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History > 2007 > USA > Politics > International (IV)
Illustration: Patrick Thomas
Middle East Peace Through Anxiety
NYT 2.12.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02oren.html
Connections
How Bhutto Won Washington
December 30, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON
BENAZIR BHUTTO always understood Washington more than Washington understood
her.
Ms. Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition leader and two-time prime minister, who was
assassinated in Rawalpindi on Thursday as she campaigned for the office a third
time, had a more extensive network of powerful friends in the capital’s
political and media elite than almost any other foreign leader. Over the years,
she scrupulously cultivated those friends, many from her days at Harvard and
Oxford. She was rewarded when her connections — at the White House, in Congress
and within the foreign policy establishment — helped propel her into power in
Pakistan.
But in the end, with yet another American administration behind her, Ms.
Bhutto’s Washington network only underscored how little the United States
fathomed the feudal politics of South Asia, and its own ability to control
events in the cauldron of Pakistan.
“I always thought this was roughly how it would end for her, but I didn’t think
it would happen today,” Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador
and a longtime friend of Ms. Bhutto’s, said in an interview on Thursday.
A descendant of a feudal landholding family in Sindh, a southern province, Ms.
Bhutto was raised in a mansion in the Karachi seaside neighborhood of Clifton
and educated at Christian convent schools. She arrived at Harvard in the fall of
1969 as a primly dressed 16-year-old, bewildered by American customs. “I was
amazed at how people talked to their parents — not enough respect,” she later
told The Washington Post.
But Ms. Bhutto adapted, and quickly befriended not only Mr. Galbraith but E. J.
Dionne and Michael Kinsley, now both columnists for The Post, and Walter
Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute and a former managing editor of
Time. By the time she got to Oxford, Ms. Bhutto drove a sports car, and she soon
became president of the Oxford Union debating society. “I remember her being
very intense,” Mr. Isaacson recalled. “But she had this really big smile, and
she had this ability to be charming.”
Ms. Bhutto’s first important trip to Washington was in the spring of 1984, when
Mr. Galbraith, then a Democratic staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, acted as her host and tutor. By then she was 30 years old and scarred
from the bloody politics back home. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been
president and prime minister of Pakistan but was hanged in 1979 on the orders of
Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military ruler. Ms. Bhutto, who had spent
months in prison and years under house arrest, was now leader of the Pakistan
Peoples Party of her father and determined to oust General Zia.
Her goal in Washington was to persuade conservative Reagan administration
officials that they would be better off with her in power. It was not going to
be easy: Ms. Bhutto’s father was known for his fiery anti-Western rhetoric, and
she had marched against the Vietnam War at Harvard.
“What she was up against was her reputation of being this anti-American
radical,” Mr. Galbraith said. “So we spent a lot of time talking about what
messages she needed to convey.”
In meetings with key members of Congress at the time — among them Senator
Charles H. Percy, the Illinois Republican who was chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, and Representative Stephen J. Solarz of Brooklyn, who was a
senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — Ms. Bhutto, under Mr.
Galbraith’s tutelage, expressed her support for democracy and the mujahedeen
“freedom fighters” who were battling the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan.
“She was this completely charming, beautiful woman who could flatter the
senators, and who could read their political concerns, who could persuade them
that she would much better serve American interests in Afghanistan than Zia,”
Mr. Galbraith said.
On that same trip, Mr. Galbraith introduced Ms. Bhutto to Mark Siegel, a
political operative who had been executive director of the Democratic National
Committee. Mr. Siegel was taken with Ms. Bhutto and supported her cause. He
became a lobbyist for the government of Pakistan when Ms. Bhutto was in power.
Most recently he was her collaborator on a book scheduled for publication in
2008.
“I started to walk the halls of Congress with her in 1984, and she developed
poise and confidence and maturity,” Mr. Siegel said. “She also understood how
important these relationships were.” Still, he said, “I would have dinner
parties at my house in the beginning, and it was not so easy to get journalists
and congressmen and senators to come.”
That changed in November 1988, when Ms. Bhutto’s party won a plurality in
Parliament in the Pakistani elections but fell short of a majority. As Mr.
Galbraith tells it, Reagan administration officials went to Ghulam Ishaq Khan,
Pakistan’s acting president, and told him that since Ms. Bhutto commanded the
most votes, he would have to invite her to form a government. Ms. Bhutto became
prime minister on Dec. 2.
“And that was the direct result of her networking, of her being able to persuade
the Washington establishment, the foreign policy community, the press, the think
tanks, that she was a democrat, that she was a moderate, that she was going to
be against the Soviets in Afghanistan,” Mr. Galbraith said.
Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Ms. Bhutto and a professor of international
relations at Boston University, agreed that her Washington network helped her
become prime minister, particularly in the face of Pakistan’s powerful army and
intelligence service. “Had the Americans not put their foot down, the
military-intelligence services would have stopped her,” Mr. Haqqani said.
Although Ms. Bhutto was twice expelled from office on charges of corruption, she
kept up her visits to Washington, usually several a year. She would call on
administration officials and members of Congress willing to see her as well as
reporters and editors at The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall
Street Journal. Soon her American Christmas card list, excluding people in
government and Congress, was up to 375 names.
“She understood the nature of political life, which is to stay in touch with
people whether you’re in or out of office,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, the former
assistant secretary of state for South Asia who attended a dinner for Ms. Bhutto
at the Willard Hotel on her last trip to Washington, in September. “She was a
superb political operative.”
Like other foreign leaders, Ms. Bhutto engaged a public relations firm to
arrange meetings for her with administration officials, members of Congress and
journalists. For the first six months of 2007, the firm Burson-Marsteller took
in fees of close to $250,000 for work on behalf of Ms. Bhutto.
Ms. Bhutto kept up her networking until the very end. Last week, Mr. Siegel
said, he e-mailed Ms. Bhutto to tell her he had heard that their publisher,
HarperCollins, was pleased with the book the two had just turned in,
“Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West.” He received a happy response
from Ms. Bhutto by BlackBerry. “Which we called her ‘crackberry’ because she was
so addicted to it,” Mr. Siegel said.
The time was 2 a.m. Thursday, noon in Rawalpindi. Six hours later, Ms. Bhutto
was dead.
As always, her last e-mail message to Mr. Siegel had been an almost
instantaneous response. “She would answer me within 15 minutes, even at crazy
times,” Mr. Siegel said. “I said, ‘Why are you up?’ And she would say, ‘I’m
working.’ ”
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
How Bhutto Won
Washington, NYT, 30.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/30bumiller.html?hp
China Finds American Allies for Security
December 28, 2007
The New York Times
By KEITH BRADSHER
BEIJING — In preparation for the Beijing Olympics and a series of other
international events, some American companies are helping the Chinese government
design and install one of the most comprehensive high-tech public surveillance
systems in the world.
When told of the companies’ transactions, critics of China’s human rights record
said the work violated the spirit of a sanctions law Congress passed after the
Tiananmen Square killings.
The Commerce Department, however, says the sophisticated systems being
installed, by companies like Honeywell, General Electric, United Technologies
and I.B.M., do not run afoul of the ban on providing China with “crime control
or detection instruments or equipment.” But the department has just opened a
45-day review of its policies on the sale of crime-control gear to China.
With athletes and spectators coming from around the world, every Olympic host
nation works to build the best security system it can. In an era of heightened
terrorism concerns, it could be argued, high-tech surveillance will be an
indispensable part of China’s security preparations for the Olympics, which runs
Aug. 8 to 24. And given China’s enormous economic potential, corporations are
always eager to get a foothold here; the Olympics provides a prime opportunity.
But China’s regime, the most authoritarian to hold an Olympics since the Soviet
Union’s in 1980, also presents particular challenges. Long after the visitors
leave, security industry experts say, the surveillance equipment that Western
companies leave behind will provide the authorities here with new tools to track
not only criminals, but dissidents too.
“I don’t know of an intelligence-gathering operation in the world that, when
given a new toy, doesn’t use it,” said Steve Vickers, a former head of criminal
intelligence for the Hong Kong police who now leads a consulting firm.
Indeed, the autumn issue of the magazine of China’s public security ministry
prominently listed places of religious worship and Internet cafes as locations
to install new cameras.
A Commerce Department official who insisted on anonymity said that the agency
was reviewing its entire list of banned exports, including military equipment,
although the sale of crime control gear to China is on a special, fast-track
review. Asked whether equipment identified as commercial by Western
manufacturers could have crime control applications, the official replied,
“There may be users in China who figure out law enforcement uses for it.”
Multinationals are reluctant to discuss their sales to China’s security forces,
but they say they have done everything necessary to comply with relevant laws.
Information is not easy to come by, but an outline of China’s mammoth effort can
be found in interviews with engineers at the public security ministry’s biennial
convention, in visits to Chinese surveillance camera factories and police
stations, and in reports on China prepared for member companies of the Security
Industry Association, a trade group based in Alexandria, Va.
Interviews with security experts and executives in Asia and the United States
also provided previously unknown details about the systems American companies
are providing.
Honeywell has already started helping the police to set up an elaborate computer
monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of
Beijing’s most populated districts, where several Olympic sites are located.
The company is working on more expansive systems in Shanghai, in preparation for
the 2010 World Expo there — in addition to government and business security
systems in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Changsha, Tianjin, Kunming and Xi’an.
General Electric has sold to Chinese authorities its powerful VisioWave system,
which allows security officers to control thousands of video cameras
simultaneously and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving
objects, like people running. The system will be deployed at Beijing’s national
convention center, including the Olympics media center.
I.B.M. is installing a similar system in Beijing that should be ready before the
Olympics and will analyze and catalog people and behavior.
Julie Donahue, I.B.M.’s vice president for security and privacy services, told a
technology news service in early December that by next summer I.B.M. would
install in Beijing its newly developed Smart Surveillance System, a powerful
network that links large numbers of video cameras. Company officials declined
repeated requests to answer questions about the system or discuss Ms. Donahue’s
remarks.
United Technologies flew three engineers from its Lenel security subsidiary in
Rochester to Guangzhou, the biggest metropolis in southeastern China, to
customize a 2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step
toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian
Games in 2010. The company is also seeking contracts to build that network.
Critics argue that all these programs violate the spirit, if not the letter, of
the American law written in response to the military crackdown at Tiananmen
Square in 1989.
The Commerce Department, charged with developing regulations that put the law in
effect, stands by its rules. The department bars exports whose sole use is law
enforcement, like equipment for detecting fingerprints at crime scenes. But
video systems are allowed if they are “industrial or civilian intrusion alarm,
traffic or industrial movement control or counting systems,” according to the
regulations.
Since multinationals increasingly manufacture some security systems in China,
export rules are irrelevant. But the post-Tiananmen law also prohibits companies
from using American security technology anywhere in the world to supply China
with banned products.
The companies note that the products they provide are not banned by the
government. Honeywell said that it complies with the letter and spirit of the
laws in every country where it operates. G.E. said it had reviewed the VisioWave
sale to China and believed that it has complied fully with both the letter and
spirit of the law.
United Technologies said that the equipment it is selling for Guangzhou is not
banned under the legislation. I.B.M. said only that it complies with American
regulations.
James Mulvenon is the director of the Center for Intelligence Research and
Analysis, a government contractor in Washington that does classified analyses on
overseas military and intelligence programs. He said the companies’
participation in Chinese surveillance “violates the spirit of the Tiananmen
legislation.”
Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California who is chairman of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, said United States companies “obviously don’t know
the meaning of decency if they’re seeking out ways to wriggle through the
loopholes in our laws to capitalize on the market opportunities presented by the
Olympics.”
He added that his committee would continue its investigation into what he sees
as American corporate assistance for political repression.
Mr. Mulvenon said that the pace of technological change means that products with
mainly civilian applications, like management computer systems with powerful
video surveillance features, had blurred the distinction between law enforcement
and civilian technologies. But he said the Commerce Department tended to define
narrowly the technologies that qualify as crime control and prevention under the
Tiananmen legislation.
The Commerce Department official said the department’s Bureau of Industry and
Security had prevented the export of a “medium-tech” product to China for the
Olympics that was clearly intended for law enforcement use. The official
declined to identify the product and insisted on anonymity because he was not
authorized to speak for the department.
Olympics security spending increased rapidly this year, after China’s
little-noticed decision last winter to create a nationwide “safe cities”
program, establishing surveillance camera networks in more than 600 cities.
A table in the security ministry’s magazine suggested the number of surveillance
cameras needed in each community, based on its size, international prominence
and location — from 250,000 to 300,000 cameras in metropolises like Beijing and
Shanghai to 1,000 to 5,000 cameras for small towns and rural counties.
London already has as many as 500,000 cameras, if the count includes video
systems at banks, supermarkets and other commercial locations. But government
agencies in London have installed smaller, separate systems of a few hundred
cameras at a time, in contrast with the highly integrated approach of the
Chinese government.
By comparison, in New York City, the police are trying to assemble a network of
3,000 public and private cameras below Canal Street to discourage terrorism in
Lower Manhattan; they are starting with 100 cameras.
Even China lacks enough security guards to watch the video feeds from so many
cameras. So authorities have been shopping for foreign computer systems that
automatically analyze the information, security executives said.
At this year’s security equipment convention — in Shenzhen, the center of
China’s security industry — multinationals competed with Chinese companies to
offer high-tech products, as police officials from around the country browsed
the booths.
Part of the sales pitches from American companies is that their systems can
protect the local police in incidents of alleged police abuse. When a car in
Beijing hit an elderly foreign tourist, the police used Honeywell systems to
check a nearby street camera and discovered that the tourist had been
jaywalking, said He Han, a Honeywell engineer who had worked on the system.
“We were one of the first to introduce foreign advanced products and management
practices,” Mr. He said. “We have the biggest user network in China.”
If American companies do not sell security systems here, Chinese companies will;
the Shenzhen conference drew a handful of American companies, but about 800 of
the nearly 1,000 exhibitors were Chinese — and they were aggressively pursuing
contracts.
The young engineers in jacket and tie at the American booths stood in sharp
contrast, for example, to a Chinese company’s booth with a half-dozen young
women in black patent-leather boots and metallic silver micro-mini dresses.
China is likely to emerge from the Olympics with remarkable surveillance
capabilities, said Mr. Vickers, the former Hong Kong police official.
“They are certainly getting the best stuff,” he added. “One, because money
talks, and second, because whatever the diplomatic issues, the U.S. wants to
supply the Olympics.”
China Finds American
Allies for Security, NYT, 28.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/business/worldbusiness/28security.html?hp
News Analysis
Salvaging U.S. Diplomacy Amid Division
December 28, 2007
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
WASHINGTON — The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday left in ruins
the delicate diplomatic effort the Bush administration had pursued in the past
year to reconcile Pakistan’s deeply divided political factions. Now it is
scrambling to sort through ever more limited options, as American influence on
Pakistan’s internal affairs continues to decline.
On Thursday, officials at the American Embassy in Islamabad reached out to
members of the political party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, according
to a senior administration official. The very fact that officials are even
talking to backers of Mr. Sharif, who they believe has too many ties to
Islamists, suggests how hard it will be to find a partner the United States
fully trusts.
The assassination highlighted, in spectacular fashion, the failure of two of
President Bush’s main objectives in the region: his quest to bring democracy to
the Muslim world, and his drive to force out the Islamist militants who have
hung on tenaciously in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed state considered ground zero
in President Bush’s fight against terrorism, despite the administration’s
long-running effort to root out Al Qaeda from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Administration officials say the United States still wants the Pakistani
elections to proceed, either as scheduled on Jan. 8 or soon after. But several
senior administration officials acknowledged that President Pervez Musharraf may
decide to put off the elections if the already unstable political climate in
Pakistan deteriorates further.
The administration official said American Embassy officials were trying to reach
out to Pakistani political players across the board in the aftermath of the
Bhutto assassination.
