regime change -- and that before being accepted as truth any "evidence" they might supply concerning Iran's nuclear program must be tested and confirmed by other sources. And those other sources should not be, as they often were in the case of Iraq, simply other exiles, or the same information being recycled among intelligence agencies.
Third, acknowledge what inspections by the IAEA can do, and do not denigrate the agency for what it cannot do. International inspection, when it works, is best at confirming whether a state is complying with its international obligations. It is not equipped to uncover clandestine weapons programs. When Mohamed ElBaradei says his IAEA has found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, he is speaking honestly as to the limitations of the powers of his inspectors. Rather than ridiculing him and the IAEA, we should acknowledge what they have accomplished in determining that Iran has not lived up to its obligations and concentrate how we can use international inspections to uncover -- more quickly, one hopes -- any future violations.
Fourth, understand that overheated rhetoric from policymakers and senior administration officials, unsupported by evidence that can stand international scrutiny, undermines the ability of the United State to halt Iran's nuclear activities. Having gone to the Security Council on the basis of flawed evidence to "prove" Iraq's WMD activities, it only invites derision to cite unsubstantiated exile reports to "prove" that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
Fifth, a National Intelligence Estimate as to Iran's nuclear activities should not be a rushed and cooked document used to justify the threat of military action. Now is the time for serious analysis that genuinely tries to pull together all the evidence and analytical skills of the vast U.S. intelligence community to reach the best possible judgment on the status of that program and the gaps in our knowledge. That assessment should not be led by a team that is trying to prove a case for its boss. Now is the time to reach outside the secret brotherhood and pull in respected outsiders to lead the assessment.
Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran would be a grave danger to the world. That is not what is in doubt. What is in doubt is the ability to the U.S. government to honestly assess Iran's nuclear status and to craft a set of measures that will cope with that threat short of military action by the United States or Israel.
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The writer was the first leader of the Iraq Survey Group searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He resigned a year ago.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020705M.shtml
Reining In Cheney
Ray McGovern
January 25, 2005
As long as the Bush administration continues to trot out the bogus claims of Iraq's WMD capacity, we will continue to challenge them. This time, Vice President Dick Cheney is basing his claim that Iran is a threat on Iraq's alleged nuclear capacity before we invaded. McGovern—who spent more than 20 years in the CIA—explains how outraged intelligence analysts are reacting to Cheney's most recent embellishment of the known facts.
Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush, chairing estimates and briefing the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Quick! Anyone! Who can put the brakes on Vice President Dick Cheney before we have another war on our hands? Current and former intelligence analysts are reacting with wonderment and apprehension to his remarks last week in an interview with Don Imus. Cheney made questionable claims about Iran's nuclear program and resuscitated his spinning on why attacking Iraq was the prudent thing to do.
There he goes again, they say—trifling with the truth on Iraq and now taking off after Iran. Does he really have the temerity to reach into the same bag of tricks used to convince most Americans that Iraq was an immediate nuclear threat? Will his distinctive mix of truculence and contempt for the truth succeed in rationalizing attacks against Iran on grounds that U.S. intelligence may have underestimated the progress in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program 15 year ago?
At this point, the focus is no longer on the bogus WMD rationale used to promote the attack on Iraq, intelligence analysts say. It’s the claims the vice president is now making regarding Iran’s nuclear capability—and, given the deliberate distortions on Iraq, whether anyone should believe him.
Appearing January 20 on MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning , Cheney warned that Iran has “a fairly robust new nuclear program.” And besides, it sponsors terrorism. Sound familiar?
In a not-so-subtle attempt to raise the alarm on Iran, the vice president adduced his favorite analogy—the one he used in 2002 to beat intelligence analysts into submission in conjuring up phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Cheney continues to underscore his claim that before the Gulf War in 1991, U.S. intelligence had erred in assessing how close Iraq was to having a nuclear weapon:
“We found out after we got into Iraq [in 1991], in fact, that he [Saddam Hussein] probably was less than a year away from having a nuclear weapon...the intelligence community had underestimated how robust his nuclear program was.”
