If you wish to score, highlighting the fact that Karl Rove sees Obama as you do is not going to win the day. Maybe not, but Rove is very perceptive and writes in a very insightful manner. McCain would be wise to heed some of Rove's advice on how to run against the messiah from Harvard (See 1 below.)
While I was out of town I watched a little more TV than I generally do and what I saw was a host of politicians trying to score points rather than enlighten. They were more interested in obfuscating than informing. For example, I heard Democrats harp on the un-drilled acreage theme as their dodge against wiping egg off their collective faces. Fact is until acreage is in production it retains an open status as leased acreage. Second fact, is that it takes a great deal of time and money to assess whether the leased acreage is worth drilling and it also takes equipment which is often not available.
As oil moves higher Greens will turn blue and compromises will occur not because it is rational but simply because politicians want to hold onto their coveted seats and as the public mood turns uglier their political security is at risk.
I heard politicians of both parties argue over how long it would take to bring oil on stream if drilling began now but of course that was the same argument made 10, 15 and 20 years ago. The truth of the matter is, as with success of The Surge, those in denial who continue to refuse to explore and drill have been caught with their pants down because world demand and declining production are driving the price of oil among other reasons.
The idea of more nuclear is opposed by the NIMBY's who fear nuclear waste yet no one ever asks where do the French put theirs'. The French get over 70% of their electricity from nuclear. Yeah, you heard me right the French, who can't even get their plumbing to work and who lost thousands of their elder citizens several years back because of a heat wave and lack of air conditioning. They suffocated in their homes and in their beds. Yet, pitiful France gets electricity from nuclear power.
We can pretty much discount energy savings from American autos makers because Ford, GM and Chrysler are probably going down the tubes. Perhaps the Japanese will come up with solutions as the world's remaining car manufacturers.
We once joked all we need is a good 5 cent cigar well today we long for a long lasting battery.
While flying home I read Marshall Goldman's new book. I urge anyone interested in what is going on in the New Energy Russia to buy and read it. Goldman discussed what Putin has been up to in terms of Russia's developing and selling its oil and, most particularly, its gas reserves, what this portends for Europe and why Putin is playing a crafty chess game making Europe increasingly dependent upon Russian gas, carried through Russia's own pipeline. Marshall speaks for me this Sunday.
Marshall writes about Reagan's warning to Europe about dependency on Russian gas and urged Europeans to begin building an alternative pipeline system that did not go through Russia. Europe finally began to realize Reagan's warning was omniscient but because of a variety of factors, ie. cost, profitability, political action by Putin etc., Putin is apparently going to be successful in blocking a second parallel pipeline and thus Europe's dependency will simply grow. Germany currently gets 49% of its energy needs from Russia.
I heard no serious campaign rhetoric excoriating the "do nothing Congress," the impending explosive impact of SS and Medical costs looming only 10 years ahead. Lot of talk on how to raise taxes without any thought to cutting spending and eliminating wasteful programs and getting serious about our own energy dependency and putting our fiscal house in order.
No sensible debate on Iraq in terms of the consequences of withdrawal, no rational discussion of the implications of a nuclear Iran and its effect on a cowering Middle East.
I witnessed a lot of finger pointing and abusive talk about GW going hat in hand to the Saudis begging for oil, I heard about one Democrat Senator getting a preferred mortgage loan while chairing the Committee that has oversight. I heard a lot about Obama opting out of public funds because he is flush with money. I watched while the media fawned over Obama's wife and pointed out her favorable ratings exceeded that of McCain's wife.
I sense even the consumers are beginning to re-act to these inanities and are starting to come to grips with the implications of an Obama presidency and the consequences of his divide and conquer strategy of taxing the rich and other espoused populisms that appeal to various aggrieved and special interest groups. I witnessed Obama's contemporary, clever ads in comparison with the tired dull ones of McCain and my heart sank. I noted the time devoted to Obama and his campaign versus that of McCain, the number of times you saw Obama and only heard some reporter talking about McCain - perhaps that is actually an unintended positive.
I heard about Obama dissing McCain's idea of town hall meetings yet remember reading in Obama's "Audacity" book how much he thought such appearances were good for the "little people." That was when he was on his change kick!
Obama is the media and press' darling and it is up to McCain to knock him out because the referee is prepared to call any attempted feint a low blow. Is McCain up to the task? So far I remain unimpressed with his pugilistic political skills. Maybe Obama will knock himself out with a missed roundhouse but I would neither count on it nor expect one and even if it happened, the press and media would not cover it. If they did they would give Obama a long count.
Lamentably, the press and media control the agenda. And by the way where is GW? Is he still the president? He must be because his ratings dropped another notch as he caved to N Korea by lifting some trade sanctions after the regime handed over documents due 17 months ago. These documents pertain to N Korea's nuclear weapons program but now evidence appears they may have a second unreported program. While N Korea dribbles information they expressly pledged we salivate and then feed this bully with more concessions and lowering our demands. When we do M Korea raises their bar of demands and stiff us. N Korea has us over a barrel and we are unwilling to use the little leverage we have. We simply never learn and in the process what kind of a mixed message does this send to Iran?
And just when I thought Hillary would no longer be front and center the press and media are smitten by the prospect of an Obama-Clinton love fest in the hope there will be a wedding which would insure their coronation. Even Sex In The City can't top this!
I keep referring to The Ship of Fools and that is what this election year resembles - ice bergs ahead and the Ship of State keeps plowing full speed in their direction.
Hamas' Prime Minister pleads with various Arab terrorist factions to honor the cease fire yet, they continue to fire missile into Israel. Haniyeh asks for the sake of Palestinian welfare and not because the Palestinians gave their word to honor the agreement. (See 2 below.)
The Netherlands is home to their variety of Jimmy Carter. The Mugabe's of the world can do what they want with impugnity but Israel remains easy pickings. (See 3 below.)
In Germany and Austria, apparently the more things change the more they stay the same. (See 4 below.)
An Israeli attack on Iran would or would not be a disaster? Freilich writes the U.S. should offer Iran a delectable deal but be ready to impose strong sanctions and take other measures if rejected. He asserts the US must demonstrate to the world we have walked that extra mile in order to gain support. He believes Iran is quite vulnerable to various pressures if we would get our act together.(See 5 below.)
Daniel Pipes offers some thoughts on how Islamism can be defeated. First, name it correctly and proceed to minimize its appeal! (See 6 below.)
Pearlstein writes the recession is just beginning. He paints a somber view which I share. (See 7 below.)
Arthur Herman read Doug Feith's book: "War and Decision" and concludes, as I have, that attacking Iraq was rational. He recounts the circumstances in a long but excellent regurgitation of the history of how the inevitable came to be. (See 8 below.)
1) OPINION: It's All About Obama
By KARL ROVE
Many candidates have measured the Oval Office drapes prematurely. But Barack Obama is the first to redesign the presidential seal before the election.
His seal featured an eagle emblazoned with his logo, and included a Latin version of his campaign slogan. This was an attempt by Sen. Obama to make himself appear more presidential. But most people saw in the seal something else – chutzpah – and he's stopped using it. Such arrogance – even self-centeredness – have featured often in the Obama campaign.
The presumptive nominee's presumptive "presidential" seal.
Consider his treatment of Jeremiah Wright. After Rev. Wright repeated his anti-American slurs at the National Press Club, Mr. Obama said their relationship was forever changed – but not because of what he'd said about America. Instead, Mr. Obama complained, "I don't think he showed much concern for me."
Translation: Rev. Wright is an impediment to my ambitions. So, as it turns out, are some of Mr. Obama's previous pledges.
For example, Mr. Obama has said he "strongly supported public financing" and pledged to take federal funds for the fall, thereby limiting his spending to roughly $84 million. Now convinced he can raise more than $84 million, he reversed course last week, ditching the federal money and its limits. But by discarding his earlier pledge so easily, he raises doubts about whether his word can be trusted.
Last month he replied "anywhere, anytime" to John McCain's invitation to have joint town hall appearances. Last week he changed his mind. Fearing 10 impromptu town halls, Mr. Obama parried the invitation by offering two such events – one the night of July 4, when every ambulatory American is watching fireworks or munching hotdogs, and another in August. His spokesman then said, "Take it or leave it." So much for "anywhere, anytime."
My former White House colleague Yuval Levin pointed out that Mr. Obama, in his first national TV ad rolled out Friday, claims credit for having "extended health care for wounded troops," citing the 2008 defense authorization. That bill passed 91-3 – but Mr. Obama was one of only six senators who didn't show up to vote. This brazen claim underscores the candidate's thin résumé and, again, his chutzpah.
Mr. Obama has now also played the race card, twice suggesting in recent weeks that Republicans will draw attention to the fact that he's black. Who is unaware of that? Americans overwhelmingly find it a hopeful, optimistic sign that the country could elect an African-American president. But they rightly want to know what kind of leader he might be. They may well reject as cynical any maneuver to discourage close examination of him by suggesting any criticism is racially motivated.
The candidate's self-centeredness has been on display before. Having effectively sewed up the Democratic nomination, he could have agreed to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations (states Hillary Clinton had carried). While reducing his lead by 50 to 55 delegates, it would not have altered the outcome. But Mr. Obama supported cutting these battleground-state delegations in half. At a time when magnanimity was called for, the candidate decided he'd strut.
Mr. Obama's alpha-male attitude was evident even as he stumbled towards and over the primary finish line. First, his campaign announced in May it was talking to Patti Solis Doyle after Sen. Clinton fired her as campaign manager. This served only to pour salt in the Clintons' wounds.