“Look, most of the people in Musharraf’s party came out of Nawaz’s party,” the
official said, referring to Mr. Sharif and speaking on condition of anonymity
because of diplomatic sensitivities. While he acknowledged that an alliance
between Mr. Sharif and Mr. Musharraf was unlikely given the long enmity between
the men, he added, “I wouldn’t predict anything in politics.”
Foreign policy analysts and diplomats said that if there were one thing that Ms.
Bhutto’s assassination has made clear, it was the inability of the United States
to manipulate the internal political affairs of Pakistan. Even before the
assassination, the United States had limited influence and did not back Ms.
Bhutto to the hilt.
“We are a player in the Pakistani political system,” said Wendy Chamberlin, a
former United States ambassador to Pakistan, adding that as such, the United
States was partly to blame for Mr. Musharraf’s dip in popularity. But, she
added: “This is Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very dangerous and violent place.”
That said, Pakistan has never been more important for the United States than it
is right now as it teeters on the edge of internal chaos. Bush administration
officials have been trying mightily to balance the American insistence that
Pakistan remain on the path to democracy and Mr. Musharraf’s unwillingness to
risk unrest that would allow Al Qaeda and the Taliban to operate more freely,
particularly with American and NATO troops next door in Afghanistan.
That is why the administration had been fighting so hard, amid skepticism from
many of its allies, to broker an agreement in which the increasingly unpopular
Mr. Musharraf would share power with Ms. Bhutto after presidential and
parliamentary elections. American officials viewed the power-sharing proposal
partly as a way to force Mr. Musharraf onto a democratic path, and partly to
relieve the growing pressure for his ouster.
On the basis of that plan, Ms. Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October after
eight years of self-imposed exile.
But the power-sharing deal never came to fruition, as the increasingly besieged
Mr. Musharraf imposed a series of autocratic measures that left him politically
weakened.
Administration officials continued to prod Ms. Bhutto toward an arranged
marriage with Mr. Musharraf even during the emergency rule. Deputy Secretary of
State John D. Negroponte traveled to Pakistan in November, and spoke by
telephone to Ms. Bhutto while Mr. Musharraf had her under house arrest. With
both sides balking at the power-sharing deal — an agreement one Bush official
acknowledged was “like putting two pythons in the same cage” — Mr. Negroponte
continued to push Ms. Bhutto to agree to the plan, according to members of Ms.
Bhutto’s political party.
“I think it was insane,” said Teresita Schaffer, a Pakistan expert at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, of the proposed alliance. “I don’t
think Musharraf ever wanted to share power.”
Until this week, Bush administration officials were still hoping that Mr.
Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto would form an alliance between their political parties
after Pakistan’s Jan. 8 elections, which would bring about as close to a
pro-American governing coalition in Pakistan as the United States was likely to
get.
The Bhutto assassination upends that plan, but Bush administration officials on
Thursday had still not given up hope that Mr. Musharraf may be able to strike a
ruling coalition with whoever becomes Ms. Bhutto’s successor in her Pakistan
Peoples Party.
The problem with that scenario, though, is that Pakistani political parties are
much more about strong, powerful individuals — like Mr. Musharraf, Ms. Bhutto,
or Mr. Sharif — than about the parties themselves. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice telephoned Ms. Bhutto’s second-in-command, Makhdoom Amin Fahim,
to offer sympathy, and she pledged to continue to support elections in Pakistan,
administration officials said.
Mr. Bush’s continued strong support for Mr. Musharraf could further erode his
already declining popular support, even if the administration still sees his
leadership as the best guarantor of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
“The danger is the centrist elements of Pakistan will be so demoralized,” said
Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He criticized
the administration for not nurturing Pakistan’s opposition for so long after Mr.
Musharraf’s coup in 1999. He expressed hope that the United States could still
urge moderate parties to ally themselves with Mr. Musharraf, forming a governing
coalition, assuming that the elections go ahead.
“It should wake up anybody who thinks that Pakistan is a stable country and that
we can deal only with Musharraf,” Mr. Cohen said of the assassination.
Ms. Schaffer and other Pakistan experts say the administration was making a
mistake by viewing Mr. Sharif with suspicion. They said that he was a moderate
who will work with the United States in the fight against terrorism, citing his
cooperation with Clinton administration.
Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, was in Islamabad with Rep.
Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, on a scheduled trip and preparing
to meet Ms. Bhutto at 9 p.m. Thursday when the news of the bombing broke. They
watched the news in their hotel, with initial reports that she had escaped
injury giving way to confirmation of her death.
“I think our foreign policy relied on her personality as a stabilizing force,”
Mr. Specter told reporters by telephone.
“Now, without her, we have to regroup.”
Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Steven Lee Myers from Crawford, Tex.
David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Vermont and David Rohde from New
York.
Salvaging U.S. Diplomacy
Amid Division, NYT, 28.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/world/asia/28policy.html?hp
Assassination Poses Dilemma for US
December 27, 2007
Filed at 2:51 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration scrambled Thursday to deal with
the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's after
having investing significant diplomatic capital in promoting reconciliation
between her and President Pervez Musharraf.
President Bush, speaking briefly to reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas,
urged that her murder not derail nascent efforts to restore democratic rule
ahead of parliamentary elections set for next month. And he demanded that those
responsible for the killing be brought to justice.
''The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists
who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy,'' said Bush, who looked tense
and took no questions. He expressed his deepest condolences to Bhutto's family
and to the families of others slain in the attack and to all the people of
Pakistan.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed those comments, calling on Pakistanis
to remain calm.
''The deadly results of this attack will no doubt test the will and patience of
the people of Pakistan,'' Rice said in a statement. ''We urge the Pakistani
people, political leaders, and civil society to maintain calm and to work
together to build a more moderate, peaceful, and democratic future.''
Bush's appearance came as U.S. officials struggled with the implications of the
assassination on relations with a nuclear-armed country that has received
billions of dollars in American financial assistance and is a key ally in the
war on terrorism. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Bush spoke briefly by
phone with Musharraf but he had no details.
Bhutto was mortally wounded Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at
least 20 others at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi. She served twice as
Pakistan's prime minister between 1988 and 1996. She had returned to Pakistan
from an eight-year exile Oct. 18. Her homecoming parade in Karachi was also
targeted by a suicide attacker, killing more than 140 people.
Stanzel said it was too soon to say who was responsible.
''I'm aware that al-Qaida may have claimed responsibility,'' Stanzel said. ''I'm
aware of news reports of that. But I don't have any specifics for you on that.''
He did say, ''Whoever perpetrated this attack is an enemy of democracy and has
used a tactic that al-Qaida is very familiar with, and that is suicide bombing
and the taking of innocent life to try to disrupt the democratic process.''
The White House expects an open review of the assassination. Stanzel said that
was crucial for the long-term prospects of democracy in Pakistan. He would not
get specific about what role, if any, the United States would play but stressed
that the United States considers Pakistan a close ally.
In his comments, Bush said asked that Pakistanis honor Bhutto's memory ''by
continuing with the democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life.''
At the State Department, deputy spokesman Tom Casey said that meant not
postponing the Jan. 8 elections and not re-imposing emergency rule, which
Musharraf declared in the fall and rescinded only earlier this month.
''It would be a victory for no one but the extremists responsible for this
attack to have some kind of postponement or a delay directly related to it in
the democratic process,'' he told reporters. ''We certainly would not think it
appropriate to have any kind of return to emergency rule or other kinds of
measures taken in response to this.''
The United States had been at the forefront of foreign powers trying to arrange
reconciliation between Bhutto and Musharraf, who under heavy U.S. pressure
resigned as army chief and earlier this month lifted a state of emergency, in
the hope it would put Pakistan back on the road to democracy. Bhutto's return to
the country after years in exile and the ability of her party to contest free
and fair elections had been a cornerstone of Bush's policy in Pakistan, where
U.S. officials had watched Musharraf's growing authoritarianism with increasing
unease.
Those concerns were compounded by the rising threat from al-Qaida and Taliban
extremists, particularly in Pakistan's largely ungoverned tribal areas bordering
Afghanistan despite the fact that Washington had pumped nearly $10 billion in
aid into the country since Musharraf became an indispensable counterterrorism
ally after Sept. 11, 2001.
Said Sen. Richard Lugar, leading Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee,
''This is a critical moment for Pakistan, for the region, and for the community
of nations as we encourage democracy and stability in Pakistan.''
Irritated by the situation, Congress last week imposed new restrictions on U.S.
assistance to Pakistan, including tying $50 million in military aid to State
Department assurances that the country is making ''concerted efforts'' to
prevent terrorists from operating inside its borders.
Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said
the assassination should spur a recommitment of U.S. support for Pakistan's
democracy.
''This atrocious attack should compel the United States to renew our commitment
to the people of Pakistan and to the voices of moderation,'' he said. ''Although
one of those voices has been prematurely silenced today, it is up to all of us
to make sure that those who have perpetrated this hideous act are brought to
justice, and that those who continue to spew the venomous, hate-filled rhetoric
of extremism are vanquished.''
Other U.S. officials and presidential candidates also issued statements
expressing shock at Bhutto's assassination. Democratic presidential candidate
Joe Biden of Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said,
''I am convinced Ms. Bhutto would have won free and fair elections next week.
The fact that she was by far Pakistan's most popular leader underscores the fact
that there is a vast, moderate majority in Pakistan that must have a clear voice
in the system.''
------
Associated Press reporters Charles Babington and Eileen Sullivan in Washington
and Ben Feller in Crawford, Texas contributed to this story.
Assassination Poses
Dilemma for US, NYT, 27.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Pakistan.html
Bhutto Reactions
December 27, 2007
Filed at 2:35 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
Reactions to the assassination of former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto.
------
''The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists
who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy. Those who committed this crime
must be brought to justice.'' -- President Bush.
------
''The brutal assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is
a tragic setback for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. Her courageous
return to Pakistan this year gave hope to all those concerned by efforts to
extinguish rule of law there.'' -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
------
''Benazir Bhutto's bravery stands in stark contrast to the cowardice of those
who remain committed only to chaos, murder and thwarting democracy in
Pakistan.'' -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
------
''It is important, when faced with the violence and loss of innocent life over
the last few days, that political leaders show a commitment to resolve but also
restraint. Extremists must be brought to justice, but extremism must not
undermine commitment to the rule of law, to human rights, and to democracy.'' --
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
------
''This cowardice act serves as yet another reminder that we must remain vigilant
in standing against the enemies of freedom in Pakistan and around the world to
ensure that their efforts to thwart democracy will once again fail.'' -- House
Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
------
''This is a sorrowful day for Pakistan and for people of goodwill across the
globe.'' -- Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
------
''This is a critical moment for Pakistan, for the region and for the community
of nations as we encourage democracy and stability in Pakistan. I reiterate
President Bush's call for continuing with the election on January 8 in honor of
Benazir Bhutto's memory.'' -- Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.
------
''The tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto was a brutal act of violence and my
prayers are with the Bhutto family. Terrorists will continue to strike at
democratic and freedom loving people around the world. It is critical that we
continue to hunt down and punish these violent extremists and remain vigilant in
the war on terror.'' -- Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo.
------
''Her death is a tragedy for her country and a terrible reminder of the work
that remains to bring peace, stability and hope to regions of the globe too
often paralyzed by fear, hatred and violence.'' -- Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
------
''Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere -- whether in New York,
London, Tel Aviv or Rawalpindi -- is an enemy of freedom. We must redouble our
efforts to win the terrorists' war on us.'' -- Former New York City Mayor Rudy
Giuliani, a Republican.
------
''I am shocked and saddened by the death of Benazir Bhutto in this terrorist
atrocity. She was a respected and resilient advocate for the democratic
aspirations of the Pakistani people. We join with them in mourning her loss, and
stand with them in their quest for democracy and against the terrorists who
threaten the common security of the world. -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.
------
''This points out again the extraordinary reality of global, violent, radical
jihadism. We don't know who is responsible for this attack, but there's no
question but that the violence we see throughout the world is violence which is
not limited to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, but is more global in nature.'' --
Former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.
------
''At this critical moment, America must convey both strength and principle. We
should do everything in our power to help bring the perpetrators of this heinous
act to justice and to ensure that Bhutto's movement toward democracy
continues.'' -- Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.
------
On this sad day, we are reminded that while our democracy has flaws, it stands
as a shining beacon of hope for nations and people around the world who seek
peace and opportunity through self-government. -- Former Gov. Mike Huckabee,
R-Ark.
------ ''The fact that she was by far Pakistan's most popular leader underscores
the fact that there is a vast, moderate majority in Pakistan that must have a
clear voice in the system. Her assassination makes it all the more urgent that
Pakistan return to a democratic path.'' -- Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.
------
''I offer my deepest condolences for the loss of Benazir Bhutto and to the
families of those killed today. This is a terrible loss to her supporters, the
people of Pakistan and for democracy.'' -- Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.
------
At this critical time we must do everything in our power to help Pakistan
continue the path toward democracy and full elections. Our first priority must
be to ensure stability in this critical nuclear state. -- Sen. Chris Dodd,
D-Conn.
------
''We must use our diplomatic leverage and force the enemies of democracy to
yield. President Bush should press Musharraf to step aside, and a broad-based
coalition government, consisting of all the democratic parties, should be formed
immediately. Until this happens, we should suspend military aid to the Pakistani
government.'' -- Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M.
Bhutto Reactions, NYT,
27.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Pakistan-Quotes.html
Bush Condemns Assassination
December 27, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
CRAWFORD, Tex. — President Bush on Thursday condemned the assassination of
Pakistan’s opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, a killing that left in ruins the
delicate diplomatic effort his administration had pursued for the last year to
reconcile that country’s deeply divided political factions.
Speaking to reporters while vacationing at his ranch here, Mr. Bush spoke only
briefly and answered no questions, underscoring the uncertainty Ms. Bhutto’s
death has caused for Pakistan and for his own policies.
“The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists
who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy,” Mr. Bush said. “Those who
committed this crime must be brought to justice.”
Now, more than ever, the Bush administration’s hopes for Pakistan rest almost
entirely with President Pervez Musharraf, the newly retired general whose
autocratic measures — most recently a declaration of emergency rule — have left
him weakened and broadly unpopular.
The apparent fragility of his power, coupled with the rise of extremism in
Pakistan, is what led President Bush’s aides to try to broker a power-sharing
agreement between Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Musharraf in the first place. Those efforts
faltered almost immediately after she returned to Pakistan in October, and ended
completely with her death.
Mr. Bush praised Ms. Bhutto more strongly than he had until now, saying: “she
knew that her return to Pakistan earlier this year put her life at risk. Yet she
refused to let assassins to dictate the course of her country.”
He expressed his condolences to Ms. Bhutto’s family, the families of the others
who died and “to all the people of Pakistan on this tragic occasion.” He said
that the best way to honor her assassination would be “by continuing with the
democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life.”
Mr. Musharraf, who seized power in a coup in 1999, has been a strong ally since
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration embraced his undemocratic
rule, while nudging him to make democratic reforms, using the country as a
bulwark against Al Qaeda in neighboring Afghanistan and, increasingly, in
Pakistan itself.
Mr. Bush referred to the killer — a single gunman who then detonated a suicide
bomb, according to reports — as “murderous extremists,” evidently accepting the
idea that those who killed her are in the same league as Al Qaeda, though there
is no immediate evidence of any terrorist group’s involvement.
Ms. Bhutto’s supporters, though, are sure to suspect the involvement of Mr.
Musharraf’s government or the security services, by either tacitly or
negligently failing to protect her. And Mr. Bush’s stance — his still strong
support for Mr. Musharraf — could further erode popular support for Mr.
Musharraf, even if the administration still sees his leadership as the best
guarantor of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
“The danger is the centrist elements of Pakistan will be so demoralized,”
Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in a
telephone interview on Thursday.
He criticized the administration for failing to nurture Pakistan’s opposition
for so long after Mr. Musharraf’s coup. He expressed hope that the United States
could still urge moderate parties to ally themselves with Mr. Musharraf, forming
a governing coalition, assuming that elections scheduled for next month go
ahead.
