| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 9:14 am Post subject: Step Forward Mr. Chalabi. The JINSA Connection |
| http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1163522,00.html
Need to build a case for war? Step forward Mr Chalabi
If governments are going to rely on intelligence, its reliability is critical
Isabel Hilton
Saturday March 6, 2004
The Guardian
In the mayhem that followed the explosions in Baghdad and Karbala this week, Ahmad Chalabi, an ever more powerful member of the Iraqi Governing Council and a Pentagon favourite, was swiftly at the scene, behaving like a politician come to offer sympathy. It was a shrewd piece of public relations - if you forget the responsibility Chalabi bears for Iraq's present tragic condition. It was Chalabi, more than any other individual, who helped persuade the US that toppling Saddam Hussein would bring peace and democracy, and break the link that he alleged existed between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaida.
The argument surrounding the decision to go to war in Iraq, Tony Blair said yesterday, is not about trust or integrity but about judgment and intelligence. That is also the case his critics make. In the approach to war, both the US and the UK governments mobilised a mishmash of arguments in a campaign of persuasion that was based not on rigorous analysis of intelligence but on the selective use of data and informants. And in this sorry tale, no one played a more critical role than the man many proclaim the most likely future leader of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.
He has been working to take power in Iraq for a long time. The son of a wealthy and influential family in Iraq that lost its place with the fall of the monarchy, Chalabi has a long association with US intelligence. In the early 1990s, he was considered a serious asset by the CIA - but they soon found him to be unreliable. By then, however, he had found other supporters, among them the staff and advisers of one of the neo-cons' favourite thinktanks, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) in Washington. In 1997, Jinsa declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National Council leader Dr Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office and a subsequently democratic future for Iraq."
Jinsa describes its mandate as two-fold: "To educate the American public about the importance of an effective US defence capability...and to inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." Their interests, Chalabi persuaded them, coincided: Saddam, the supporter of Palestinian suicide bombers, the strongest and most troublesome leader in the Arab world and a menace to Israel, should be replaced with a friendly government that would make peace with Israel and become the US's best Arab friend.
The advocates of radical action in the Middle East came to power with Bush. The next steps are now well documented. As Richard Perle once complained: "The CIA has been engaged in a character assassination of Ahmad Chalabi for years now, and it's a disgrace." To bypass such obstacles, an alternative intelligence group - the Office of Special Plans - was created. But there was still a shortage of evidence on two key points: that Saddam had WMD and that he had links to al-Qaida. Step forward Ahmad Chalabi, whose INC benefited from nearly $100m of US taxpayers money, despite Chalabi's conviction for a $300m bank fraud in Jordan. Chalabi, who knows a market when he sees one, claimed his sources inside and outside Iraq could supply the necessary evidence.
In 2001, Colin Powell declared: "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction...our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbours of Iraq." Tony Blair told the Commons in November 2000 that, "We believe that the sanctions regime has effectively contained Saddam Hussein." These assessments coincided with the view of the intelligence services and the inspectors.
The alternative intelligence, marshalled to make the case for war, came overwhelmingly from Chalabi's INC and their carefully coached "sources". Among the INC allegations that have not been borne out were that Hussein had built mobile biological weapons facilities, that he was rapidly rebuilding his nuclear weapons programme and that he had trained Islamic warriors at a camp south of Baghdad. Now defence officials acknowledge that the defectors' tales were "shaky" at best.
On whose judgment was this shaky information included in official pre-war intelligence estimates of Iraq's illicit weapons programmes and key statements by US and UK politicians? On September 12 2002, for instance, claims by Iraqi military officers supplied by the INC that Iraq had been training Arabs in "hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage and assassinations" were given uncritical prominence in a White House report. And what is now described as an INC "fabrication" - that Iraq had mobile biological warfare research facilities - was included in Powell's presentation to the UN security council in February 2003.
To give wider credibility to this dubious narrative, Chalabi planted stories in mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times, stories that were then quoted as independent corroborative evidence by administration officials. The paper's now much-criticised specialist on WMD, Judith Miller, has acknowledged her 10-year association with Chalabi.
Chalabi has admitted that the "evidence" he supplied was wrong. Unlike Blair, he is no longer interested in pretending that there are any WMD in Iraq, but nor is he repentant. Bush may lose the election and Blair is trapped in the political minefield of the war's aftermath, but Chalabi is a clear winner. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph. Since Saddam was gone, "What was said before is not important."
When the US flew Chalabi into Iraq by helicopter early in the war, along with 700 friends and supporters, he was not remotely electable. He did, though, look like a man positioning himself to be at the centre of power. This week, Iraq's provisional constitution was agreed. Given Bush's need to create a puppet government in time for the US elections, power will now remain in the hands of the governing council until such time as elections might be held - a promise that recedes into the future with each terrorist outrage. The first drafts of the Iraqi transitional administrative law were written by Chalabi's nephew. The longer elections are postponed, the better for Chalabi, who is now in control of Iraq's finances and of de-Ba'athification.
Perhaps his greatest coup was to gain possession of 25 tonnes of captured Saddam documents that could prove useful in the future. Before the war, for instance, the Jordanian foreign minister criticised Chalabi as untrustworthy. Chalabi then threatened to "expose" documentary evidence of the Jordanian royal family's close relations with Saddam. The public criticisms stopped. Since the war several forged documents have come into circulation. Some have been used to animate dead arguments, others to discredit critics of the war, such as George Galloway.
With power there also come opportunities for enrichment. US authorities in Iraq have awarded more than $400m in contracts to a company that has extensive family and business ties to Chalabi. One, for $327m, to supply equipment for the Iraqi armed forces, is now under review after protests to Congress.
If intelligence, Blair tells us, is to be of even greater importance in the future, its reliability is critical - an argument, perhaps, to learn from recent experience. Not for the US Defence Department. It plans to spend $4m over the next year buying intelligence on Iraq. And who does it plan to buy that intelligence from? Step forward Ahmad Chalabi.
Isabel.Hilton@guardian.co.uk
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cnn.com: Transcript of David Kay's evidence on 28.01.04 to US Senate committee | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 10:09 am Post subject: Chalabi's Disinformation |
| Subj: Chalabi's Disinformation
Date: 2/21/04 5:57:18 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
Friends,
Chalabi’s Disinformation
Ahmed Chalabi, the neocon-connected head of the Iraqi exiles who provided much of the bogus information for US intelligence, has come close to acknowledging that he provided disinformation—but the ends justified the means. In this mailing, I have included a recent article on Chalabi’s semi-confession, a more analytical piece on the issue by Jim Lobe, and an older article by Robert Dreyfus going over Chalabi’s background and close neocon connections.
As the recent article by Jack Fairweather puts it: "An Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty prewar intelligence to Washington said his information about Saddam Hussein's weapons -- even if discredited -- achieved the aim of persuading the United States to topple the dictator.
Ahmed Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by U.S. intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr. Chalabi for providing what turned out to be false or wildly exaggerated intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. During an interview, Mr. Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled U.S. intelligence.
‘We are heroes in error,’ he said in Baghdad on Wednesday. ‘As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful.’"
One can understand why Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles would present any kind of disinformation in order to get their enemy Saddam removed—and become the new rulers of Iraq. (Chalabi is a member of the provisional council). But why did the US government believe him? Wouldn’t there be skepticism about any information from a group with a vested interest in overthrowing Saddam?
Intelligence and Middle East experts knew all along that Chalabi’s information was apt to be fallacious. "The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counter-terrorism expert, said before the war. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defence Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches." http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0930-06.htm
But while real intelligence experts rejected Chalabi’s information as bogus, Chalabi was championed by the neoconservatives. Robert Dreyfus points out Chalabi’s long-time and intimate connection with the neoconservatives. "What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October [2002], Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an [neocon] American Enterprise Institute conference called ‘The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq,’ which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center."
The neocons identified with Chalabi because their interests converged on removing Saddam. The had a symbiotic relationship. The neocons provided Chalabi with the support he needed, and Chalabi provided the bogus intelligence information that advanced the neocons war agenda. The relationship became much more significant as the neocons took top national security positions in the Bush administration. As Jim Lobe writes: "Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neo-conservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld – Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
"Feith's office was home to the office of special plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were tasked with reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case that Hussein represented a compelling threat to the United States.
"OSP also worked with the defense policy board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neo-conservative hawks chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a longtime Chalabi friend.
"DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, played prominent roles in publicizing through the media reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as possible.
"Chalabi even participated in a secret DPB meeting just a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon in which the main topic of discussion, according to the Wall Street Journal, was how 9/11 could be used as a pretext for attacking Iraq."
Significantly, due to neocon power in the Bush administration (VP Cheney’s role was crucial here). the war propaganda of Chalabi and his associates spread beyond the confines of the OSP and the Defense Department. As I pointed out in my message of February 15, "CIA "Intelligence’ was Neocon War Propaganda," this bogus intelligence found its way into CIA intelligence assessments.