Then, after the primaries ended June 3, Mr. Obama's campaign leaked word that Leon Panetta (a Clinton supporter who'd apparently angered the Clintons by persistent criticism of their performance) and Ms. Doyle would conduct its outreach to the Clinton camp. Ms. Doyle was named chief of staff to the as-yet-to-be-chosen vice presidential running mate. All this was pointless, but reveals a disposition certain to manifest itself in other ways.
Mr. McCain will be helped if he uses Mr. Obama's actions to paint his opponent as someone driven by an all-powerful instinct to look out only for himself. In a contest over who is willing to put principle above personal ambition and self-interest, John McCain, a war hero and a former POW, wins hands down. That may not be the most important issue to voters in electing a president, but it's something they will rightly take into account.
2) Haniyeh: Stop firing at Israel for sake of Palestinians
By Fadi Eyadat
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Friday appealed to Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip to honor the week-long truce with Israel, and stop firing at the Negev, for the good of the Palestinian civilian population.
Two mortar shells from Gaza hit the western Negev on Friday, exploding in open areas, despite the cease fire agreement. No damage or injury were reported.
"We expect everyone to respect the agreement so that the Palestinian people achieve what they look for, an end to this suffering and breaking the siege," he told reporters outside a Gaza mosque after Muslim prayers.
The attack on Friday came one day after two Qassam rockets were fired from the Strip into Israel. The militant Fatah offshoot Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for the attack and demanded that the cease fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which currently includes only the Gaza Strip, be extended to include the West Bank as well.
Palestinian medics and local residents said the Israel Defense Forces killed a Palestinian teenager during a raid in the West Bank on Friday.
The residents said the 17-year-old was killed while confronting Israeli soldiers who raided the village of Beit Umar, near Hebron.
An IDF spokesman said troops fired at a group of militants who hurled firebombs at them, hitting one.
At a high-level security meeting late Thursday, Israel decided to keep the border crossings into the Gaza Strip closed on Friday because of the latest rocket attack defense officials said. They added that a limited amount of fuel would be transferred into the Strip despite the closure.
Since the cease fire went into effect last Thursday, instead of retaliating for rocket attacks with air strikes at Palestinian rocket squads, Israel closed the border crossings, where vital supplies are shipped into Gaza - restoring a blockade that has caused severe shortages.
The move hits at the main interest of Hamas - ending the blockade and easing the hardships facing the people under its control. Hamas officials charged that by restoring the blockade, Israel is violating the truce. Underlining the high level of distrust, Palestinians formed a committee to track Israeli violations.
At a meeting Wednesday, Israeli defense officials discussed how to proceed once the crossings are reopened. According to the same officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meetings are closed, Israel might reset the truce clock each time it closes the crossings in response to a Palestinian violation.
Israel had significantly increased the amount of supplies flowing into Gaza on Sunday, in accordance with the truce agreement, and was ready for another increase next Sunday. But a barrage of four Qassam rockets, claimed by Islamic Jihad, stopped the process. Now Israel is considering counting three days from each reopening of the crossings before it reinstates the original increase.
During a visit to Prague, Czech Republic, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Israel should reopen the crossings to preserve the truce.
"[The reopening is] important because the closure... of Gaza is actually producing a situation where you have 1.5 million of our people who live there with a sense of not much to lose," Fayyad said. "That is a situation that's got to end."
Hamas charged that the re-imposed blockade is a violation. But Hamas official Taher Nunu said that Hamas is committed to the truce. "The [Hamas] government will not allow anyone to violate this agreement," he said.
The rocket attack Thursday came as Israeli envoy Ofer Dekel headed to Egypt to meet with Egyptian officials on the final stage of the truce - a swap of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for an Israeli soldier Hamas has held captive for two years. Israel has balked at Hamas' demands, saying its list of prisoners includes militants involved in deadly attacks on Israelis.
Hamas also has demanded that Israel allow reopening of Gaza's only border crossing with Egypt in the final phase of the six-month truce deal.
The Rafah crossing has been sealed since the Hamas violent takeover over the Strip last June, confining Gaza's people to the tiny seaside territory. Israel has said it would not allow reopening of Rafah until the soldier is freed.
Fatah Al-Aqsa Brigades confirms they launched projectiles today
On Friday afternoon the Al-Aqsa Brigades confirmed the
statement of "Abu Qusay" who claimed the Thursday projectile launch as an
Al-Aqsa Brigades action.
This new information contradicts reports from early Friday, which condemned
"Abu Qusay" for delivering false information, and banned him from the
Brigades.
The latest information holds that Qusay's claim of responsibility for the
Thursday attacks is accurate. An Al-Aqsa Brigades spokesman told Ma'an
Friday afternoon that the launch of projectiles on Thursday was meant as a
message for Israel that the Palestinian resistance will not stand idle
before the Israeli aggression towards Palestinians.
Statements from the Brigades received by Ma'an declared that that the truce
should be renegotiated to include the West Bank in order to end the
aggression of Israeli forces against the Palestinians.
Brigades representatives consider the statements made by Hamas spokesperson
Sami Abu Zuhri regarding the parties in Ramallah and their relationship with
the Al-Aqsa Brigades, as a strong step towards strengthening internal
divisions among Palestinians. The Brigades source expressed the importance
of this relationship as Israel's role in undermining the unity of the
Palestinian people, their inherited history and struggle, increases.
3) 'Dutch Jimmy Carter' accuses Israel of terrorism in new book
By Cnaan Liphshiz
The emotion in Andreas Van Agt's voice as he lambastes Israel's behavior seems puzzling for a man of his status. It is especially intriguing when one is reminded that this blue-eyed professed idealist is an astute statesman who presided as the Dutch prime minister for five years, until 1982.
"My involvement in the Middle East is certainly unusual," Van Agt confessed in an interview with Haaretz at his home in Nijmegen, where he discussed Israel, the Palestinians, European foreign policy, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.
Currently, Van Agt is writing a book about the Israeli-Arab conflict. In December he launched an info-site (www.driesvanagt.nl) about the subject, in which he accuses Israel of brutal treatment of the Palestinians, violating international law and implementing racist policies.
Among other illustrations, the site contains one snapshot of a graffiti slogan said to have been sprayed by Jewish settlers on a Hebron wall, reading: "Arabs to the gas chambers."
Last year, Van Agt spoke as keynote speaker at a controversial solidarity rally with the Palestinian people in Rotterdam, where he lamented the Dutch boycott of Hamas, calling it wrong "and even stupid." He has also been outspoken in accusing the Israel Defense Forces of acting like a terrorist organization.
"In my country, people are highly surprised by my demeanor. Some even say it should be ascribed to my advanced age; that I'm not fully in my right mind anymore," the 77-year-old says with a snicker while sitting under the outdated portrait of the Queen, which hangs on the wall of his modern-style, taupe-colored den.
Van Agt hails from the ranks of the ruling party, the Christian Democratic Appeal. Such statements about Israel can therefore be seen as embarrassing for the current leadership, which is considered one of Israel's staunchest supporters in the European Union.
When Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen was asked earlier this year during a visit to Israel whether he regarded the statements by the former premier as embarrassing to the government, his first response was a hearty laugh. He then distanced himself from the former leader. "Dries Van Agt represents the opinion of one man: Dries Van Agt," Verhagen told Haaretz.
Van Agt nonetheless maintains his statements are embarrassing to CDA top-brass, adding that the embarrassment is not an undesirable effect as far as he is concerned. "I could say that maybe what I'm doing is not as embarrassing to them as it should be," he says.
His penchant for criticizing Israel to varying degrees of acrimoniousness was not characteristic of his term in office. "The Dutch Jimmy Carter", as local media sometimes dub him, says he became vocal after 1999, when his "eyes were opened" during a traditional catholic pilgrimage trip to religious sites in the Holy Land.
"I'm driven partly by my shame for not speaking up for the Palestinians when I was in power, and partly by some striking experiences I had when visiting the Occupied Territories in the recent past," he says. "People often ask me how come I'm so outspoken now, but did not speak up when I was in a position of power. And it's true, I never spoke up for the Palestinians, except for when Sabra and Shatila happened. And even that was in soft terms."
Van Agt says he is still "ashamed" that he made effort to sooth matters for Israel after the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian militiamen in an IDF-controlled area of Lebanon. "That was my inclination, that was how I was mentally structured vis-à-vis Israel at the time," he says.
But much more than Sabra and Shatila, it was the story of one Palestinian young man from Bethlehem which put Van Agt on his present course, according to the ex-premier.
"In one of my visits to Bethlehem I heard a story, which now I know is just one of many," Van Agt recalls. "It was a story horrendous humiliation of a Palestinian student trying to get to university for a collective exam. His story, which the university president told me, struck me like lightening."
At the last IDF checkpoint on the way, according to the story which Van Agt says he heard from the university president, the student was pulled over and ordered to climb out of the window. "Then the humiliation began. He fell down and was then ordered to walk on hands and feet and bark. Then the soldiers laughed about the Palestinians all being dogs."
That story, Van Agt says, served to undermine his former conviction that "everything which Israel does is what it needs to do for its survival." It launched him into the problem, he says.
"I began studying, figuring out what's going on there. I found one story after the other. Then I started thinking about the 39 United Nations resolutions begging, demanding and imploring Israel to vacate the Occupied Territories. All were dismissed by Israel. Saddam Hussein was attacked after four resolutions, but Israel got 39 and nobody talks about applying even the slightest pressure on Israel to comply with them," he complains.