“It should wake up anybody who thinks that Pakistan is a stable country and that
we can deal only with Musharraf,” Dr. Cohen said of the assassination.
Bush Condemns
Assassination, NYT, 27.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/world/asia/28cnd-policy.html
Doubts Engulf an American Aid Plan for Pakistan
December 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Weeks before it is to begin, an ambitious American aid
plan to counter militancy in Pakistan’s tribal areas is threatened by important
unresolved questions about who will monitor the money and whether it could fall
into the wrong hands, according to American and Pakistani officials and analysts
familiar with the plan.
The disputes have left many skeptical that the $750 million five-year plan can
succeed in competing for the allegiance of an estimated 400,000 young tribesmen
in the restive tribal region, a mountainous swath of territory left destitute by
British colonialists and ignored by successive Pakistani governments. Today, the
Taliban, Al Qaeda and other foreign militants use the area as a base to fuel
violence and instability in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan and to plot
terrorist attacks abroad.
Critics of the aid plan say the region is rife with corruption, and even
Pakistan’s own government has limited reach there. But the risk of leaving it
isolated and undeveloped is greater than ever. This month, Bush administration
officials acknowledged they were reviewing their Afghan war plans top to bottom.
The civilian aid program would provide jobs and schooling, build 600 miles of
roads and improve literacy in an area where almost no women can read. It adds to
the more than $1 billion in American military aid to Pakistan annually — much of
which does not make its way to frontline Pakistani units, some American
officials now acknowledge. The tribal area for which this new money is intended
remains so unsafe that no senior American official has visited in the last nine
months.
“My sense is they are ready to start, but who is going to be responsible for
management?” said Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, who
serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is one of several members of
Congress who have begun pushing the State Department for details of how the
civilian aid will be monitored. They said they had not received satisfactory
answers. The importance of the issue, they said, was underlined by the scores of
investigations into corruption connected with huge amounts of money and
equipment for reconstruction and strengthening Iraq’s army and police forces
that cannot be accounted for.
“We’re not quite certain about it,” Mr. Tierney said. “I have concerns that it
not be a repeat of situations in Iraq.”
In fact, wary of corruption and hamstrung by local hostility, American officials
say that as in Iraq they will rely heavily on private contractors to administer
the development aid, a decision that could eat up as much as half the budget.
Other proposals, like training a civilian conservation corps, have yet to gain
traction.
The new program is meant to start slowly, with the first portion of the overall
program out to bid at $350 million. Among the handful of companies invited to
bid are DynCorp International and Creative Associates International Inc., both
of which won substantial contracts in Iraq. How effective they will be in the
tribal areas is equally uncertain.
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, where large numbers of American soldiers offer some
protection to aid projects, the Pakistani authorities tightly control access to
the tribal areas. The Pakistani military has suffered hundreds of casualties
trying to subdue the area in the last few years, and heavy fighting has flared
again in recent weeks.
The region remains so dangerous that it is virtually off limits even to American
military officials and civilians who would oversee the programs. The Pakistani
authorities have ruled out using foreign nonprofit groups, known as NGOs,
shorthand for nongovernmental organizations. But neither do they approve the
American choice of private contractors. They would like the money to go through
them.
“We are living in times when NGOs are considered to be all out to convert
tribesmen,” Javed Iqbal, until recently the additional chief secretary of
Federally Administered Tribal Areas, as the region is formally called. The title
is a holdover from the British era.
“To deal with the tribesmen, you have to understand the tribes,” Mr. Iqbal said.
“You cannot ask a woman how frequently does she take contraception, which was
one of the questions on an NGO questionnaire. The first reaction is going to box
you in the face, and then tell you to get lost.”
But Mr. Iqbal said he was convinced that the for-profit companies would take a
disproportionate amount of the program money. “Forty-eight percent of the
program money goes to consultants,” he said.
Rick Barton, a former official at the United States Agency for International
Development, or A.I.D., who now works on Pakistan issues at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the estimate was in the
ballpark.
Development firms commonly charge 25 percent to 50 percent of a program’s entire
cost in profit and overhead, depending on the scope and difficulty of the task,
he said. And the task is indeed difficult.
The region of 3.2 million people has no industry, virtually no work and no hope.
Men aged 18 to 25, who are the target of the program, find offers of 300 rupees
a day from the Taliban — about $5 — attractive.
The men, almost entirely Pashtun, have little in common with the rest of
Pakistan. Their Pashtun brethren live in the southern part of Afghanistan,
astride a border that is extremely porous, allowing extremists to move easily
back and forth.
“They are going to find pockets of opportunities,” Mr. Barton said. “But will it
be a lot of nice things that won’t add up to much? Probably.”
The hostility to Westerners has become so intense in and around the tribal areas
that an Austrian refugee worker said she was barred in early December from
walking through a refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar that she had
regularly visited for the last six years.
Westerners, she said, are believed to be implicated in what Pakistanis see as an
American foreign policy that is anti-Muslim and harms Pakistani interests.
“I offered to cover myself in a burqa, and to wear their kinds of sandals,” said
the worker, Mechtild Petritsch, who works with the Frontier Primary Health
Campaign. “But they said I would be discovered because I walk like a foreigner.”
Nor has the new director of A.I.D. in Islamabad, Anne Aarnes, been able to visit
the tribal areas. It was nine months ago when the deputy chief of mission at the
United States Embassy, Peter Bodde, went to Khyber, one of the seven divisions
of the tribal areas, to address the local Chamber of Commerce. A planned visit
by the new United States ambassador, Anne Patterson, was canceled last month
because of sectarian violence in the area.
“This is an extremely difficult undertaking in an extremely difficult part of
the world,” said a senior American official at the United States Embassy in
Islamabad after the presentation of an embassy PowerPoint slide show attended by
nearly a dozen embassy officials. “Something like this hasn’t been tried on this
scale in this part of the world.”
The presentation listed the range of programs involving A.I.D., the narcotics
section of the State Department and, to a small extent, the Pentagon. Besides
providing jobs, schooling, and roads the American plan also calls for improving
the “capacity” of the local Pakistani authorities so that the government becomes
a more viable and friendly force in everyday lives.
That is an extremely challenging ambition because the government’s
representatives, known as political agents, run their areas with an iron fist
and are almost uniformly corrupt, Pakistani and American officials say.
Moreover, the power of Islamic religious leaders in the region has grown in part
because President Pervez Musharraf has undercut the authority of political
agents, viewing them as competition, Pakistani officials said.
Now the Americans are trying to build up the political agents again and use the
development projects to improve relations between them and local communities.
Concerns about corruption are so severe, however, that the first grants will be
held to only about $25,000 each, to finance small projects like repairing water
wells and small sewage plants.
In an illustration of the challenges facing even modest programs, experts point
to the three-year-old plan by A.I.D. to repair 60 rundown schools. Because of
deteriorating security, even local contractors were too scared to work in some
places. Only 35 schools have been completed, A.I.D. officials said. Some of them
remain bereft of teachers. Several are known as “ghost schools” because they are
used for other purposes.
One successful school in the Mohmand tribal district demonstrates both the need
and the potential for success, however. Enrollment there had shot up to 217
students from 21, according to an American official who sent a Pakistani
employee to scout the situation.
Because the United States is viewed with such opprobrium, it will not be
identified on any of the aid, preventing any possible flow of good will. The aid
will instead be presented as Pakistani. That, said a senior United States
Embassy official, would help the Pakistanis feel like owners of the effort.
“This is about teaching them how to get smart about how to run the country and
win people’s support,” the official said.
Asked what he thought of the American goal to improve the “capacity” of the
administration of which he is a senior member, Mr. Iqbal, the Pakistani
official, who attended college in the United States, replied, “Bunkum.”
To complicate matters further for the Americans, Mr. Iqbal, who had been their
main interlocutor on the program and who by current standards is quite
understanding of the American goals, resigned in early December for an unrelated
reason. American officials said his departure represented a setback for them.
From their side, the American consultants often display a high degree of
skepticism about the Pakistanis. A senior official for one of the contracting
firms in Pakistan, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired,
suggested a way to monitor the money up close, but which is unlikely to be
acceptable in the tribal areas.
In Afghanistan, the contractor shared a compound with the provincial governor.
“That worked pretty good,” he said. “You’ve got to co-locate with the government
officials. We get pushed back, but you make it happen. They don’t like it
because it means they can’t steal.”
Doubts Engulf an
American Aid Plan for Pakistan, NYT, 25.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/world/asia/25pakistan.html?hp
Rice Visits Iraq Amid Strain With Turkey
December 19, 2007
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY and SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unannounced visit to
Iraq on Tuesday, visiting the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and then Baghdad, as
tensions mounted along the country’s mountainous border with Turkey.
Shortly before the visit, Turkish troops staged a brief cross-border attack into
northern Iraq to strike at a group of Kurdish militants there. The Turkish
military, in a statement on its Web site, said its troops had inflicted heavy
losses on the fighters after spotting them trying to cross into Turkey on Monday
night.
American military officers in Washington and overseas said that the Turkish
ground force sent across the border numbered only in the hundreds and that it
moved fewer than two miles into Iraqi territory. Turkey said only that it was a
“small-scale operation,” and indicated that the troops quickly returned to
Turkey.
“Nothing the Turks have done to date should be considered a surprise,” said an
American military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he
was discussing actions of a sovereign ally. “We’ve shared information as we said
we would do. The decision to pursue military options is theirs.” American
officials said the Turkish operation appeared to be over.
Turkey’s recent moves against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq have placed the
United States in a delicate position between a NATO ally and the Iraqi
government it backs.
But Ms. Rice sidestepped a query on the Turkish strike at a news conference in
Baghdad, saying the United States, Iraq and Turkey had a “common interest” in
stopping attacks by the Kurdistan Workers Party, known by its Kurdish initials,
P.K.K.
Still, she reiterated words of caution for Turkey, which says it has the right
to strike at the P.K.K. in Iraq because the group’s presence there threatens
Turkey’s sovereignty.
“No one should do anything that threatens to destabilize the north,” Ms. Rice
said.
The P.K.K. has bases in Turkey as well as Iraq, and the United States considers
it a terrorist organization. The group, which wants an autonomous Kurdish region
in eastern Turkey, has fought the Turkish military for decades.
The cross-border operation took place two days after Turkey carried out broad
airstrikes in northern Iraq against the group. The United States provided
intelligence and opened Iraqi airspace for the airstrikes, according to Turkey’s
top military commander. Iraqi officials angrily protested the strikes, saying
they had killed four people and displaced 286 families.
Pentagon officials said after Sunday’s airstrikes that the United States had
“deconflicted” the airspace over northern Iraq for Turkey.
The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking in the capital,
Ankara, used careful diplomatic language to describe Turkey’s military efforts
but avoided speaking directly of the Tuesday strike.
“At the moment, our army is doing whatever is necessary,” he said, according to
the official Anatolian News Agency. “From now on, our security forces will
continue to do whatever is necessary.”
Turkey keeps a contingent of 500 to 1,000 special forces troops at an outpost in
northern Iraq, as it has since the mid-1990s. Their role is to oversee and
monitor, not to stage operations.
Ms. Rice did not detail the reason for the trip, her eighth to Iraq, though in
visiting Kirkuk she highlighted the city’s pivotal role in determining the Iraqi
geopolitical landscape.
Dec. 31 is the constitutional deadline for a referendum to decide whether the
city should become the fourth province in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous
Kurdish region, though the vote seems unlikely to be held by then. The outcome
is certain to play a role in determining whether Iraq will eventually be
partitioned among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, a move Turkey would
oppose if it strengthened Iraq’s Kurdish north.
Elsewhere in Iraq on Tuesday, a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest blew
himself up in a public cafe in the embattled province of Diyala, a police
official said, killing 11 people and wounding 18. A car bomb also detonated in
central Baghdad, killing four people and wounding seven.
Cara Buckley reported from Baghdad, and Sabrina Tavernise from Istanbul.
Reporting was contributed by Stephen Farrell and Ahmad Fadam from Baghdad, Thom
Shanker from Washington, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul and Iraqi employees of The
New York Times in Diyala Province and Sulaimaniya.
Rice Visits Iraq Amid
Strain With Turkey, NYT, 19.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html
Secretary Calls Iran a Threat to Regional Security
December 8, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
MANAMA, Bahrain, Dec. 8 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates declared today
that Iran is a grave threat to regional security, even without nuclear weapons,
and called on Tehran to account for the full range of intelligence describing
its support for terrorism and instability around the world.
Just days after Iran claimed political victory when a new American intelligence
assessment found Tehran had frozen its nuclear program, Mr. Gates said in his
keynote address to a security conference here that Iran could restart those
efforts at any time and must come clean on its efforts to build the bomb.
Mr. Gates dismissed questioners who suggested that the United States had a
double standard on nuclear arms in the Middle East and that a nuclear-armed
Israel was the real danger. The defense secretary stated that, unlike Iran,
Israel never threatened to destroy a neighbor.
In comments to reassure Persian Gulf partners that may fear American
isolationism after the Iraq war, Mr. Gates stressed Washington's commitment to
the region, and pressed for an areawide missile-defense system and increased
cooperation on local waterways to counter terrorism, piracy, narcotics
trafficking and smuggling.
But the most provocative section of his address was in mocking Iran's praise of
a new National Intelligence Estimate as a "watershed" — the first time Tehran
accepted the conclusions of American spy agencies. As the audience chuckled, Mr.
Gates said Iran's approval of the American intelligence estimate required Iran
to accept other assessments on its misbehavior.
"Since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence
assessments," Mr. Gates said, "I assume that it will also embrace as valid
American intelligence assessments of its funding and training of militia groups
in Iraq; its deployment of lethal weapons and technology to both Iraq and
Afghanistan; its ongoing support of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and
Hamas that have murdered thousands of innocent civilians; and its continued
research and development of medium-range ballistic missiles that are not
particularly cost-effective unless equipped with warheads carrying weapons of
mass destruction."
The National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran had had a secret nuclear
arms program but had halted the effort in 2003. The response from Tehran was to
describe the report as America's confession of a mistake.
In his speech, Mr. Gates chose words that showed him still a moderate on how to
blunt Iranian behavior while remaining a hawk on the use of intelligence — and
on the Iranian threat.
The defense secretary consistently says diplomatic and economic pressures should
be the first choice to halt Iranian nuclear ambitions and that military action
should remain only a last resort. His statements are softer than the words of
President Bush, who as recently as October invoked images of a World War III to
warn of the Iranian threat.
But, as would be expected of a former director of central intelligence, Mr.
Gates said Iran "cannot pick and choose" only the American intelligence it
likes.
He said the estimate "is explicit that Iran is keeping its options open and
could re-start its nuclear weapons program at any time — I would add, if it has
not done so already."
The speech captured the same tone of calibrated irony that Mr. Gates used in
response to a caustic address delivered by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
to a regional security conference in Munich in February. Yet Mr. Gates was blunt
in his assessments of Iranian action to provoke violence and instability around
the world.
"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a
threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country
in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of
the ballistic missiles Iran is developing," he said.
An Iranian delegation was invited to the conference, but organizers said that no
officials from Tehran were in attendance.
Mr. Gates encouraged Persian Gulf nations to move beyond bilateral relations
with the United States in countering Iran and offered as fertile areas of
cooperation "shared early warning, cooperative air and missile defense and
maritime security awareness." In particular, he urged allies to develop regional
air and missile defense systems.
To underscore the importance of the regional dialogue, the American delegation
to this year's conference, sponsored by the International Institute for
Strategic Studies, included for the first time the defense secretary; the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen; and the senior
commander of American forces in the Middle East, Adm. William J. Fallon.
"The United States remains committed to defending its vital interests and those
of its allies in Iraq and in the wider Middle East," Mr. Gates said.
In a lively question period, Mr. Gates was asked whether he thought Israel's
nuclear program was a threat to the region. The defense secretary paused, and
said, "No, I do not," and moved on to the next question.
