Mother Jones Daily
March 10, 2003
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Bush's 'Serenity'
Washington's Spy Games
Many years ago, a close friend of mine had a "born again" experience and joined a Protestant sect. It's an experience I've never forgotten. His concern for his unsaved friend -- me -- was touching in its own way, but also deeply unnerving because every conversation we had led only one place -- to my potential conversion. There was no searching, no quest; there were no real questions left. There was just a path -- only one -- and I was not on it.
There can be no ambiguity in such a born-again experience. In a single moment -- our President claims that his was when the Rev. Billy Graham planted a "mustard seed" in his soul -- you are set on the path and then -- by his account it seems to have taken the President a year -- you find yourself there, in the only place to be. ("I do not pray for earthly things, but for heavenly things, for wisdom and patience and understanding. My faith gives me focus and perspective.") It's a total package and undoubtedly a totalizing experience. And then it's just a matter (no small matter admittedly), even a duty to bring the rest of the world along. Iraq is about to have an armed conversion experience -- and so are we all after a fashion.
As our President puts the matter with reference to the rest of the fallen lot of us, "During the more than half century of my life, we have seen an unprecedented decay in our American culture, a decay that has eroded the foundations of our collective values and moral standards of conduct. Our sense of personal responsibility has declined dramatically, just as the role and responsibility of the federal government have increased. The changing culture blurred the sharp contrast between right and wrong and created a new standard of conductÉ I believe America must seize this moment, America must lead. We must give our prosperity a greater purpose, a purpose of peace and freedom and hope. We are a great nation of good and loving people. And together, we have a charge to keep." (All of these quotes are taken from a recent message sent out by Danny Schecter, the news dissector, who runs www.mediachannel.com and who, in turn, is citing "the personal testimony in Christian witness submitted by Bush to the founder of a Christian website. It was published to show that Bush 'could be the answer for the culture of life and begin the road back to returning America's soul ... '")
Now the President's "charge to keep" is surely mixing with other very American images, hardly less meaningful to him, of the cavalry charging to the rescue, the Marines hitting the beach, this time in the Middle East, where the world itself can more or less be born anew. The President is serene because he's there, where the rest of us can't hope to reach him. All these months he's known that he has the sword in his hand. He's just been waiting for that bugle, whether divine or out of the Westerns of our mutual childhoods, to blow. What happens when he charges and the world turns out to be disastrously different from everything he imagines I hate to think.
In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank takes up the issue of the President's "serenity" in For Bush, War Defines Presidency, a piece which begins:
"In the coming weeks, all signs indicate, President Bush will launch the first war without direct provocation in the nation's history ... Repercussions of the war are likely to define not just the Bush presidency, but also the U.S. role in the world and even the course of domestic policy for years to come.It is the largest of gambles -- except that Bush, in rhetoric and in temperament, sees it not as a gamble but as a historical inevitability. As he has upped the ante in Iraq by linking the war to the future of the United Nations, NATO and American leadership in the world, he appears confident and serene in the face of bitter worldwide protest.
'This is his moment; this is his Omaha Beach,' said Craig Stapleton, a close friend who is ambassador to the Czech Republic. 'He knows exactly what to do.'"
In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Norman Mailer offers his distinctive version of the administration's religious fervor, defining a group he calls "flag conservatives." Here's a drastically edited down passage:
"At the root of flag conservatism is not madness, but an undisclosed logic ... From a militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten ... Once we become a twenty-first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture ... To flag conservatives, war now looks to be the best possible solution. Jesus and Evel Knievel might be able to bond together, after all....
There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique to Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. Yes, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes ... Without a commitment to Empire, the country will go down the drain. This, I would opine, is the prime subtext beneath the Iraqi project, and the flag conservatives may not even be wholly aware of the scope of it, not all of them. Not yet."
Finally, I'm including two interesting pieces, one by Stan Crock of Business Week, another by Ben Macintyre the London Times, on how the Europeans see this administration's essential fundamentalism, that mix of the born-again kind and, among those administration members not faintly born again, imperial fundamentalism, military fundamentalism, Likudism, and the gods alone know what else.
As you may recall, last week I pointed out a piece in the British Observer on a leaked National Security Agency document calling for heightened surveillance of and interception of phone calls and emails from UN delegations crucial to the upcoming Security Council vote. The leaked document was completely ignored by the media here in the United States for two days, until Ari Fleischer at a news conference was asked about it and provided a non-denial. Then it was written about sparsely at best, not at all in The New York Times, and generally with a ho-hum, no-big-deal, didn't-even-bother-the-delegations-concerned tone in places like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Elsewhere, including in letters to me, it was denounced as a forgery.