Europeans, he says, have a political obligation toward the Palestinians which they have overlooked. "All the other Arabs, in some way or another, happy or unhappy, dictatorial or not, have their only states. The only Arabs that never got a state were the Palestinians. That has to do with the former colonialist powers, the U.K. and France."
The second reason for his feeling of commitment toward the Palestinians, Van Agt says, is that "without the worst crime in the history of humanity, the Holocaust, the Shoa, Israel would not have come into existence in that time and in that formula."
Most Western nations, he says, are in some form complicit in the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, be it by denying shelter for Jewish refugees, or collaborating with the Germans. This resulted in guilt which prompted Europeans "to sacrifice the Palestinians for Israel," he proposes. "The Palestinians paid the price for something they were not responsible for. That is my drive," he says after a short dramatic pause. "And the emotions you see are real and authentic, and they stem from this injustice."
The self-proclaimed commitment that European nations have for democracy, Van Agt argues, means that they should recognize Hamas as a legitimate representative of the Palestinians. "It is not Hamas' government which is illegitimate," he says, alluding to Hamas' victory in the 2006 elections over Fatah. "It is counterproductive and unwise not to talk to Hamas - also because the legitimacy of the current government in Ramallah is questionable."
The three conditions for recognizing Hamas as stipulated by Israel and the Quartet strike Van Agt as stupid. "The first requirement, that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is biased because Israel does not recognize Hamas' right to rule. Where's the reciprocity there?" he complains. Besides, he says, "Israel has never defined its own borders, so demanding Hamas to recognize an entity without clear borders is totally unreasonable."
The demand that Hamas honor the Palestinian Authority's past agreements with Israel is also unpalatable to Van Agt, on the grounds that they were not signed and conducted by a democratically elected, and hence legitimate, regime. To him, the Palestinian Authority consists of a bunch of small, fragmented Bantustans," he says.
"The Oslo Accords and the talks that followed were the most self-defeating thing Arafat had ever done," the former premier observes. "The Accords didn't provide any guarantees to the Palestinians and were not based on international law. And Abbas is continuing with this endeavor which runs contrary to the rights and interests of the Palestinians."
As for the third demand, which is to renounce violence, Van Agt says: "First of all, Israel is still employing violence, so again there's no reciprocity. But besides that, since when does international law renounce the right of occupied people to resist the occupying power?"
When the subject of Hamas' own debatable level of commitment to democratic values comes up - along with the question of whether the Islamist organization should be afforded the protection of a set of values that it does not honor ? Van Agt acknowledges that "things could be better."
He adds: "Hamas' behavior is reason for great concern, that's right. But it's ignorant to judge how Hamas is ruling without taking into account the impossible conditions in Gaza, the biggest prison in the world."
Hamas' suicide bombings are "illegal and detestable" to Van Agt, he says, but he would only agree to call Hamas a terrorist organization if the definition is applied to the Israeli army as well. "If one party is called a terrorist entity because it carries out deliberate attacks against civilians to pursue political goals, then the Israeli army is guilty of state terrorism. That needs to be said, too. Human rights organizations report that the Israeli army has killed more than 3000 Palestinian civilians since the beginning of the second Intifada."
Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, he recalls, "introduced the bombing of civilians as a military tactic in the run up to the establishment of Israel, and were therefore called terrorists."
The perceived failure of Israel's neighbors to live up to Western standards of democracy is also a result of their conflict with Israel, according to Van Agt. "Maybe I'm a naïve idealist, but I think that if Israel had not evolved into being a disaster for its neighbors then they would behave much batter. Not perfectly, not to the full standard, but much better. I cannot help but put much of the blame on Israel itself, and the pressure that it has placed on its neighboring countries."
However, Van Agt is willing to acknowledge that Israel is currently fighting extremist Muslim groups who are also committed to the destruction of societies like the Netherlands.
In Van Agt's eyes, Israel "is not behaving like a country that deserves to be called a member of the family of civilized nations." This observation applies to the U.S. too, he says, "which is co-responsible for the injustice we have been facing for decades."
According to Van Agt, Israel is making frequent and excessive use of deadly force against the Palestinians. This accusation has been seen as hypocritical of Van Agt by some pro-Zionist detractors in the Netherlands, most notably by the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation (CIDI.)
In 1977, when Van Agt was justice minister, a group of Moluccan militants seeking autonomy for their group of Indonesian islands hijacked a train in northeast Holland and took its 50 passengers hostage for 20 days. Rather than resolve the situation through dialogue, Van Agt voted in favor of a military operation that left six of the nine hijackers dead, along with two hostages.
The analogy between the use of force in the Moluccan hijacking case and use of force by Israelis against Palestinians is farfetched, Van Agt says. "Given the same set of circumstances, I would still authorize the use of force," he says.
According to his account, it was Van Agt who cast the deciding vote in favor of the action in a small forum of five.
"The prime minister was against the action and another minister was also opposed. I was for it along with two others. We had tried to negotiate for long enough - weeks.
The situation on the train, Van Agt recalls, was becoming critical." Doctors warned us that people on the train might have heart attacks. There was also the possibility that someone might go berserk and attack one of the highjackers - and who knows what kind of bloodshed might have ensued. I would do the same exactly all over again."
The militants' demands nonetheless seem justified to Van Agt, he says. The South-Moluccans, who were seen by many Indonesians as collaborators with the Dutch colonizing power, came to Holland in the 1950s for a temporary stay. They had been promised by the Dutch government that they would get their own independent state, but felt betrayed after the Netherlands failed to deliver.
Over the years, several opinion-shapers, including the German writer and journalist Henryk Broder have accused Van Agt of anti-Semitism because of his criticism of Israel. People from organizations which are critical of Israel and regularly confer with Van Agt, like "A Different Jewish Voice" and United Civilians for Peace, say he is anything but anti-Semitic.
He says he has had to face the accusation because "It's the most effective way of keeping countless others from following my example and speaking about what they really feel."
The accusers, however, allege Van Agt demonstrated anti-Semitism before he became so involved with the Palestinian cause. In 1972, one year after he left his position as a lecturer on criminal law to become justice minister, Van Agt sparked a heated debate by attempting to pardon the last three Nazi war criminals still in Dutch prisons.
At a press conference that same year, he said to a journalist: "I am only an Aryan" in speaking about his intention to bring about the Nazi prisoners' release for health reasons.
"I was what is called a progressive thinker," Van Agt explains. "Now, in the last years of my life, I'm returning to that. I had some very modern ideas about the use and uselessness of applying criminal law sanctions. I have very serious doubts about the use, and hence justification, of detaining people for anything but the heaviest crimes."
"I had these kinds of ideas long before I came to a position of power. I wrote about them and promulgated them in books and articles. So that was nothing new. Then all of a sudden, to the surprise of everyone, including myself and my wife, I became justice minister. And that meant I got the problem of the three remaining Germans war criminals in Dutch prisons on my plate."
The two previous justice ministers, Teun Struycken and Carel Polak, also supported releasing the prisoners in principle, according to Van Agt. "Polak was one of the many highly gifted sons of the Jewish people", Van Agt says. "And justice minister Ivo Samkalden, also Jewish, had released one of the Dutch war criminals already in the 1960's."
"These ministers agreed that holding on to the prisoners was senseless," he adds. "I would still support their release if it happened today. They were of bad health, and one or two of them was senile. I still believe it's nonsense to keep a senile person in prison, and when detaining people doesn't make sense, then it's injustice."
Injustice in the case of the Nazi criminals was not the way to celebrate the reestablishment of Dutch constitutional state (Rechtstaat in Dutch) after the Nazi occupation, he argues. "It needed to be shown in its full potential. Keeping these people in jail served no legal purposes. Specific prevention? They couldn't even handle a pen. And as for general prevention, well, did anyone think the Germans would start another war if the prisoners were released?" Two of the Breda Three were released in 1989. A third died in the southern-Holland prison in 1979.
The famous "Aryan" statement, which grabbed headlines in 1972, needs to be understood in context, he says. "When I just got my appointment as a minister, the first thing I did was meet the press. I was totally inexperienced and green. It was a very informal cocktail party. I went around, mingled, made jokes and was basically having fun with the new friends to come."
Then the question came up. "I should have known it, but I was so naïve then. One journalist asked if I would act to end the continued detention of the three German prisoners. And then I made the gravest mistake. I said that even my Jewish predecessor was unsuccessful in getting them out of jail - 'and I'm only an Aryan.'"
Slowly shaking his head, Van Agt repeats the short explosive sentence. "It was made in self-deprecation. I was deriding myself, a style which has always characterized my presentations. But that wretched word was in the newspapers the next morning. One guy picked out that one sentence from that informal conversation."
The explanations eventually satisfied the Dutch electorate and the press, Van Agt says. "I hadn't heard about the story for 30 years, but when I started becoming critical of the state of Israel, it resurfaced in an effort to silence me. Those who criticize me and others who speak out, always target the person bearing the message. They are not interested in a fair and open debate. Kill the messenger, if you can't beat the message." In earnest tone of voice, he concludes: "I am definitely not an Anti-Semite."
Moreover, he says that no anti-Semite could ever reach a position of power in the Netherlands. "It's absolutely impossible. Even among those who have become highly critical of Israel's illegal policies, there is a deep respect for the Jewish people."
That respect, he says, has developed into a "deeply engrained consciousness of the contribution that European Jews have made over the years to European culture. No one with anti-Jewish sentiments could come to power here."