That “Robust” Word Again
Forget the fact that few nuclear engineers agree on that time frame. The question is what relevance Cheney's claim has for today. In view of the evolving debate on how “robust” Iran’s nuclear program is, we are sure to be hearing more from the vice president on this subject in the months ahead. How much credence are we to put in what he says?
With the final report on the search for Iraqi WMD now delivered, Cheney is still trying to exculpate himself from his false claims about Iraq’s nuclear capability by equating Iraq’s nuclear posture before 1991 with its much weaker capability in the months preceding the US/UK attack in March 2003.
Needed: Enriched Uranium
For Iraq to possess the nuclear weapons program Cheney claimed it had in March 2003, it needed—first and foremost—highly enriched uranium. But events in the 1990s had eviscerated its capacity to obtain it. After the 1991 Gulf War, all highly enriched uranium was removed from Iraq. UN inspectors destroyed Iraq’s centrifuge and isotope separation programs. And from 1991 on, Iraq was subjected to an intrusive arms embargo and sanctions regime, which made it much more difficult than during the pre-Gulf War years to import material for a nuclear weapons program.
Thus, for Cheney to invoke what Iraq may have been capable of doing in 1991 and apply that to the very different situation in Iraq in 2002 is, at best, disingenuous. There are huge differences between the situations in 1991 and 2002. In 2002, the Iraqis lacked highly enriched uranium and the necessary infrastructure. American inspectors working for the UN team knew that—and reported it—from their hands-on experience in early 2003.
Chutzpah, Confidence, Naiveté: A Noxious Mix
Cheney’s chutzpah on this key issue has been particularly striking. On March 16, 2003, just three days before the war, he zoomed far beyond the evidence in telling NBC’s Meet the Press , “We believe he [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” Asked about ElBaradei’s report just nine days before that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program, Cheney said, “I disagree...I think Mr. ElBaradei is frankly wrong.”
“How did they ever think they could get away with it—I mean using forgery, hyperbole, half-truth, malleable house-engineers, and carefully rehearsed émigrés?” asked a government scientist. Well, remember his March 16, 2003 remarks on NBC’s Meet the Press just before the war?
“We will be greeted as liberators...the people of Iraq will welcome us as liberators.”
The administration’s reasoning, it seems clear, went like this: We’ll use the forged documents on Iraq seeking uranium in Niger and the strained argument that those famous aluminum tubes were destined for centrifuge application, and that will be enough to get Congress to go along. The war will be a cakewalk. We’ll depose a hated dictator and be hailed as liberators. We’ll become the dominant world power in that part of the world and, with an infrastructure of permanent military bases in Iraq, we’ll be able to make our influence felt on the disposition of oil in the whole region. Not incidentally, we will be in position to prevent any possible threat to Israel. At that point, then, tell me: Who is going to make a ruckus over the fact that we used a little forgery, hyperbole, and half-truth along the way?
And so, our Congress was successfully conned into precipitous action to meet a non-existent threat. We deposed Saddam and occupied the country. Everything fell into place. But the Iraqis missed their cue and failed to welcome our troops as liberators. All this brings to mind the old saying, “There is no such thing as a perfect crime.”
Concern, Pressure From Abroad
At this point, British officials, who have had a front-row seat for all this, are worried that Cheney is now driving administration policy on Iran, according to a recent article in The Times of London. Adding to London’s concern is the fact that the Pentagon seems to be relying heavily on “alarmingly inconclusive” satellite imagery of Iranian installations.
(For those of you who missed it, please know that since 1996, analysis of satellite imagery has been performed in the Department of Defense, not by CIA analysts, as had been the case before. As you can imagine, this has made it much easier for the Pentagon to come up with the desired “supporting evidence” than was the case in the days when CIA had that portfolio and imagery analysts were encouraged to “tell it like it is.”)
Complicating the Iranian nuclear issue still more is Israel's hard-nosed attitude. Its defense minister has warned, “Under no circumstances would Israel be able to tolerate nuclear weapons in Iranian possession.”