It is apparent that Ahmed Chalabi and his fellow exiles served as a transmission belt for war propaganda to advance neocon war goals. It is obvious that there was nothing subtle in the neocons’ intelligence deception. Everyone with knowledge in the area should have been skeptical of this intelligence. But the neocons and their supporters such as VP Dick Cheney just pressured others to accept it and the bureaucratic leaders such as CIA director George Tenet lacked the character to resist. And the mainstream media is still too timid to bring out the totality of this deliberate disinformation, talking instead about intelligence "errors." Reality is just too unpalatable for respectable, mainstream folk to face.
__________________________________
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040219-115614-3297r
The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
For Iraqi, the end justifies means
By Jack Fairweather
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
Published February 20, 2004
BAGHDAD -- An Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty prewar intelligence to Washington said his information about Saddam Hussein's weapons -- even if discredited -- achieved the aim of persuading the United States to topple the dictator.
Ahmed Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by U.S. intelligence agents.
But many American officials now blame Mr. Chalabi for providing what turned out to be false or wildly exaggerated intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
During an interview, Mr. Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled U.S. intelligence.
"We are heroes in error," he said in Baghdad on Wednesday. "As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful.
"Our objective has been achieved. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."
Mr. Chalabi added: "The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if [President Bush] wants."
His comments are likely to inflame the debate on both sides of the Atlantic over the quality of prewar intelligence, and over the way it was presented by Mr. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as they argued for military action.
U.S. officials said last week that one of the most celebrated pieces of false intelligence, the claim that Saddam had mobile biological-weapons laboratories, had come from a major in the Iraqi intelligence service made available by the INC.
U.S. officials at first found the information credible, and the defector passed a lie-detector test. But in later interviews it became apparent that he was stretching the truth and had been "coached by the INC."
He failed a second polygraph test, and intelligence agencies were warned that the information was unreliable in May 2002.
But analysts missed the warning, and the mobile-lab story remained firmly established in the catalog of purported Iraqi violations until months after the overthrow of Saddam.
The United States at one point claimed to have found two mobile labs, but the trucks were later reported to have held equipment to make hydrogen for weather balloons.
Last week, State Department officials conceded that much of the firsthand testimony they had received was "shaky."
"What the INC told us formed one part of the intelligence picture," said a senior official in Baghdad. "But what Chalabi told us, we accepted in good faith. Now there are going to be a lot of question marks over his motives."
Mr. Chalabi remains an influential member of the Iraqi Governing Council, though he has failed to develop the popular following in Iraq that his most enthusiastic sponsors once expected.
____________________________
http://antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2004
February 21, 2004
Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War
by Jim Lobe
For those still puzzling over the whys and wherefores of Washington's invasion of Iraq 11 months ago, major new, but curiously unnoticed, clues were offered this week by two central players in the events leading up to the war.
Both clues tend to confirm growing suspicions that the Bush administration's drive to war in Iraq had very little, if anything, to do with the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or his alleged ties to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda – the two main reasons the U.S. Congress and public were given for the invasion.
Separate statements by Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and US retired Gen. Jay Garner, who was in charge of planning and administering postwar reconstruction from January through May 2002, suggest that other, less public motives were behind the war, none of which concerned self-defense, preemptive or otherwise.
The statement by Chalabi, on whom the neo-conservative and right-wing hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office are still resting their hopes for a transition that will protect Washington's many interests in Iraq, will certainly interest congressional committees investigating why the intelligence on WMD before the war was so far off the mark.
In a remarkably frank interview with the London Daily Telegraph, Chalabi said he was willing to take full responsibility for the INC's role in providing misleading intelligence and defectors to President George W. Bush, Congress and the US public to persuade them that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United States that had to be dealt with urgently.
The Telegraph reported that Chalabi merely shrugged off accusations his group had deliberately misled the administration. "We are heroes in error," he said.
"As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful," he told the newspaper. "That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."
It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over the past decade, effectively conspired with his supporters in and around the administration to take the United States to war on pretenses they knew, or had reason to know, were false.
Indeed, it now appears increasingly that defectors handled by the INC were sources for the most spectacular and detailed – if completely unfounded – information about Hussein's alleged WMD programs, not only to US intelligence agencies, but also to US mainstream media, especially the New York Times, according to a recent report in the New York Review of Books.
Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neo-conservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld – Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
Feith's office was home to the office of special plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were tasked with reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case that Hussein represented a compelling threat to the United States.
OSP also worked with the defense policy board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neo-conservative hawks chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a longtime Chalabi friend.
DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, played prominent roles in publicizing through the media reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as possible.
Chalabi even participated in a secret DPB meeting just a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon in which the main topic of discussion, according to the Wall Street Journal, was how 9/11 could be used as a pretext for attacking Iraq.
The OSP and a parallel group under Feith, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, have become central targets of congressional investigators, according to aides on Capitol Hill, while unconfirmed rumors circulated here this week that members of the DPB are also under investigation.
The question, of course, is whether the individuals involved were themselves taken in by what Chalabi and the INC told them or whether they were willing collaborators in distorting the intelligence in order to move the country to war for their own reasons..
It appears that Chalabi, whose family, it was reported this week, has extensive interests in a company that has already been awarded more than 400 million dollars in reconstruction contracts, is signaling his willingness to take all of the blame, or credit, for the faulty intelligence.
But one of the reasons for going to war was suggested quite directly by Garner – who also worked closely with Chalabi and the same cohort of US hawks in the run-up to the war and during the first few weeks of occupation – in an interview with The National Journal.
Asked how long US troops might remain in Iraq, Garner replied, "I hope they're there a long time," and then compared US goals in Iraq to US military bases in the Philippines between 1898 and 1992.
"One of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights with (the Iraqi authorities)," he said. "And I think we'll have basing rights in the north and basing rights in the south ... we'd want to keep at least a brigade."
"Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century: they were a coaling station for the navy, and that allowed us to keep a great presence in the Pacific. That's what Iraq is for the next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence in the Middle East," Garner added.
While US military strategists have hinted for some time that a major goal of war was to establish several bases in Iraq, particularly given the ongoing military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, Garner is the first to state it so baldly.
Until now, US military chiefs have suggested they need to retain a military presence just to ensure stability for several years, during which they expect to draw down their forces.
If indeed Garner's understanding represents the thinking of his former bosses, then the ongoing struggle between Cheney and the Pentagon on the one hand and the State Department on the other over how much control Washington is willing to give the United Nations over the transition to Iraqi rule becomes more comprehensible.
Ceding too much control, particularly before a base agreement can be reached with whatever Iraqi authority will take over Jun. 30, will make permanent US bases much less likely.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2004
_______________________________________
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/21/dreyfuss-r.html
Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy
Ahmed Chalabi's long and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 11.18.02
If T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") had been a 21st-century neoconservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he'd be Ahmed Chalabi's best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neoconservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put American troops -- and American oil companies -- in full control of the Persian Gulf's reserves and use the Gulf as a fulcrum for enhancing America's global strategic hegemony. Just as Lawrence's escapades in World War I-era Arabia helped Britain remake the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the U.S. sponsors of Chalabi's INC hope to do their own nation building.
"The removal of [Saddam Hussein] presents the United States in particular with a historic opportunity that I believe is going to prove to be as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the entry of British troops into Iraq in 1917," says Kanan Makiya, an INC strategist and author of Republic of Fear.
Chalabi would hand over Iraq's oil to U.S. multinationals, and his allies in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Even more broadly, once an occupying U.S. army seizes Baghdad, Chalabi's INC and its American backers are spinning scenarios about dismantling Saudi Arabia, seizing its oil and collapsing the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It's a breathtaking agenda, one that goes far beyond "regime change" and on to the start of a New New World Order.
What's also startling about these plans is that Chalabi is scorned by most of America's national-security establishment, including much of the Department of State, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is shunned by all Western powers save the United Kingdom, ostracized in the Arab world and disdained even by many of his erstwhile comrades in the Iraqi opposition. Among his few friends, however, are the men running the Bush administration's willy-nilly war on Iraq. And with their backing, it's not inconceivable that this hapless, exiled Iraqi aristocrat and London-Washington playboy might end up atop the smoking heap of what's left of Iraq next year.
The Chalabi Lobby
Almost to a man, Washington's hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. "He's a rare find," says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. "He's deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West."
In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.
The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi's cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). "Chalabi is the one that we know the best," says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. "He could be Iraq's national leader," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.
What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called "The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq," which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. "The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years," Perle told me.
Philosophical or not, since its founding in 1992, Chalabi's INC has been trying to drag the United States into war with Iraq. By its very nature, the INC's strategy -- building a paramilitary presence inside Iraq, creating a provisional government, launching attacks on Iraqi cities -- was intended to create inexorable momentum for a war in which in the United States would be compelled to support the INC. But American policy in the 1990s was focused primarily on containing Saddam Hussein and depriving him of weapons of mass destruction, so the INC's efforts were sidetracked during the Clinton administration.