4) Is Europe Repainting Its Nazi Past?
By Janet Levy
Europe's soccer games have long been the preserve of boisterous fans, drunken brawls and riots. Lately, they have also become the province of anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who comfortably spew hateful epithets in the anonymity of crowded stadiums where they enjoy a troubling measure of support.
In recent years, soccer crowds have gone so far as to simulate the hissing of Nazi gas chambers, pairing the sound with Nazi salutes. In Belgium, Muslim fans at a soccer match between Israel and Belgium shouted "Jews to the gas chambers" and "strangle the Jews," while waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags. Freed from the restraints of acceptable behavior, with inhibitions loosened by alcohol consumption and the intense camaraderie of team spirit, soccer fans freely unleash anti-Semitic slurs with abandon and without fear of retribution.
This alarming behavior prompts questions as to whether anti-Semitism is becoming acceptable again in a Europe that has forgotten its Nazi past, and whether guilt has been supplanted by denial. Is the era of Nazism being re-examined and re-framed in a more positive light that contributes to such gratuitous and ugly outbursts?
Two recent disturbing incidents appear to support this idea, raising legitimate concerns that Europe is indeed repainting its Nazi past.
The first incident occurred on June 16 during the televised, Euro 2008 soccer match between Germany and Austria. The words to the nationalistic first stanza of Deutschland Uber Alles, usually avoided since the fall of the Third Reich, were displayed in subtitles on Swiss television.
Germany, Germany above everything,
Above everything in the world,
When it always for protection and defense,
Brotherly sticks together.
From the Meuse to the Neman
From the Adige to the Belt.
Responding to the controversy generated by the broadcast, SRG, the Swiss company that televised the offensive lyrics, claimed that the editors who were responsible for subtitling for the match made an innocent mistake as a result of stress and poor research. The national coordinator for subtitling, Gion Linder apologetically stated, "We are going to hold a special history lesson for all German-speaking staff to explain the issues surrounding the national anthem."
Also at the Euro 2008, the No. 4 designee on the list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals and on Interpol's Most Wanted list cheered the team from his native Croatia at the European Championship in southern Austria. Milivoj Asner, the 95-year-old former police chief and Gestapo agent who sent hundreds of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies to their deaths, lives openly in Klagenfurt, Austria, under an assumed name, although his real identity and his Nazi-affiliated past is known and in some cases, admired by locals.
Former Austrian Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider, whose party was accused of supporting an anti-Semitic platform, refers to Asner as a "treasured" neighbor and told Der Standard, the Austrian daily newspaper, "He's lived peacefully among us for years, and he should be able to live out the twilight of his life with us."
Shielding Asner from justice, the Austrian government has resisted efforts to prosecute him. When Croatia demanded his extradition in 2005, Austria initially claimed that Asner was an Austrian citizen and was thereby exempt from extradition proceedings. Later admitting that he lacked Austrian citizenship, the authorities insisted that Asner was too ill to stand trial. Recently, the Austrian government informed a group of Jewish Nazi hunters that Asner was "not capable enough to be questioned or go before a court." Yet, a fit, confident Asner was recently filmed on a three-hour outing, strolling about town, attending a soccer match and visiting local cafes.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Jerusalem-based, Simon Wiesenthal Center, which hunts Nazis and war criminals worldwide, exclaimed,
"Austria has long had a reputation as a paradise for war criminals and now they've been caught in the act. It is time for them to do what is right and help bring Nazi war criminals to justice. If this man is well enough to walk around town unaided and drink wine in bars, he's well enough to answer for his past."
Zuroff added, "This is clearly a reflection of the political atmosphere which exists in Austria and which in certain circles is extremely sympathetic to suspected Nazi war criminals."
Ironically, in March, Austria assumed the chairmanship of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. Clearly, by allowing a leading Nazi war crimes suspect to live freely in its midst, Austria demonstrates a poor commitment to Holocaust remembrance and derides the importance of seeking justice for its victims.
These two incidents, the posting of the lyrics to the Nazi anthem and the indifference to the presence of a wanted Nazi war criminal, indicate that Europeans may be beginning to rethink their Nazi past and view it in a more acceptable light. To nonchalantly dismiss the seriousness of the "mistaken" subtitles as job stress and ignorance and to shield a former member of the Gestapo from prosecution, indicates fading memories of the Nazi-era atrocities and, more seriously, a refusal to admit Europe's complicity in the greatest crime against humanity in modern times.
These incidents are not isolated. They occurred against a background of steadily increasing anti-Semitism in Europe since 1990, according to multiple country surveys conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2002, the ADL found that 1 in 5 Europeans harbor strong anti-Semitic views and that 49% of those surveyed believe that Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.
In Europe, comparisons are often made between Israelis and Israeli soldiers and Nazis and the SS. These simplistic comparisons ignore the basic reality that that Israelis are fighting suicide bombers and rocket barrages in a defensive war against annihilation and the Holocaust was a premeditated genocide against an entire religious group. The insistence that Israel's current struggle to survive is on a par with the inhumanity of the Holocaust is a blatant distortion. It is fueled by an undercurrent of Jew hatred.
It has also become commonplace in Europe to hear the Holocaust downplayed as an atrocity and equated instead with current racist attitudes. This, in effect, softens the immensity and horror of the Holocaust. It becomes recast as merely a social gaffe that only occasionally is carried to extremes by small groups, rather than its reality as a systematic, mass extermination. Such soft-pedaling of the Holocaust helps engender and legitimize anti-Semitism and should be a grave cause for concern for the future of European Jewry.
Despite philosopher George Santayana's well-known warning - "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - Europe appears today stubbornly headed down the road to forgetting its past. This bodes poorly for the future of Jews on the continent and has chilling implications for all of us worldwide.
5) A disastrous attack on Iran?
By CHUCK FREILICH
The debate over a possible American or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear program has heated up, with some arguing, including a recent New York Times editorial, that the consequences would be "disastrous." Would they really?
First, the good news is that we are not there yet, that Iran is highly vulnerable to external pressure and that we may never have to get there, if the international community gets its act together. What is needed is a comprehensive policy of heavy sanctions, combined with a big diplomatic carrot.
To this end, the US should seek to fully engage Iran and offer a "grand bargain," an array of incentives, in exchange for its willingness to forgo its nuclear program. Iran hardliners in particular should support a policy of engagement: Only if the US proves to both domestic and world opinion that it has exhausted all diplomatic possibilities, will it gain support for major economic sanctions, let alone future military action. Iran will probably reject the offer, as it has all others, but we will only know if the option is pursued and it is a vital way station on the road to stronger measures. Talking to Iran does not imply acquiescence, or appeasement
The US and the West, however, should engage from a position of strength. Important sanctions can be imposed now, such as heightened restrictions on trade credits, international banking transactions and investments in Iran. Iran imports 40% of its refined gasoline products: If the West banned these sales, its economy could be brought to its knees. Oil exports make up 80% of Iran's state budget: were imports of Iranian oil banned, its economy would be brought to a standstill. Iran's automobile industry is domestically produced, except for engines: cut sales of engines and its economy would be greatly weakened.
SHOULD THESE and other measures fail, or sufficient international cooperation not be forthcoming, the US could impose a unilateral naval embargo on Iran, which would have the combined affect of most of these measures and then some. Only if this, too, failed, would there be a need to consider direct military action, primarily an aerial operation, with little or no ground forces.
There is little doubt that Iran will respond to a direct attack, or a blockade, but its options, heated rhetoric notwithstanding, are actually limited. What can it truly do? Attack American ships, block the Gulf? Maybe a pinprick to make it look good at home, but beyond that, the risks of escalation and the costs to Iran's economy are too great. Iran is extremist, not irrational. It may very well cause the US greater difficulty in Iraq, and increased terror can be expected against US and Western targets. It is highly unlikely, however, that Iran would be willing to go beyond limited actions and risk direct military escalation, not when the US has 150,000 soldiers on its doorstep. Moreover, US preparations can greatly reduce, though not eliminate, the dangers of Iran's potential responses.
Oil prices will further skyrocket and Iran could add to the crisis by cutting output, but anything beyond temporary measures would be tantamount to cutting off its nose to spite its face. There will be a strong public reaction in the Moslem world, though Arab regimes will be quietly relieved to be free of a nuclear Iran. If the US plays out the diplomatic route first, international reaction will be muted.
MILITARY ACTION will incur costs for the US, but far from being "disastrous," or even heavy, they will probably be limited. Whether justified, is a strategic and normative judgment call, to be weighed against the dangers of a nuclear Iran. Instead of unwarranted, self-deterring risk aversion, let us not forget who wields the incalculably greater "stick": Iran certainly will not.
Iran is far more likely to respond against Israel, indeed, to open up with everything it, Hizbullah and Hamas have - large scale terror, rocket attacks blanketing Israel, ballistic missiles. Israel may pay a heavy price and there is a significant danger of confrontation with Hizbullah, Hamas and, conceivably, Syria. It is a price Israel should be willing to pay. The real issue regarding military action is the operational outcome. Iran has dispersed and hardened its nuclear sites and may have a parallel covert program. Thus, even a fully "successful" strike would only destroy the known program and Iran, having largely mastered the technology, might be able to reconstitute it. The question is how long a delay is worthwhile: two years, maybe not, five, probably yes.
6) The Enemy Has a Name
By Daniel Pipes
If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the "global war on terror," the "long war," the "global struggle against violent extremism," or even the "global struggle for security and progress."