Now, the Observer reports, an arrest has been made in England. (So much for the forgery theory. At least the British government believes the document real enough to pursue a possible leakee.) Here then is part of an email just sent out by Observer correspondent Ed Vulliamy on the subject:
"This is to inform you that there has just been an arrest at the British Government's Communications Headquarters (GCHQ - equivalent of the NSA) in connection with the leak of the memo. If charges are made, they will be serious -- Britain is far more severe in these matters than the US (so far!). They could result in a major trial and a long prison sentence for the alleged mole. It it is also a criminal offence to receive such information in Britain (some of you may recall the 'ABC' trial of the 1970s), and this may also become an issue of press freedom. The authors of the piece will defy any attempt by the government to discuss our sources.It is important that maximum international -- as well as domestic British -- pressure be brought to bear on the Blair government over this impending case, the prosecution of which will inevitably have a political agenda, and to protect this prospective defendant all we can. Pleading motive will be impossible because there is no defence of justification in Britain.
It would be a great help if you would very kindly put your minds to the issue during a spare moment, and think of appropriate people -- individuals, concerned organisations, politicians, academics and student or grass roots groups -- who might consider making representations to the British government in a letter to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, London, SW1. And secondly, whether any of you may even want to make such a communication yourselves."
It will also be interesting -- given the kinds of coverage Cold War spying and leaking once got -- to see whether this case is once again ignored here. The Observer, naturally, is covering the story from virtually every angle -- including the historical.
Among the articles that might be written on this side of the Atlantic would be one about the British and American intelligence agencies and what kinds of opposition there is within each government to the war policies of Bush and Blair. (By the way, as also reported in the Observer, the reaction to this leaked document abroad was not, in fact, ho-hum.)
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute. {publish-page-break}
Will Bush Wait?
Define 'Smoking'
Richard Perle, War Profiteer?
Is the Anglo-American war resolution doomed? The French and the Russians are certainly making it sound that way; both French President Jacques Chirac and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov have declared that they will use their countries' Security Council veto to kill the proposal.
Still, officials in Paris and Moscow are clearly hoping that they won't have to cast such a fateful vote. Chirac, who has become the favorite target of war party pundits, told reporters that he does not believe Washington can round up the nine votes needed to pass the resolution later this week.
William Pfaff, writing in The Boston Globe, seconds Chirac's assessment. Washington's war resolution, Pfaff predicts, "will fall short, possibly badly short, of the nine votes needed to pass." Not that a UN defeat -- even a lopsided one -- is likely to slow the Bush administration's rush to war, Pfaff asserts.
"President Bush, in any case, seems much too committed for anything now to stop him. Anyway, he doesn't have to go to the UN. He claims the right to go to war without further Security Council action -- even if that would mean too bad for Tony Blair and the president's other foreign allies."
Officials at the White House and Pentagon have long argued that they don't need the UN's backing to go to war. And Blair has said the same. But officials in London seem to have little appetite for that possibility, and are clearly pushing for at least a veneer of multilateral support. The apparent disagreement could be a diplomatic game of good cop/bad cop, or it could be a sign of real problems for the Bush administration's 'coalition of the willing.'
On Monday, London appeared to have won at least a token compromise from the White House hawks, as both governments agreed to postpone the Security Council vote until later in the week. But, in a bid to win further support, British diplomats are suggesting further concessions -- particularly an extension to the March 17 deadline for compliance by Iraq. As The Independent reports, US officials are showing little sign of flexibility on that front.
Mark Weisbrot, writing on Common Dreams, argues that the Bush administration has already invested far too much in the war -- politically and financially -- to accept any delay.
"None of this matters because George W. Bush has decided to invade Iraq, and he intends to do it very soon. More than the coming hot desert weather or moonless nights, he is in a hurry because he is losing support at home with each passing day....
The Bush team has successfully used the war since last August to displace domestic issues, thereby winning both houses of Congress and avoiding a cesspool of scandals (remember Enron? Harken Energy Corporation? Halliburton?). War is their savior, or so they hope."
Blair, meanwhile, faces a very different dilemma. Already, one of Blair's cabinet ministers -- Clare Short -- has threatened to resign if Great Britain goes to war without UN support. As Nick Assinder of the BBC reports, the row has exploded any claim that Blair's support is rock-solid.
"The question it all raises is whether Ms Short is simply the tip of an iceberg that could sink Tony Blair's premiership.It is absolutely the case that there are other cabinet ministers deeply troubled over the possibility of war against Saddam Hussein. Robin Cook is persistently whispered to be the top of the list - but there are others.
And it seems highly likely that, if Mr Blair insists on going to war without a second UN resolution, they will feel compelled to speak out and possibly even follow Ms Short's example."
So, Bush can't afford to delay, and Blair can't afford to hurry. In deriding the French, the Germans, and other overseas critics, conservatives have repeatedly thundered that Washington must not allow foreign interests to dictate US policy. War Watch has to wonder; how long will London's interests be allowed to dictate the timetable for a war the White House seems intent on waging?