At the time, most of the national-security establishment saw the INC as weak and ineffectual. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, famously ridiculed Chalabi and company as "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London," adding, "I don't see any opposition group that has the viability to overthrow Saddam." Supporting the INC, he warned, meant that "the Bay of Pigs could turn into the Bay of Goats." And a widely cited 1999 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Rollback Fantasy," lambasted the INC's strategy for a gusano-style offensive by a ragtag army operating out of the so-called no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, saying it was "militarily ludicrous and would almost certainly end in either direct American intervention or a massive bloodbath."
Indeed, in 1996 an ill-organized INC offensive in northern Iraq, where Chalabi had assembled about 1,000 fighters, was half-heartedly backed by the CIA. Not only did Saddam Hussein's troops not defect en masse, as predicted by Chalabi, but one of the INC's key allies, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, chose to ally itself with Baghdad, inviting the Iraqi army back into northern Iraq's Kurdish areas for a mop-up exercise. Another of the INC's allies, the Iraqi National Accord, apparently blew up the INC's main offices in an act of bloody fratricide. These tragic failures only increased the distaste for Chalabi at the CIA and among the U.S. military.
Still, Chalabi is a survivor. Since the 1996 fiasco, he's managed a precarious balance atop a fractious and quarrelsome constellation of Iraqi opposition factions, from Kurds and Shi'a tribal leaders to Islamic fundamentalists, monarchists and military officers.
Our Man in Baghdad
Born in 1945, Chalabi is the scion of a wealthy, oligarchic Shi'a family with close ties to the Hashemite monarchy that was installed in Iraq after World War I by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and the British imperial authorities. Chalabi's grandfather served in nine various Iraqi cabinet positions, his father was a cabinet officer and president of the figurehead Iraqi senate, and his mother ran political salons that catered to Iraq's elite. In 1958 that all came to a crashing end when a coalition of army officers and the Iraqi Communist Party led a revolution that toppled King Faisal II. The Chalabis scattered.
As a young man Chalabi lived in Jordan, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the United States, where he attended MIT before earning a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. He took a position teaching math at the American University of Beirut. In 1977, Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan invited Chalabi to Amman to establish the Petra Bank, a financial institution that would soon become the second-largest commercial bank in Jordan.
In an August 1989 episode still surrounded by controversy, however, the government of Jordan seized the Petra Bank under martial law, arresting its chief currency trader and using Jordan's central bank to pump $164 million into the Petra Bank and its allied institutions to keep them liquid. To avoid arrest, Chalabi fled the country "under mysterious circumstances," according to a 1989 article in the Financial Times. The Hudson Institute's Max Singer says that Prince Hassan personally drove Chalabi to the Jordanian border, helping him escape. (According to one account, Chalabi was in the trunk of the car.) Chalabi eventually was tried in absentia by a Jordanian court and sentenced to 22 years of hard labor for embezzlement, fraud and currency-trading irregularities. He reportedly got away with more than $70 million.
The INC offers a different version. According to Zaab Sethna, an INC spokesman, King Hussein of Jordan executed a politically motivated coup against Chalabi in coordination with Iraq because Chalabi was "using the bank to fund [Iraqi] opposition groups and learning a lot about illegal arms transfers to Saddam." Because the Petra Bank had inside information about Jordanian-Iraqi trade, Chalabi used his position in a freelance, cloak-and-dagger operation to feed intelligence about Iraq's trade deals to the CIA. Because Chalabi was already active in anti-Iraq opposition groups and had a connection with Perle, it's possible that Chalabi's account is true.
Further evidence of political motives behind the seizure of the Petra Bank and Chalabi's intelligence connections: The American lawyer who represented the Petra Bank's Washington, D.C., subsidiary was former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. And when Chalabi fled the country, anonymous leaflets reportedly circulated linking Chalabi to an alliance with Iraq's Shi'a and with (mostly Shi'a) Iran, all in a vague conspiracy against Iraq and Jordan. (During the Iran-Iraq war and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Jordan -- always delicately balanced between "Iraq and a hard place," as King Hussein was wont to say -- tilted toward Iraq. Afterward, King Hussein distanced himself from Baghdad and eventually reconciled with Chalabi. The jail sentence for bank fraud stands but reportedly might be lifted soon by Jordan's King Abdullah.)
Of course, the fact that Chalabi may have been prosecuted for political reasons does not mean that he is innocent of embezzlement and fraud. In any case, allegations of self-dealing have followed him everywhere since.
Puppet Theater
Soon after fleeing Jordan, Chalabi began making the contacts with the CIA that would eventually lead to the INC's founding in 1992. Meeting first in Vienna, Austria, and then in Salahuddin in northern Iraq, the INC emerged as an umbrella group for the many factions of Iraqi opposition in exile. In the early 1990s, the CIA spent about $100 million through the INC and its Kurdish allies in the north -- until the fiasco of 1996. Though the CIA cut off the INC after that, Chalabi was undeterred and went about working with congressional Republicans to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. That law set up a pool of funds and in-kind contributions for the INC and other opposition forces. In its implementation, however, the INC has been embroiled in repeated disputes with the State Department over its accounting for funds received. (In 1999, when asked about secrecy in accounting for certain INC expenditures, Chalabi blurted: "Damn right! It was covert money.") "He's a criminal banker," says Akins, the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "He's a swindler. He's interested in getting money, and I suspect it's all gone into his bank accounts and those of his friends."
Earlier this year, the State Department and the INC were deadlocked over payments to the INC, and the dispute was resolved only when the Pentagon, with its pro-Chalabi group, agreed to take over payments to the INC for the latter's intelligence-gathering work inside Iraq.
Even after 1996, Chalabi continued to insist that Saddam Hussein's government would crumble if the INC, with only limited American backing, were to launch its planned offensive. In June 1997, Chalabi spoke to JINSA's board, which includes, not surprisingly, Perle, Woolsey and key hard-line backers of Israel such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow and former Rep. Steve Solarz (D-N.Y.). "The INC plan for Saddam's overthrow is simple," Chalabi told JINSA. From its base in northern Iraq, the INC would begin to confront Iraqi forces with only political and logistical support from the United States, including U.S. efforts to "feed, house and otherwise provide for the Iraqi army as it abandons Saddam." Then, Chalabi concluded, "With U.S. political backing and regional support for a process of gradual encirclement, Saddam can be driven into hiding in Takrit and eventually removed." That's it.
The idea that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein is as easy as that was, of course, ridiculed by virtually all CIA, military and State Department strategists. But without the ability to commit hundreds of thousands of American troops and a relentless wave of bombing sorties, it was all that Chalabi and his allies had -- until September 11.
Effectively capitalizing on the impact of 9-11, Perle, Woolsey and company began beating the drums for a full-scale war against Iraq. With President Bush in tow and railing against "the guy who tried to kill my dad," the war party got the upper hand. According to the latest leaks about U.S. strategy, a war against Iraq now could involve up to 250,000 U.S. troops and would result in an open-ended military occupation of Iraq modeled on the post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan.
The INC, meanwhile, hopes to ride into Baghdad on American tanks. Weeks ago the Pentagon began a program to train INC combatants for a coming conflict in Iraq, but its effort fooled no one. Ousting Saddam Hussein, if it happens, will be the work of U.S. troops, not the INC. But a Big Brother-style public-relations offensive is being readied, aimed at creating the myth that Iraq has been liberated by an alliance of the United States and the INC. "I want to create the national story that Iraqis liberated themselves," says WINEP's Clawson. "It may have no more truth than the idea that the French liberated themselves in World War II." But, insists Clawson, it's a fiction that will resonate with Iraqis.
Almost no one, not even the INC itself, thinks that Chalabi has any cachet inside Iraq. Entifadh Qanbar, the earnest, young ex-Iraqi officer who heads the INC's office in Washington, says that Chalabi represents Iraq's "silent majority." Asked whether people in Baghdad have even heard of Chalabi, Qanbar says: "They may not know the man. But he represents their views."
Others scoff at even that notion. "It's a formula for setting up a puppet regime," says David Mack, vice president of the Middle East Institute, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and ex-deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who's dealt extensively with Iraqi opposition politicians and military officers. "And we will have responsibility for propping them up for a long, long time to come, possibly with the blood of American soldiers."
But indefinitely propping up an INC-style quisling regime might be exactly what the United States wants, as it would mean that U.S. troops would be occupying Iraq's oil fields for years to come.
Striking Oil
It's hard to overstate the importance of Iraqi oil. With proven reserves of 112 billion barrels (and many analysts saying that its true reserves are double that), Iraq sits above the second largest supply of oil in the world. Its crippled industry can produce only 2 million barrels of oil a day at present, but with a modest effort, Iraq's output could soar to as high as 7 million to 8 million barrels per day by decade's end. Controlling that much oil would give the United States enormous leverage over Europe and Japan, which depend heavily on Gulf oil; over Russia, whose economy is hinged to the price of its oil exports, which could be manipulated by an American-run Iraq; and over Saudi Arabia, whose regime's survival is linked to oil. "The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war," says Akins. "We take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell." "It's probably going to spell the end of OPEC," says JINSA's Bryen.