This timidity translates into an inability to define war goals. Two high-level U.S. statements from late 2001 typify the vague and ineffective declarations issued by Western governments. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defined victory as establishing "an environment where we can in fact fulfill and live [our] freedoms." In contrast, George W. Bush announced a narrower goal, "the defeat of the global terror network" – whatever that undefined network might be.
"Defeating terrorism" has, indeed, remained the basic war goal. By implication, terrorists are the enemy and counter terrorism is the main response.
But observers have increasingly concluded that terrorism is just a tactic, not an enemy. Bush effectively admitted this much in mid-2004, acknowledging that "We actually misnamed the war on terror." Instead, he called the war a "struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."
A year later, in the aftermath of the 7/7 London transport bombings, British prime minister Tony Blair advanced the discussion by speaking of the enemy as "a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam." Soon after, Bush himself used the terms "Islamic radicalism," "militant Jihadism," and "Islamo-fascism." But these words prompted much criticism and he backtracked.
By mid-2007, Bush had reverted to speaking about "the great struggle against extremism that is now playing out across the broader Middle East." That is where things now stand, with U.S. government agencies being advised to refer to the enemy with such nebulous terms as "death cult," "cult-like," "sectarian cult," and "violent cultists."
In fact, that enemy has a precise and concise name: Islamism, a radical utopian version of Islam. Islamists, adherents of this well funded, widespread, totalitarian ideology, are attempting to create a global Islamic order that fully applies the Islamic law (Shari‘a).
Thus defined, the needed response becomes clear. It is two-fold: vanquish Islamism and help Muslims develop an alternative form of Islam. Not coincidentally, this approach roughly parallels what the allied powers accomplished vis-à-vis the two prior radical utopian movements, fascism and communism.
First comes the burden of defeating an ideological enemy. As in 1945 and 1991, the goal must be to marginalize and weaken a coherent and aggressive ideological movement, so that it no longer attracts followers nor poses a world-shaking threat. World War II, won through blood, steel, and atomic bombs, offers one model for victory, the Cold War, with its deterrence, complexity, and nearly-peaceful collapse, offers quite another.
Victory against Islamism, presumably, will draw on both these legacies and mix them into a novel brew of conventional war, counter terrorism, counter propaganda, and many other strategies. At one end, the war effort led to the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan; at the other, it requires repelling the lawful Islamists who work legitimately within the educational, religious, media, legal, and political arenas.
The second goal involves helping Muslims who oppose Islamist goals and wish to offer an alternative to Islamism's depravities by reconciling Islam with the best of modern ways. But such Muslims are weak, being but fractured individuals who have only just begun the hard work of researching, communicating, organizing, funding, and mobilizing.
To do all this more quickly and effectively, these moderates need non-Muslim encouragement and sponsorship. However unimpressive they may be at present, moderates, with Western support, alone hold the potential to modernize Islam, and thereby to terminate the threat of Islamism.
In the final analysis, Islamism presents two main challenges to Westerners: To speak frankly and to aim for victory. Neither comes naturally to the modern person, who tends to prefer political correctness and conflict resolution, or even appeasement. But once these hurdles are overcome, the Islamist enemy's objective weakness in terms of arsenal, economy, and resources means it can readily be defeated.
7) This Recession, It's Just Beginning
By Steven Pearlstein
So much for that second-half rebound.
Truth be told, that was always more of a wish than a serious forecast, happy talk from the Fed and Wall Street desperate to get things back to normal.
It ain't gonna happen. Not this summer. Not this fall. Not even next winter.
This thing's going down, fast and hard. Corporate bankruptcies, bond defaults, bank failures, hedge fund meltdowns and 6 percent unemployment. We're caught in one of those vicious, downward spirals that, once it gets going, is very hard to pull out of.
Only this will be a different kind of recession -- a recession with an overlay of inflation. That combo puts the Federal Reserve in a Catch-22 -- whatever it does to solve one problem only makes the other worse. Emerging from a two-day meeting this week, Fed officials signaled that further recession-fighting rate cuts are unlikely and that their next move will be to raise rates to contain inflationary expectations.
Since last June, we've seen a fairly consistent pattern to the economic mood swings. Every three months or so, there's a round of bad news about housing, followed by warnings of more bank write-offs and then a string of disappointing corporate earnings reports. Eventually, things stabilize and there are hints that the worst may be behind us. Stocks regain some of their lost ground, bonds fall and then -- bam -- the whole cycle starts again.
It was only in November that the Dow had recovered from the panicked summer sell-off and hit a record, just above 14,000. By March, it had fallen below 12,000. By May, it climbed above 13,000. Now it's heading for a new floor at 11,000. Officially, that's bear market territory. We'll be lucky if that's the floor.
In explaining why that second-half rebound never occurred, the Fed and the Treasury and the Wall Street machers will say that nobody could have foreseen $140 a barrel oil. As excuses go, blaming it on an oil shock is a hardy perennial. That's what Jimmy Carter and Fed Chairman Arthur Burns did in the late '70s, and what George H.W. Bush and Alan Greenspan did in the early '90s. Don't believe it.
Truth is, there are always price or supply shocks of one sort or another. The real problem is that the underlying fundamentals had gotten badly out of whack, making the economy susceptible to a shock. The only way to make things better is to get those fundamentals back in balance. In this case, that means bringing what we consume in line with what we produce, letting the dollar fall to its natural level, wringing the excess capacity out of industries that over expanded during the credit bubble and allowing real estate prices to fall in line with incomes.
The last hope for a second-half rebound began to fade earlier this month when Lehman Brothers reported that it wasn't as immune to the credit-market downturn as it had led everyone to believe. Lehman scrambled to restore confidence by firing two top executives and raising billions in additional capital, but even that wasn't enough to quiet speculation that it could be the next Bear Stearns.
Since then, there has been a steady drumbeat of worrisome news from nearly every sector of the economy.
American Express and Discover warn that customers are falling further behind on their debts. UPS and Federal Express report a noticeable slowdown in shipments, while fuel costs are soaring. According to the Case-Shiller index, home prices in the top 20 markets fell 15 percent in April from the year before, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac report that mortgage delinquency rates doubled over the same period -- and that's for conventional home loans, not subprime. United Airlines accelerates the race to cut costs and capacity by laying off 950 pilots -- 15 percent of its total -- as a number of airlines retire planes and hint that they may delay delivery or cancel orders of new jets from Boeing and Airbus. Goldman Sachs, which has already had to withdraw its rosy forecast for stocks, now admits it was also too optimistic about junk bond defaults, and analysts warn that Citigroup and Merrill Lynch will also be forced to take additional big write-downs on their mortgage portfolios.
Meanwhile, General Motors, already reeling from a 28 percent plunge in the pace of auto and truck sales, now confronts the fact that it won't get any help this time from GMAC, its once highly profitable finance arm, which is reeling from an increase in delinquencies on home and auto loans. With the car maker hemorrhaging cash, whispers of a possible default sent the price of insuring GM bonds soaring on the credit default market.
You know things are bad when middle-class Americans have to give up their boats and Brunswick, the nation's biggest maker of powerboats, is forced to close 10 plants and lay off 2,700 workers.
For much of the year, optimists took comfort in the continuing strength of the technology sector and exports to fast-growing countries around the world. But even those bright spots have dimmed.
Tech stocks got hammered yesterday after software maker Oracle and Black Berry maker Research in Motion warned that the pace of corporate orders had slowed.
And both India and China raised interest rates and bank reserves sharply in an effort to tame inflation and slow their overheated economies, even as the air continued to rush out of their real estate and stock market bubbles.
Like the rain-swollen waters of the Mississippi River, this sudden surge of downbeat news has now overflowed the banks of economic policy and broken through the levees of consumer and investor confidence. At this point, there's not much to do but flee to safety, rescue those in trouble and let nature take its course. And don't let anyone fool you: It will be a while before things return to normal.
8) Why Iraq Was Inevitable
By Arthur Herman
According to an April 2008 poll in U.S. News & World Report, fully 61 percent of American historians agree that George W. Bush is the worst President in our history. Some of these scholars cite the President’s position on the environment, or on taxes, or on the economy. For most, though, the chief qualification for obloquy lies in Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.
In this, of course, the historians are hardly alone: five years after the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom, both the mainstream media and America’s political elites treat the Iraq war as a disaster virtually without precedent in our national experience. But while politicians and journalists are not necessarily expected to be adepts of the long view, for professional historians the long view is a defining necessity. As the English historian F.W. Maitland wrote more than a century ago, “It is very hard to remember that events that are long in the past were once in the future.” Hard it may be, but the job of historians is not only to remember it but to judge events accordingly.
In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.
Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.
It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate:
Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. . . . Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.
These were the words of President Clinton on the night of December 16, 1998 as he announced a four-day bombing campaign over Iraq. Only six weeks earlier, Clinton had signed the Iraq Liberation Act authorizing Saddam’s overthrow—an initiative supported unanimously in the Senate and by a margin of 360 to 38 in the House. “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom,” Clinton had declared. On the evening the bombs began to drop, Vice President Al Gore told CNN’s Larry King:
You allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. How many people is he going to kill with such weapons? . . . We are not going to allow him to succeed. [emphasis added]
What these and other such statements remind us is that, by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s. (This was literally the case, the end of hostilities in 1991 being merely a cease-fire and not a formal surrender followed by a peace treaty.) Not only that, but the diplomatic and military framework Bush inherited for neutralizing the Middle East’s most fearsome dictator had been approved by the United Nations. It consisted of (a) regular UN inspections to track and dispose of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) remaining in Saddam’s arsenal since the first Gulf war; (b) UN-monitored sanctions to prevent Saddam from acquiring the means to make more WMD’s; and (c) the creation of so-called “no-fly zones” over large sections of southern and northern Iraq to deter Saddam from sending the remnants of his air force against resisting Kurds and Shiite Muslims.
