War of words in Washington

The coming war - in Washington

Published at http://www.palestinereport.org on February 27, 2003.

by Mark Perry

SO MUCH of Washington runs on paper - or rather, on papers: there are 
"Defense Planning Guidances," "National Security Strategy Studies," and an 
entire host of memos that seem dependent on colors - white papers, for 
instance, that result from the findings of "Blue Ribbon Panels" or, oddly, 
“flimsy, buff and green” - the papers of the military decision-making 
process.

Mostly, like the Mitchell Plan, the papers are passed around for a time and 
then ignored. This is particularly true for Democratic administrations. 
There might well be a natural law governing this that is the inverse of Sir 
Isaac Newton's: the more papers a Democratic administration writes the less 
weight they have. This was certainly true for the Clinton White House, 
which produced more useless studies than any previous administration. 
That's not true for the Republicans; the Republicans don't write many 
papers, but the ones they do write actually count. As a corollary to 
Newton's law of gravity Republican papers not only have weight, they will 
scare the daylights out of you.

This is certainly true for a paper now circulating through policy circles 
in Washington. This "5/21 Brief" (as it is called) was the result of a 
briefing given by current Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on May 
21, 1990 - ten years ago - when he was a lowly assistant, but kindred 
spirit to then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. The reason that the 
paper has gained such new attention is that it provides a guide to the 
current administration's strategic thinking, including its current plans to 
invade Iraq. The paper is old news, but unlike the papers of the Clinton 
years (which represented a "hiccup in American history," in the phrase of 
one administration official), this paper counts. Written by Wolfowitz and a 
team of defense policy experts, many of whom now serve in senior positions 
at the Pentagon, the paper recommends that the US take steps to ensure its 
strategic dominance, including the use of unilateral military action to 
project power. The paper says that instead of shrinking the US military 
(the policy that was followed during the Clinton years) the nation should 
expand its reach and funding - from 3.0 percent to 3.8 percent of US Gross 
National Product. The increase in funding would be necessary to underwrite 
the new bases for American troops, which would be dispatched to 
particularly unstable regions to keep the peace and to “expand” and “shape” 
the “zone of democracy.”

Richard Haass, the State Department’s head of policy and planning, and an 
early critic of the Wolfowitz paper, provides a succinct view of 
Wolfowitz’s core beliefs: “Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to 
massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. 
If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of 
the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone 
in your own territory. Other governments, including the United States, gain 
the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a 
right of preventive, or preemptory, self-defense. You essentially can act 
in anticipation if you have grounds to think it’s a question of when, and 
not if, you’re going to be attacked.”

This was a revolutionary doctrine, and one supported during the first Bush 
administration by a coterie of conservative policymakers. But the paper 
produced by Wolfowitz and his team was buried just after it was presented 
because it caused such a stir in the public press. The overwhelming public 
response was, in fact, quite negative - Wolfowitz and his team were 
recommending unilateral American military action to a public that then 
believed strongly (and still does) that the US should only act when its 
interests are directly threatened, and then only in cooperation with its 
allies. Additionally, while Wolfowitz and then-Secretary of Defense Richard 
Cheney promoted the ideas contained in the paper to then-President Bush, 
the ideas the paper espoused were lost in the hubbub over Iraq's invasion 
of Kuwait. Indeed, the first Bush to serve as president was to give a talk 
on rethinking American strategy on the very day that Saddam Hussein invaded 
Kuwait.

But while the paper was sidelined, it was not forgotten. In the first days 
of the new Bush administration, Wolfowitz and his allies at the Pentagon 
revived their ideas and began to spread them to key officials in the State 
Department and White House. They had a number of natural allies, including 
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who serves as Vice President Dick Cheney’s national 
security advisor. Libby helped draft the Wolfowitz paper and has remained 
one of its most outspoken and, as Cheney’s deputy, most powerful advocates.

The group around Wolfowitz was slow to regain the kind of influence in the 
new Bush administration that it had in the previous Bush administration, 
but the events of September 11 gave them their opening. Just after the 
attacks in New York and Washington, the Wolfowitz group lobbied heavily for 
an adoption of their position as the official US national security 
strategy. The battle was short-lived: just weeks after the New York and 
Washington attacks the Bush administration adopted a paper called, simply 
enough, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” 
The paper revived all of the principles of the “5/21 Brief” including its 
core principle - that while the US would attempt to recruit “coalitions of 
the willing” in its global battle against terrorism it would, where 
necessary, act alone.