While they continue to insist that they do not need international support for their war, Bush administration hawks are still lobbying to gain support for their war-making resolution. While the lobbying and arm-twisting continues, British and American diplomats are also suggesting that UN weapons inspectors are withholding compelling information about Iraq's arms program from the Security Council.
Conservatives in Washington and London are alleging that inspectors have made two discoveries that would support the Anglo-American claims. They are also suggesting that chief weapons inspector Hans Blix held the information back in order to undermine the arguments for war.
The London Times reports that British and US diplomats will demand that Blix reveal more details about "a huge undeclared Iraqi unmanned aircraft." And The New York Times relays claims from Bush administration officials (unnamed, of course) that arms inspectors have found "a new variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas."
As they have in the past, officials in the US and Britain are asserting that the two alleged discoveries are the "smoking gun" of Iraqi wrongdoing that war critics have long demanded. But are an unmanned drone and empty rocket warheads really evidence of the as-yet-undiscovered weapons of mass destruction that war party pundits so blithely claim Iraq possesses? Military affairs analyst William M. Arkin, writing in the Los Angeles Times, doesn't think so. It should be instructive, Arkin suggests, that US military leaders seem far less convinced than their civilian counterparts that Iraq has such arms.
"For one thing, while not dismissing the seriousness of chemical and biological warfare, most field commanders are reasonably confident they can handle any such attacks Hussein can mount. For another, they understand all too well the mass destruction a full-scale war might inflict.Moreover, most know that, after nearly four months of renewed weapons inspections by the United Nations and the most intensive effort in the history of the U.S. intelligence community, American analysts and war planners are far from certain that chemical and biological weapons even exist in Iraq's arsenal today.
Incredible as it may seem, given all the talk by the administration -- including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's discourse last week about continuing Iraqi deception -- there is simply no hard intelligence of any such Iraqi weapons."
In other words, no bullets for that "smoking gun."
The Bush administration's war on terror has turned into a bonanza for some government contractors, and the war in Iraq will undoubtedly follow suit. Many of those companies have close, if indirect, ties to the White House and the Republican Congress. But Seymour M Hersh reports in The New Yorker that at least one Bush appointee is in a position to benefit directly from the security-and-war spending spree. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and one of Washington's most outspoken hawks, is also a managing partner in a venture firm called Trireme Partners. Trireme's main business, Hersh reports, "is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense." And the Defense Policy Board, Hersh notes, advises the Pentagon "not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement."
"As chairman of the board, Perle is considered to be a special government employee and therefore subject to a federal Code of Conduct. Those rules bar a special employee from participating in an official capacity in any matter in which he has a financial interest. 'One of the general rules is that you don't take advantage of your federal position to help yourself financially in any way,' a former government attorney who helped formulate the Code of Conduct told me. The point, the attorney added, is to 'protect government processes from actual or apparent conflicts.'"
Hersh also reports that Perle, in his capacity as chairman of the policy board, met in January with Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi, who served as one of the middlemen between the White House and the Islamic government in Iran during the Iran-Contra scandal.
"One board member, upon being told of Trireme and Perle's meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed, 'Oh, get out of here. He's the chairman! If you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland security, and I've put people on the board with whom I'm doing that business, I'd be had' -- a reference to Gerald Hillman, who had almost no senior policy or military experience in government before being offered a post on the policy board. 'Seems to me this is at the edge of or off the ethical charts. I think it would stink to high heaven.'"{publish-page-break}
New New World Order
War Crime?
Arms, Real and Fictional
Gratuitous France-Bashing
When President Bush sought last year to secure United Nations approval for his administration's bellicose policies on Iraq, unilateralist neoconservatives were enraged. And their anger has only grown, as the international body has become a millstone around the war party's imperial ambitions. Now, however, with the White House eager to force a Security Council vote they will almost certainly lose, Washington's hawks are exultant.
The president and his hawkish inner circle continue to insist that the US will invade Iraq with or without UN backing. That is music to neoconservative ears -- and not just because their long-awaited war would begin. As the London Guardian notes, Washington's unilateral war "could mark a potentially fatal rupture to the UN's founding principles."
"US and British officials say the UN must act on Iraq now or be rendered irrelevant, perhaps permanently. This argument ignores the fact that the UN is already acting, principally through the inspections process. What they really mean is that if the UN does not deliver the outcome they want, they will ignore it. George Bush's clear message is that if and when such disputes arise in future, the US might bypass the UN altogether."
A war in Iraq, an empire-building administration, and a crippled UN -- it would be a neoconservative dream come true. It would also be a nightmare for much of the rest of the world, Thomas Walkom suggests in the Toronto Star. Soon, Walkom writes, Iraq will not be alone in defying the will of the global community.