The problem, as Bill Clinton discovered at the start of his second term, was that this “containment regime” was collapsing. By this point Saddam was not just the brutal dictator who had killed as many as two million of his own people and used chemical weapons in battle against Iran (and in 1988 against Iraqis themselves). Nor was he just the regional aggressor who had to be driven out of Kuwait in 1991 by an international coalition of armed forces in Operation Desert Storm. As Clinton recognized, Saddam’s WMD programs, in combination with his ties to international terrorists, posed a direct challenge to the United States.
In a February 17, 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Clinton focused on what in his State of the Union address a few weeks earlier he had called an “unholy axis” of rogue states and predatory powers threatening the world’s security. “There is no more clear example of this threat,” he asserted, “than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and he added that the danger would grow many times worse if Saddam were able to realize his thoroughly documented ambition, going back decades and at one point close to accomplishment, of acquiring an arsenal of nuclear as well as chemical and biological weapons. The United States, Clinton said, “simply cannot allow this to happen.”
But how to prevent it? An opportunity arose later the same year. In October 1998, Saddam threw out ten Americans who were part of a UN inspection team, and on the last day of the month announced that he would cease all cooperation with UNSCOM, the UN inspection body. On December 15, UNSCOM’s director, Richard Butler, reported that Iraq was engaged in systematic obstruction and deception of the internationally mandated inspection regime. Although the UN hesitated to invoke the technical term “material breach,” which would almost certainly have triggered a demand for a response with force by the world body, Clinton himself was determined to act. He had already received a letter from a formidable list of U.S. Senators, including fellow Democrats Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urging him to “respond effectively”—with air strikes if necessary—to the “threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its WMD programs.” After consulting with Great Britain and other allies, Clinton ordered Butler to pull out the remaining inspectors. On December 16, he launched Operation Desert Fox.
For four days, American and British planes and cruise missiles bombarded Iraqi sites in an effort to degrade Saddam’s programs. The key objective was to knock out communication-and-control networks—and in this, a Clinton official would assert, Desert Fox “exceeded expectations.” But the attacks did virtually nothing to destroy facilities suspected of housing weapons, most of which were in unknown locations. The only way to find out where they might be was by reintroducing UN inspectors, something Saddam now adamantly refused to permit.
Thus, in the end, Desert Fox proved a failure, not because of insufficient American firepower but because of Saddam’s defiance—and because of a lack of forceful follow-up. True, passage of the Iraq Liberation Act meant that the United States now had a regime-change resolution on the books and was providing a certain amount of money and aid for covert internal action against Saddam. True, too, Vice President Al Gore was a particularly strong supporter of these initiatives. But in the wake of Desert Fox, Saddam had conducted his own violent crackdown on potential opposition figures, which meant there was no hope for Iraqis to retake their country without massive outside help.
As 1999 dawned, the choices narrowed. Inspections had failed. So had air strikes and covert action. So had international trade sanctions, which imposed a new level of misery on the Iraqi people without putting any pressure on Saddam himself. The UN’s Oil-for-Food Program, created in 1996 in order to allow Iraq to sell some of its oil in exchange for food and other necessary supplies, appeared to be still another failure: Iraqis continued to starve, while Saddam seemed to grow only richer.
And so, “starting in early 1999,” as Kenneth Pollack, an official in Clinton’s National Security Council, would later recount, “the Clinton administration began to develop options to overthrow Saddam’s regime.”
A plan for an actual land invasion of Iraq had been drawn up a few years earlier under the stewardship of Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was updated after Desert Fox. Although (Pollack writes) “no one thought the U.S. public would support such an invasion,” this was now beginning to seem the only option.
Concurring with this judgment was Scott Ritter, an American who had served on the UN’s weapons-inspection term and had become notorious for his aggressive approach to his job. In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late 1998, Ritter castigated the Clinton White House for failing to confront Saddam with the threat of invasion. This hardly endeared him to the President, but it did win him two warm allies in the Senate. One was the Republican John McCain. The other was the Democrat John Kerry, who outspokenly declared that since Saddam clearly intended “to build WMD’s no matter what the cost,” America “must be prepared to use force to achieve its goals.”
But nothing would happen in 1999. At the end of the year, the UN passed Resolution 1284—an effort to get Saddam to accept a new inspection regime, called UNMOVIC, in exchange for lifting sanctions on all goods for civilian use. Yet, weak as the resolution was, it led to a split in the Security Council, with four members—including France, Russia, and China—abstaining from the vote. That split would become permanent. By 2000, life at the Security Council would turn into a constant battle of wills, with the U.S. and Great Britain in one corner and Russia, France, Germany, and China in another. Although George W. Bush would later come to be blamed for wrecking the coalition that had fought the first Gulf war, the reality is otherwise: the wreck occurred three years before he became President.
All the same, as the military historian John Keegan has pointed out, Resolution 1284 did signal the beginning of the end of Saddam Hussein. By refusing to re-admit inspectors, even under a relaxed sanctions regime, Saddam made it unmistakably clear that only a credible threat of military force would make him budge, and only the exercise of military force would ever get him out.
Unfortunately, by this time Clinton had lost whatever limited appetite for armed confrontation he might earlier have entertained. According to Pollack, the lengthy campaign to dislodge Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo had given the White House a taste of might go wrong in open-ended military operations, and Clinton’s advisers “were not looking to back into a war with Saddam the way they had backed into one with Milosevic.” Besides, the proposed invasion plan called for 400,000-500,000 troops and six months of laborious preparation, which would stretch to the breaking point an American military that, thanks to Clinton-era cuts, was now little more than half the size of the one that had fought Desert Storm.
In his final year in office, Clinton decided that his contribution to Middle East peace would lie not in the removal of Saddam Hussein but in a grand attempt to resolve the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. With this, he missed his last chance to deal forcefully with the man he was publicly committed to overthrowing. Worse, by focusing his energies on a futile effort to placate Yasir Arafat, he diverted American attention not only from Saddam but from the mounting challenge represented by Osama bin Laden—not to mention the possibility that these two sinister figures might some day find common ground. As Clinton’s administration ended and George W. Bush’s began, Iraqi defectors were claiming that Saddam had set up camps in which terrorists connected with bin Laden were training to attack the United States.
Confronting the same threat faced by the Clinton administration, and the same policy predicament, the incoming Bush team arrived at the same conclusion—namely, to do nothing. Bush’s advisers, like Clinton’s, were split. In the Defense Department, some, like Paul Wolfowitz, seemed (according to Pollack) “obsessed” with getting rid of Saddam—though in point of historical fact Wolfowitz’s position was not strikingly dissimilar to Al Gore’s. For others, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, Iraq “simply did not measure up” to China or Russia or Europe on the scale of international importance.
Most, like Vice President Cheney, were in the middle. They saw plainly enough that containment was not working, and they also saw the long-term benefits of regime change. But they recognized as well that (to quote Pollack again) “toppling Saddam was going to be difficult, potentially costly, and risky.” The net result was that by the summer of 2001, despite the almost complete collapse of the sanctions regime, “it had become clear that the administration was not going to pursue a radically new approach to Iraq.”
Then came September 11. A hitherto obscure terrorist threat emanating from the Arab-Muslim world had reached out to commit mass murder against Americans on their own soil, and in so doing had changed everyone’s priorities. Hillary Clinton, the new junior Senator from New York, put it this way in an interview with Dan Rather two days after 9/11, using starkly confrontational language of the sort for which President Bush would soon be pilloried: “Every nation has to be either for us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.”
As for the administration, it had come to understand something else—namely, that its responsibility extended beyond the clear and present danger presented by nations, like Afghanistan, guilty of harboring terrorists. It had to prepare for future threats as well. In that regard, Iraq moved quickly to the head of the list.
As Douglas Feith explains in War and Decision, the recently published memoir of his days as Under Secretary for Policy in Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department, there were several reasons why a post-9/11 strategy had to focus on Saddam Hussein. First among them was Saddam’s ties to terrorist groups, of which the Clinton administration had been well aware and had repeatedly cited. Although no evidence existed that Saddam had been involved in al Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington—and no Bush official ever asserted otherwise—the White House learned after the liberation of Afghanistan that Abu Musab Zarqawi, one of al Qaeda’s key operatives, had found safe haven in Iraq. There was also some evidence (cited by General Tommy Franks in his own memoir, American Soldier), that Zarqawi “had been joined there by other al-Qaeda leaders.”
In March 2002, a New Yorker article described the presence in Afghanistan of a radical Islamic group, Ansar al-Islam, whose members were being trained in al-Qaeda camps but being paid through Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service—suggesting a connection “far closer than previously thought.” From other intelligence sources it appeared that Zarqawi was in fact heading Ansar al-Islam, and that its members were training for WMD use against Western countries. Finally, in September 2002, the CIA released a report, Iraqi Support for Terrorism, asserting that “Iraq continues to be a safe haven, transit point, or operational node for groups and individuals who direct violence against the United States.”1
We now know, thanks to captured Iraqi documents, that American intelligence seriously underestimated the extent of Saddam’s ties with terrorist groups of all sorts. Throughout the 1990’s, it emerged, the Iraqi intelligence service had worked with Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Front, and Yasir Arafat’s private army (Force 17), and had given training to members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Saddam also collaborated with jihadists fighting the American presence in Somalia, including some who were members of al Qaeda. It may be that al Qaeda had no formal presence in Iraq itself, but the captured documents show that it did not need such a presence. Saddam was willing to work with any terrorists who targeted the United States and its allies, and he reached out to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups (and vice-versa) whenever the occasion warranted.