The British are well advised to worry, given the appeal that preemption holds for our vice president and president. In his Aug. 26, 2002 speech, Cheney also became the first senior U.S. official publicly to refer approvingly to Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. (In a rare instance of U.S. willingness to criticize Israel at the UN, Washington had joined other Security Council members in unanimously condemning Israel’s preemptive attack. And, as far as I know, that remains the official U.S. position.)
Cheney And Israel
Cheney, nonetheless, has done little to disguise his admiration for Israel’s policy of pre-emption. Ten years after the attack on Osirak, then-Defense Secretary Cheney reportedly gave Israeli Maj. Gen. David Ivri, then the commander of the Israeli Air Force, a satellite photo of the Iraqi nuclear reactor destroyed by U.S.-built Israeli aircraft. On the photo Cheney penned, “Thanks for the outstanding job on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981.”
Looking again at the Cheney-Imus dialogue last week, Cheney, after expressing deep concern over Iran’s “fairly robust new nuclear program,” repeated basically what Condoleezza Rice had said earlier in the week—“Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel.” Imus then brought up the subject of pre-empting Iran, asking, “Why don’t we make Israel do it?”
Cheney’s response should give all of us pause:
“Well, one of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked, that if, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had significant capability, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”
The vice president’s nonchalance betrays the apparent equanimity with which he regards such a possibility. His words are bound to endear him further with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, but the tone, as well as the words, are poison to 1.3 billion Muslims.
Someone needs to tell Cheney that “diplomatic mess” trivializes the lasting damage to the United States that such an attack would inevitably bring. Not only can his attitude be read as a green light for Israeli pre-emption, but it would undoubtedly be read as proof of U.S. complicity, should the Israelis attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. And the queues at Al Qaeda recruiting stations—already lengthened by Abu Graib and Fallujah—would now stretch out longer than the lines at the polls in the minority precincts of Ohio.
Restraining Cheney?
And so we are back to the key question: Can anyone put the brakes on the vice president? It would normally be the job of CIA analysts to point out to the president and his senior advisors the manifold problems that would accrue from an Israeli attack (or, worse still) a U.S., or joint U.S.-Israeli, attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. But Seymour Hersh’s recent report that the White House is weeding out the apostates from the true believers among CIA analysts, together with the current dearth of courage in senior Agency ranks, suggest that those remaining analysts who still subscribe to the old Agency ethos of speaking truth to power will continue to choose to resign and look for honest work.
This will leave the field to the kind of “slam-dunk” sycophants who conjured up “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and then passed their reporting off as intelligence analysis. What can we expect of them this time on Iran?
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/reining_in_cheney.php
No Time for Euphoria
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com
Thursday 03 February 2005
If Bush believes what he said Wednesday night -- that we must stand with our allies to prevent tyranny -- he should stop his incoherent saber rattling over Iran's nuclear plans and join Europe in real negotiations.
Feb. 3, 2005 - President Bush's State of the Union address adds the element of euphoria to the utopianism of his inaugural address. Coming between the two speeches, the Iraqi election gave him a ?landmark event in the history of liberty? over which to drape his universal abstractions. Who would not want it to be true that the courageous people of Iraq as one body have defied bloodthirsty fanatics in order to establish a thriving democracy that will be a beacon to the rest of the Middle East, and that the glow from that fire will truly light the world?
The Iraqi election, in fact, went more or less as anticipated. The Kurds voted in overwhelming numbers (though an exit poll reported that they also overwhelmingly endorsed independence). The Shiites, the majority suppressed throughout the entire history of Iraq, turned out in large numbers to celebrate their inevitable empowerment. And the Sunnis, who have always ruled, for whom the election would ratify their minority status, and who as yet have been allotted no part in a new government, hardly voted at all. Most of the Sunnis, according to one poll, are sympathetic to the insurgency. Yet all the parties campaigned on ending "the occupation," as even members of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Cabinet call the coalition forces. Integrating the Sunnis, beginning with the writing of a constitution, has been made more difficult by a centrifugal election process.