He was pressed again on whether the United States had a double standard in
organizing the world community to prevent Iran from going nuclear but not
working to disarm Israel.
"Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors, it has not shipped
weapons to a place like Iraq to kill thousands of civilians, it has not
threatened to destroy any of its neighbors, it is not trying to destabilize the
government of Lebanon," Mr. Gates said.
Israel's nuclear arsenal may be an open secret, but it is rarely a topic for
official comment. Mr. Gates's statements were heard by the predominantly Arab
audience as implicitly confirming its existence.
Secretary Calls Iran a
Threat to Regional Security, NYT, 8.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/washington/09gates.html?hp
Letters
Bush and Iran: A New Landscape
December 6, 2007
The New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “U.S. Finding Says Iran Halted Nuclear Arms Effort in 2003” (front page, Dec.
4):
The National Intelligence Estimate has established that Iran halted its weapons
program four years ago, and President Bush has been misleading us on Iran. I am
appalled, once again.
How can we, the American people, allow the Bush administration to continue to
“massage” its own intelligence assessment on Iran’s extinct nuclear weapons
program to prove that Iran must be pressured to suspend its weapons program?
Excuse me?
I agree with President Bush that it is a warning signal, but the warning is that
the last thing we, the American people, need is to be misled into another
disastrous war based on blatant lies, overblown rhetoric, reckless hype and
trumped-up intelligence. Congress must intervene quickly; we have lost too many
men and women to the war machine. Nancy DePas
Flushing, Queens, Dec. 4, 2007
•
To the Editor:
It should come as no shock to anyone who has actively followed the Iraq war that
President Bush has chosen to mislead the American public about the status of
Iran’s nuclear weapons program. I have followed this war especially closely as
my husband has served in Iraq twice, my friend’s son has served twice, and my
other friend’s son died there.
President Bush has consistently demonstrated that he believes that belligerent
words and actions make America safer, despite the now highly successful
terrorist recruiting station known as Iraq. I am begging Congress, on behalf of
my husband and our entire military, please do not let President Bush further
abuse our fighting men and women. Condemn him for his brazen falsehood, and
refuse to let our brave military be used against Iran. Wendy Chambers
Alexandria, Va., Dec. 5, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Re “An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate” (news analysis, front page, Dec.
4):
Your article about Iran’s supposed abandonment of its nuclear arms program asked
if the latest revelations will raise questions, again, about the integrity of
America’s beleaguered intelligence agencies. Having worked as an analyst at the
National Security Agency, and had contacts with colleagues at the C.I.A., over
the years, I can assure you that, in most cases, there is incredible pressure
brought to bear on tailoring intelligence estimates to support White House
policy initiatives. This was especially true during the Reagan years with regard
to Nicaragua, and I suspect, with the current administration.
The people who make up the intelligence community are dedicated, hard-working
and patriotic individuals who honestly believe in their mission and strive to
make a difference. I find it sad that critics, and this White House, in
particular, seek to discredit their efforts in order to mask incompetence,
wrongheadedness and misdirected zeal. The most pernicious advocate of this form
of scapegoating is the office of the vice president. Manuel Michalowski
Washington, Dec. 4, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Re “Bush Insists Iran Remains a Threat Despite Arms Data” (front page, Dec. 5):
What’s surprising about the response to this report is how eager people are to
believe it. The same people who have discredited our intelligence on Iraq have,
overnight, become “believers” in the same intelligence community.
One might conclude that the reason for this transformation from cynic to
believer is the report’s usefulness to critics of the Bush administration.
Unfortunately, this report is also useful to those whose economic relationship
with Iran is better served by turning a blind eye to its hostility toward the
West.
Regardless of one’s political affiliation, Americans, especially presidential
candidates, should remain clear on who our enemies and friends really are. Iran
is no friend of America. Andrea Economos
Scarsdale, N.Y., Dec. 5, 2007
•
To the Editor:
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program is good news for
the United States and the international community. It removes the urgency for
using force against Iran. It gives diplomacy a chance to work, which could lead
to a thaw of our relations with this critical Muslim nation.
But most important, it saves us from making another mistake like Iraq.
I remember sitting next to a top American envoy shortly after America’s March
2003 invasion of Iraq. I asked him how the United States could justify that
attack, since American troops failed to find weapons of mass destruction.
He could only reply, We will find them.
I am glad that this time we find out first before we again wage a war with
incalculable financial and diplomatic consequences.
Vincent Wei-cheng Wang
Richmond, Va., Dec. 4, 2007
The writer is an associate professor and chairman of the department of political
science, University of Richmond.
•
To the Editor:
Re “Good and Bad News About Iran” (editorial, Dec. 5):
With your call for “intensified pressures,” you seem to join President Bush in
spinning the National Intelligence Estimate’s finding that Iran halted nuclear
weapons work in 2003 into an argument for a continued hard line.
But the truly worrisome fact is not that Iran is developing nuclear skills that
could be applied to a bomb; it is that many countries are.
Some, like India, Pakistan and Israel, have acquired nuclear arsenals and yet
enjoy our support. The only long-term solution for nuclear proliferation is to
lead a global effort to abolish nuclear weapons.
The United States cannot preach as long as it possesses the world’s foremost
nuclear arsenal, pursues nuclear bunker-busters, and threatens nuclear first use
and attack on nonnuclear states. Nuclear abolition should be a top issue in the
presidential campaign and a priority for a new administration.
David Keppel
Bloomington, Ind., Dec. 5, 2007
•
To the Editor:
In your editorial, you appropriately caution us not to be overly optimistic
about a regime (Iran’s) that has made a habit of misrepresenting facts about
weapons programs and other issues.
You seem to omit a caution for us not to give credence to any warnings from
President Bush or anyone in his administration based on seven years’ history of
costly and deadly lies. One hopes that Mr. Bush might “salvage his credibility
with the American people and America’s allies” (do we still have any?) by
talking with rather than bombing the Iranians. After all, they both speak the
same language of deception.
Theodore S. Voelker
Copake, N.Y., Dec. 5, 2007
Bush and Iran: A New
Landscape, NYT, 6.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/opinion/l06iran.html
Op-Ed Contributors
In Iran We Trust?
December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By VALERIE LINCY and GARY MILHOLLIN
Washington
ON Monday the United States intelligence community issued what everyone agrees
was blockbuster news: a report stating that in the autumn of 2003, Iran halted
its nuclear weapons program. The National Intelligence Estimate has been
heralded as a courageous act of independence by the intelligence agencies, and
praised by both parties for showing a higher quality of spy work than earlier
assessments.
In fact, the report contains the same sorts of flaws that we have learned to
expect from our intelligence agency offerings. It, like the report in 2002 that
set up the invasion of Iraq, is both misleading and dangerous.
During the past year, a period when Iran’s weapons program was supposedly
halted, the government has been busy installing some 3,000 gas centrifuges at
its plant at Natanz. These machines could, if operated continuously for about a
year, create enough enriched uranium to provide fuel for a bomb. In addition,
they have no plausible purpose in Iran’s civilian nuclear effort. All of Iran’s
needs for enriched uranium for its energy programs are covered by a contract
with Russia.
Iran is also building a heavy water reactor at its research center at Arak. This
reactor is ideal for producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, but is of little use
in an energy program like Iran’s, which does not use plutonium for reactor fuel.
India, Israel and Pakistan have all built similar reactors — all with the
purpose of fueling nuclear weapons. And why, by the way, does Iran even want a
nuclear energy program, when it is sitting on an enormous pool of oil that is
now skyrocketing in value? And why is Iran developing long-range Shahab
missiles, which make no military sense without nuclear warheads to put on them?
For years these expensive projects have been viewed as evidence of Iran’s
commitment to nuclear weapons. Why aren’t they still? The answer is that the new
report defines “nuclear weapons program” in a ludicrously narrow way: it
confines it to to enriching uranium at secret sites or working on a nuclear
weapon design. But the halting of its secret enrichment and weapon design
efforts in 2003 proves only that Iran made a tactical move. It suspended work
that, if discovered, would unambiguously reveal intent to build a weapon. It has
continued other work, crucial to the ability to make a bomb, that it can pass
off as having civilian applications.
That work includes the centrifuges at Natanz, which bring Iran closer to a
nuclear weapon every day — two to seven years away. To assert, as the report
does, that these centrifuges are “civilian,” and not part of Iran’s weapons
threat, is grossly misleading.
The new report has also upended our sanctions policy, which was just beginning
to produce results. Banks and energy companies were pulling back from Iran. The
United Nations Security Council had frozen the assets of dozens of Iranian
companies. That policy now seems dead. If Iran is not going for the bomb, why
punish it?
No company or bank will agree to lose money unless a nuclear threat is clear.
Likewise, is it fair for the United Nations to continue to freeze the assets of
people like Seyed Jaber Safdari, the manager of the Natanz plant, or companies
like Mesbah Energy, the supplier of the reactor at Arak, because of links to a
program that American intelligence believes is benign? One European official
admitted to us that he and his colleagues were flummoxed. “We have to have a new
policy now for going forward,” he said, “but we haven’t been able to figure out
what it is.”
This situation is made all the more absurd by the report’s suggestion that
international pressure offers the only hope of containing Iran. The report has
now made such pressure nearly impossible to obtain. It is hardly surprising that
China, which last week seemed ready to approve the next round of economic
sanctions against Tehran, has now had a change of heart: its ambassador to the
United Nations said yesterday that “we all start from the presumption that now
things have changed.”
We should be suspicious of any document that suddenly gives the Bush
administration a pass on a big national security problem it won’t solve during
its remaining year in office. Is the administration just washing its hands of
the intractable Iranian nuclear issue by saying, “If we can’t fix it, it ain’t
broke”?
In any case, the report is an undoubted victory for Iran. Even if it opens the
way for direct talks, which would be a benefit, it validates Iran’s claim that
efforts to shut down Natanz are illegitimate. Thus Iran will be free to operate
and add to its centrifuges at Natanz, accumulate a stockpile of low-enriched
uranium customary for civilian use, and then have the ability to convert that
uranium in a matter of months to weapons grade. This “breakout potential” would
create a nuclear threat that we and Iran’s neighbors will have to live with for
years to come.
Valerie Lincy is the editor of Iranwatch.org. Gary Milhollin is the director of
the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
In Iran We Trust?, NYT,
6.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/opinion/06milhollin.html
New Data and New Methods Lead to Revised View on Iran
December 5, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — How could American intelligence agencies have overstated
Iran’s intentions in 2005 so soon after being reprimanded for making similar
errors involving Iraq?
The spy agencies had swallowed hard and pledged to do better after a
presidential commission in March 2005 issued a blistering accounting of the
intelligence failures leading to the Iraq war.
But a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that was issued two months later
said Iran’s leaders were working tirelessly to acquire a nuclear weapon — a
finding that, like the prewar intelligence on Iraq, has now been acknowledged to
have been wrong in one of its chief conclusions.
Current and former intelligence officials insist that much of the 2005 Iran
report still holds up to scrutiny.
At the same time, they acknowledge that in retrospect, some of its conclusions
appear to have been thinly sourced and were based on methods less rigorous than
were ultimately required under an intelligence overhaul that did not begin in
earnest until later.
It was also written by some of the same team that had produced key parts of the
flawed Iraq estimate. Robert D. Walpole oversaw both reports as the national
intelligence officer responsible for assessing illicit-weapons programs.
Robert Hutchings, who as head of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to
early 2005 oversaw early production of the 2005 Iran assessment, said the
quality of information about Iran’s nuclear program should have made American
intelligence analysts wary of judging anything with “high confidence.” That was
how the 2005 report described the basis for its assertion that Iran was
determined to develop nuclear weapons, a conclusion that has been disavowed.
“The fact that we’ve reversed course two years later suggests that the high
confidence back then wasn’t warranted,” said Mr. Hutchings, who had left the
intelligence council by the time the intelligence estimate was produced in May
2005.
Paul R. Pillar, another member of the National Intelligence Council in 2005,
said it was a “fair point” to criticize intelligence agencies for overstating
their confidence in the judgments of the 2005 estimate. But he said the judgment
that Iran is determined to obtain the bomb could prove correct in the long run.
The intelligence agencies’ 2005 finding that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons
program was consistent with strong warnings about Iran issued at the time by
Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and John R.
Bolton, then the under secretary of state. But there has been no indication that
policy makers sought in any way to influence the agencies’ conclusions on Iran,
which like all intelligence assessments are supposed to be immune from political
pressure.
The officials said that the 2007 estimate was an attempt by spy agencies to
examine the Iran problem in a new light, and that in the process they recast
many of their principal judgments about Iran’s weapons programs that might have
relied on outdated information.
Some sources used for the 2005 estimate were discarded for the new report, and
some old information that intelligence agencies did not use for the 2005
estimate was re-examined and included in the estimate released Monday.
The new intelligence estimate concludes with “high confidence” that Iran halted
work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “puzzling” and “disturbing” that
intelligence agencies in 2005 could produce a flawed estimate so soon after what
he called the Iraq “debacle.”
Government officials who have read both estimates said the 2005 report was
filled with analysis based on somewhat murky knowledge of Iran’s capabilities
and the goals of its leaders. They said the new intelligence estimate contained
very specific information to back up unusually confident conclusions about the
state of Iran’s weapons program.
Government officials said the new judgments were grounded largely in information
from human sources that is buttressed by other information gathered by spy
satellites and communications intercepts.
John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from
2000 to 2004 and the acting director for two months in 2004, said the agencies’
shifting view between 2005 and 2007 simply showed how difficult intelligence was
to get right.
“In 2005, what we had was what we had,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “I think people
should take comfort from the fact that they’ve changed their view.”
Over the past year, officials have put into place rigorous new procedures for
analyzing conclusions about difficult intelligence targets like Iran, North
Korea, global terrorism and China.
Analysts from disparate spy agencies are no longer pushed to achieve unanimity
in their conclusions, a process criticized in the past for leading to
“groupthink.” Alternate judgments are now encouraged.
In the case of the 2007 Iran report, “red teams” were established to test and
find weaknesses in the report’s conclusions. Counterintelligence officials at
the C.I.A. also did an extensive analysis to determine whether the new
information might have been planted by Tehran to throw the United States off the
trail of Iran’s nuclear program.
One result was an intelligence report that some of the intelligence community’s
consistent critics have embraced.
“Just possibly, the intelligence community may have taken a major step forward,”
Senator Rockefeller said.
Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
New Data and New Methods
Lead to Revised View on Iran, NYT, 5.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/washington/05intel.html?hp
Iran Welcomes New US Intelligence Report
December 4, 2007
Filed at 12:53 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's foreign minister on Tuesday welcomed the U.S.
decision to ''correct'' its claim that Tehran has an active nuclear weapons
program, state-run radio reported.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was referring to a U.S. intelligence
assessment released Monday that reversed earlier claims that Iran had restarted
its weapons program in 2005 after suspending it in 2003.
''It's natural that we welcome ... countries that correct their views
realistically which in the past had questions and ambiguities about (Iran's
nuclear activities),'' Mottaki said.
The new U.S. intelligence report Monday concluded that Iran's nuclear weapons
development program has been halted since the fall of 2003 because of
international pressure.
The finding is part of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that also
cautions that Tehran continues to enrich uranium and still could develop a bomb
between 2010 and 2015 if it decided to do so.
The conclusion that Iran's weapons program was still frozen, through at least
mid-2007, represents a sharp turnaround from the previous intelligence
assessment in 2005.
Then, U.S. intelligence agencies believed Tehran was determined to develop a
nuclear weapons capability and was continuing its weapons development program.
The new report concludes that Iran's decisions are rational and pragmatic, and
that Tehran is more susceptible to diplomatic and financial pressure than
previously thought.
''Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less
determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005,''
says the unclassified summary of the secret report.
The findings come at a time of escalating tensions between the United States and
Iran, which President Bush has labeled part of an ''axis of evil,'' along with
Iraq and North Korea.