"In effect, Bush has served notice that the painstaking logic of collective security, which the U.S. itself did so much to create 58 years ago, is to be junked.Paul Johnson isn't nervous. In fact, the frightening, destabilizing scenario Walkom describes is very much what Johnson hopes to see. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Johnson sounds the increasingly familiar diplomatic rallying cry of the imperial, unilateral hawks, railing against "entangling alliances in which a single rogue power, like France, has the right to inhibit America's pursuit of her vital national interests."War is to be no longer a last resort but an active part of superpower foreign policy. Decisions on the international order are to be made not at the U.N. but in Washington alone. The sovereignty of other nations is now to be wholly contingent upon U.S. geopolitical interests.
No wonder the rest of the world is nervous."
"This means Washington must take a critical look at NATO and the United Nations, neither of which reflects America's true singularity as the world's only superpower. America should look, rather, to bilateral deals with powers that really matter, like Russia, China, India and Japan -- deals based, like the special relationship with Britain, on a practical community of interests. What America should avoid, in any case, is legal obligations that prevent it from doing what it knows to be right and necessary."
This, then, is the brave new new world order the Bush administration promises to deliver -- an order in which America's interests, as defined by whoever happens to be resident in the White House, trumps all; an order in which the US administration's self-fulfilling assessment of what is "right and necessary" is never put to the test. It is also, as Johnson and other neocons know, an order in which the United Nations -- the only global body in which the world's weak nations have at least nominal equality with the strong -- truly would be irrelevant.
Is it actually necessary to explain why such a world would be far less secure? Given the neoconservative eagerness to kill the UN, it apparently is. And Mark Littman does an admirable job of it in the Guardian. A US-led preemptive war against Iraq would be a clear breach of the UN charter, Littman explains.
"What would be the consequences of such illegality? Most obvious would be the human, economic and environmental costs, including any further violence that a war against Iraq might trigger. An illustration of how unpredictable and incalculable such costs might be is furnished by a recollection of the events of 1914. When the Hapsburg empire attacked the Serbs, the campaign was expected to be short because of the immense military superiority of Austria/Hungary over the Kingdom of Serbia. Four years later, the Hapsburg empire, together with those of Germany and Russia, lay in ruins. A residue of bitterness and hatred was left that bred an even worse war 20 years later in which there were more than 50 million fatalities. Who can say with certainty where today's threatened war might lead?A second consequence would be of immense world significance, for it would mean the end of the United Nations and with it the final collapse of the efforts of the past century to create effective international institutions that would replace perpetual war with perpetual peace."
Would an Anglo-American preemptive war really be illegal? It is a question that few people in either capital seem interested in addressing. Which is disturbing, Anthony Howard writes in the London Times, particularly considering the vast amounts of legal study devoted to a very similar question the last time Great Britain faced such a question -- during the Suez crisis in 1956. That British government sought to make sure it could act within the confines of international law, Howard writes. This one seems eager to know as little as necessary.
"I have no idea what the views of the current legal adviser to the Foreign Office, Michael Wood, are; but, if he stands four-square behind our new belligerent Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, he will be turning his back on the position taken up by his predecessor, Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, when Britain last contemplated the same kind of invasion. This is what Sir Gerald had to say at the time: 'The plea of vital interest, which has been one of the main justifications for wars in the past, is indeed the very one which the UN Charter was intended to exclude.' If such a view was so demonstrably right then, what -- apart from all the huffing-and-puffing of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary -- has happened to change the situation today?"
Last week, the UN's chief atomic arms inspector declared that two pieces of 'evidence' that the Bush administration has repeatedly cited to support its allegation that Iraq is pursuing nuclear weapons are little more than fantasy. But is a little thing like fake evidence going to stop the White House? Certainly not. Even if the specific claims are baseless, the general assertion that Iraq is trying to build nuclear weapons should not be dismissed, Bush advisors argue.
In fact, neither the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, nor the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice would acknowledge that the evidence they had previously touted was faked. Instead, both pointed to the fact that the UN had "come close" to pronouncing Iraq free of a nuclear weapons program in the 1990's, only to find that it was not. Of course, that discovery came when UN arms inspectors entered Iraq to search for proscribed weapons.
While Iraq's nuclear weapons of mass destruction appear more and more to be a White House fantasy, the Pentagon has a new weapon of massive destruction that is very, very real. On Tuesday, the Air Force successfully tested a 21,000-pound monster bomb in a remote part of Florida. The bomb, an even larger version of the huge 'daisy cutter' explosive used in Afghanistan, is the most destructive non-atomic bomb ever built for the US military.
"Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld deadpanned, 'This is not small,' and did not downplay its potential impact on the attitude of Iraqi troops.'There is a psychological component to all aspects of warfare,' Rumsfeld said."
Believe it or not, Congress is in session. True, the national debate over whether to wage a war in Iraq has entirely bypassed the only body that, according to the Constitution, has the authority to make that decision. But that doesn't mean that our representatives in Washington are sitting on their hands. In fact, two Republican Congressmen have decided to take aggressive action against at least one clear enemy. You know, that 'rogue power' that helped our nation gain its independence a few centuries ago.