The morning after, the Iraqi state received the nod of legitimacy from other governments, but it is no more capable than before of providing security or basic public services. It remains utterly dependent on "the occupation" for the indeterminate future. Nor is this democracy any more protective of liberal values. Just days before the election, Human Rights Watch reported that the Iraqi government engages in systematic torture of detainees, including children.
The Shiite victory was also a quiet victory for Iran, whose leaders, unlike Bush, did not claim credit. The Iranian Shiite government has invested more than $1 billion in Iraqi Shiite political parties, organizations and media. The Qods Force, the extraterritorial arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has trained Shiite militias, and its intelligence agents have honeycombed the Iraqi government and Shiite parties.
Before the election, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a "Shiite crescent" dominated by Iran, stretching through Iraq to southern Lebanon. Though Abdullah subsequently praised the balloting in Iraq, his anxiety about Iranian influence in Iraq is shared by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The Iraqi election is the culmination of the long Iran-Iraq war -- which Iran has now won without lifting a finger. Its deadly neighbor has been replaced by a Shiite ascendancy atop a weak state that cannot threaten it but is subject to its influence in a thousand and one ways. When the mist of elation lifts, the shadow of Iran looms.
The Bush policy consists of paralysis interrupted by fits of saber rattling. The responsibility for reining in Iran's development of nuclear weapons has been assumed by the United Nations and the European Union. Led by Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, the EU negotiated Iran's agreement to allow inspection of its facilities and to freeze its production of fissible material. For his good deed and for declaring before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration has attempted to oust ElBaradei.
Despite their promise, these negotiations are unlikely to succeed unless the United States enters into them; for only it can offer the big carrots: a lifting of sanctions, then recognition and perhaps eventual entry into the World Trade Organization. Iran has not been intimidated by the presence of some 150,000 U.S. troops next door; that has not prevented it from suppressing its reform movement. Opening Iran to liberalization while containing its nuclear ambition would appear to be an obvious win-win for the West. But some within the administration actively wish for the negotiations to fail.
Vice President Dick Cheney openly fantasizes about an Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker reports that there are clandestine Special Operations teams inside Iran trying to identify hidden facilities that might be targets of U.S. bombing. Two Republican senators, Rick Santorum and John Cornyn, have introduced a bill that would authorize the funding of Iranian exile groups and stipulate "regime change" as official U.S. policy.
Yet the United States is already overstretched militarily. And, in any case, there is no way of knowing conclusively that all Iranian nuclear facilities would be eliminated by an Osirak-like strike. If attacked, Iran could create untold mischief within Iraq. But the dream world of ideology trumps the national interest. Thus, toward the Europeans' greatest diplomatic initiative, on the country whose fate is most closely linked with Iraq, Bush's policy, on the eve of his trip to Europe, is a vacuum.
In his State of the Union address, Bush boldly stated: ?We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing and end its support for terror.? But Bush is playing no part whatsoever in the Europeans' negotiations. His declaration, a shameless falsehood, suggests that he cannot defend his actual refusal to do what he says he is doing.
Blinding bursts of triumphalism are characteristic of a march of folly and quicken its pace. True, just as paranoids have real enemies, so the euphoric can experience a high from genuine events. But the insistence on euphoria, as those who grapple with sober reality know, is symptomatic of a disorder that can dangerously swing in mood.
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Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020405K.shtml
Bush's Iran-for-Khan Deal
by Ted Kahl on 01/20/2005 10:57am. - revised 01/21/2005 3:16am
Ever since the Khan Nuke scandal broke in Pakistan, I have suspected there may be a LOT more to it (see below).
But first...Seymour Hersh has exposed the latest twist in this festering scandal.
The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices - known as sniffers - capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.
Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, "They don't want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can't have two of those. There's no education in the second kick of a mule." The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its cooperation-American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, "confessed" to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. "It's a deal-a trade-off," the former high-level intelligence official explained. "'Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.' It's the neoconservatives' version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation."
The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons arsenal. "Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market," the former diplomat said. "The U.S. has done nothing to stop it."