At an Oct. 17 news conference, Bush said, ''If you're interested in avoiding
World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them
(Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.''
Rand Beers, who resigned from Bush's National Security Council just before the
Iraq war, said the report should derail any appetite for war on the
administration's part, and should reinvigorate regional diplomacy. ''The new NIE
throws cold water on the efforts of those urging military confrontation with
Iran,'' he said.
However, Israel's defense minister said Tuesday that Israeli intelligence
believes Iran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon.
''There are differences in the assessments of different organizations in the
world about this, and only time will tell who is right,'' Defense Minister Ehud
Barak told Army Radio.
On Monday, senior intelligence officials said they failed to detect Iran's fall
2003 halt in nuclear weapons development in time to reflect it in the 2005
estimate.
One of the officials said Iran is the most challenging country to spy on --
harder even than North Korea, a notoriously closed society. ''We put a lot more
collection assets against this,'' the official said, ''but gaps remain.'' The
officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the
subject.
U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, said the risk of Iran acquiring a
nuclear weapon remains ''a serious problem.''
''The bottom line is this: For that strategy to succeed, the international
community has to turn up the pressure on Iran with diplomatic isolation, United
Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure and Iran has to decide it
wants to negotiate a solution,'' Hadley said.
Bush was briefed on the 100-page document on Nov. 28. National Intelligence
Estimates represent the most authoritative written judgments of all 16 U.S. spy
agencies. Congress and other executive agencies were briefed Monday, and foreign
governments will be briefed beginning Tuesday, the officials said.
The intelligence officials said they do not know all the reasons why Iran halted
its weapons program, or what might trigger its resumption. They said they are
confident that diplomatic and political pressure played a key role, but said the
U.S. invasion of Iraq, Libya's termination of its nuclear program and the
implosion of the illegal nuclear smuggling network run by Pakistani scientist
A.Q. Khan also might have influenced Tehran.
To develop a nuclear weapon, Iran needs to design and engineer a warhead, obtain
enough fissile material, and build a delivery vehicle such as a missile. The
intelligence agencies now believe Iran halted warhead engineering four years ago
and as of mid-2007 had not restarted it.
But Iran is still enriching uranium for its civilian nuclear reactors that
produce electricity. That leaves open the possibility that fissile material
could be diverted to covert nuclear sites to produce highly enriched uranium for
a warhead.
This national intelligence estimate was originally due in the spring of 2007 but
was delayed because the agencies wanted more confidence their findings were
accurate, given the inaccuracy of the 2002 intelligence estimate of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction program.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said the
report showed ''a level of independence from political leadership that was
lacking in the recent past.''
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell decided last month that key
judgments of NIEs should not be declassified and released. The intelligence
officials said an exception was made in this case because the last assessment of
Iran's nuclear program in 2005 has influenced public debate about U.S. policy
toward Iran, and must be updated to reflect the latest findings.
------
Associated Press writers Pamela Hess in Washington and Matti Friedman in
Jerusalem contributed to this report.
Iran Welcomes New US
Intelligence Report, NYT, 4.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons
By STEVEN ERLANGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
December 5, 2007
The New York Times
JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 — Israel today took a darker view of Iran’s nuclear
ambitions than the assessment released by United States intelligence agencies on
Monday, saying it was convinced that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.
It said Iran had probably resumed the nuclear weapons program the American
report said was stopped in autumn 2003. “It is apparently true that in 2003 Iran
stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time,”
Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio. “But in our estimation,
since then it is apparently continuing with its program to produce a nuclear
weapon.”
Israel led the reaction around the world today to the new intelligence
assessment released in the United States on Monday that Iran had halted its
nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Iran welcomed the report. “It is natural that we welcome it,” the Iranian
foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told state-run radio. “Some of the same
countries which had questions or ambiguities about our nuclear program are
changing their views realistically.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna said the new assessment should
now help ease the international confrontation with Iran and prompt it to
cooperate fully with the United Nations nuclear watchdog. The agency had been
criticized in the past by the Bush administration for not pressing Iran hard
enough on its nuclear intentions.
"This new assessment by the U.S. should help to defuse the current crisis," the
IAEA’s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in a statement.
"At the same time, it should prompt Iran to work actively with the IAEA to
clarify specific aspects of its past and present nuclear program as outlined in
the work plan and through the implementation of the additional protocol."
But the United States, Britain and France urged the international community to
maintain pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment activities despite the
new assessment.
"We think the report’s conclusions justify the actions already taken by the
international community to both show the extent of and try to restrict Iran’s
nuclear program and to increase pressure on the regime to stop its enrichment
and reprocessing activities," a spokesman for British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown was quoted by Reuters as saying.
"It confirms we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear
weapons and shows that the sanctions program and international pressure were
having an effect,” he said.
France expressed a similar opinion. "It appears that Iran is not respecting its
international obligations," a French foreign ministry spokeswoman was quoted by
Reuters as saying.
"We must keep up the pressure on Iran,” the spokeswoman said, adding that France
“will continue “to work on the introduction of restrictive measures in the
framework of the United Nations.”
At a meeting with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, today in Moscow,
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said Iran should ensure its nuclear
activities are "open and transparent," Bloomberg reported. Mr. Putin’s spokesman
said that Russia is offering to supply Iran fuel for the Russian-built nuclear
power plant at Bushehr, in southern Iran, with the intention of persuading Iran
to suspend uranium enrichment, Bloomberg reported.
“The sooner we ship it, the less they will have a need for their own program,"
the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted as saying.
The new American intelligence assessment comes at a sensitive time, when the six
powers involved in negotiating with Iran — the United States, China, Russia,
Britain, France, and Germany — have decided to press ahead with a new United
Nations Security Council resolution.
Iran had maintained since 2003, when it started negotiations with the three
European countries, France, Germany and Britain, that its program was peaceful
and not meant for military purposes. It insisted that it wanted to enrich
uranium to produce nuclear fuel for its nuclear reactors.
However, the West had accused Iran of having a clandestine nuclear program. The
Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions on Iran for its
defiance to halt its enrichment program.
With his comments today, Mr. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, came close to
contradicting the American assessment of “moderate confidence” that Tehran had
not restarted its nuclear weapons program by mid-2007 and that the halt to the
weapons program “represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program.”
In other words, while the Americans think Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons
program while continuing to enrich uranium as rapidly as it can, Israel thinks
that Iran has resumed its nuclear weapons program with the clear aim of building
a nuclear bomb.
Israel must act in accordance with its intelligence estimates, Mr. Barak
suggested. “It is our responsibility to ensure that the right steps are taken
against the Iranian regime. As is well known, words don’t stop missiles.”
Assessments may differ, Mr. Barak said, “but we cannot allow ourselves to rest
just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if
it is from our greatest friend.”
Mr. Barak also said that the apparent source for the new American assessment on
the weapons program was no longer functioning. “We are talking about a specific
track connected with their weapons building program, to which the American
connection, and maybe that of others, was severed,” Mr. Barak said cryptically.
It was only today that Israel received and began to assess a copy of the
classified American report, which is believed to run some 130 pages, Israeli
officials said.
Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that diplomacy
remained the correct path for now to deter Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
But he was explicit about the Israeli conclusion that Iran’s intention is
military, not civilian.
“We believe that the purpose of the Iranian nuclear program is to achieve
nuclear weapons,” Mr. Regev said. “There is no other logical explanation for the
investment the Iranians have made in their nuclear program.”
Some of the differences on estimates for when Iran could be capable of producing
a bomb are slight, a matter of a few months, between Israel’s estimate of late
2009 or early 2010 to Washington’s 2010-2015. “A lot of it is splitting hairs,”
Mr. Regev said. “Is it 2009 or 2010? Is it likely or very likely? These words
are vague.”
Mr. Olmert, who had been briefed on the new assessment in Washington last week,
tried to play down the gap in judgments with Washington. “According to this
report, and to the American position, it is vital to continue our efforts, with
our American friends, to prevent Iran from obtaining non-conventional weapons,”
he said.
The American assessment said that Iran probably halted the weapons program
“primarily in response to international pressure,” a judgment Israel embraced as
a call for further diplomatic action.
But Israeli experts on Iran said that the American report will make any action
against Iran less likely, whether diplomatic or military, and would probably
kill or dilute American-led efforts to pass another sanctions resolution through
the United Nations Security Council.
Efraim Kam, former Israeli military intelligence official on Iran and deputy
director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University,
said that the report “makes it very hard for anyone in the United States or
Israel who was thinking of going for a military option.”
If American intelligence thinks there is no military nuclear program, “that
makes it harder for Israel to go against it,” he said, since an Israeli attack
would require operational coordination with Washington, “and will also make it
harder to pass tougher sanctions. A lot of countries will be happy to go along
with that — Russia, China — it’s a gift for the Iranians.”
He said the American assessment surprised him. “The report says its assessment
is correct for now, but it could change any time,” he said. “Maybe the Iranians
assessed that it was better for them to halt the military program and
concentrate on enriching uranium,” which takes a long time, “and then go back to
it.”
Iran was shocked this week when Chinese banks refused loans to Iranian
businessmen, probably because of American pressure.
The head of the Iran-China chamber of commerce said Monday that over the past
week Chinese state banks had refused to open a letter of credit for Iranian
businessmen, the daily Etemad reported.
“The banks have not given any reason for these restrictions yet,” he said,
adding that a trade delegation was in Beijing to discuss the restriction and
that Iran’s central bank was also negotiating with the Chinese.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran, and Isabel Kershner from
Jerusalem.
Bush Says Iran Still a
Danger Despite Report on Weapons, NYT, 4.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/world/middleeast/05webreact.html?hp
U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work
December 3, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies
concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the
program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran
was working inexorably toward building a bomb.
The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to be major factor in the tense
international negotiations aimed at getting Iran to halt its nuclear energy
program. Concerns about Iran were raised sharply after President Bush had
suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III,”
and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government
in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.
The finding also come in the middle of a presidential campaign during which a
possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear program has been discussed. The
assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view
of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran’s ultimate intentions about
gaining a nuclear weapon remain unclear, but that Iran’s “decisions are guided
by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the
political, economic and military costs.”
“Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and
pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige,
and goals for regional influence in other ways might — if perceived by Iran’s
leaders as credible — prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear
weapons program,” the estimate states.
The new report comes out just over five years after a deeply flawed N.I.E.
concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons programs and was
determined to restart its nuclear program. The report led to congressional
authorization for a military invasion of Iraq, although most of the N.I.E.’s
conclusions turned out to be wrong. The estimate does say that Iran’s ultimate
goal is still to develop the capability to produce a nuclear weapon.
The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, quickly issued a statement
describing the N.I.E. as containing positive news rather than reflecting
intelligence mistakes. “It confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran
seeking to develop nuclear weapons,” Mr. Hadley said. “It tells us that we have
made progress in trying to ensure that this does not happen. But the
intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon
remains a very serious problem.”
“The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved
diplomatically — without the use of force — as the administration has been
trying to do,” Mr. Hadley said.
Last month, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the international Atomic
Energy Agency, had reported that Iran was operating 3,000 uranium-enriching
centrifuges, capable of producing fissile material for nuclear weapons.
But his report said that I.A.E.A. inspectors in Iran had been unable to
determine whether the Iranian program sought only to generate electricity or
also to build weapons.
The N.I.E. concludes that if Iran were to end the freeze of its weapons program,
it would still be at least two years before Tehran would have enough highly
enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. But it says it is still “very
unlikely” Iran could produce enough of the material by then.
Instead, today’s report concludes it is more likely Iran could have a bomb by
the early part to the middle of the next decade. The report states that the
State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research judges Iran is unlikely
to achieve this goal before 2013, “because of foreseeable technical and
programmatic problems.”
The new assessment upends a judgment made about Iran’s nuclear capabilities in
2005. At the time, intelligence agencies assessed with “high confidence” that
Iran is determined to have nuclear weapons and concluded that Iran had a secret
nuclear weapons program.
Since then, officials said they have obtained new information leading them to
conclude that international pressure, including tough economic sanctions, had
been successful in bringing about a halt to Iran’s secret program.
“We felt that we needed to scrub all the assessments and sources to make sure we
weren’t misleading ourselves,” said one senior intelligence official during a
telephone interview, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In a separate statement accompanying the N.I.E., Deputy Director of National
Intelligence Donald M. Kerr said that given the new conclusions, it was
important to release the report publicly “to ensure that an accurate
presentation is available.”
U.S. Says Iran Ended
Atomic Arms Work, NYT, 3.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/middleeast/03cnd-iran.html?hp
Text
White House Reaction to Iran Report
December 3, 2007
The New York Times
Here is the text of a statement issued today by Stephen Hadley, President
Bush’s national security adviser, concerning the new National Intelligence
Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The intelligence estimate says that,
contrary to previous assessments, Iran halted the program in 2003 in response to
international pressure and has probably not restarted it since then, though it
has the capacity to do so.
Today’s National Intelligence Estimate offers some positive news. It confirms
that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
It tells us that we have made progress in trying to ensure that this does not
happen.
But the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear
weapon remains a very serious problem. The estimate offers grounds for hope that
the problem can be solved diplomatically — without the use of force — as the
Administration has been trying to do. And it suggests that the President has the
right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to
negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests while ensuring that the world
will never have to face a nuclear armed Iran.
The bottom line is this: for that strategy to succeed, the international
community has to turn up the pressure on Iran — with diplomatic isolation,
United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure — and Iran has to
decide it wants to negotiate a solution.
White House Reaction to
Iran Report, NYT, 3.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/04irantext.html
Op-Ed Contributor
Middle East Peace Through Anxiety
December 2,
2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL B. OREN
Annapolis,
Md.
LAST week’s
multi-national summit meeting here was about many things, the least of which,
perhaps, was the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Behind the calls for the
creation of a Palestinian state that would live serenely and stably alongside
the Jewish state, beyond the vision of a Middle East at last absolved of its
longest-running conflict, was the paramount question of power — who in the
region wields it and who in the region wants it. Indeed, while Annapolis is
unlikely to succeed in bridging the gaps between Israeli and Arab positions, it
effectively drew lines in the sand between those nations siding with America and
the West and those allied with Iran.
As a rule, international conferences have never served as effective frameworks
in the search for Middle Eastern peace. The British held the first one, the St.
James Conference, back in 1939, and failed to reconcile the warring Jews and
Arabs of Palestine. The United Nations tried next at Lausanne in 1949 and met
with similar results; Arab delegates refused to sit at the same table with the
Israelis. The Geneva Conference, jointly sponsored by the United States and the
Soviet Union but without the participation of the Syrians and the Palestinian
Liberation Organization, convened in December 1973, and unraveled a few days
later without a single sentence exchanged between Arab representatives and
Israelis.
Far more pomp and optimism attended the Madrid Conference in 1991 where
President George H. W. Bush, flush from his victory over Iraq, heralded a new
era of Arab-Israeli understanding. Such empathy was notably absent, however, as
Israeli and Arab leaders exploited the forum for trading accusations. Stymied,
the comprehensive talks dissolved into separate Syrian-Israeli and
Palestinian-Israeli tracks that led ultimately nowhere.
The Annapolis gathering, at least superficially, seemed different. Avoiding the
rancorous rhetoric that poisoned previous gatherings, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, ardently reiterated their
commitment to achieving peace, even at great sacrifice. Present at the table
were not only the Syrians and the Palestinians but also the Saudis — talking to,
if not yet shaking hands with, their Israeli counterparts.
Nevertheless, the chances for any progress emerging from Annapolis seem at best
remote. Peace treaties in the past were forged by strong statesmen — Menachem
Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s
King Hussein.
But Mr. Olmert and Mr. Abbas are two of the region’s weakest leaders, unpopular
among their own people and discredited by corruption charges. And President
Bush, who, unlike his father, has not won a war in Iraq, is hardly perceived as
muscular in Middle Eastern eyes. Indeed, Mr. Bush’s refusal to engage in direct
mediation in the manner of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and his insistence
that comprehensive talks be broken down into bilateral and multilateral tracks,
à la Madrid, further diminishes any hope for breakthrough.