Ohio Republican Bob Ney, chairman of the House Administration Committee, has ordered that the menus in all the Capitol's cafeterias be amended to read 'freedom fries' and 'freedom toast.' That's right, Congress has taken the bold step of editing the word "French" from its lunchtime lexicon.
Timothy Noah, ably pointing out the obvious, notes on Slate that the maneuver seems ridiculous. In that mood, Noah suggests other cultural editing the war party might want to consider.
"If chauvinistic warmongers want to start renaming stuff, it should be Iraqi stuff. There's probably not much point in going after Iraqi food such as masgoof (barbecued fish) and pacha (sort of an Iraqi haggis) because Americans don't eat them. A better idea would be to tear out every page in the Bible that features an Iraqi place name, such as Babylon, Babel, the Garden of Eden, Nineveh, and Ur. The Christian right will object, but we all have to make sacrifices during wartime."
Not all hawks hate the French, of course. Rod Dreher of The National Review makes that clear, delivering an underhanded compliment so larded with insults that even Ney's jingoism seems kind. Dreher insists that he loves the French -- just not their politics, diplomacy, or moral values ("arrogant, hypocritical, and cynical"). No, what Dreher loves about the French is their food and their discerning rejection of things not French.
"What is beautiful? What is delicious? What is worthy; we live in a world that asks only, What is quick and easy? Many of the French resist this modern, very American impulse. They do it in bad, stupid ways sometimes, but their instinct is right. As someone who grew up in a disposable culture, the effort the French put into aesthetic excellence never fails to move me, and makes me want to learn from them.Now, this doesn't mean they aren't treacherous creeps. In many ways, they have put their own civilization at risk. They have discarded their Catholic religion. They have let so many Muslim immigrants into their country that they now find it difficult to stand up to Islamic terrorism. In their pride, they are trashing their relationship with the only country capable of fighting effectively for Western civilization and its values against the barbaric Islamic onslaught. If more of our troops die trying to fight Saddam in the sandstorms that have now begun in the desert, it will be partly France's fault for causing these delays. Tarte tatin or a good bottle of Bordeaux can cover a multitude of sins, but not these, not this time.
But I can't hate France, and when this ugly time passes, I'll be back."
Of course, Dreher smugly assumes that he'll be welcomed back. Is it too much to hope, War Watch wonders, that the immigrant-accepting 'treacherous creeps' will instead give him a reception full of at least one of the national traits he seems to admire so? {publish-page-break}
No Fig Leaf?
Tony Blair, War Casualty?
The Balsa Bomber
Are the US and Great Britain headed for a fateful defeat at the United Nations tomorrow? Recent reports certainly suggest so. And, while that defeat probably won't even slow the Bush administration's rush to war, it would almost certainly further isolate the US and put several of Washington's key allies under heavy pressure.
Bush administration officials have said they will call for a Security Council vote on the Anglo-American war resolution tomorrow. As of late Tuesday, the White House apparently had little confidence in the outcome of that vote, distributing a memo acknowledging that ten days of frenzied lobbying and diplomatic arm-twisting had failed to attract the support of a majority of the council.
With the promise of a French veto looming, the Bush administration had hoped to at least win a council majority, giving Washington, London, and Madrid at least a veil of multilateral cover for the promised preemptive invasion. As has been the case for weeks, the Bush administration's chances for such a moral victory are controlled by six non-permanent Security Council members. In the council vote, all have a single vote. But, as The Economist notes, "the moral force of any eventual resolution would depend not just on how many countries back it, but which ones."
"The undecideds are a mixed bag -- ranging from Chile, one of the front-runners among emerging economies, led by a respected social democrat, to Guinea, one of the most backward of nations, ruled by an ailing despot."
Unhappily for the US, while it appears likely that Guinea will support the war-making resolution, both Chile and Mexico are firmly on the fence and pushing for a compromise measure the Bush administration has declared unacceptable.
That compromise was floated a few weeks ago by another of Washington's staunchest historical allies and vital trading partners -- Canada. The proposal differs from the Anglo-American plan in two significant ways; it gives Iraq more time to disarm, and establishes a series of clear benchmarks that Baghdad must meet to avoid war. Finally, today, all six undecideds called for the council to consider a version of the Canadian plan, extending Iraq's deadline to 45 days. Both President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have said that 45 days is too long to wait. But Fred Kaplan suggests on Slate that Blair, desperate for a diplomatic fig leaf of some sort, "will probably sign on to this proposal, or co-opt it," if it stands a chance of passage.
"In that case, President Bush will probably have to endorse it, too: better to wait a while longer than to see his most solid ally face a vote of no-confidence and possibly be replaced by a new prime minister who has a clear mandate to view American policy more skeptically, to say the least. (The fact that Bush has gone back to the United Nations for a second resolution at all is entirely due to his special relationship with Blair.)...