The INC is quietly courting the American oil companies. In mid-October, Chalabi had a series of meetings with three major U.S. oil firms in Washington. "The oil people are naturally nervous," says INC spokesman Zaab Sethna, who took part in the meetings between Chalabi and the oil executives. "We've had discussions with them, but they're not in the habit of going around talking about them." That's true. In interviews, oil company officials speak cautiously and only on background about Iraq, laughing nervously at the idea of being quoted. They are extremely wary of associating themselves with the INC or with U.S. war plans for fear of angering Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf. Asked about talks with the INC, one U.S. oil executive blanched, saying, "I can't discuss that, even on background."
But the untold riches that lie beneath the soil of Iraq are a powerful lure for multinational oil companies. "I would say that especially the U.S. oil companies ... look forward to the idea that Iraq will be open for business," says an executive from one of the world's largest oil companies, adding that the companies are trying hard not to be noticed.
"We don't have a stake in Iraq now," says another oil industry executive. "One of the frustrations that U.S. oil companies have is that the Russians, the French and the Chinese already have existing relations with Iraq. And the question is: How much of that will be sanctified by the people who succeed Saddam?"
The INC and its backers make no bones about the fact that the American forces gathering to attack Iraq will be liberating Iraq's oil. Unable to restrain himself, Chalabi blurted to The Washington Post that the INC intends to reward its American friends. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he proclaimed.
Meanwhile, economists allied with the INC -- including strategists at the Heritage Foundation, the AEI and JINSA -- are abuzz with plans to "denationalize" the Iraqi oil industry and then distribute it to Western, mostly American, companies. In late September, in "The Future of a Post-Saddam Iraq: A Blueprint for American Involvement," the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen put forward a nearly complete scheme for the privatization of Iraq's oil, creating three separate companies for southern Iraq, the region around Baghdad and the Kirkuk fields in northern Iraq, with additional companies to operate pipelines and refineries and to develop Iraq's natural gas. In an interview, Cohen warned that France, Russia and China might find that their existing oil contracts with Iraq won't be honored by the INC. "It will be up to the next government of Iraq to examine the legal validity of the deals signed by the Saddam regime," says Cohen. "From a realpolitik point of view, these governments should try to get in early with the Iraqi National Congress and abandon Saddam. The window of opportunity is closing."
It's hard to imagine that a regime that denationalized Iraq's oil would be very popular with Iraqis. The nationalization, which took place between 1972 and 1974, electrified Iraqis and stunned the industry worldwide. It also set dominoes falling throughout the Persian Gulf and the OPEC nations, as other countries ousted the multinationals and created state-owned enterprises. Eventually, even Saudi Arabia seized control of all-powerful Aramco, the consortium of Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Chevron that had long been the colossus of the Persian Gulf. Now, cautiously, the oil industry sees a war in Iraq as a way to win back what's been lost.
"Even in Saudi Arabia, all we can do is buy their oil," says an American oil company official. U.S. companies, this executive confirmed, want to return to greater direct control, perhaps through so-called production-sharing agreements that would give them both a direct stake in the oil fields and a greater share of the profits.
It's also clear that the INC, the neoconservatives and oil executives are thinking beyond Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Ever since Robert W. Tucker wrote an article in Commentary in the 1970s proposing a U.S. occupation of Saudi Arabia's oil fields, such a scenario has been a cherished vision for a small but growing circle of strategists. (Last summer Perle invited a RAND Corporation analyst to speak to the Defense Policy Board on exactly that topic.) Earlier this year, in an article titled "Free the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia," Singer suggested that the United States should help create a Muslim Republic of East Arabia. "I meant it seriously," says Singer. "Saudi Arabia is vulnerable not only to a U.S. seizure of their land but to U.S. unofficial participation in a rebellion by minority Shi'a in the Eastern Province." The Eastern Province, which is largely Shi'a, happens to include the vast bulk of Saudi Arabia's oil fields.
One other problem is that the INC does not represent the entire Iraqi opposition movement. The two main Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, though long-time bloody rivals, have momentarily patched things up. They've allied, in turn, with the Iraqi National Accord, a CIA-backed group of former Iraqi military officers, and with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to form the Group of Four, an alternative to the INC that, they hope, will attract further American support. There is even a monarchist group trying to restore T.E. Lawrence's Hashemite kingdom in Baghdad that, some say, could promote a kingship in Iraq for Prince Hassan of Jordan, a Hashemite himself.
Do these strategic realities, and the wide ridicule of Chalabi among Middle East experts, matter? "I don't think their point of view is relevant to the debate any longer," says Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute. "Sor-ry!" Thanks to the "entire vast army [of neoconservatives]" who've successfully won over Bush and Cheney, she observes, the INC has something that the other groups lack: the support of the president of the United States.
Robert Dreyfuss
Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 10:20 am Post subject: Buchanan and the US Commitment to Israeli Security |
| Subj: Buchanan and the US Commitment to Israeli Security
Date: 2/21/04 11:20:26 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Friends,
Buchanan and the US Commitment to Israeli Security
Pat Buchanan has been courageous in presenting the truth about the neocons and the war, while many other critics of the neocons skirt the taboo areas. In the following piece Buchanan dares to point to the ethnic motivation for neocon policy. "If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from ‘American empire’ to ‘benevolent global hegemony’ to ‘a Pax Americana’ to ‘world democratic revolution’ have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?"
And Buchanan notes that by their very open exercise of power, the neocons have revealed themselves to the public—at least the observant public. "But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed."
This is an excellent article but with one significant, probably unavoidable, error. While Buchanan emphasizes that American foreign policy should pursue American national interest, he says it can be committed to protecting Israel’s security and survival.
"The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide."
Undoubtedly, in order to stay in the mainstream media it is necessary to pay homage to Israeli security. Buchanan obviously should be credited for having the courage of saying what he does. But how would one separate American commitment to Israeli security from the neocon policy that Buchanan decries. To Zionists, Likudniks and Laborites alike, the "security and survival" of Israel means the maintenance of an Israeli monopoly of power in the Middle East by weakening Israel’s neighbors and/or bringing them within Israel’s orbit. And since Israel by definition is a Jewish state—i.e., a Jewish supremacist state—the "security and survival" of Israel entails dealing with the Palestinian demographic threat to Jewish demographic superiority. The fact of the matter is that neocon/Likudnik positions have consisted of nothing else but efforts to enhance the "security and survival" of Israel.
Do the neocons understand Israel’s security needs? It would seem that they do. If Israel were a weak country, would the US really defend its existence, especially if the danger were something other than a direct military assault--a slow demographic threat combined with external terrorist attacks? During the 1970s the neocons made much of the fact that America was unable to defend its client states—Vietnam and Iran. It is because the Zionists don’t fully trust the US to advance their interests that Israel has made itself one of the greatest powers in the world. Without such overwhelming military power combined with influence in the US government (which impacts on the UN and other international bodies), it is unlikely that a Jewish supremacist state could survive in an Arab sea of people any more than white South Africa could survive amidst black Africans.
Demography is seen as the all-important problem to Israeli Jews. And this is simply because Israeli is a defined as a Jewish state. As Israeli commentator Uri Avnery put it in December 2002 [http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article215.html ]
"In reality, this is not a ‘Jewish democratic state’ but a ‘Jewish demographic state’. Demography overcomes democracy in all fields of action. An Arab citizen feels at every turn, since childhood, that he has no part in the state, that he is, at most, a tolerated resident. In every government office, police station or place of work, even in the Knesset, he is treated differently from a Jew, even in times of quiet. True, apart from the Law of Return, which gives a ‘Jew’ and his family (but not to Arab refugees) the absolute right to come to Israel, no law discriminates between a ‘Jew’ and a non-Jew. But this is only make-believe: numerous laws accord special privileges to persons ‘to whom the Law of Return applies’, without mentioning ‘Jews’ specifically.
"This is so self evident, that all state officials act accordingly without even being aware of it. The ‘Israel Land Authority’ distributes land to Jews, not to Arabs. All state development projects include Jews only. Among the hundreds of new towns and villages set up since the founding of Israel, not a single one was established for Arabs. There is no Arab minister in the Government, no Arab judge on the Supreme Court bench."
But the existence of the Jewish character of Israel is being threatened by the Palestinian population, with its burgeoning population. Without a predominantly Jewish population, the Jewish character of Israel would be eliminated—if the polity remained democratic, that is. Since the essence of Israel is its Jewishness, demographic changes would mean the end of Israel.
Thus, it is the demographic threat which poses the greatest danger to Israel. And this is clearly recognized by Israeli Jews.
Avnery continues: "The ‘demographic problem’ is being pondered in universities, talked about in the media, expounded by politicians and commentators.