“The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to 
counter a sufficient threat to our national security,” the paper notes. 
“The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction - and the more 
compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, 
even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemies’ 
attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the 
United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.” The Wolfowitz team won 
other victories - it convinced Bush’s national security team that it needed 
to work for “regime change” in Iraq and needed to increase the defense 
budget, which has now been increased to exactly 3.8 percent of the US gross 
national product.

This rewriting of national security policy did not go unnoticed. Two years 
after the Bush administration published its new national security strategy 
paper, John Ikenberry (a noted policy strategist at Georgetown University) 
published an article in Foreign Affairs noting that the new “apocalyptic” 
doctrine was being promoted by a core group of “neo-imperialists” who 
viewed American power as “unconstrained by the rules and norms of the 
international community” or international bodies, like the United Nations. 
“At the extreme,” Ikenberry wrote, “these notions form a neo-imperial 
vision in which the United States arrogates to itself the global role of 
setting standards, determining threats, using force, and meting out 
justice.” The label, “neo-imperialist” has stuck and, as Ikenberry 
predicted, a strong counter to the neo-imperialist argument has emerged, in 
a group that is now been labeled “the realists.” While the response of 
these “realists” has been long in coming, the opposition to the 
Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz doctrine has come not from the ranks of the 
Democratic Party, but from the ranks of the moderate center of the 
Republican Party - from those who served the current president’s father.

The opening skirmish of this campaign took place on Friday, February 21, 
when former national security advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew 
Brzezinski wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal on the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both men, highly regarded in Washington 
policy circles (but up until this month loathe to take on the 
neo-imperialists in public) have been expressing their reservations about 
the administration’s post-September 11 policies for well over a year. 
Neither believes in the unilateralist bent of the neo-imperialists, and 
both have been privately outspoken in what they see as the administration’s 
mishandling of its friendships in Europe and its penchant for the use of 
unbridled military force. For both Scowcroft and Brzezinski, the decision 
to publish their article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came after 
weeks of consultations with senior Republicans and Democrats no longer 
serving in the government - as well as after long discussions with the 
current president’s father, who is said to strongly disagree with his son’s 
policies but refuses to critique them privately or comment on them in 
public.* The article was only written after both men decided that the 
administration’s greatest vulnerability is its unreflective support for 
Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza, which both believe poses the 
greatest threat to gaining worldwide acceptance for the global war on 
terrorism.

The February 21 article, “A Road Map for Israeli-Palestinian Amity,” is 
remarkable. Scowcroft and Brzezinski do not offer an open or outspoken 
critique of American policy, but their viewpoint is a stark departure from 
those held by Wolfowitz - and from his aid, Douglas Feith - who remain 
Israel’s staunchest allies inside the administration. While endorsing 
Bush’s vision for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, Scowcroft and 
Brzezinski make it clear that they believe his call for new Palestinian 
leadership is counterproductive. A resumption of the peace process, they 
say, should not be “conditioned” on “the replacement of a particular 
individual.” To do so, they add, invites “resistance” to US goals “in the 
Palestinian population.” Scowcroft and Brzezinski go on to endorse a 
settlement based on “boundaries approximating the pre-June 1967 borders,” 
arrangements for Jerusalem that “accommodate two separate sovereignties,” a 
resolution of the refugee problem that provides for “relief and justice” 
for them but without upsetting the demographic balance in Israel, and a 
“protection regime” for the holy places. Privately, the two are more 
outspoken: Scowcroft has told associates that Bush’s call for the 
replacement of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was “stupid,” while 
Brzezinski has appeared on television programs promoting the view that the 
US is in danger of promoting policies that “could be confused with those of 
another nation.”

The Scowcroft-Brzezinski vision is breathtaking. It not only marks a 
complete break with the Bush administration’s pro-Israel policies (and 
confirms their view that Bush’s call for a replacement of Arafat is 
counterproductive), it marks a shift away from the Wolfowitz-Feith 
worldview. It is, in fact, a denunciation of Wolfowitz’s (and Dick Cheney 
and Donald Rumsfeld’s) view that Israel, like the United States, has the 
right to intervene to protect its security because (following US doctrine) 
the Palestinians support terrorism and, therefore, have ceded some of their 
sovereign rights.

There is only one problem with the Scowcroft-Brzezinski article. It never 
appeared. While Scowcroft and Brzezinski were told by Wall Street Journal 
editors that the op-ed would run on Friday (a fact confirmed by the 
appearance of the article on the website of the Council on Foreign 
Relations - where it still appears under the head “Wall Street Journal 
op-ed”) the article did not appear in any of the newspaper’s editions. 
Editors of the Journal, it is rumored, told Scowcroft directly that they 
thought the article was too controversial. The decision left both men 
sputtering in anger, but confirmed to them what the rest of us have known 
for some time - that there is an unofficial news blackout on the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the media, to the point where those 
advocates of even the most moderate two-state resolution of the conflict 
are considered “supporters of terrorism.”