Yet, in spite of its glaring handicaps, Annapolis must be deemed a triumph — not
of peacemaking, paradoxically, but of girding the region for conflict. Though no
doubt sincere in their desire to neutralize the Arab-Israeli irritant in Middle
Eastern affairs, participants in the conference were above all motivated by
their fear of a radical and relentlessly aggressive Iran. This fear has deepened
with the success of the Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza,
as well as the expansion of Iranian influence westward into the Iraqi vacuum.
The inability of the international community either to entice or deter the
Iranians from producing nuclear weapons adds urgency to the need to unite those
countries threatened by those bombs. That, and not American fiat, brought 49
states and organizations to Annapolis; that, and not the yearning for an
Israeli-Arab accord, impelled a Saudi prince to sit alongside an Israeli prime
minister.
Not unexpectedly, the Iranians reacted ferociously to Annapolis. President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pronounced it a “failure” and the government-controlled
press promised to “bring down Islamic wrath” on its participants. But such rage
merely betrays the anxiety induced by Annapolis in Tehran. For the first time a
coalition of Western and modern Arab leaders has coalesced and declared its
commitment to resist “extremism” in the Middle East — a well-known euphemism for
Iran.
What’s more, new efforts have begun to confront Iran outside of the United
Nations and woo Syria from Iran’s orbit. An international conference may not be
the ideal formula for attaining Israeli-Palestinian peace, but it can provide a
powerful forum for expressing solidarity in the face of war.
Situated on the Naval Academy campus, not far from where the meeting’s delegates
gathered, is America’s oldest war monument. Carved out of marble in 1806, the
30-foot-high column commemorates the Navy’s victory in America’s first war in
the Middle East — against the pirates of Tripoli.
Today, 200 years later, the United States is again taking the lead in rallying
opposition to another rogue state in the region. The Barbary Wars, as they were
called, lasted a long time, flaring off and on from 1801 to 1815. The struggle
against Iran inaugurated at Annapolis is only just beginning.
Michael B. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a
visiting senior lecturer in Middle East history at Yale, is the author of
“Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.”
Middle East Peace Through Anxiety, NYT, 2.12.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02oren.html
Letters
Bush’s
Mideast Diplomacy: What if ...
November
29, 2007
The New York Times
To the
Editor:
Re “Israel and Palestinians Set Goal of a Treaty in 2008” (front page, Nov. 28):
Imagine what might have happened if, after the attacks of Sept. 11, President
Bush had dedicated his administration to peace negotiations between Israel and
the Palestinians with the vigor he is displaying now.
Imagine if he had recognized then, as he appears to now, that a peaceful
settlement of that dispute, more than any issue, is essential to stamping out
the root causes of Al Qaeda and the forces of extremism.
Imagine if, rather than invading Iraq, he had only gone after Al Qaeda in
Afghanistan, and departed after eliminating it as a threat.
Seven years after mocking President Clinton’s “nation building” and peace
efforts, President Bush has pushed aside the protests of his vice president, and
is perhaps sheepishly beginning to throw himself into these efforts.
With luck, perhaps it’s not too late for President Bush and the world to build
something from the ashes of his failed policies.
Philip M. Berkowitz
New York, Nov. 28, 2007
•
To the Editor:
When the parties fail to agree on the identification of the thorny issues that
confront them, let alone which should be addressed first, what genuine
expectation can there be of a successful outcome when the United States
proclaims that it will not impose, only nudge?
To assuage Arab public opinion will require more than pious pronouncements; and
there’s the rub.
Francis Taghert
Chicago, Nov. 28, 2007
•
To the Editor:
The concerns of some of the Arab countries expressed in “A Large Shadow Cast by
an Absent Country” (news analysis, Nov. 28) provide an unprecedented opportunity
for the concerned countries to materially influence the peace process.
Let some of these countries make a real contribution to the Palestinian people
by pouring into the West Bank some of the recently gotten oil revenue gains. The
funds should be used to create a viable infrastructure of schools, hospitals,
roads and whatever else has been neglected over the last 50 years.
But this largess must be used as the carrot to produced some of the needed
compromises. The United States should extend the same kind of a carrot, in the
form of resettlement help to the Israelis, for them to make some hard
compromises.
The corresponding sticks are the same for both sides: more bloodshed and misery.
Cornell Jaray
Oceanside, Calif., Nov. 28, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Re “Oasis or Mirage?” (column, Nov. 28):
Some of Thomas L. Friedman’s readers might pooh-pooh his call for Arab gestures
toward Israel. Yet if in 1977 Anwar el-Sadat had merely touched the tarmac with
his big toe and then hurried back to Cairo, it would have elicited sufficient
Israeli swoon to end up at Camp David, so hungry were we for regional
acceptance.
Thirty years and thousands of terror-related Israeli deaths later, we’re a lot
more hard-headed, but I have a feeling we’d soften up considerably with the
first real knock at the door.
Lawrence Rifkin
Jerusalem, Nov. 28, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Re “Jump on the Peace Train,” by Maureen Dowd (column, Nov. 28):
Yes, why after all this time, are Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
President Bush doing what all sane minds expected them to do years ago — try to
work out a peace process using diplomacy? Is it because everything they have
done to this point has been catastrophic and self-defeating?
What a difference five years makes. Five years ago, President Bush, armed with
the greatest military might the world had seen, was going to easily force Pax
Americana upon the Middle East. Today, with our enemies worldwide empowered, and
our problems not solved but compounded throughout the Middle East and the Muslim
world, a much meeker and more realistic president and secretary of state are
just hoping that diplomacy will somehow clean up the mess they have made of
things, and, yes, their tarnished legacies.
Carl Mattioli
Newtonville, Mass., Nov. 28, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Maureen Dowd is, as usual, spot on. The Bush administration’s token gesture
toward diplomacy is far too little, much too late. That ship has already sailed,
and what we now have with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice is amateur hour
writ large.
Any fool knows that diplomacy is an avenue of first resort, not a last-ditch
effort following lies, deceit, illegal aggression, torture, unilateralism and
general bellicosity. The Annapolis peace conference, minus Iran, is a dangerous
fraud, and isolating Iran will accomplish absolutely nothing of value.
Vaughn A. Carney
Stowe, Vt., Nov. 28, 2007
Bush’s Mideast Diplomacy: What if ..., NYT, 29.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/opinion/l29mideast.html
Bush
Calls Abbas, Olmert to White House
November
28, 2007
Filed at 8:47 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Just 24 hours after securing an agreement between Israeli and
Palestinian leaders to resume long-stalled peace talks, President Bush invited
the pair to the White House to ceremonially inaugurate the first formal, direct
negotiations in seven years.
Capping an intense flurry of diplomacy that salvaged a joint Israeli-Palestinian
agreement at nearby Annapolis, Md., to launch a fresh round of talks, Bush
planned to meet separately Wednesday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,
then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and finally to get them together for an
afternoon session declaring the talks formally under way.
After meeting their own low expectations for the Annapolis conference amid
intense skepticism, Bush administration officials crowed with delight.
''What has been remarkable about this process is that they are now ready to
go,'' Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told ABC during a round of TV
interviews Wednesday morning in which she praised unprecedented support for the
peace process from Arab states.
''It's going to be hard, but you had support in that room that you had not had
from Arab states in the past,'' Rice said on NBC.
After inaugurating the negotiations at the White House, the two sides have
agreed to continue with a meeting in the region on Dec. 12, Rice said Tuesday.
Bush, along with Rice, had earlier salvaged a ''joint understanding'' between
the Israelis and Palestinians, who had remained far apart on the details of the
statement until the last minute.
But with prodding from the American side, Olmert and Abbas -- troubled leaders
with fragile mandates for peace -- told international backers and skeptical Arab
neighbors they are ready for hard bargaining toward an independent Palestinian
state in the 14 months Bush has left in office.
''This is the beginning of the process, not the end of it,'' Bush said after
reading from the just-completed text the statement that took weeks to negotiate
and yet sets only the vaguest terms for the talks to come.
''I pledge to devote my effort during my time as president to do all I can to
help you achieve this ambitious goal,'' Bush told Abbas and Olmert as the three
stood together in the U.S. Naval Academy's majestic Memorial Hall. ''I give you
my personal commitment to support your work with the resources and resolve of
the American government.''
The two Mideast leaders were circumspect but optimistic.
''I had many good reasons not to come here,'' Olmert told diplomats, including
those from Arab states that do not recognize Israel like Saudi Arabia and Syria.
''Memory of failures in the near and distant past weighs heavy upon us.''
Abbas, meanwhile, recited a familiar list of Palestinian demands, including
calls for Israel to end the expansion of Jewish settlements on land that could
be part of an eventual state called Palestine and to release some of the
thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
''Neither we nor you must beg for peace from the other,'' Abbas said. ''It is a
joint interest for us and you. Peace and freedom is a right for us, just as
peace and security is a right for you and us.''
Bush has held Mideast peacemaking at arms' length for most of his nearly seven
years in office, arguing that conditions in Israel and the Palestinian
territories were not right for a more energetic role. Arab allies, among others,
have warned that the Palestinian plight underlies other conflicts and feeds
grievances across the Middle East, and have urged the White House to do more.
Bush seemed to answer the criticism Tuesday, giving detailed reasons why the
time is now. He said Israeli and Palestinian leaders are ready to make peace,
that there is a wider and unifying fight against extremism fed by the
Palestinian conflict and that he world understands the urgency of acting now.
Later, in an interview with The Associated Press, Bush spoke of the importance
of giving beleaguered Palestinians something positive to look forward to -- and
he sketched a grim alternative.
Without a hopeful vision, he said, ''it is conceivable that we could lose an
entire generation -- or a lot of a generation -- to radicals and extremists.
There has to be something more positive. And that is on the horizon today.''
Negotiating teams will hold their first session in the region in just two weeks,
on Dec. 12, and Olmert and Abbas plan to continue one-on-one discussions they
began earlier this year. In addition, many of the same nations and organizations
attending Tuesday's conference will gather again on Dec. 17 in Paris to raise
money for the perpetually cash-strapped Palestinians.
To attract Arab backing, the Bush administration included a session in the
conference devoted to ''comprehensive'' peace questions -- a coded reference to
other Arab disputes with Israel. Syria came to the conference intending to raise
its claim to the strategic Golan Heights, seized by Israel in 1967, and Lebanon
wanted to talk about its border dispute with Israel. Rice told reporters that
Syria and Lebanon spoke up, but she gave no details.
But in a sign of the difficult road ahead, Abbas' speech was immediately
rejected by Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction that stormed to power in the
Gaza Strip in June, a month before Bush announced plans for the peace
conference.
------
Associated Press writers Amy Teibel, Mohammed Daraghmeh, Anne Gearan and Ben
Feller contributed to this report.
Bush Calls Abbas, Olmert to White House, NYT, 28.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mideast-Summit.html
Iranian
President: Annapolis a Failure
November
28, 2007
Filed at 8:29 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
TEHRAN,
Iran (AP) -- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday the U.S.-hosted
Mideast peace conference was a ''failure'' and that Israel is doomed to
''collapse,'' lashing out at the Annapolis meeting that is widely seen as
isolating Iran.
The comments were the first time in months that the hard-line Ahmadinejad has
used such strong anti-Israeli rhetoric, highlighting Tehran's bitterness toward
the conference, which its closest Arab ally Syria attended.
''It is impossible that the Zionist regime will survive. Collapse is in the
nature of this regime because it has been created on aggression, lying,
oppression and crime,'' Ahmadinejad said after a Cabinet meeting, according to
state-run television.
''Soon, even the most politically doltish individuals will understand that this
conference was a failure from the beginning,'' he said in comments reported by
the official IRNA news agency.
Iran has repeatedly condemned the conference, saying it would fail to bring any
peace for the Palestinians and warning that it will discredit Arab countries who
participated. Iran on Tuesday expresses surprise that Damascus participated in
the gathering, although it has stopped short of directly criticizing its ally.
Ahmadinejad said the Palestinian ''resistance'' -- such as Hamas, which is
backed by Tehran -- must have a say in any settlement.
''Many such meetings have been held but have failed,'' he said. ''If decision is
made about Palestine, representatives of the elected Palestinian government and
resistance should be there and the rights of the Palestinian people --
self-determination, the right of voting and return of refugees -- must be
recognized,'' he said.
Ahmadinejad has raised controversy in the West with past predictions of Israel's
eventual destruction, including a comment saying it should be ''wiped off'' or
''disappear'' from the map -- and even critics at home said his inflammatory
speeches were needlessly provoking the West against Iran.
Iranian President: Annapolis a Failure, NYT, 28.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iran-Conference.html
News
Analysis
Iran
Casts Big Shadow on Mideast Talks
November
28, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER
ANNAPOLIS,
Md., Nov. 27 — The Middle East peace conference here on Tuesday was officially
about ending the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. But there was an unspoken goal
just below the surface: stopping the rising regional influence of Iran and
Islamic radicalism.
That is why, despite enormous skepticism about the ability of the Israelis and
Palestinians to reach a final peace treaty, there is enormous relief among the
many Sunni Arab countries in attendance that the United States has re-engaged in
what they see as the larger and more important battle for Muslim hearts and
minds.
“The Arabs have come here not because they love the Jews or even the
Palestinians,” said an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team who spoke on
condition of anonymity. “They came because they need a strategic alliance with
the United States against Iran.”
Hovering over Annapolis are deep anxieties over the challenge from a resurgent
Shiite and non-Arab Iran, with its nuclear program and its successful allies and
proxies in southern Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Those Arab
nations fear that the tide of history is moving away from them, and that they
are losing their own youth to religious militancy.
“There is a genuine concern and fear among political classes in the Arab world
that the Islamic trend hasn’t reached its plateau,” said Hisham Melhem, the
Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya television. “They worry that Iran and its
allies act as if this may be the beginning of the end of America’s moment in the
Middle East.”
Those concerns are linked in the minds of the region’s leaders to the
Palestinian issue, he said. “They want to try for a resolution to an
Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has always been the focal point for
mobilization of Islamic and radical groups,” he said.
Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, put it this way: “This
is the summit of our hope and their fear. It’s our hope that at long last the
Arab world will understand that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is not the core
and can be solved, and their fear of Islamic extremism and Iran, which they call
the Persian threat. This is what brought them here.”
In his speech here, President Bush listed three reasons why he thought “the time
is right” for Annapolis. First, he said, “because Palestinians and Israelis have
leaders who are determined to achieve peace.” But second, he said, “because a
battle is under way for the future of the Middle East, and we must not cede
victory to the extremists.” His third reason was an extension of the second,
“because the world understands the urgency of supporting these negotiations.”
In his own speech, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, took a similar
tack, addressing Mr. Bush directly and saying, “We do recognize — and I presume
that you share with me this view — that the absence of hope and overwhelming
despair would feed extremism.”
The Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, was blunt. “Stagnation in the peace
process has increased the appeal of extremist ideologies,” he said. “Feelings of
despair and frustration have reached a dangerously high level.”
Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat professor of government at the University of
Maryland, said that the fear of growing militancy and radicalism, fed by the
model of Iran and Al Qaeda, has brought the Arabs together in the hope that a
new urgency will persuade Washington to try to settle the Israeli-Palestinian
problem.
“They’re very worried about militancy and their public’s great sympathy with
Hezbollah and Hamas,” Mr. Telhami said, speaking by telephone from Cairo. “They
were all stunned by the Hamas takeover of Gaza” in June.
The countries of the gulf in particular, he said, “are worried about regional
stability, about their kids and about jeopardizing their extraordinary economic
power.” The moderate Arab states are “vulnerable to militancy because of the
Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq, and they want to reduce their vulnerability.”