"’Experts’ with computers are calculating what will be the percentage of Jews in Israel in 10, 25, 50 or a hundred years time. Will they be less than 78%? Or - God forbid! - only 75%? Will the womb of the orthodox Jewish woman, in addition to expected immigration, balance the production of the Arab uterus?" http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article215.html
But even if the population of Jews should increase the arid land simply could not hold that great number.. The dean of Israel's revisionist historians, Benny Morris, maintains that "This land is so small that there isn't room for two peoples. In fifty or a hundred years, there will only be one state between the sea and the Jordan. That state must be Israel." http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id128.htm
The fact that revisionist historian Morris would express such a view shows that the belief in the demographic threat to Israel exists not only among Likudniks but also on the Left
In short, for the US to defend Israel’s security means far more than to defend it from direct external military assault. It means to be committed to Jewish demographic dominance and ethnic supremacy. Now the Likud uses a more militant approach to achieve Israeli security, but Labor’s "peace process" was still intended to maintain Jewish demographic dominance in Israel and Israeli dominance in the Middle East. To maintain Israeli security, the "peace process" at most offered the Palestinians cut up, waterless bantustans.
The Palestinians and Israel’s Arab/Islamic neighbors will never accept the Israeli definition of its security unless they are beaten down into submission—altered into puppet states or powerless mini-states. For the US to pursue such a policy means that the US must pursue an endless war in the Middle East and become the major target for Islamic terrorists. For the US not to do this would show that it is not really committed to Israel’s security and survival.
__________________________
http://amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html
March 1, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative
No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington Post depiction of himself as the "intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy."
The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are losing their grip on reality.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, "There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust." "What is new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained" now menaces "our survival as a nation."
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
"[A] radical strain within Islam," says Perle, " ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws."
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to "overthrow our civilization" and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this same scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more battles.
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never "overthrow our civilization."
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, "[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never "the clear and present danger" the authors insist she was.
Calling their book a "manual for victory," they declaim:
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.
But no nation can "end evil." Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every human heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle propose to "end" it? Nor can any nation "win the war on terror." Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA, Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela. Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin, Mao, Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can "end" it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and "immortality," will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors: "We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they kill our people or others .... We must deter all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not" [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending everyone, everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to Cuba, from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have used torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations that need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli Defense Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a short list of priority targets: "The war on terror is not over, it has barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder."
Now al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn, "present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time."
"Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?" the authors demand. They call for a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a "Western orientation"—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus? Invade? Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to guerrilla war?
Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad’s regime be destroyed—by us?
"We don’t have much time," say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to provide us "with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror," or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how would that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a "state sponsor of terror" 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. "The regime must go," say our authors, because Ayatollah Khamenei has
… no more right to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker.
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to "toss dictators aside"? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves. "We have no doubt how such a war would end," say the authors. They also had no doubt how the Iraqi war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom and democracy? Not exactly:
It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome.
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the desperate for action this day: "We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial."
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends.
They promised him a "cakewalk," that we would be hailed as "liberators," that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, "What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass."
What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003.
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s protégé passed over? Because the "INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis." The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle asserted that Saddam "is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons."
Naming Khidir Hamza, "one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam," as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of 400 uranium enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. "Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them." Only "preemptive action" can save us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam was imminent:
With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even?
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had access to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his links to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s "collaboration with terrorism is well documented," wrote Perle, "Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11 ringleader, is convincing."
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. "We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not."
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. "No war in ‘04" is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about "unipolar" moments and "American empire" aside, there are limits to American power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000 are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his "axis-of-evil" rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of the Union, "We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire."
The long retreat of American empire has begun.
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the imminent departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, "One squeezes the orange and throws away the rind."
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars, seems, given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in unreality. Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this authority. Nor does it appear he intends to try. And were the United States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate every ally in the Islamic world and Europe—including Tony Blair’s Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed our armed forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our demise as a nation.
If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to isolate it from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father to help us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather than another enemy of the United States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of enemies. They do not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked us. They want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies. They want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls "the Firemen’s War" into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit 9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their desperation knows no bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy as appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and isolating your enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia and China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an American victory—call it imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of operations, multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of our country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an Arab and Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their war for hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not America’s agenda, and their fight is not America’s fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum and Perle concede, this is "our generation’s great cause."
"Who are those guys?" Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men who would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and retribution across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David invented the "axis-of-evil" phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum ratted out his old colleagues in a "hot" book and got himself hired by National Review, where he produced a cover story about a dirty dozen "Unpatriotic Conservatives" who hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and "wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror."
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must, in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle co-authored "A Clean Break," a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus secretly urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by his own government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of Defense while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate themselves with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon once bore the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings. The toxic charge of "Anti-Semite!" has become the last argument of the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People are less intimidated now. They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He opposed war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we would unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know where the neocons came from—that was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.
National Review’s response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a separate column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of having "blamed the Jews," he insisted that the term neocon, in common usage for 25 years, is now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews. They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives.’
Mowbray and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant soldier who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but only add to their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their tactics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics of the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word "neocon," he writes, the "con" stands for conservative and the "neo" stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so few are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a book with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil, declared: "This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth."
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from "American empire" to "benevolent global hegemony" to "a Pax Americana" to "world democratic revolution" have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the Palestinians a home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a Munich sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has been opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined by what is best for America. And what is best for America is what our forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of foreign wars, avoid "permanent alliances," beware of "passionate attachments" to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory was won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic into Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of Israel only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of a foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to rationalize their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. "The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism," Frum and Perle protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey says it is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an "ideological" nation, "like the Soviet Union of yesteryear." We and Israel are democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to it.
That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
But this is nonsense, and Kristol knows it. When Britain and France declared war on Hitler on September 3, 1939, FDR did not "come to the defense of France and Britain." He delivered a fireside chat that night promising the nation America would stay out. There will be "no blackout of peace" here, FDR promised us.When France fell in May-June of 1940, pleading for planes, FDR sent words of encouragement. Not until 18 months after the fall of France did we declare war on Hitler and not until after Hitler declared war on us. Thus, we did not go to war to defend democracy in Britain or France. We went to war to smash the Japanese Empire that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Kristol is parroting liberal myths.
In the Cold War the United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek, Salazar, Franco, Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and the Korean generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey, Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats proved far more reliable than democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, and Pierre Trudeau. When it comes to wars that threaten us, hot or cold, we Americans are at one with Nietzsche, "A state, it is the coldest of all cold monsters."
India is democratic and 200 times the size of Israel. Yet in India’s wars with Pakistan, we tilted toward Pakistan. Why? Because the Pakistanis were allies, and India sided with Moscow. That India was democratic and Pakistan autocratic made no difference to us.
As for Israel, has America really given her $100 billion and taken her side in every Arab quarrel because she is a democracy?
Tell it to Tony Judt. When this British historian proposed—given the impossibility of separating Arabs from Jews on the West Bank—that Israel annex the West Bank, become a bi-national state, and give Palestinians equal rights, neocons went berserk.
Frum called Judt’s idea "genocidal liberalism" that would leave Jews exposed to slaughter. John Podhoretz declared it "unthinkable" and "the definition of intellectual corruption." "[H]aughty and ugly," said the New Republic, which hurled Judt from its masthead.
But if the just solution to the South African problem was to abolish bantustans and create a one-man, one-vote democracy, why is that not even a debatable solution to the Palestinian problem?
In temperament, too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the antithesis of conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn, they are the "neo-Jacobins" of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.
Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint.
The Perle-Frum book is marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons’ fatal flaw. In the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing their plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to deny it. They reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where they came from, what they believed, how they were different, and how they had become the new elite. With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush marching to their war drums, one of them bellowed, "We are all neoconservatives now!"
But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country ensnared in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will be made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
And this one they’ve got right.
March 1, 2004 issue
2004 The American Conservative | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 10:36 am Post subject: The Neo-Con Philosophy of Intelligence |
| The Neo-Con Philosophy of Intelligence. by Tom Barry, Asia Times
.. The CIA is thus being set up as the main institutional fall guy in the Iraq WMD scandal. However, the true problem rests with the very type of intelligence that right-wing groups such as the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) and PNAC ..
.. The neo-cons, who were the leading strategists and cheerleaders for a new war against Iraq, are among the strongest supporters of plans to overhaul US intelligence operations - not because they believe that the CIA doesn't get its facts right. On the contrary, neo-cons like Schmitt, Richard Perle, David Brooks and Frank Gaffney say the CIA is too focused on the facts
..
... Contrary to what many policymakers thought when they supported the Iraqi war resolution on the basis of US intelligence about Iraq's WMDs and terrorist ties, Myers said that intelligence "doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is." ..
... Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans to undermine the CIA and DIA and then mounted a threat-assessment campaign that was "political propaganda", not intelligence. ..
... Their politicization and manipulation of intelligence did succeed in winning public and policymaker support for the Iraq invasion, but their lies certainly did not lead to victory. ...
... Rather than formulating policy based on this intelligence, they sought to manufacture their own intelligence through the Office of Special Plans and by cherry-picking tidbits of gossip and unverified intelligence from the CIA that would support their conclusions about what the intentions of the evil Saddam regime must be. ...
... What the US public and Congress should expect is that the president gets all the facts before declaring war. ..
http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB19Aa01.html
----------------------
Rumsfeld and Tenet to testify next month at the "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States".