In spite of this distinct chill, however, Scowcroft and Brzezinski have 
been circulating their paper much as Wolfowitz first circulated his “5/21 
Brief” - from hand-to-hand among good friends who agree with their 
position. So it is that Washington’s fax machines have been busily 
reproducing the Scowcroft-Brzezinski conclusion: that finding a solution to 
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the lines of the Saudi proposal 
endorsing United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338 would do far more to 
“facilitate international cooperation with the US in its war on terrorism” 
than an attack on Iraq.

The impact of this opening skirmish in what promises to be a public war 
over the administration’s policies cannot be exaggerated. Even inside the 
administration, battle lines are being formed over US post-Iraq policy. In 
spite of the power of the administration’s pro-Israel heavyweights (Cheney, 
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith) the outcome of the battle is not clear. The 
neo-imperialists are not only taking stock of public opinion, which is 
starting to show the first glimmerings of doubt over the Iraq adventure, 
but they fear a public backlash over their unstinting support of Israel. In 
addition, the government of Ariel Sharon has most recently made a number of 
unpublicized but well-known foreign policy gaffes and, once again, 
embarrassed itself with senior administration officials. The most recent 
terrorism scare in the US - which saw hordes of people running to hardware 
stores to buy duct tape and plastic bags - resulted from a “foreign 
intelligence report” that said that the Al Qaeda network had targeted a 
well-known and popular Jewish-owned resort in what one intelligence 
official described as “a Bali-like bombing.” US intelligence officials gave 
great weight to the report because it was so highly detailed. But questions 
about its veracity were inevitably raised and its source was brought to the 
US for interrogation. According to intelligence officials, the Israeli 
official who made the report failed a polygraph test. This, coupled with 
impatient public statements from Israeli officials (including Zalmon 
Shoval, the former Israeli ambassador to the US) over the timing of the US 
invasion of Iraq (“what are you waiting for?” Shoval was quoted as saying) 
have left American officials wondering whether the Israeli government has 
any sense of how delicate US public opinion can be.

In spite of all of this, however, the Bush administration is continuing its 
march - or sprint - to war. The strategy it is pursuing was put in place 
ten years ago by Israel’s closest supporters. It is unlikely that now, with 
over 150,000 US troops in place, a war against Iraq can be averted. Nor, it 
seems, will the Bush administration be deterred by mass demonstrations or 
even a break in the Atlantic alliance.

There is always a chance, slim though it may now seem, that the US will do 
what it has never done before - that it will pressure the Sharon government 
to accede to direct negotiations with the Palestinians and the 
establishment of a Palestinian state according to UN resolutions 242 and 
338. Two weeks ago, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice interrupted 
Douglas Feith during a national security meeting at the White House with 
the words: “If we need to know what the Israelis think, we’ll call in the 
Israeli ambassador for his views.” Chastened, Feith returned to the 
Pentagon and removed the Likud party campaign posters from the walls of his 
office.-Published 26/2/03(c)Palestine Report

©Palestine Report. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of 
Palestine Report or Palestine Report Online content is 
expressly  prohibited without the prior written consent of Palestine Report.

Also in this week’s issue: the Palestine Red Crescent Society provides 
Palestinians with pamphlets on chemical warfare, and a Nablus father 
watches Israeli soldiers kill his son in cold blood.

To subscribe to the full weekly email edition of Palestine Report, see 
http://www.palestinereport.org for check and credit card subscription.

Palestine Report - Telling the story of one
nation's search for independence and justice.

[*or is bush sr's alleged opposition just a good cop- bad cop tactic to 
protect the dynasty and the club?]

=================

FAIR-L
                     Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
                Media analysis, critiques and activism

 MEDIA ADVISORY:

 Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed:
 Bombshell revelation from a defector cited by White House and press

 February 27, 2003

 On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq
 crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD
 [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist,"
 the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief
 who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had
 destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and
 banned missiles, as Iraq claims.

 Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to
 Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions
 about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced.
 But Newsweek's John Barry-- who has covered Iraqi weapons inspections for
 more than a decade-- obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by
 officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N.
 inspections team known as UNSCOM.

 Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its
 chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them,"
 Barry wrote. All that remained were "hidden blueprints, computer disks,
 microfiches" and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in
 order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday
 resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were
 told the same story, Barry reported, and "a military aide who defected
 with Kamel... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD
 stocks."

 But these statements were "hushed up by the U.N. inspectors" in order to
 "bluff Saddam into disclosing still more."