There are risks in acceding to these new, more extended resolutions. The feuding within the council could stretch on for months, the mutual hostilities hardening, and the noose around Saddam loosening with every delay. The question must be asked, though: Do these concerns justify outright rejection of a compromise? What's the harm in holding off an invasion, even for several months? Yes, it would mean U.S. troops, many of them reservists, have to wait around and possibly fight in the summer heat. But logistical timetables shouldn't govern military decisions (that was how nations plunged into World War I), and inconvenience is never a good rationale for war."
Blair's preseveration clearly isn't high on Charles Krauthammer's list of priorties. Predictably, the hawkish Washington Post pundit sees great risk in "dallying and deferring at the United Nations." Instead, he advises the president to simply walk away from the negotiating table and start the war, alone if necessary.
"No more dithering. Every day you wait is an advertisement of hesitation and apprehension. It will not strengthen Tony Blair. It will not strengthen the resolve of our allies in the region. It will only boost the confidence and resolve of the people you are determined to defeat.If the one-line resolution passes, the violation triggers 1441, which triggers the original resolutions ending the Gulf War. If it fails, you've exposed the United Nations for what it is: the League of Nations, empty, cynical and mendacious. Mr. President: Call the vote and walk away."
Like most war party pundits, Krauthammer opines that a defeat for the US would be an indictment only of the nations voting to check Washington's rush to war. Jules Witcover of The Baltimore Sun counters that the very possiblity of such a vote is, in itself, an indictment -- of the Bush administration's diplomatic ineptitude:
"Why has the situation come to this diplomatic mess? At the core, it is Mr. Bush's essential contempt for the United Nations as an inhibition to unilateral action. He never wanted in the first place to go to the United Nations for endorsement of a pre-emptive attack on Iraq and was only dragged there by Mr. Powell's insistence.The president said from the start that he had no confidence in U.N. inspections and has sought to end them as soon as he could to get on with the invasion. Obliged to deal within the U.N. framework, his administration has attempted to bully and/or bribe reluctant Security Council members to go along while throwing billions at the Turks to get use of their territory from which to attack Iraq.
As a result, not only has Mr. Bush failed to achieve U.N. backing to do so, but in the process he also has fueled a rampant anti-Americanism -- or at least an anti-Bushism -- around the globe. The preposterous end is that some polls find that the president, and not the beast of Baghdad, is seen in other countries as the greater threat to peace."
Washington's diplomatic clumsiness was on full display this week, as ham-fisted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld managed to undercut the Bush administration's most critical ally. With typically Rumsfeldian swagger, the secretary assured a roomful of reporters that the US could easily handle the war in Iraq -- even if the British chose to remain on the sidelines.
As Nick Assinder of the BBC quips, "if this was Donald Rumsfeld trying to help Tony Blair, he had better not consider a career in the diplomatic service."
"With one brief comment he has managed to blow a series of massive holes in the prime minister's armour.He undermined the prime minister's claims he is a major influence on President Bush. He handed the prime minister's anti-war faction the opportunity to declare Britain now had a way out of conflict. And he allowed the dissenters to claim he had finally let the cat out of the bag and shown what they had been saying all along -- that the US is determined to go to war on Iraq with or without the support of any other country."
Rumsfeld's comment resulted in a series of frantic phone calls between the secretary and his British counterpart, Geoff Hoon, and the Pentagon boss soon issued a rare public clarification. British support, he insisted, has never been in question. But the damage had been done. Blair, already under seige at home, had been publicly dismissed by the single man widely seen as the most ardent advocate of a preemptive attack. As Polly Toynbee of the London Guardian notes, Blair is now "at the mercy of a swindling old arms-dealing poseur in the Elysée, and even worse, the power-crazed global bullies in the White House."
"The damage done to him is serious, and probably irrecoverable. Even if the war goes 'well', there will be no forgiving his refusal to listen to his natural friends and allies. One sign that he drifts in fairy realms is his triumphalist insistence that when this is all over, he will embark on that even greater challenge - the euro referendum. It is as if he has not understood how his war strategy has left no Europe to join. Try framing a barn-storming campaign speech now on our great European destiny, a joint defence and foreign policy - and so on. The words die on the lips of even the stoutest Europhiles, cast into despair.There are too many things now for which he will not be forgiven by too many of his supporters: the war has leaked over into everything else. Forget leadership challenges, but when this is over Blair will be weaker."
Just how much weaker, of course, could depend on what happens at the UN on Friday. As John Donnelly and Beth Carney of The Boston Globe explain, the Security Council vote is undoubtedly more important to Blair than to Bush.
"'They all have plenty to lose if a war goes badly, but Blair is the most fragile because he has such significant opposition within his own party,' said Simon Serfaty, a European analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank. 'You have to remember that [former Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher was forced out from within her own party, and she was no French poodle. She could bark.'Blair does not face imminent ouster. Prime ministers can be removed only if they lose a major vote in the House of Commons, and Blair is expected to win an Iraq vote because of support from the opposition Conservative Party. But if a war goes very badly, huge dissatisfaction from his Labor Party would show he had lost his party's confidence and he could face pressure to resign, analysts say."