Second, as Feith relates, Saddam had the WMD know-how, as well as probable stockpiles, that terrorist groups like al Qaeda might want for future operations. Just weeks before 9/11, a privately sponsored exercise had simulated a smallpox attack on the United States. The results were chilling: more than three million people infected within two months, and one million dead. “Today,” declared the official report, “we are ill-equipped to prevent the dire consequences of a biological-weapon attack”—a conclusion that would cast a shadow of apprehension over the post-9/11 Defense Department, as dark as the shadow cast by the anthrax scare that gripped the country after five people received fatal doses in the mail and by the discovery during the invasion of Afghanistan that the Taliban had been experimenting with chemical weapons.
Where would terrorists look to acquire such inefficient but murderous weapons? As far as anyone knew, the place to start would be Saddam’s Iraq. UNSCOM had uncovered Saddam’s extensive biological-weapons (BW) program, dating back to before Desert Storm, only in 1995. Since then, Iraq claimed to have destroyed its BW stockpile—but there was no proof of this. Similar doubts surrounded Saddam’s chemical-weapons (CW) program, of which even bigger stockpiles remained unaccounted for. (In UNSCOM’s estimate, there were 1.5 undocumented tons of VX gas alone.) In addition, UNSCOM believed Saddam still possessed clandestine Scud missiles, useful as a delivery system for a chemical attack.
Third was Saddam’s declared antipathy toward the United States. In 1993 he had hatched a plot to assassinate his then-nemesis, former President Bush, during a visit by the latter to Kuwait. A “general suspicion” among Clinton-administration officials, in Pollack’s words, was that Saddam was also “working on a variety of terrorist contingencies” in the event that the United States ever tried to topple his regime. He was the only world leader who actually applauded the attacks of 9/11.
Finally and most ominously, Saddam was emerging, like a great malignant moth, from the containment regime in place since the end of the first Gulf war. By the end of the 1990’s, sanctions had become a joke, proving less a liability to Saddam than an asset in rebuilding his power. In October 2000 a supposedly “contained” Iraq had boldly renewed its military cooperation with Syria, moving divisions to the Syrian border and even deploying troops into Syria itself to put pressure on Israel. Since then, Saddam’s attacks on American and British air patrols over Iraq had grown more intense. When General Tommy Franks met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the liberation of Afghanistan, these attacks headed his daily list of challenges. “It would only be a matter of time,” Feith writes, “before Iraq was once again engaged in a violent clash with the United States.”
With the fall of Afghanistan, moreover, Bush’s military planners had become more rather than less nervous about the Iraqi threat. Osama bin Laden’s escape from his Tora Bora hideout raised the possibility that he might find safe haven in Baghdad. (Saddam had offered the terrorist leader sanctuary at least once before, after his 1997 expulsion from Sudan.) And as for weapons of mass destruction, on this issue the CIA and its director, George Tenet, still had no doubts, and Tenet’s dogmatic certainty on the point was backed up by the UN inspectors themselves.
Since 1998, no inspector had visited Iraq. Huge quantities of chemical WMD’s were known to have existed before Desert Storm. Quantities had been destroyed since. How much more was left? Saddam had never made the accounting demanded by the UN. In its absence, the UN’s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, reasonably inferred that considerable quantities must still have existed.
Today we know that this conviction—which had underlain Clinton’s air strikes in 1998 and the UN’s desperate efforts to reinsert its inspectors into Iraq, and which was shared by virtually every foreign intelligence service, from the French and Germans to the British and Japanese—was the weakest link in the case for going to war with Iraq. But who was responsible for the mis-impression? Some have blamed it on the assurances of former Iraqi exiles, especially Ahmed Chalabi of the Iranian National Congress; their motive was presumably to convince the Bush administration to depose the dictator and put them in charge. A more likely culprit seems to have been another Iraqi exile, Rafid Ahmed Alwan, code-named “Curveball,” who arrived in Germany in 1999 telling horrific tales of Saddam’s BW arsenal.
Exiles and/or charlatans may indeed have played a part in misleading the CIA and other Western intelligence services. But by far the most important deceiver was Saddam himself. For more than a decade, he had consistently acted like a guilty man, evading inspections and moving trucks from palace to palace in the dead of night. Even his own army officers, Feith writes, believed he was hiding biological and chemical weapons. And as became clear from his post-capture interrogations, this was precisely the impression he intended to convey, assuming that it would be enough in itself to deter not only an American invasion but an insurrection by Iraqi Kurds or Shiites, or even—his most consistent worry—an attack by Iran.
It never seems to have occurred to Saddam that an American President would take him seriously enough to decide that his supposed WMD stockpiles and programs had to be destroyed by any means necessary. But there was nothing unreasonable about the President’s inference—which was the inference of most American politicians as well. No one knew for sure, just as no one knew what links Saddam might have with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. If WMD’s existed once, they might well still exist; nothing, and certainly not Saddam’s behavior, suggested otherwise.
Nor was there any way to know, at least until troops were on the ground. Thus, dealing forthrightly with the issue entailed, first, threatening Iraq with a full-scale land invasion and then, if Saddam refused to back down, launching an actual attack.
Convincing Congress that the United States enjoyed a right of “anticipatory self-defense” against Saddam was hardly a difficult task. On the contrary, in September 2002 the Senate virtually arm-twisted Bush into giving it time to pass a new and more specific resolution than the Clinton-era one authorizing regime change in Iraq. In ringing the tocsin, moreover, leading Democrats spoke at least as assertively as leading Republicans. One of them was Charles Schumer:
Hussein’s vigorous pursuit of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, and his present and potential future support for terrorist acts and organizations . . . make him a terrible danger to the people of the United States.
Another was Hillary Clinton:
My position is very clear. The time has come for decisive action to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s.
John Edwards was still another:
Every day [Saddam] gets closer to his long-term goal of nuclear capability.
Howard Dean, then the governor of Vermont, was of a similar mind:
There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the U.S. and our allies.
More than half of Senate Democrats, including John Kerry and Joseph Biden, joined with Republicans in authorizing the President “to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq,” and in so doing to enforce all the relevant but ineffectual resolutions passed by the UN Security Council. In the House, 81 Democrats (out of 209 in total) concurred. Later, many would claim that they had been tricked or misled or even lied to. In fact, the vote reflected nothing more than an affirmation of the old Clinton-era position, now urgently reinforced by the experience of 9/11.2
It was, after all, California’s Nancy Pelosi who had warned the nation on December 16, 1998, during Operation Desert Fox, that Saddam’s “development of WMD technology . . . is a threat to countries in the region.” During the House debate in October 2002, Pelosi sounded the same urgent theme, summing up a threat whose imminence the Democrats had been insisting upon for years. “Yes,” reiterated the tireless Pelosi, “[Saddam] has chemical weapons. He has biological weapons. He is trying to get nuclear weapons.”
That said it all.
As the leaves turned in Washington in the fall of 2002, mainstream Democrats were on board with Bush, just as they had been on board with Clinton. The real reluctance for war came from Republican ranks—and from within the administration itself. The most serious dissenter was Secretary of State Colin Powell, together with his assistant Richard Armitage. Both men wanted to find a way to prop up the containment “box” around Saddam without having to resort to drastic military action.
Their hopes, however, were already more than three years out of date. The main feature of the containment regime had become the Oil-for-Food program, set up by the United Nations in 1996 with Clinton-administration approval. Within months, the program had become a spigot of cash for Saddam and his family and cronies. The full extent of the corruption, and the full roster of who paid in and who was paid out, may not be known for decades, if ever. But the overall picture is reasonably clear, thanks again in large part to documents seized in the 2003 invasion.
Saddam had shrewdly realized that vouchers for the sale of his oil might serve as a kind of international currency, distributed by him to favored customers who would be obliged to pay him kickbacks, all out of reach of the scrutiny of the UN. Eventually, UN administrators were brought into the conspiracy as well.3 Within a year the program had miraculously restored Saddam’s personal wealth and power, even as the Iraqi people continued to suffer. By the time of the U.S. invasion, he had skimmed at least $21 billion from the program, in addition to the billions made through smuggled oil sales to other Middle East countries, including his old enemy Iran.
The list of recipients of Oil-for-Food vouchers grew to more than 270 names, constituting a Who’s Who of slippery international politicians and diplomats—all of whom, needless to say, opposed any talk of military action against Iraq. On the Security Council, Russia, France, and China, key adversaries of U.S. policy toward Iraq going back to Clinton days, were among Saddam’s key beneficiaries. Not only was Oil-for-Food the biggest scandal in UN history, it had turned the UN’s mandate inside out. A program established to punish a rogue tyrant was systematically making him more powerful; nations that were supposed to be his custodians had become his accomplices; and the institution whose purpose was to protect international order was destroying it.
At the time, though, no one in the Bush administration knew this. That was why, in September 2002, President Bush was willing to yield to Colin Powell and British prime minister Tony Blair and ask the UN for one more resolution, this one explicitly threatening Saddam with military force if he did not finally comply with all the preceding resolutions against him.