Aaron David Miller, a former negotiator for the Clinton administration, said
that while he applauded the effort at Annapolis, he doubted that the Bush
administration “has the will and skill” to pull off a peace treaty. “The chances
for a Palestinian state in George Bush’s term are slim to none,” he said. But
the Annapolis gathering does have important regional significance.
“For the Arab centrists, the new Middle East is a nasty one, and the Palestinian
issue resonates emotionally and deeply,” he said.
So despite low Arab expectations, too, Arabs came as a way to commit Washington,
as both Saudi Arabia and Jordan have been demanding since 2001, to press for an
Israeli-Palestinian peace and begin a larger regional process through it. “Bush
will be gone in a year,” Mr. Miller said. “But the Arabs want to lock the U.S.
into some kind of negotiating process in which the next president is also
locked.”
Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, put it pithily.
“Everybody at Annapolis has something in common,” he said. “It’s not love of
Israel or the Palestinians. It’s fear of Iran. Everyone needs a relative to
protect them from Iran.”
Iran Casts Big Shadow on Mideast Talks, NYT, 28.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/washington/28assess.html?hp
Putin
Says U.S. Is Meddling in Russian Election
November
27, 2007
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
MOSCOW,
Nov. 26 — President Vladimir V. Putin today accused the United States of trying
to taint the legitimacy of upcoming Russian parliamentary elections by pressing
a group of prominent independent election observers to abandon their attempts to
monitor the campaign.
Mr. Putin contended that the election monitors, who are deployed by the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, had canceled their plans to
monitor the parliamentary balloting because of pressure from the State
Department in Washington.
Mr. Putin’s statements in recent weeks have taken on an increasingly
nationalistic tone as he has sought to muster support for his party in the
balloting on Sunday. Speaking to reporters today in St. Petersburg, he once
again criticized what he suggested was foreign meddling in Russia’s affairs.
“According to information we have, it was again done at the recommendation of
the U.S. State Department and we will take this into account in our inter-state
relations with this country,” he said. “Their goal is the delegitimization of
the elections. But they will not achieve even this goal.”
In focusing on the supposed role of the State Department in the decision, Mr.
Putin was highlighting a charge first made on Nov. 19 by the chairman of
Russia’s Central Election Commission, Vladimir Y. Churov.
Mr. Churov noted at a news conference that the monitoring group had abandoned
its mission soon after its director, Ambassador Christian Strohal of Austria,
visited Washington. Mr. Strohal’s aides said subsequently that the timing of the
visit and the decision had been coincidental.
A spokeswoman for the election observers today called Mr. Putin’s assertion
“nonsense.” The United States Embassy in Moscow would not immediately comment.
The election-monitoring arm of the O.S.C.E., the Office for Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights, or O.D.I.H.R., announced on Nov. 16 that it was
canceling its mission to Russia, saying that restrictions imposed by the Russian
government had made it impossible for it to carry out its work. The State
Department and European diplomats supported the decision.
Urdur Gunnarsdottir, a spokeswoman for the monitoring arm, said Mr. Putin was
misinformed about the reasons for the group’s withdrawal.
“This was a decision that was simply based on the fact that we were not
receiving any visas and time had run out,” she said. “The only consultation that
took place was within our office with the people that plan these observation
missions and carry them through. They have 150 observation missions under their
belt. They know by now what needs to be in place to do this.”
Mr. Putin has turned the parliamentary elections into a referendum on his
leadership, and in recent days he has stepped up his campaigning for his party,
United Russia. At the same time the Kremlin has used its control over the
election laws, government agencies and the news media to ensure that the
opposition has little if any chance of gaining a foothold in the next
Parliament.
Over the weekend, the opposition coalition, which is headed by Garry Kasparov,
the former chess champion, held rallies and marches in Moscow, St. Petersburg
and other cities. The rallies were broken up by riot police officers, with
hundreds of people detained. Mr. Kasparov’s movement, Other Russia, contends
that Mr. Putin is creating a Soviet-style dictatorship in Russia.
Mr. Kasparov himself was arrested in Moscow on Saturday when he tried to deliver
a letter to the federal election authorities assailing the conduct of the
election, and a judge sentenced him to five days in jail.
In St. Petersburg on Sunday, two well-known opposition politicians, Boris Y.
Nemtsov and Nikita Y. Belykh, leaders of a mainstream liberal party, the Union
of Right Forces, were briefly detained.
O.D.I.H.R. has monitored every election in Russia since the fall of the Soviet
Union in 1991. Its presence was viewed as an effort by Moscow to ensure that
elections complied with international standards.
But the Kremlin has in recent years chafed at the group’s reports, contending
that they were biased against the government.
After the 2004 presidential elections, which Mr. Putin won in a landslide, the
group stated flatly that the campaign had not been conducted fairly.
In recent months, Russian officials maintained that monitoring group needed to
be reformed. At the same time, the Kremlin repeatedly delayed the issuing of
visas to the group’s monitors, preventing them from observing the campaigning
for Parliament around the country, as well as news coverage, as is customary.
Russian officials then abruptly said they would sharply limit the size of
O.D.I.H.R.’s mission to only 70 people, down from 400 in the parliamentary
election in 2003.
Putin Says U.S. Is Meddling in Russian Election, NYT,
27.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/world/europe/27russia.html?hp
Rice’s
Turnabout on Mideast Talks
November
26, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 25 — At President Bush’s first National Security Council meeting in January
2001, he announced that he did not want to be drawn into the shattered Middle
East peace process, people at the meeting recalled, because he believed that
former President Bill Clinton had pushed so hard for an Israeli-Palestinian
accord that he made the situation worse.
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld agreed with
the president, while Secretary of State Colin L. Powell countered that even if
the breakdown in peace talks during Mr. Clinton’s term helped lead to the second
Palestinian intifada, or uprising, the United States could not stay aloof.
Condoleezza Rice, the new national security adviser, kept silent, but privately
she shared Mr. Bush’s views.
“There was absolutely no prospect of a Middle East peace process that was going
to lead to anything,” she said in an interview in May about her thinking in
2001. “I just didn’t see it.”
Nearly seven tumultuous years later, Ms. Rice, as secretary of state, has led
the Bush administration to a startling turnaround and is now thrusting the
United States as forcefully as Mr. Clinton once did into the role of mediator
between the Israelis and Palestinians. The culmination of her efforts occurs
this week in Annapolis, Md., as Mr. Bush, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel
and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, meet to set the outlines of a
final peace agreement before the end of Mr. Bush’s term.
For Ms. Rice, Annapolis reflects her evolution from passive participant to
activist diplomat who has been willing to break with Mr. Cheney and other
conservatives skeptical of an American diplomatic role in the Middle East. Mr.
Cheney argued with Ms. Rice against a pivotal Middle East speech that Mr. Bush
gave in 2002 in the Rose Garden, fought her on a host of other issues, including
Iran and North Korea, and today surrounds himself with senior advisers dubious
about the Annapolis meeting.
Many other Middle East experts remain unconvinced as well, particularly since
the failure so far of the Israelis and Palestinians to agree on a joint
statement to come out of the 40-nation conference has forced Ms. Rice to recast
Annapolis as the start rather than the end of negotiations. Critics say she is
organizing little more than an elaborate photo opportunity.
“This administration has too often engaged in stagecraft, not statecraft,” said
Dennis Ross, who was Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton and the first President
George Bush. “One of the reasons there’s so much skepticism from people in the
region is that they were led to believe that this was going to be a
breakthrough.”
Ms. Rice’s thinking on the Middle East changed for several reasons, her aides
said. She has been under increasing pressure to get involved in the peace
negotiations from European and Arab leaders whose support she needs for the
campaign of diplomatic and economic pressures on Iran. She considers it equally
important, her aides said, to shore up the moderate leadership of Mr. Abbas, who
is facing a sharp internal challenge from the more militant Hamas faction.
Not least, Ms. Rice’s supporters say, she is determined to fashion a legacy in
the Middle East that extends beyond the war in Iraq.
Ms. Rice was able to engineer the administration’s shift in large part because
of her extraordinarily close relationship with the president — Mr. Bush “loved
Condi,” said Andrew H. Card Jr., the former White House chief of staff — and her
ability to move him at critical moments. Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice insisted, is also
fully committed to the Annapolis meeting.
“The president has wanted to see this happen,” Ms. Rice said in a recent
interview. “We have discussions about how to do it — is the time right for this
or is the time right for that? But this is the president’s issue as much as it’s
mine.”
A Foot on
the Brakes
Ms. Rice began her journey as a voice of caution in the first big Middle East
crisis the White House faced, in the spring of 2002, when a Palestinian suicide
bomber blew himself up at a large Passover meal in an Israeli beach resort
hotel. The militant group Hamas took responsibility, and Israel’s leaders,
reacting with fury, sent troops and tanks to storm the Ramallah compound of
Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
Mr. Bush responded by dispatching Mr. Powell to the region, even though both
believed that there was little the United States could do. “The president said,
‘You’ve got to go, it’s going to be ugly, you’re going to get beaten up, but
you’ve got a lot of fire wall to burn up,’” Mr. Powell recalled.
Ms. Rice, whose first trip to Israel was in 2000, stayed back in Washington to
monitor and rein in Mr. Powell. She was the messenger for Mr. Bush, who had
adopted his hands-off policy in Middle East negotiations not only because of Mr.
Clinton but because he was reluctant to make too many demands on Israel at that
point in his term. So as Mr. Powell traveled from fruitless meetings with Ariel
Sharon, then the prime minister, in Jerusalem and Mr. Arafat in Ramallah, Ms.
Rice was constantly on the telephone admonishing Mr. Powell to slow down to
avoid putting too much pressure on Mr. Sharon, Mr. Powell recalled.
“She was conveying whatever angst existed in the White House that day,” Mr.
Powell said. “It was cautionary and wanting to know what I was doing so she
could report it to the president.”
By the end of the trip, Ms. Rice even rejected Mr. Powell’s idea of a peace
conference in the region, but Mr. Powell dug in. “I finally told her, late at
night, ‘You may not like it, but I’m the one who’s here, and I’ve got to say
something,’” Mr. Powell said he told Ms. Rice. He announced the conference
before returning to Washington, but without support from the White House, the
idea was dead.
The Bush administration might have continued with bursts of attention followed
by drift had it not been for the looming war in Iraq. By June 2002, Mr. Bush and
Ms. Rice realized that before the Europeans and Arabs would support an
American-led invasion, the administration would have to prove that it cared
about more in the Middle East than the security of Israel.
Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice began to engage in a major rethinking. The result was a
speech, a major departure in American policy, that called for Palestinian
elections and demanded the ouster of Mr. Arafat before the United States would
support a Palestinian state. Ms. Rice saw it as the beginning of a notion that
one day there could be a democratic Arab Middle East, but Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr.
Cheney, who were strongly opposed to anything that might require Israel to
accept a Palestinian state that could become a source for terrorism on its
border, objected.
At a National Security Council meeting a few days before the speech, Mr. Cheney
spoke up. “There was just a sense of was the president inserting himself in
something that he didn’t have an answer for, and that was possibly going to make
things worse or certainly not make them better?” Ms. Rice said, recalling the
nature of Mr. Cheney’s doubts. Mr. Rumsfeld eventually agreed with the speech,
but the vice president was still opposed on the day that Mr. Bush delivered it,
June 24, 2002.
“I think he just thought the president shouldn’t be giving a speech on the
Middle East, which kind of implied that if something happened, we might
re-engage,” Ms. Rice said. Mr. Cheney declined to comment on Ms. Rice’s remarks.
Detoured by
Iraq
Over the next year, the peace efforts languished as Ms. Rice and Mr. Bush
focused on the coming invasion of Iraq. When Israeli tanks and troops surrounded
Mr. Arafat’s compound again in September 2002, this time in response to
back-to-back suicide bombings, Ms. Rice viewed the siege as damaging to the
administration’s campaign to enlist support in the Arab world for the war in
Iraq. In a White House meeting with Dov Weissglas, then a senior adviser to Mr.
Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, Ms. Rice demanded, successfully, that the
Israelis withdraw.
“She said in her way, politely but very firmly, that the United States was
trying to put together the coalition prior to the invasion of Iraq, and our
operation at that time was very disturbing,” Mr. Weissglas said in a recent
interview.
It was not until the eve of the war in March 2003, and then only under pressure
from Tony Blair, the British prime minister, that the White House finally
endorsed the “road map,” a peace plan of incremental steps that was to lead to a
Palestinian state in three years. Mr. Bush said he was adopting the plan because
the Palestinians had slated Mr. Abbas to take the job of prime minister and
negotiate with Israel.
By the spring of 2004, when Mr. Bush agreed to support a plan by Mr. Sharon to
withdraw Israeli settlers and forces from Gaza, Mr. Sharon asked for something
more that set off a huge fight within the administration: American recognition
that Palestinian refugees and their descendants who had fled in the 1940s would
have a right of return to a new Palestinian state, but not to Israel itself.
Ms. Rice agreed that allowing Palestinians to return to Israel would overwhelm
the Jewish population and effectively obliterate Israel’s identity as a Jewish
state. Mr. Cheney and his allies supported Mr. Sharon’s request, but the State
Department had always taken the position that the issue — with the final borders
of a Palestinian state and how Jerusalem might be shared by the two sides —
should be decided through negotiations, not by fiat from Washington.
Aware of the debate within the Bush administration, Tzipi Livni, now the Israeli
foreign minister but then the minister for immigrant absorption, went to plead
her case to Ms. Rice in Washington. “I had the opportunity to convince Rice,”
Ms. Livni said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year.
Ms. Rice said she understood the issue was “very, very core” to Ms. Livni, and
acknowledged that Ms. Livni’s appeal “was taken into account in the president’s
words” when Mr. Bush made a pivotal announcement, in April 2004, that any “just,
fair and realistic framework” for Israel would mean that Palestinians would have
to settle in their own state — an enormous benefit to Mr. Sharon.
A Reckoning
Point
When Ms. Rice became secretary of state in the second term, she told Mr. Bush in
a long conversation at Camp David the weekend after the 2004 election that her
priority would have to be progress in the Middle East. It was a turning point in
more ways than one; Mr. Arafat died a few days later. Although Ms. Rice said in
an interview that she had set no conditions when she took the job, her aides
said that she had known that her relationship with the president would give her
far greater influence to push an agenda, including peacemaking in the Middle
East, than Mr. Powell’s.
Accordingly, Ms. Rice spent much of 2005 working on the Gaza withdrawal that she
thought would contribute to stability. Instead, it was seen as so emboldening
the radicals that in early 2006 Hamas won a landslide victory in Palestinian
elections over Mr. Abbas and his governing party, Fatah.
Ms. Rice, who had heralded the election as a symbol of the new stirrings of
democracy in the Middle East, was so blindsided by the victory that she was
startled when she saw a crawl of words on her television screen while exercising
on her elliptical trainer the morning after the election: “In wake of Hamas
victory, Palestinian cabinet resigns.”
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’” Ms. Rice recalled. When the crawl
continued, she got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department.
“I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’” Ms. Rice recalled. “And
they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, Hamas won?’”
Ms. Rice’s credibility was further damaged when she delayed calling for a
cease-fire as Israel plunged into a two-front war in Lebanon and Gaza that
summer. By the end of 2006, with the peace efforts in shambles and the
administration’s time running out, Ms. Rice began to pick up the pieces.
Over Christmas, she took home reports written by the State Department historian
on previous American efforts toward a peace agreement in the Middle East, and
met alone in her Watergate apartment with Ms. Livni. There they worked out an
ambitious plan to get Mr. Olmert to meet with Mr. Abbas, not on the incremental
steps of the road map, but on the big “final status” issues of a Palestinian
state.
Since then, Ms. Rice has made eight trips to the region, and her supporters say
she remains determined against the odds. “She knows very well if she doesn’t do
anything, she will be Iraq,” a European diplomat and a friend of hers said.
Mr. Weissglas had another interpretation. “I don’t think she’s led by the desire
to get a Nobel Prize for Peace,” he said. “But I think she truly believes in the
last five years conditions have changed on both sides that enable now a step
toward a final resolution.”