So, what are Blair's chances for avoiding political disaster? Anne Penketh of The Independent considers four possible scenarios. In only two does Blair escape unscathed, and Penketh says both are unlikely.
Maybe Washington should be a tad more circumspect before pulling the trigger on "smoking gun" claims.
Earlier this week, Bush administration officials jumped on two revelations as undeniable evidence of Iraq's refusal to disarm. The first was the discovery, by UN arms inspectors, of an unmanned Iraqi drone aircraft. The second was the alleged confrontation between a US surveillance airplane and two Iraqi fighter jets.
In the last 24 hours, however, both claims have been cut down to size.
As Salon reports, Iraqi officials diplayed the unmanned aircraft to reporters. It is made of balsa wood, with the wings held on by duct tape. Not exactly the stuff of strategic nightmares. What's more, Baghdad insists that it declared the drone in a January report. The confusion, Gen. Mohammed Amin claimed, was the result of a typo: "The declaration said the wingspan was 14.5 feet instead of 24.5 feet as stated by Powell."
As for the supposed mid-air confrontation, Iraqi officials insist that, also, was a simple technical misunderstanding. Amin insists that UN inspectors had informed Iraqi officials of only one scheduled U-2 surveillance flight. The second flight -- the one that Iraqi jets supposedly buzzed -- was not scheduled and caught the Iraqi airforce by surprise, Amin told the Associated Press.
"Amin poured scorn on the American version of events, saying it reflected 'the frustration and the failure of American policies in finding excuses for aggression against Iraq.'"{publish-page-break}
United Nations, Iraq, war, nuclear weapons, mother of all bombs, George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, French, Jacques Chirac, arms inspections, Hans Blix, Security Council, weapons of mass destruction
Will they or won't they?
As of late Thursday, it was still unclear if the United States would force a UN Security Council vote on its war-making resolution. Administration officials were pre-emptively waging a recrimination-filled campaign on two fronts, dismissing the UN as irrelevant, and rejecting Iraq's latest signs of cooperation as subterfuge.
What has become increasingly clear, however, is that the struggle within the Security Council is less about Iraq or the UN than it is about the US and the Bush administration's agenda of domination. As William Pfaff writes in The International Herald Tribune, that agenda is now threatening the very heart of the post-war diplomatic system.
"The international system rests on the principle of absolute sovereignty of states, which has nothing to do with the merits or morality of governments. By trial and error, this has been found the least bad of international diplomatic and legal systems. The United Nations is the agent of this system for exercising international authority.The United States, in the Iraq crisis, is proposing to break the system. This is what the current crisis is really about. The Bush administration says that unless the Security Council gives the United States what it wants, America will ignore the United Nations and from now on do whatever it thinks right. In this, a different international order is implicitly proposed. The United States making a claim to the sovereign right to intervene in, disarm, and carry out 'regime change' in other countries, subject to no external restraint."
That unchecked interventionism is exactly what France, Germany, Russia, and so many other countries around the world find so disturbing. Despite the charges of 'appeasement,' none of the war party's biggest critics are excusing Saddam Hussein. But Iraq remains a sovereign country, protected by the same standards of international law as the United States. Now, George Soros writes in The Miami Herald, Bush is proposing to scrap those standards in favor of a world with two distinct classes of sovereignty: "American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations; and the sovereignty of all other states."
"The Bush administration believes that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are mere decorations. This belief is not false, but it exaggerates one aspect of reality to the exclusion of others. The aspect it stresses is military power. But no empire could ever be held together by military power alone.Yet that belief guides the Bush administration. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon believes the same, and look where that has led. The idea that might is right cannot be reconciled with the idea of an open society."
As both Pfaff and Soros note, the Bush administration's über-hawks have been building their 'might makes right' doctrine since the president first took office. The war in Iraq is only the latest example of that approach, in which Teddy Roosevelt's foreign policy axiom is carried to the bellicose extreme -- plenty of big sticks, and an eagerness to use them, with very little speaking at all.
The Bush administration, of course, has argued that the war in Iraq is justified because Iraq represents a threat to world peace. Unfortunately, none of those arguments have convinced the world's skeptics, in part because the administration has been unable to provide any evidence of a real threat. In fact, the only arguments that have found supporters outside the hawkish right are the purely idealistic ones -- that Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be removed to 'liberate' the Iraqi people, and that a 'liberated' Iraq will serve as a democratic inspiration for the rest of the Middle East.
Both arguments have been repeatedly undermined, of course, usually by the Bush administration itself. White House and Pentagon officials have been forced to explain why they did business with the "monster" they now seek to topple. Now, according to Forward's Oni Nir, Bush's own State Department has drafted a report punching holes in the 'wave of democracy' theory.