=====================
The Sorrows of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic [The American Empire Project ] by Chalmers Johnson (Author)
Book Review at the bottom of this page:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805070044/ref=ase_counterpunchmaga/102-0070999-5428135?v=glance&s=books
also
# American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. by Kevin Phillips
# Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. by Noam Chomsky
# The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. by Paul Krugman
# America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. by Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay
# Incoherent Empire. by Michael Mann | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 10:58 am Post subject: Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous |
| www.counterpunch.org
March 5, 2004
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
How They Might Influence the Election
By BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analyst
(A Primer for a Talk in Santa Fe, New Mexico.)
You've all surely heard widely varying stories about how much power,
or how
little power, the so-called neoconservatives -- or neocons -- have
inside the
Bush administration. I've been asked to explain, briefly, some of the
mysteries
about these neocons and what role, if any, they might play in this
year's
election.
To start with, let's spend a minute or two on definitions -- who's a
neocon
and who is not? Specifically, President George W. Bush and his very
highest-level foreign policy advisers are not neocons. Bush himself,
as well as
Vice-President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
and National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, are all just plain conservatives
and always have
been, with nothing "neo" about them. (Secretary of State Colin Powell
is not a
neocon either, but in the eyes of many Washington insiders he is also
not
really a part of this inner sanctum that dominates the actual making
of U.S.
foreign policy these days.)
The real neocons are those who started out as liberals or at least
Democrats
and who later proudly became Republicans. They are all one or more
rungs below
Bush's top foreign policy advisers in the hierarchies of our nation's
capital. Others, generally younger officials, are happy to call
themselves neocons,
even though technically they cannot claim to be neo-anythings,
because they
never were liberals and never switched parties. In their careers to
date, they've
always been conservatives. But they too claim the neocon label.
A few of the neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas
Feith, "Scooter"
Libby, John Bolton, and Elliott Abrams) wield real power in
Washington. Most,
however, do not. In general, the neocons and their supporters who are
not in
top jobs are advocates, spokesmen, think tank idea-men, writer-
flacks, and
rationalizers of policies that would never be implemented unless they
were
converted into official policy by Bush himself and his top advisers,
and by those
who have paid the most money for his elevation to the presidency, the
leaders of
the corporate and military power structure that dominates the
country's
politics. This structure, of course, is far greater than just a small
group of
leaders. It includes thousands of defense and high-tech workers,
contractors,
government employees, military personnel, members of Congress,
investment firms,
many lawyers and judges, and lobbyists, foreign and domestic, who see
their
future livelihood as dependent on the continuation of this system.
Within this entire conglomerate, the neocons definitely wield real
power and
influence, even though none of them at present occupies a cabinet-
level
position. But one thing and only one thing makes them important --
the fact that
with minor exceptions, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice have
enthusiastically
accepted all the early phases of the policy agenda that has, since
the early
1990s, been the very trademark of the neocons. This agenda includes a
general, or
global, aspect and another aspect that gives greater emphasis to the
Middle
East than to any other area. The global agenda includes constantly
expanding
U.S. military expenditures, a unilateral U.S. drive for global
domination, and
increased control over the world's fossil fuel supplies. The Middle
East agenda
includes the strengthening of Israeli/U.S. partnership and hegemony
throughout
the region and, in furtherance thereof, advocacy of war, first
against Iraq
and then if necessary against Syria, Iran, and possibly other Middle
Eastern
states.
In effect, Bush has made at least the early stages of these policies
his own.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice support them. Early on, Colin Powell may
have had
qualms about these policies, but, good soldier that he is, his
loyalty to the
Bush family quickly overcame his qualms.
The neocons are lying low at the moment, for a couple of reasons.
Since the
March 2003 invasion of Iraq, they have gone through an early phase of
riding
high and wanting to capitalize on their success, and then a "downer"
phase --
still continuing -- of nagging constant casualties and instability in
Iraq. This
is one reason for downplaying their own role in policymaking. Another
is
their ties to Israel. Some of the most important neocons support and
encourage
practically every policy of Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud
government, although
they choose not to advertise these close ties. Too much talk by the
neocons
poses some danger for Bush in this election year. His political
handlers surely
want to avoid the embarrassment that might result if it became more
widely
accepted that one of the real U.S. motives in invading Iraq was to
strengthen
Israel's military position and political dominance throughout the
Middle East. It
has been important ever since Bush took office in January 2001 for
the
administration to downplay any connection between Israel and the war
against Iraq.
Obfuscating the "Israeli motive" of the war was almost certainly one
of the
reasons the administration so transparently exaggerated first Iraq's
possession
of weapons of mass destruction and, more recently, Washington's
desire for
democracy in Iraq.
So supporters of Bush have launched a two-pronged counterattack,
arguing
first that the influence of the neocons over U.S. foreign policy is a
myth and,
second, that if you are dumb enough to believe the myth, it is almost
a sure
thing that you are also an anti-Semite. A great example of this
approach was
written by David Brooks, one of the New York Times' more conservative
columnists,
who also appears frequently on PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In
his January
6, 2004 Times column, Brooks wrote:
"Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day
you read
that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into
Syria. Web
sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies . . . The full-mooners
fixated on
a think tank called the Project for the New American Century [or
PNAC] . . .
To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish
Trilateral
Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles . . . In
truth, the people
labeled neocons (con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short
for 'Jewish')
travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much
contact with
one another . . . There have been hundreds of references, for
example, to
Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've
been told by
senior administration officials that he has had no significant
meetings with
Bush or Cheney since they assumed office . . . It's true that both
Bush and the
people labeled neocons agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique
threat to
world peace. But . . . all evidence suggests that Bush formed his
conclusions
independently . . . Still, there are apparently millions of people
who cling
to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and
malevolent
forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy
explanation for
everything . . . Anti-Semitism is resurgent."
This piece by David Brooks is an effort, first, to divert attention
from the
extraordinarily well documented influence of the neocons and, second,
to
squelch criticism of what many Americans believe are dangerous U.S.
policies toward
Israel, Iraq, and the entire Middle East. The views of the neocons
have in no
sense been a conspiracy. Information about them is wide open and
readily
available. Raising the charge of anti-Semitism against those who
criticize U.S. --
and Israeli -- policies is, to put it bluntly, appalling but not
surprising.
The British journalist Robert Fisk has commented, with respect to the
Brooks
column, that:
"Brooks even tries to erase the word 'neo-conservative' from the
narrative of
the Iraq war . . . And so here we go again. No weapons of mass
destruction.
No links between Saddam and 11 September. No democracy. Blame the
press. Blame
the BBC. Blame the spooks. But don't blame Messers Bush and Blair.
And don't
blame the American neo-conservatives who helped to push the US into
this
disaster. They don't even exist. And if you say they did, you know
what you're going
to be called."
Most people who are knowledgeable on Middle Eastern affairs believe,
as
Robert Fisk does, that the neocons are in no way a myth. And in the
area of
intelligence, it is quite clear that the neocons are right now trying
to expand their
influence. They are trying to switch the entire blame for the fiasco
over
weapons of mass destruction and the continuing killings in Iraq to
the CIA. There
is no question that the CIA deserves some of the criticism directed
against
it, but most of the blame in my view belongs to the administration's
own
distortions and exaggerations of intelligence. The neocons want to
reorganize the
intelligence apparatus of the United States to make it even easier
for the
administration to introduce more distortions and exaggerations into
intelligence
analysis in the future. The proper answer here is to make the CIA
less
susceptible to any administration's attempts to slant and twist
intelligence analysis
to its own liking. (For proposals on precisely how the CIA should be
reorganized, see http://www.counterpunch.org/)
One of the problems we face in trying to evaluate the true influence
of the
neocons in supporting aggressive U.S. foreign policies that
strengthen Israel's
position throughout the Middle East is the need to determine the
relative
weight of the neocons versus other factors that are also at work in
influencing
U.S. policy toward Israel. One of these other factors is AIPAC -- the
American
Israel Public Affairs Committee, the principal pro-Israel lobby
organization
-- and its numerous subsidiary lobbies that are able to generate
majority
support in both houses of Congress for almost any measure that the
government of
Israel wants. Without the activities of these organizations, the
influence of
the neocons in Washington would be diminished, although by how much
we cannot
say.
It suffices to know, however, that the neocons and the lobby together
form a
very powerful mutual support society, and their relationship is
symbiotic in
the extreme. The neocons, as noted, have long pressed for ever larger
military
expenditures by the U.S., thus throwing their full support to the
very groups
that finance most heavily the election of today's presidents. The
influence of
the lobby, for its part, is far more than a matter of the money it
has to
spend. The extremely close ties that many elements of the U.S.
military-industrial complex have developed in recent decades with the
smaller but also powerful
Israeli military-industrial complex magnify the strength of the pro-
Israel
lobby in Washington in ways that most people simply do not
comprehend. The
Israeli activist, Jeff Halper, who is the founder and head of the
Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions and has had considerable experience dealing
with
members of Congress in recent years, describes it this way:
"Israel has located itself very strategically right in the center of
the
global arms industry. Israel's sophisticated military hardware and
military
software are very important to weapons development in the United
States. Israel has
also become the main subcontractor of American arms. Just last year,
Israel
signed a contract to train and equip the Chinese army. It signed
another
multi-billion dollar contract to train and equip the Indian army.