What Powell found at the UN astonished even him. At a press conference, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, shrieked that “nothing! nothing!” justified war—making Powell so angry that, as he would later tell the reporter Bob Woodward, he could barely contain himself. “Any leverage with Saddam was linked directly to the threat of war,” Powell recalled, “and the French had just taken the threat off the table.” He could not believe the Europeans’ stupidity. Neither could the President. But it was not stupidity; it was self-interested duplicity.
The UN’s refusal to hold Saddam accountable had the unintended effect of bringing even Powell into line with the White House. In conversations with Bush, he began to use terms like “mosh pit” and “quagmire” to describe the world body. Still, the decision had been made to go back for another, tougher resolution—something that Bill Clinton in his time had conspicuously not secured—either for Desert Fox or for Kosovo.
In going to the UN, Bush willy-nilly allowed the focus to shift from the threat posed by Saddam to the United States, which would justify anticipatory action in self-defense, to Saddam’s defiance of existing UN resolutions, which conferred on the Security Council the right to approve or disapprove of action. Suddenly the salient point at issue was Saddam’s actual stockpiles, determining the nature and extent of which had been the UN’s focus for more than a decade. This led to a crucial delay of more than six months, from September 2002 until March 2003, a period Saddam duly exploited both to build an international coalition aimed at blocking Security Council action and to prepare his own defensive plans.
The case against Saddam, even by the UN’s own rules, was rock solid, and in November 2002 the Security Council did unanimously issue Resolution 1441, ordering him to disarm his WMD’s or face “serious consequences.” Everyone understood that “serious consequences” meant the use of force, including on Iraqi territory. But the Europeans, determined to thwart the U.S., declined to take it that way. No military action was envisaged, they insisted; the passage of Resolution 1441 was action enough. Large crowds mobilized across Western Europe to denounce the very thought of war.
On November 25, 2002, under the terms of 1441, UN inspectors re-entered Iraq. They came back empty-handed. On December 7, Iraq dumped thousands of pages of documents on UNMOVIC. Even Hans Blix recognized that this mountain of materials, some of them over a decade old, contained nothing to clear up the question of what had happened to Saddam’s stockpiles. All the same, Blix asked for time to sift through the document dump, knowing the task would consume months.
As Bob Woodward notes in Plan of Attack, his account of the run-up to the war, Bush so far had been “a study in patience.” (It is also true that General Franks was not yet ready for offensive operations, and needed time for the buildup of American forces in Kuwait that was the leverage behind the implicit threat of force.) The President held back until Blix’s interim report on January 27, 2003, which even the New York Times labeled “grim.” There was nothing in it to suggest that Iraq had accepted the principle of complying with UN resolutions or intended to take any of the steps that, in Blix’s words, “it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.”
Blix himself still held out the hope that, somehow, at some future time, Saddam would yet decide to comply. But his mission was doomed from the start. “UNMOVIC had the impossible task,” John Keegan notes, “of proving a negative, that Saddam no longer had forbidden weapons.” But the burden of proof belonged legally on Saddam himself, as stated in Resolution 1441, and it was his failure to comply with that demand, and not Bush’s supposed doctrine of “preemptive war,” that triggered the U.S. invasion. What finally forced the Americans’ hand was the UN’s failure or refusal to acknowledge the very existence of the demand that it itself had made.
The UN’s moment of truth came on February 5, 2003, when Powell gave a final presentation of the case against Saddam to the Security Council, with CIA director George Tenet sitting behind him. Powell’s 76-minute exercise in destructive analysis documented what everyone knew was the case: that Saddam was in “material breach” of the UN’s own stated requirements. That being so, the UN had lost any empirical grounds for declining to take military action. The only question left was whether the Security Council had the moral courage to stand behind its own resolution.
Later, Powell’s defenders would charge that he had been tricked or deceived into making the speech—and in retrospect he said he was humiliated by the thought that he had conveyed false or misleading information. In fact, as Feith shows, the speech came at Powell’s own suggestion, and before giving it he had ruthlessly winnowed out any evidence he considered shoddy or dubious. Even so, he offered over 100 examples of Saddam’s evasion and deceit, evidence based on eyewitness accounts, radio intercepts, and satellite photos. Nor did he hesitate to bring up the al-Qaeda connection as an indicator of possible future horrors along the lines of 9/11. “Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and al Qaeda together,” Powell asserted, and only military action could ensure that they forever remained apart.
His words were wasted. Russia, France, and Germany stood fast against war “under any circumstances.” Their intransigence, reinforced by their own secret links to Saddam, doomed any final Security Council vote for action. But Powell’s speech did at least confirm the near-unanimity of the official U.S. position. As the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote the next day, “I can only say he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.” Indeed, even before Powell’s speech, Joseph Biden, reacting to Blix’s interim report, had summed up the feeling of many Democrats in these words:
Saddam is in material breach of the latest UN resolution. . . . The legitimacy of the Security Council is at stake, as well as the integrity of the UN. [If] Saddam does not give up those WMD’s and the Security Council does not call for the use of force, I think we have little option but to act with a larger group of willing nations, if possible, and alone if we must.
The die was cast.
Operation Iraqi Freedom got under way on March 21, 2003. In October of that year, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) reported it was unable to find any of the WMD stockpiles that everyone believed were in Iraq. Still, what the group did find, in the words of its director David Kay, was “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment” that Saddam had concealed from Blix’s inspectors in 2002: proof, in other words, of Saddam’s clear material breach of Resolution 1441.
Of course, this was not the element of the ISG report that attracted the attention of the war’s critics. According to the New York Times, the ISG’s findings supported the view that Bush had “used dubious intelligence to justify his decision to go to war.” That was and is false.
While Kay and his ISG inspectors found no WMD’s, they did not say there had been none. To the contrary: “My view,” Kay stated, is that “Iraq indeed had WMD’s” and that smaller stocks still existed on Iraqi territory. Later he told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that he had found evidence of some WMD’s having been moved to Syria before the war. A question mark hangs over that possibility to this day.
In testifying to the Senate, moreover, Kay asserted unequivocally that “the world is far safer with the disappearance and removal of Saddam Hussein,” adding that the upper echelons of the Iraqi regime had become divided into two factions: those willing to sell to the highest bidder whatever they knew about manufacturing WMD’s and those, including Saddam himself, willing to buy someone else’s know-how at equally high prices. Saddam’s FBI interrogations would confirm Kay’s analysis. There Saddam admitted that he intended to rebuild his WMD programs once he rid himself of the international sanctions imposed after 1991. He knew that WMD’s were the key to his future power, just as they had been in the past. Had he been allowed to remain Iraq’s dictator, he would have emerged as an even greater international menace than before the Gulf war.
Those who condemn Bush’s decision to go to war, bemoan its cost in material and human terms, and deplore the damage it has allegedly done to the American image around the world should consider what would have happened if there had been no war. It is not just that millions of Iraqis would still be in the iron grip of Saddam and his police state. The fact is that, by 2002, no inspection regime and no amount of international pressure, no matter how plumped up by yet another UN resolution, would have kept him contained any longer. The Oil-for-Food corruption would have continued to grow unrestrained, finding reliable co-conspirators in Europe and the Middle East. Rising oil prices over the next half-decade would have kept Saddam awash in cash, allowing him to rebuild his military and cement his connections with powers like Syria and Russia. He had called our bluff before; but this time it was no bluff.
Given the logic of the situation, at what point could Bush have avoided war? To have taken the military option off the table before going to the UN would have undercut everything his analysts and policy advisers, including at the CIA, had been saying since 9/11—and brought howls of protests from leading Democrats in Congress. Doing so after the passage of Resolution 1441 would have made a mockery of the rationale for going to the UN in the first place, and, as Powell explicitly recognized, undermined the resolution itself.
Should we have backed off after the Blix report on January 27, 2003, even as the American troop buildup in Kuwait was in full swing? That would have devastated Bush’s reputation as a war leader after his resounding success in Afghanistan, and guaranteed that he would never be more than a one-term President (which may have been the real objective of his critics anyway).
Saddam Hussein had become a virus infecting the international body politic. The leading symptom of that infection was Oil-for-Food—emblematic of a moral anarchy let loose in the world that would prevail as long as Saddam remained in power. That anarchy had destroyed Iraq; eaten away the legitimacy of the United Nations; and almost wrecked NATO. Indeed, it is hard to see how NATO members already embittered by the diplomatic battle in the UN in 2002 could have continued to cooperate militarily in Kosovo or Afghanistan. Nor is it clear that Eastern European nations would want to join a NATO led by a power, the United States, that had displayed such bare-faced unwillingness to stand up to a dangerous dictator.
“My job is to secure America,” George Bush told Bob Woodward in 2004. “I also believe that freedom is something people long for.” Had he wished, he could also have referred back to the words uttered by President Clinton six years earlier, in February 1998:
Let’s imagine the future. What if [Saddam] refuses to comply, and we fail to act, or take some ambiguous third route? . . . Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.
Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq war, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster. If, after 9/11, Bush had then blinked in his turn, he might indeed have found himself out of office by January 2005, and someone else would have had to tackle the job under much more disadvantageous conditions.
To judge by his unequivocal pronouncements pre-2003, and as improbable as it sounds now, that someone might well have been Al Gore, the erstwhile hawkish Vice President who had championed the Iraq Liberation Act, or indeed John Kerry, who back in 1998 told Scott Ritter that containment of Saddam was not working and that the time had come to use force. If Bush had failed to act, either one of these two men might have come to office in January 2005 publicly prepared to deal with the “gathering threat” that his predecessor had unaccountably allowed to grow larger and closer and ever more virulent.
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