"The report strongly criticizes the controversial prediction of a post-Saddam Hussein democratic 'domino effect' in the Middle East, the Forward has learned. It was put together by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, an agency that produces independent intelligence assessment reports. Officials at the State Department have taken the unusual step of sending the secret report to a select group of legislators on Capitol Hill.Congressional staffers confirmed the existence of the report, but refused to disclose any details, citing the document's classified status."
Of course, many anti-war activists remain convinced that the administration's rush to war is primarily about oil -- specifically locking up Iraq's oil to slake America's massive thirst for petroleum. Mother Jones contributing writer Robert Dreyfuss reports that the reasoning is partly right. Tracing the roots of the war back three decades, Dreyfuss explains how an invasion of Iraq and control of Iraq's oil fields is a pivotal step in an effort to control the flow of Gulf oil -- and with it the world's economy. The war is about oil, Dreyfuss writes, because oil is power.
In fact, Dreyfuss reports that many oil companies are actually deeply concerned about a war in Iraq, worried that it will spawn chaos throughout the oil-producing region. Still, as Warren Vieth and Elizabeth Douglass report, American and British oil companies would certainly be "long-term beneficiaries of a successful military offensive."
"Industry officials say Hussein's ouster would help level the playing field for U.S. and British firms that have been shut out of Iraq as Baghdad has negotiated with rivals from other countries -- notably France, Russia and China, three leading opponents of war.A post-Hussein Iraq also would be a bonanza for the U.S.-dominated oil-services industry, which is in the business of rehabilitating damaged infrastructure, reversing declining output from aging fields and providing essential support work to drillers and explorers. A leader in that industry is Halliburton Co., where Dick Cheney was chief executive before becoming vice president."
In campaigning for the White House, President Bush described himself as 'a uniter, not a divider." Well, Bush may have split NATO, torn apart the Security Council, and divided the country, but he's managed to get two of the world's most committed antagonists to agree on at least one point. As the BBC reports, both Pakistan and India have announced they strongly oppose any US military adventurism in Iraq.
Of course, the countries have somewhat different reasons for standing against Washington's plans, and a joint statement on Iraq from Islamabad and Delhi is a verified longshot. Popular opposition to the war is remarkably strong in both countries, but neither government wants to alienate the US. So, while they trade diplomatic barbs and artillary shells over Kashmir, the governments of India and Pakistan can take solace in the fact that, on at least one issue, they are in the same position.
Reconstruction, Pentagon-Style
The Bush administration is clearly eager to fight a war in Iraq, and clearly believes it can do so without any help. But is Washington as eager to rebuild the country it's about to invade? And can the US accomplish that massive undertaking without international support?
Hugh White of the Melbourne Age asserts that the White House has shown little appetite for the work or the bill.
"George Bush has done little to prepare Americans for what will probably be a long and difficult task. The military dimensions alone are daunting. America's army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, was reprimanded by the Pentagon recently for saying the occupation force would need to number several hundred thousand troops. But comparisons with peacekeeping operations elsewhere suggest he was right....
Britain has hoped that the UN will come to the rescue, and take over responsibility for Iraq, as it did in East Timor. But if the invasion goes ahead without UN endorsement, the UN is unlikely to help pick up the pieces afterwards. Herein lie the seeds of a troubled future. America has the will to invade Iraq without UN support, but it may not have the will to rebuild it without UN support."
Sandra Mitchell, the head of the International Rescue Committe, told US Senators that the UN and private aid organizations were finding it nearly impossible to plan for an invasion's humanitarian fallout -- primarly because the US has allowed military planning to blot out all other on-the-ground concerns.
"'US planning has so embedded humanitarian tasks and activities with the military war plan that vital information remains classified,' Ms Mitchell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She pointed out that over two weeks ago, the UN's top humanitarian official had said food stocks and supplies being sent to the region by the US Government were not enough to meet the needs of Iraq....
Secrecy over its humanitarian plans was underscored when the man who has been nominated to run the program declined to appear at the Senate hearings. General Jay Garner told the senators he was 'unavailable.'"
That's not to say the Bush administration is keeping all its reconstruction initiatives under wraps. Among other things, a select group of US construction firms has been invited to bid on a lucrative contract to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. As Sheryl Fred of the Center for Responsive Politics reports, those companies are generous in their own rights -- contributing "a combined $2.8 million--68 percent to Republicans--over the past two election cycles."
Randeep Ramesh, noting that Halliburton is among the firms invited to bid on the huge progect, argues that the effort to impose order on Iraq "is a decision that involves weighing difficult moral, ethical and legal issues that threaten to destabilise the fragile world order." It should not, Ramesh asserts, be "just another business opportunity."
"The 25 million people of Iraq deserve better, especially considering the scope of the humanitarian assistance that will be necessary, in the event of war, to feed, house, clothe and care for refugees, the wounded and ill in Iraq, as well as those who will inevitably flee to neighbouring states."