 CIA spokesman Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. "It is
 incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," Harlow told Reuters the day the report
 appeared (2/24/03).

 But on Wednesday (2/26/03), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript-- an
 internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped "sensitive"-- was obtained by Glen
 Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who in early February revealed
 that Tony Blair's "intelligence dossier" was plagiarized from a student
 thesis. Rangwala has posted the Kamel transcript on the Web:
 <http://casi.org.uk/info/unscom950822.pdf>http://casi.org.uk/info/unscom950822.pdf. 

 In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: "All weapons-- biological,
 chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed."

 Who is Hussein Kamel?

 Kamel is no obscure defector. A son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, his
 departure from Iraq carrying crates of secret documents on Iraq's past
 weapons programs was a major turning point in the inspections saga. In
 1999, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council (1/25/99), UNSCOM reported
 that its entire eight years of disarmament work "must be divided into two
 parts, separated by the events following the departure from Iraq, in
 August 1995, of Lt. General Hussein Kamel."

 Kamel's defection has been cited repeatedly by George W. Bush and leading
 administration officials as evidence that 1) Iraq has not disarmed; 2)
 inspections cannot disarm it; and 3) defectors such as Kamel are the most
 reliable source of information on Iraq's weapons.

 * Bush declared in an October 7, 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several
 years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military
 industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that
 it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly
 biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely
 produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of
 biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of
 killing millions."

 * Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation to the U.N.
 Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it
 had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX
 on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out
 after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of
 Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."

 * In a speech last August (8/27/02), Vice President Dick Cheney said
 Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned
 more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection
 regime itself."

 * Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recently wrote in the
 Chicago Tribune (2/16/03) that "because of information provided by Iraqi
 defector and former head of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs,
 Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the regime had to admit in detail how it cheated
 on its nuclear non-proliferation commitments."

 The quotes from Bush and Powell cited above refer to anthrax and VX
 produced by Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The administration has cited
 various quantities of chemical and biological weapons on many other
 occasions-- weapons that Iraq produced but which remain unaccounted for.
 All of these claims refer to weapons produced before 1991.

 But according to Kamel's transcript, Iraq destroyed all of these weapons
 in 1991.

 According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in August
 1995. If that is true, all of these U.S. officials have had access to
 Kamel's statements that the weapons were destroyed. Their repeated
 citations of his testimony-- without revealing that he also said the
 weapons no longer exist-- suggests that the administration might be
 withholding critical evidence. In particular, it casts doubt on the
 credibility of Powell's February 5 presentation to the U.N., which was
 widely hailed at the time for its persuasiveness. To clear up the issue,
 journalists might ask that the CIA release the transcripts of its own
 conversations with Kamel.

 Kamel's disclosures have also been crucial to the arguments made by
 hawkish commentators on Iraq. The defector has been cited four times on
 the New York Times op-ed page in the last four months in support of claims
 about Iraq's weapons programs--never noting his assertions about the
 elimination of these weapons. In a major Times op-ed calling for war with
 Iraq (2/21/03), Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution wrote that
 Kamel and other defectors "reported that outside pressure had not only
 failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly
 spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be." The release
 of Kamel's transcript makes this claim appear grossly at odds with the
 defector's actual testimony.

 The Kamel story is a bombshell that necessitates a thorough reevaluation
 of U.S. media reporting on Iraq, much of which has taken for granted that
 the nation retains supplies of prohibited weapons. (See FAIR Media
 Advisory, "Iraq's Hidden Weapons: >From Allegation to Fact,"
 <http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-weapons.html>http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-weapons.html 
.) Kamel's testimony
 is not, of course, proof that Iraq does not have hidden stocks of chemical
 or biological weapons, but it does suggest a need for much more media
 skepticism about U.S. allegations than has previously been shown.

 Unfortunately, Newsweek chose a curious way to handle its scoop: The
 magazine placed the story in the miscellaneous "Periscope" section with a
 generic headline, "The Defector's Secrets." Worse, Newsweek's online
 version added a subhead that seemed almost designed to undercut the
 importance of the story: "Before his death, a high-ranking defector said
 Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions." So far, according to a February
 27 search of the Nexis database, no major U.S. newspapers or national
 television news shows have picked up the Newsweek story.


 ***
 Read the Newsweek story:
 <http://www.msnbc.com/news/876128.asp>http://www.msnbc.com/news/876128.asp

 ***
 Read Glen Rangwala's analysis of the Kamel transcript:
 <http://middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html>http://middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html 

 ***
 If you'd like to encourage media outlets to investigate this story,
 contact information is available on FAIR's website:
 http://www.fair.org/media-contact-list.html
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