Whenever I hear about US-Pakistan intrigue, it sparks my interest, especially stories about Pakistan's rogue nuke scientist A.Q. Khan. Back when this scandal first broke a year ago, it reminded me of Iran-Contra type shenanigans... especially when Greg Palast reported this at the time:
On November 7, 2001, BBC TV and the Guardian of London reported that the Bush administration thwarted investigations of Dr. A.Q. Khan who this week confessed selling atomic secrets to Libya, North Korea, and Iran. The Bush Administration has expressed shock at the disclosures that Pakistan, our ally in the war on terror, has been running a nuclear secrets bazaar. In fact, according to the British News Team's sources', Bush did not know of these facts because, shortly after his inauguration, his National Security Agency (NSA) defectively stymied the probe of Khan Research Laboratories. CIA and other agents could not investigate the spread of 'Islamic Bombs' through Pakistan because funding appeared to originate in Saudi Arabia... According to both sources and documents obtained by the BBC, the Bush Administration 'Spike' of the investigation of Dr. Khan's Lab followed from a wider policy of protecting key Saudi Arabians including the bin Laden Family"...
The point is that intelligence agencies under Clinton, based on many other leads as well, were following up on the Saudi connection until the Bush team interfered.
This made me wonder if the Saudis used BCCI in the '80's to finance this "spread of Islamic bombs", back when Khan started his career in the blackmarket? Then, after the BCCI scandal and dissolution, were money laundering networks patterned after BCCI used -- such as those that financed Al Qaeda?
Or, as I wrote at the end of this quoted excerpt to a Chicago Sun-Times article (link since expired)...
Pakistani Who Sold Nuke Tech Can Keep Wealth; Bush Gives Musharraf the High Five
09-Feb-04
Pakistan
"President Pervez Musharraf has pledged that the disgraced founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program can keep the vast wealth he accumulated selling bomb-making technology to rogue states around the world. Just days after Musharraf provoked worldwide consternation by pardoning Abdul Qadeer Khan for supplying nuclear expertise to Libya, Iran and North Korea, he told the Sunday Telegraph he would also spare the scientist's property or assets. 'He can keep his money,' Musharraf said, adding there had been good reason not to investigate the origin of Khan's suspicious wealth before 1998, when Pakistan successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. '...you have to ask yourself whether you act against the person who enabled you to get the bomb.' Khan is thought to have earned millions of dollars from his sale of nuclear know-how, beginning in the late 1980s. Much of the money was funneled through bank accounts in the Middle East." Which bank? The Saudi-CIA laundromat, BCCI?
Further fueling my suspicions was this Sy Hersh article I posted in March...
THE DEAL: Bush, Musharraf and Nuclear Blackmarkets
03-Mar-04
Pakistan
Seymour Hersh writes: "A Bush Administration intelligence officer with years of experience in nonproliferation issues told me last month, 'One thing we do know is that this was not a rogue operation. Suppose Edward Teller had suddenly decided to spread nuclear technology and equipment around the world. Do you really think he could do that without the government knowing? How do you get missiles from North Korea to Pakistan? Do you think A.Q. shipped all the centrifuges by Federal Express? The military has to be involved, at high levels... We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A. Q. Khan network fifteen years ago. Some of those involved today in the smuggling are the children of those we knew about in the eighties. It's the second generation now.' In public, the Bush Administration accepted the pardon at face value. Within hours of Musharraf's television appearance, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, praised him as 'the right man at the right time.'"
It also made me wonder if any of the usual suspects were involved -- the guys we know from Iran-Contra (such as Armitage!), Iraqgate and the Reagan-Bush-CIA funding of the Mujahideen. (Of course, apart from the Saudi financing, this is just pure speculation, unless some investigator finds out more).
As for Bush's current Iran-for-Khan deal, keep in mind what whistleblower Karen Kwiatkowski said:
"What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it's worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam," said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.
Or as Jim Lobe called current Bush policy, "Iran-Contra, Amplified"
http://blog.democrats.com/node/2727