What is it
equipping them with? It is equipping them with American weapons.
"Israel is very important, because on the one hand it is a very
sophisticated, high-tech arms developer and dealer. But on the other
hand, there are no
ethical or moral constraints: there is no Congress, there are no
human rights
concerns, there are no laws against taking bribes -- the Israeli
government can
do anything it wants to. So you have a very sophisticated rogue
state -- not a
Libyan rogue state, but a high tech, military-expert rogue state. Now
that is
tremendously useful, both for Europe and for the United States."
Halper points out that there are still some American Congressional
constraints on selling arms to China because of China's human rights
problems. So Israel
modifies American arms just enough that "they can be considered
Israeli arms,
and in that way bypasses Congress." He adds that "for the most part,
Israel
is the subcontractor for American arms to the Third World. There is
no terrible
regime . . . that does not have a major military connection to
Israel.
Israeli arms dealers are . . . like fish in water in the rough and
tumble countries
that eat Americans alive: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, China,
Indonesia,
these countries where Americans just cannot operate, partly because
of business
practices, and partly because they have [Congressional] constraints
and laws."
Thus, when AIPAC sells Israel to Congress, it does not go to
congressmen and
ask them to support Israel because it is Judeo-Christian, or because
it is the
"only democracy in the Middle East." AIPAC sells Israel by telling a
congressman that he or she should support Israel because this is how
many industries
in your state have business links to Israel, this is how many
military research
people are sitting in universities in your district, this is how many
jobs in
your district are dependent on the military and the defense industry.
Therefore, if you are voting against Israel, you are voting against
your own best
interests. Halper adds that in most congressional districts, "members
of Congress
have a great dependence on the military. More than half of industrial
employment in California is in one way or another connected to
defense. Israel is
right there, right in the middle of it all. And that is part of its
strength."
When activists on the other side go to a member of Congress and talk
about
human rights, about occupation, about Palestinians, the congressman
usually, in
Halper's experience, says, "Look I know, I read the papers, I'm not
dumb, but
that is not the basis on which I vote. The basis on which I vote is
what is
good for my constituents."
Although Israel is a tiny country, its U.S. supporters present it as
more
than an ally of the United States. The AIPAC website says, for
example, that the
job of Israel is to protect American economic interests in the Middle
East. It
even says that Israel is developing laser weapons from outer space to
protect
American interests. Israel clearly sees itself as, and is proud of
being, a
part of the American Empire. We need to expose Israel as the regional
superpower and necessary component in the U.S. Empire that it really
is.
So both the neocons and these other factors that strengthen the
neocons
should be kept in mind when we try to answer questions about the
neocons and the
2004 presidential election. Let's look at two questions.
First, what role if any will the neocons and their views on foreign
policy
play in this year's presidential election?
Perhaps the neocons will not play any role, but that may be wishful
thinking.
If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Karl Rove come to believe, around
September or
October, that they are likely to lose the election, it is not by any
means
beyond belief that they would, in desperation, undertake some new
aggressive and
"preemptive" military action against Syria, Iran, North Korea, or
someplace
else we cannot now even anticipate. In other words, a new "October
surprise."
They have used lies to instill fear and advance their ill-considered
doctrine of
preemption once, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that
they
might do so again. The neocons, of course, would be among the
strongest advocates
of such moves, and that would be one way in which they might
influence the
election. Peace movements in this country and around the world
should, in my
view, be ready to undertake massive demonstrations in the hope of
preventing such
an eventuality.
Second, how might the outcome of the election affect the neocons
themselves?
The answer here is simple, but it is a limited answer. If the
Democrats win
back the presidency this year, the neocons -- or most of them -- will
at least
temporarily be out of work, and that will be excellent news. Any
conceivable
Democratic administration would implement somewhat less aggressive
and less
unilateral foreign policies. But most likely, a Democratic
administration would
be almost as beholden to the nation's military-national security-
corporate
complex for campaign funding as the present Republican
administration. There would
be changes of tone in U.S. foreign policies, but very likely only
limited
changes in the policies themselves. The close ties between the U.S.
and Israeli
military-industrial complexes that I described would continue, and
changes in
U.S. policies toward the Middle East would be minimal.
Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950 and worked on the analysis
side of the
Agency for over 28 years. In the 1970s he served as a National
Intelligence
Officer (principal adviser of the Director of Central Intelligence)
for
Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Before his retirement in
1979, he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a
250-person unit.
He can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
The following article is excellent as well:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/12/Counterpunch_1.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2004 8:23 am Post subject: 'Attacks on Shia benefit coalition' |
| http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6FA53784-0CC9-4910-9D70-117A88842BB5.htm
'Attacks on Shia benefit coalition'
Saturday 06 March 2004, 17:51 Makka Time, 14:51 GMT
Tuesday's bombings killed more than 170 people
Related:
Al-Qaida denies Karbala, Baghdad bombings
US to tighten security along Iraq border
Iraqis blame carnage on occupation
Over 180 dead in Iraq blasts
The recent deadly bombings of two Shia Muslim shrines in Iraq could benefit the US-led coalition and prolong the occupation, an Egyptian state-owned newspaper has said.
Such attacks serve the interests of the coalition "if not prolonging their presence in Iraq, then at least (justifying the) setting up (of) permanent military bases after handing over power to a transitional government," said governmental daily Al-Ahram on Saturday.
Editorialist Salama Ahmad Salama said the coalition forces, which are scheduled to hand over authority to an interim Iraqi body on 30 June, were the only ones to benefit from such attacks.
"The accusations by American sources against foreign or terrorist infiltrators are strange given that American forces are responsible for controlling the borders and maintaining security inside Iraqi towns," she said.
The series of bombings in Baghdad and the holy city of Karbala on Tuesday killed more than 170 people and wounded over 550 others.
US officials blamed the attacks on the al-Qaida network and Jordanian Islamic armed fighter Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, accusing them of trying to ignite a civil war.
It was the bloodiest day in Iraq since Anglo-US troops ousted
Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003.
AFP | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 1:11 pm Post subject: JINSA/PNAC Zionist (Neocon) Spy Unit Skirted CIA on Iraq |
| When you read the following, keep in mind that Douglas Feith is a JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremist Jew who is pictured at www.nowarforisrael.com as we really need to put the heat on these nefarious traitors to America (like Feith, Bolton, Perle, etc) who have no problem spending the lives of US soldiers (over 600 thus far in Iraq) for their 'protect Israel at all cost' agenda:
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-tenet10mar10,1,267466.story
THE NATION
Spy Unit Skirted CIA on Iraq
Pentagon group's role in shaping White House views about ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda was greater than known, Senate panel hears.
IRAQ WAR 2003
INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
TENET GEORGE J
IRAQ WAR 2003 INTELLIGENCE SERVICES DEPARTMENT OF
THE NATION
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE U S
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — A special intelligence unit at the Pentagon privately briefed senior officials at the White House on alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda without the knowledge of CIA Director George J. Tenet, according to new information presented at a Senate hearing Tuesday.
The disclosure suggests that the controversial Pentagon office played a greater role than previously understood in shaping the administration's views on Iraq's alleged ties to the terrorist network behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and bypassed usual channels to make a case that conflicted with the conclusions of CIA analysts.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tenet said he was unaware until recently that the Pentagon unit had presented its findings to the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice. It is not clear whether Cheney or Rice were present for the briefing, which was mentioned in a Defense Department letter released by the Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
In a wide-ranging hearing, Tenet said violence in Iraq was on the upswing, but that he thought there was a "low probability" that strife would prevent the United States from handing authority to an interim Iraqi government on July 1.
Although the hearing was billed as a session to discuss international security concerns, it was marked by heated exchanges reflecting the political tensions over the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons the Bush administration cited as the principal reason for last year's U.S.-led war.
Tenet came under sharp attack from Democrats, who called the prewar intelligence a "fiasco," pointed to what they said were disturbing disparities between classified CIA estimates and more alarming versions released to the public before the war, and criticized the CIA director for saying recently that the agency never portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat.
"The fact that the intelligence assessments before the war were so wildly off the mark should trouble all Americans," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the committee.
It was under questioning from Levin that Tenet acknowledged that he did not know until within the last few weeks that a special Pentagon intelligence analysis unit had briefed the White House on ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"I did not know that at the time, and I think I first learned about this at [a congressional] hearing last week," Tenet said. A U.S. intelligence official said Tenet first learned of the White House briefing Feb. 24 during a closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The Pentagon unit was created by Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The unit was a handful of intelligence analysts, Feith has said, and was established to examine state sponsorship of terrorism, but is principally known for its efforts to assemble evidence linking Iraq to Al Qaeda.
It has been reported previously that the so-called Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group presented its findings to the CIA in August 2002. But in a letter to Warner released Tuesday for the first time, Feith said the group's briefing "was also given to National Security Council and Office of Vice President staff members."
Levin asked Tenet whether it was "standard operating procedure" for intelligence analysis to be presented to the White House without his involvement.
"I don't know," Tenet replied. "I've never been in the situation."
