More News — July1-8, 2003

Harpers Weekly Review, 7/1/03


"Breaking the Army"
-- Michael O'Hanlon in The Washington Post, 7/3/03:

After criticizing the Clinton administration for overdeploying and overusing the country's military in the 1990s, the Bush administration is now doing exactly the same thing -- except on a much larger scale. Hordes of active-duty troops and reservists may soon leave the service rather than subject themselves to a life continually on the road. Much more than transforming the armed forces or relocating overseas bases, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must solve this problem before the Bush administration breaks the American military.

The problem is most acute for the Army. Even as most Marines, sailors and Air Force personnel go home to a grateful nation, the Army still has more than 185,000 troops deployed in and around Iraq. Another 10,000 are in Afghanistan. More than 25,000 troops are in Korea; some 5,000 are in the Balkans; and dozens here and hundreds there are on temporary assignments around the world. Nearly all of these soldiers are away from their home bases and families.

This total of nearly 250,000 deployed troops must be generated from an Army of just over 1 million. The active-duty force numbers 480,000, of which fewer than 320,000 are easily deployable at any given moment. The Army Reserve and Army National Guard together include 550,000 troops, many of whom already have been called up at least once since 9/11.

Deployment demands are likely to remain great, even if Rumsfeld and Bush hope otherwise. The Pentagon is lining up 20,000 to 30,000 allied troops to help in Iraq come September, from countries such as Poland and Italy and Ukraine. Unfortunately, as recent events underscore, the overall mission will still likely require nearly 200,000 coalition forces. That means 125,000 to 150,000 U.S. troops could still be needed for a year or more -- with 50,000 to 75,000 Americans remaining in and around Iraq come 2005 and 2006 if past experience elsewhere is a guide.

As a result, a typical soldier spending 2003 in Iraq may come home this winter only to be deployed again in late 2004 or 2005. The typical reservist might be deployed for another 12 months over the next few years. These burdens are roughly twice what is sustainable.


"What I Didn't Find in Africa"
-- Joseph C. Wilson 4th in The New York Times, 7/6/03 (reproduced at commondreams.org):

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as charg? d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and S?o Tom? and Pr?ncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council.

It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me.

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake ? a form of lightly processed ore ? by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.

In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70's and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90's. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible.

The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq ? and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.

(As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors ? they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government ? and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)

Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case.

Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted.

I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program ? all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.

But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.


Bush tells Mahmoud Abbas why he went to war
("PM Abbas Tells Hamas 'Road Map Is a Life Saver for Us,'" -- Arnon Regular in Ha'aretz, 7/7/03):

God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.


"Who Lost the WMD?"
-- Massimo Calabresi and Timothy J. Burger in Time, 6/29/03:


Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.

Eric Hobsbawm,
"Only in America"
(Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/4/03):

The details in the great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run.

As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its habitus, or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an 18th-century Constitution reinforced by two centuries of Talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the U.S.A. are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has also made the government of the U.S.A. largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid, effective national decision-making, not least by the president, is almost impossible. The United States, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of U.S. and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. That has created the foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to function as the world's only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world.


"Senator John Edwards' Address On Rewarding Work And Creating Opportunity"
(Georgetown University, 6/17/03; as transcribed at johnedwards.com):

Except for a brief respite in the '90s, for most of my adult life American politics has been stuck in the grip of two competing and unsatisfactory theories. The first, which I thought we'd disproved in the '80s, was the conservative notion that America should ask the least of those with the most. That idea was so far wrong, it took our country a decade to recover, and yet our leaders are making the same mistake again, this time with feeling. The second theory, which I thought we'd banished in the last decade, was the notion among some in my party that we could spend our way out of every problem. It didn't work, yet some in my party want to bring it back. . . .

The President and I agree on one thing: this campaign should be a debate about values. We need to have that debate, because the values of this president and this administration are not the values of mainstream America, the values all of us grew up with -- opportunity, responsibility, hard work.

There's a fundamental difference between his vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth. He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure everybody has the chance to be an owner.

For a man who made responsibility the theme of his campaign, this president sure doesn't seem to value it much in office. We've lost 3.1 million private sector jobs. Over $3 trillion in stock market value lost. A $5.6 trillion budget surplus gone, and nearly $5 trillion of red ink in its place. Bill Clinton spent 8 years turning around 12 years of his predecessors' deficits. George Bush erased it in two years, and this year will break the all-time record.

Yet even with all those zeroes, the true cost of the administration's approach isn't what they've done with our money, it's what they want to do to our way of life. Their economic vision has one goal: to get rid of taxes on unearned income and shift the tax burden onto people who work. This crowd wants a world where the only people who have to pay taxes are the ones who do the work.

Make no mistake: this is the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago. Like socialism, it corrupts the very nature of our democracy and our free enterprise tradition. It is not a plan to grow the American economy. It is a plan to corrupt the American economy and shrink the winners' circle.

This is a question of values, not taxes. We should cut taxes, but we shouldn't cut and run from our values when we do. John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan argued for tax cuts as an incentive for people to work harder: Americans work hard, and the government shouldn't punish them when they do.

This crowd is making a radically different argument. They don't believe work matters most. They don't believe in helping working people build wealth. They genuinely believe that the wealth of the wealthy matters most. They are determined to cut taxes on that wealth, year after year, and heap more and more of the burden on people who work.

How do we know this? Because they don't even try to hide it. The Bush budget proposed tax-free tax shelters for millionaires that are bigger than most Americans' paychecks for an entire year. And just last week, Bush's tax guru, Grover Norquist, said their goal is to abolish the capital gains tax, abolish the dividend tax, and let the wealthiest shelter as much as they want tax-free. . . .

In these times of national sacrifice, we should not be asking less of the most fortunate. I agree with Bill Gates, Sr., the father of the richest man in America, that in a world where taxes must be paid, the people who inherit massive estates ought to pay taxes too. I agree with Warren Buffett, the shrewd investor and another of America's richest men, who said that something is deeply wrong when a billionaire has a lower tax rate than his secretary. . . .

Mr. President, I challenge you. Explain why you think a multimillionaire should pay 15% on his next million, while a fireman has to pay over 30% for each extra dollar of overtime. Mr. President, explain how you square that with America's values.


"Facing Reality in Iraq"
-- New York Times editorial, 7/8/03:

Assertions by Washington-based Pentagon officials that the current force is large enough don't square with reports from the field, which depict a steadily mounting conflict as well as sinking morale among some U.S. units exhausted after months of hard duty. Nor are the Pentagon's reports about the recruitment of allied forces encouraging: Though 70 nations have been contacted, only about 10 have made concrete commitments, and the number of non-U.S. troops is due to rise only from 12,000 to 20,000 by the end of summer. The poor support is a direct result of the administration's poor diplomacy, both before and after the war -- and, in particular, its insistence on monopolizing control over Iraq while mostly excluding the United Nations. India and Pakistan, for example, are reluctant to deploy troops under U.S. rather than U.N. command, and European countries have been slower to supply aid and advisers who could be assisting with reconstruction.