Tenet emphasized that he briefed President Bush personally almost daily, and that his was "the definitive view about these subjects."
"I know you feel that way," Levin replied, making it clear he wasn't convinced.
Levin said the committee had obtained copies of the Pentagon group's written briefing material, and that the version presented to the White House included material omitted from the briefing for the CIA. He declined to elaborate, saying the documents were classified.
A government official familiar with the briefings said the presentation for the White House included a slide sharply critical of the CIA for failing to recognize evidence pointing toward collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That slide was excluded from the briefing at CIA headquarters at Langley, Va.
The government official said those briefed at the White House included the staff of Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff.
The Pentagon intelligence group was disbanded before the war, but remains under scrutiny because of its controversial mission and role.
Critics say it sifted through years of intelligence reports on Iraq, seizing on shards that supported the contention that there was collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and then funneling the information to senior policymakers to help bolster the case for war. Pentagon officials reject that characterization.
Many of the group's findings have been disputed by the CIA and other agencies, who say there is a history of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda but no evidence of an operational relationship. But administration officials continue to cling to the theme, and polls show many Americans believe that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
In January, Cheney said "there's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government." Cheney has touted the work of the Pentagon group, saying a Feith memo that lists Iraq-Al Qaeda connections and was leaked to the media is the "best source" on the subject.
Tenet said Tuesday that the CIA "did not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document," and that he intended to contact Cheney to caution him about its conclusions. "I learned about [Cheney's] quote last night when I was preparing for this hearing," Tenet said. "And I will talk to him about it."
Some lawmakers said that if Tenet did not believe Iraq was an imminent threat — as he said in a recent speech at Georgetown University — he should have done more to challenge the prewar assertions by Bush and others casting Hussein's regime as a danger that required immediate military intervention.
"You can't have it both ways, can you, Mr. Tenet?" said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). "You can't on the one hand just say look, we never said that war was imminent, and then have this superheated dialogue and rhetoric [from the White House] … and tell us here before the committee that you have no obligation to correct it or didn't even try."
Tenet shot back: "I'm not going to sit here today and tell you … what I did or what I didn't do, except that you have the confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence I said something about it."
Kennedy then asked Tenet whether he believed the administration "misrepresented the facts to justify the war." Tenet responded, "No, sir, I don't."
Dissecting a key prewar intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons program, Levin cited a number of cases in which he said the CIA or the administration hardened its language or dropped caveats to bolster the case for war. A declassified version of the report warned that Iraq's alleged weapons stocks could be used "against the U.S. homeland," language he said was missing from the classified text.
In another example, Levin cited the CIA's assessment in its classified analysis that Iraq would supply weapons to Al Qaeda only under "desperate" or "extreme" circumstances, qualifiers missing from the public version of the report.
Democrats attacked Tenet for allowing recent statements by administration officials to go unchallenged. Cheney, in particular, has reiterated claims that the intelligence community has backed away from, including comments suggesting Iraq might have been complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks, and that Iraqi trailers seized by American forces are "conclusive" evidence that Iraq had banned weapons.
Urged by Levin to be more swift and assertive in correcting public statements by White House officials, Tenet said, "Sir, it's a fair point."
Republicans on the committee accused Democrats of using the hearing to score political points against the Bush administration as the presidential election is heating up.
Some Republicans defended Tenet, and said he should not have to answer for the prewar claims made by policymakers. The CIA director "is not their keeper," said Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), the chairman of the committee.
Even Republicans who were not involved in the hearing reacted to Democrats' criticisms. One, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a television interview called Kennedy and Levin "two old attack dogs gumming their way through artificial outrage about something they should know a lot more about and be more responsible about."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-03-09-iraq-intel_x.htm
Tenet: CIA lax in policing Iraq war claims
By John Diamond, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — CIA Director George Tenet acknowledged Tuesday that his agency was "wildly inconsistent" about policing White House statements on Iraq before the invasion last year. The result, Democrats say, is that Bush administration exaggerations about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction went unchallenged.
CIA chief George Tenet told senators Tuesday that his agency did not consistently police White House statements on Iraq.
By Dennis Cook, AP
Senate Democrats pressed the nation's top spy on whether Tenet had a responsibility to ensure policymakers did not overstate the CIA's carefully qualified intelligence reports. With the presidential campaign under way, the senators made clear their real target was not Tenet but President Bush.But the CIA chief said he had no major problems with the case the administration made for going to war. And when asked by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., whether he thought the White House had misrepresented facts to justify the war, Tenet said, "No sir, I don't." Under heated questioning by Senate Democrats, Tenet said he was too busy to check every public utterance by Bush administration officials. Kennedy contrasted Tenet's insistence that the CIA never characterized the Iraqi threat as "imminent" with pre-war warnings by the Bush administration about the "grave" and "unique and urgent" threat posed by Iraq."You can't have it both ways, can you, Mr. Tenet?" Kennedy said. "If you're saying that there was no immediate threat and you hear either the president, the vice president, the secretary of Defense using that super-heated rhetoric, we have to ask, what is your responsibility?"Tenet replied, "I have a responsibility. I lived up to my responsibility." Tenet said that when he was aware that a senior administration official exaggerated the Iraqi threat, he took action internally.But Tenet said there were times when he was unaware of administration statements or failed to ensure that a concern he had raised previously was not later ignored.• Tenet said the CIA did not "approve" a Jan. 20, 2003, Bush administration report to Congress referring to Iraqi "attempts to acquire uranium." The CIA had previously told the White House not to repeat that charge because there was no intelligence to support it. Even so, Bush cited the claim just days later in his State of the Union address.• Tenet learned only last week that senior Pentagon official Douglas Feith had briefed White House officials and senators about alleged connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. "We did not clear on that document," Tenet said. Tenet said that when CIA officials complained, the Pentagon issued a correction. "I don't know that I did (correct the record) in this instance," Tenet said. "I don't know that I listened to it or was made aware of it." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 1:28 pm Post subject: The (Neocon) Lie Factory |
| Robert Dreyfuss discusses (on the 'Democracy Now' radio program which broadcast nationally in the USA on Pacifica Radio) his excellent 'The (Neocon) Lie Factory article mentioned below at the following URL:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/06/1527224
Subj: The (Neocon) Lie Factory
Date: 1/9/04 5:21:34 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
Friends,
The (Neocon) Lie Factory
This is an excellent article by Jason Vest and Robert Dreyfus discussing how the neocons took over Defense Department intelligence and used it to propagandize for war against Iraq, especially with the creation of the Office of Special Plans. Thus neocon dominance went far beyond the existence of a few leading individuals, such as Wolfowitz, Feith, or Perle. Rather, the leading neocons brought in other members of their ilk and concomitantly purged those career officials who were resistant to their war mission. All the neocons worked together to promote the war. "’It was organized like a machine," she [Karen Kwiatkowski] says. ‘The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission.’" A close analogy was the success of the old Soviet-directed Communists to take over liberal and leftist organizations (and some governments) by virtue of their discipline and organization. The neocons, however, achieve greater success without the external, formal discipline of the Communist Party. They seem to have innate talent here. But it also might be added that the neocons are able to act more openly—in part because to oppose to them brings on the lethal charge of "anti-Semite," which is far more deadly than "red-baiter."
_________________________
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
MotherJones.com / News / Feature
The Lie Factory
Robert Dreyfuss, Jason Vest. Mother Jones. San Francisco: Jan/Feb 2004. Vol. 29, Iss. 1; pg. 34
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story for how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war. BY ROBERT DREYFUSS & VEST
IT'S A CRISP FALL DAY IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and tne air is filled with swarms
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews-some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity-exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE END of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting-and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neoconservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
IN AN ADMINISTRATION devoted to the notion of "Feith-based intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity."
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this?'" Rumsfeld noted. "'Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy...."
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances-once in late 2001 and again last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue [intelligence] operation" outside officiai CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric "Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts-including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt-who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.
Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soulmates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He'd come to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's. "He makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years, Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle's arms-control adviser. In the '90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with Schmitt on Moynihan's staff and they had remained friends. Asked about the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence "cell," Schmitt-who is currently the executive director of the Project for the New American Century-says that he can't say much about it "because one of my best friends is running it."
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP-the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."
BESIDES CHENEY, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board.
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism.
"Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. "We gave the names of people who were doing the links," he told an interviewer from PBS'S Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with."
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency-which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon-leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's informants provided worthwhile intelligence.
SO FAR, DESPITE ALL of the investigations underway, there is little sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it operates in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told the Los Angeles Times, "the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents-documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, "or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken."
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats-but no Republicans-in support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully," Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans. "I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions."
Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.
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More on Lieutenant Colonel Karen KwiatkowsKi:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/11/18/us-air-force-lt-colonel-speaks-out-against-bush-neocons.php
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/12/13/buchanan-discusses-jinsa-pnac-neocon-cabal-on-c-span.php
Neocon Potpouri:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/01/02/neo-con-potpourri.php
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NY TIMES/Zionist Extremist Jew Safire Push Neocon Line
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