Both articles are adapted from “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” by
Elisabeth Bumiller, to be published next month by Random House.
Rice’s Turnabout on Mideast Talks, NYT, 26.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/washington/26rice.html?hp
President Bush and ‘Madame Rice’: A Personal Bond Helps Align Policy
November
26, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 25 — Condoleezza Rice and President Bush are often described as opposites,
but their closest advisers say they are remarkably alike. Both are products of
their own elites — Mr. Bush from the old East Coast establishment, Ms. Rice from
Southern black professionals — who are supremely self-confident on the surface
but harbor resentments underneath. Ms. Rice, like Mr. Bush, has been
underestimated her entire life, as an African-American, as a woman and often as
the youngest person in the room.
Ms. Rice’s unusually tight bond with Mr. Bush has helped her as secretary of
state in his second term to prod the president toward diplomacy with Iran and
North Korea. But administration officials have long said that her devotion to
Mr. Bush made her unwilling to challenge the president when needed during his
first term, when she served as a less than confident national security adviser.
More often in those years, Ms. Rice used her relationship with Mr. Bush to try
to gain control over the national security process as well as two powerful men
who drove much of the agenda in the first term, Vice President Dick Cheney and
Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary.
In January 2001, Ms. Rice went to Mr. Bush to stop Mr. Cheney from taking a
major part of her job, running National Security Council meetings in the
president’s absence, as Mr. Cheney had proposed to Mr. Bush that he do. “She
threw a fit,” a former administration official close to Mr. Cheney recalled.
Ms. Rice, in an interview earlier this year, said that she went to the president
because she was determined “to get it fixed,” and that she made the argument to
him that it “wasn’t appropriate” for Mr. Cheney to run the meetings since that
had not been the role of vice presidents in the past. “Mr. President, this is
what national security advisers do,” Ms. Rice recalled that she told the
president, who sided with her.
In August 2002, Ms. Rice went to Mr. Bush to tell him that Mr. Cheney had to be
reined in after the vice president gave a speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars
convention in Nashville that effectively threatened war with Saddam Hussein and
asserted that there was “false comfort” in sending United Nations weapons
inspectors to Iraq.
“The president said, ‘Well, why don’t you call Dick and tell him what you want
him to do?’”said Ms. Rice, who said she told Mr. Cheney that his speech was
going to “trap” the president because Mr. Bush was planning to call for weapons
inspections. The vice president, she said, agreed to temper his next speech. Mr.
Cheney had no comment on Ms. Rice’s remarks.
In September 2003, Ms. Rice went to Mr. Bush to try to wrest control of the
administration’s Iraq policy from Mr. Rumsfeld and L. Paul Bremer III, then the
administration’s top civilian administrator in Iraq, whose dictates from Baghdad
had frustrated Ms. Rice for months.
“I explained the problem, how we were starting to get decisions out there that
we would know after the fact, that had huge policy implications, and we just
couldn’t work that way,” Ms. Rice said she told the president, who by October
had put Ms. Rice in charge of what the White House called the Iraq Stabilization
Group to manage policy during the American occupation.
In the fall of 2006, when administration officials knew that the president would
dismiss Mr. Rumsfeld once he found a replacement, Ms. Rice had a hand in his
ouster when she went to Mr. Bush and enthusiastically recommended Robert M.
Gates, an old friend and a superior from her days on the National Security
Council staff of Mr. Bush’s father.
“I told the president, ‘We have to reach out to him,’” Ms. Rice recalled. She
had battled for years with Mr. Rumsfeld, whose Department of Defense, she said,
withheld so much crucial war planning information from her during the period
before the Iraq war that she had to send members of her staff to the Pentagon to
secretly ferret out documents.
In recent months, Ms. Rice has gone so often to Mr. Bush to push him on
diplomacy with Iran and North Korea that he has started to needle her that she
expects him to talk to people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the radical Islamist who
is president of Iran, or Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader whom Mr. Bush has
said he loathes.
“You want me to sit down with Ahmadinejad?” a White House official recalled that
Mr. Bush had archly asked Ms. Rice. “Kim Jong-il? Is he next?” The White House
official said that Mr. Bush had also taken to calling Ms. Rice “Madame Rice,” as
in “Madame Rice, you’re not coming in to tell me that we ought to change our
position?”
This article is adapted from “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” by Elisabeth
Bumiller, to be published next month by Random House.
President Bush and ‘Madame Rice’: A Personal Bond Helps
Align Policy, NYT, 26.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/washington/26adviser.html
News
Analysis
Australia’s Path Bends Away From U.S.
November
26, 2007
The New York Times
By RAYMOND BONNER
LONDON,
Nov. 25 — The defeat of John Howard, Australia’s prime minister, in Saturday’s
election deprived President Bush of one of his most steadfast allies and will
bring changes in Australia’s foreign policy that will be felt in Washington.
During recent years, Mr. Howard was unabashedly in the American corner at times
when other world leaders were keeping their studied distance, and his loss is
likely to be particularly acute for Mr. Bush, who puts great stock in personal
relations in the conduct of foreign relations.
Mr. Howard, leader of the center-right Liberal Party, was one of the most
frequent foreign visitors to the Bush White House and Texas ranch (ranking
behind Tony Blair of Britain and King Abdullah II of Jordan, and tied with Ariel
Sharon of Israel), according to the State Department.
Australia’s next prime minister, Kevin Rudd, said Sunday, in his first news
conference since the election, that he had received a congratulatory call from
President Bush, and that he would be visiting the United States early in the new
year.
Under Mr. Rudd, the most notable foreign policy changes will be on the
environment, nuclear issues and Iraq, said a veteran Australian diplomat, who
requested anonymity because he feared that Mr. Rudd would not look kindly on a
public servant speaking out on foreign policy.
Mr. Rudd stated unequivocally in his victory speech on Saturday evening that
Australia would ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. That will further
isolate the United States, leaving it as the only industrialized country not to
have done so.
Mr. Rudd has said that his Labor Party would withdraw Australia’s 550 combat
troops from Iraq. That would still leave more than 300 Australian support troops
in Iraq, so the move may be seen as largely symbolic.
For the Bush administration, symbolism and gestures count in a war without much
international support, and the biggest difference on Iraq may come over the new
government’s public posture.
In the face of the largest antiwar demonstrations since Vietnam, Mr. Howard sent
Australian troops into Iraq. In fact, Australia’s tough and highly trained
special forces were secretly operating in western Iraq in advance of the
American invasion. Mr. Howard could at times sound more hawkish than Mr. Bush on
the need to stay the course when the war was going badly.
Mr. Rudd, by contrast, is unlikely to offer public support for the war effort,
and if he does speak on the subject, he may well be critical, the veteran
diplomat said.
Washington can still continue to count on Australian support in Afghanistan,
Australian officials and political analysts said. Australia has about 1,000
troops there, including special forces.
Washington will undoubtedly be watching Australia’s relations with China under
Mr. Rudd, who was once a diplomat in Beijing and speaks fluent Mandarin. When
President Hu Jintao of China was in Australia in September, Mr. Rudd spoke to
him in Chinese.
But with China a huge buyer of Australian resources, Australia had already been
moving closer to Beijing. Under Mr. Howard, President Hu was the first
nondemocratic leader to address the Australian Parliament.
A looming source of friction between the United States and Australia is over
Australia’s uranium policy; Australia has some of the largest uranium deposits
in the world. The Bush administration has been pushing Congress to allow the
transfer of nuclear technology and fuel to India, which was halted during the
Clinton administration. Mr. Howard’s government said it would sell uranium to
India.
But the Labor Party, which was a leader in the world antinuclear movement in the
1970s, opposed the sale, and has said it will not sell uranium to any country
that has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which India has not.
Another potential fissure is over America’s military presence in Australia. An
expansion of America’s forward basing abilities, which was part of the agenda of
Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, has gone on almost unnoticed
in Australia’s vast Northern Territory. This is not likely to sit well with
Labor’s left-wing base.
Mr. Howard was often lampooned by his critics as being Bush’s poodle, a word
which some also used to describe Mr. Blair. But a look at the record suggests
that Australia did well out of the relationship.
Tariffs were lifted on Australian steel, a free-trade agreement was signed, and
Australia alone enjoys visa requirements for professionals that allow some
10,500 a year to enter the United States.
The Howard government also gained greater access to military technology and
intelligence, said Michael Thawley, the Australian ambassador to Washington from
2001 to 2005. He declined to provide details.
When Mr. Howard began to face domestic political pressure at home over the
detention of two Australian citizens, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he appealed directly to Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney, and the two were released.
Several recent polls have shown a growing antagonism in Australia toward
America, with many Australians expressing a higher regard for China. But the two
men whose names are being bandied about as the most likely ambassadors to
Washington are Bob Carr, a long-time Labor politician who is a student of
American presidents, and Kim Beazley, a former defense minister and a leader of
the Labor Party who is a Civil War buff.
Australia’s Path Bends Away From U.S., NYT, 26.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/world/asia/26australia.html
Ally of
Bush Is Defeated in Australia
November
25, 2007
The New York Times
By TIM JOHNSTON
SYDNEY,
Australia, Nov. 24 — Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, one of President
Bush’s staunchest allies in Asia, suffered a comprehensive defeat at the hands
of the electorate on Saturday, as his Liberal Party-led coalition lost its
majority in Parliament.
He will be replaced by Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader and a former diplomat.
“Today Australia looks to the future,” Mr. Rudd told a cheering crowd in his
home state, Queensland. “Today the Australian people have decided that we as a
nation will move forward.”
Mr. Howard’s defeat, after 11 years in power, follows that of José María Aznar
of Spain, who also backed the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and political
setbacks for Tony Blair, who stepped down as Britain’s prime minister in June.
Mr. Howard conceded nearly two hours after the last polling booths closed in the
west of the country.
“A few moments ago I telephoned Mr. Kevin Rudd and I congratulated him and the
Australian Labor Party on a very emphatic victory,” Mr. Howard told a room of
emotional supporters.
“I leave the office of prime minister with our country prouder, stronger and
more prosperous than ever,” he said.
Returns for a small number of seats are yet to be compiled, but analysts
estimate that over all the Labor Party gained 28 seats to win a comfortable
22-seat majority in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament, where governments
are formed. Official results are expected within the next day or two.
Mr. Howard may suffer the indignity of losing his own seat, representing a
district on Sydney’s north shore, which he has held for 33 years, to a former
television anchor and rookie politician. He would be the first sitting prime
minister to lose his seat since 1929.
It was a bruising campaign, and the Liberal Party has said it will challenge
some results on the grounds that the Labor candidates had broken electoral law
by failing to resign from government jobs before running for office. The Labor
Party said it had broken no laws.
Mr. Rudd, 50, campaigned on a platform of new leadership to address broad
concerns about the environment, health and education. He has said his first acts
as prime minister would include pushing for the ratification of the Kyoto
agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and negotiating the withdrawal of
Australia’s 500 troops from Iraq.
Analysts said the leadership change was unlikely to bring a radically new
foreign policy, although they expected a shift in emphasis in the relationship
with the United States, Australia’s closest ally. “Australia will remain a close
ally of the United States, and Rudd remains committed to the alliance,” said
Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. But
he noted that “if there is a Democratic administration elected next year, to
some extent they would become closer.”
Mr. Howard has a strong personal relationship with Mr. Bush that is based on a
similar socially conservative philosophy and a shared outlook on terrorism.
Australian opinion polls have shown that although Australians remain strong
supporters of the so-called Anzus alliance — the security pact among Australia,
New Zealand and the United States — they do not approve of Mr. Bush or the Iraq
war.
The attempts by Mr. Howard’s coalition to stress its economic record apparently
failed to impress voters. The Australian economy has had 17 years of continuous
growth, lately driven by Chinese demand for Australian iron ore and coal. Mr.
Howard had warned voters that a Labor victory would endanger the country’s
prosperity.
Despite the coalition campaign, there was little distance between the parties on
economic policy, and the defining characteristics came down to the personalities
of the leaders. Mr. Howard was running for a fifth term, and many voters said
they were ready for a change.
“Howard is out of touch,” said George Varvaressos, 52, who voted in eastern
Sydney on Saturday morning. “It’s the arrogance of being in power for too long —
he hasn’t been listening.”
If Australia’s strongest military and political alliance is with Washington, the
fuel for its economy is coming from China. Mr. Fullilove says Mr. Rudd’s ability
to manage the relationship among Canberra, Washington and Beijing will be
crucial.
Mr. Rudd, 18 years younger than Mr. Howard, has a reputation as a cerebral
student of policy, as opposed to the Liberal leader’s image of a hardened and
aggressive political animal.
“He seems more personable, approachable. He doesn’t seem arrogant — yet — and I
have respect for him,” said Marcelle Freiman, who voted for Mr. Rudd in eastern
Sydney on Saturday.
Mr. Rudd’s dry image was altered by the news that he had visited a strip club
during a trip to New York in 2003.
He was a diplomat in Beijing and speaks Mandarin. He impressed many with a
fluent address to President Hu Jintao of China when Mr. Hu visited Australia in
September.
Mr. Fullilove said Mr. Rudd’s experience regarding China was unlikely to make a
significant difference to Australia’s relationship with the United States. “I
would counsel against people assuming that because Kevin Rudd speaks Mandarin
there would be a big rebalancing of the relationship in favor of Beijing,” he
said.
Ally of Bush Is Defeated in Australia, NYT, 25.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/world/asia/25australia.html
A Glance
at Past Mideast Peacemaking
November
23, 2007
Filed at 11:17 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
A look at
Mideast peace conferences with U.S. involvement:
------
Sept. 5-17, 1978, Camp David, Thurmont, Md.:
-- Participants: President Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
-- Details: Sadat and Begin sign agreements with Carter developing a framework
for peace. Under the first, Israel returns the Sinai, occupied in 1967, for
peace. Talks fail on the second agreement for an elected authority replacing
Israel's military governments in the West Bank and Gaza.
------
March 1979, Washington, DC:
-- Participants: Begin, Sadat and Carter
-- Details: Israel agrees to give the Sinai back to Egypt, but keep the Gaza
Strip. The agreement prompted Arab states to boycott Egypt.
------
Oct. 30 -Nov. 1, 1991, Madrid, Spain:
-- Participants: President George H.W. Bush, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev,
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir,
Jordanian Foreign Minister Kamel Abu Jaber, Chief Palestinian delegate Haider
Abdul-Shafi, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa.
-- Details: President Bush called for peace with security and diplomatic and
economic relations. Direct talks begin among Israel and Syria, Lebanon and
Jordan.
------
Sept. 1993, Washington, DC:
-- Participants: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, PLO Chairman Yasser
Arafat, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, PLO Executive Council Member
Mahmoud Abbas, President Clinton.
-- Details: Witnessed by Clinton and former Presidents Bush and Carter at the
White House, Peres and Abbas signed the Oslo accord, which had been negotiated
in secret meetings shepherded by a Norwegian group of academics and lower-level
officials. The deal included mutual recognition between Israel and Arafat's PLO
and allowed for the creation of a Palestinian autonomy government in the West
Bank and Gaza. Tough issues -- the fate of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements,
Palestinian refugees -- were left for ''final status'' talks.
------
Oct. 15-23, 1998, Wye River Conference Centers, Queenstown, Md.:
-- Participants: Clinton, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
-- Details: Israel agrees to hand over an additional 13 percent of the West Bank
(bringing Palestinian control to about 40 percent), release Palestinian
prisoners and lift trade restrictions. Palestinians agree to arrest militants,
give up some guns and annul a clause in their charter that negated Israel's
right to exist. The sides also agree to report on security cooperation to CIA
envoys, which is still in practice.
------
January 2000, Shepherdstown, W.Va.:
-- Participants: Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Syrian Foreign
Minister Farouk al-Sharaa.
-- Details: The talks fail over details of an Israeli offer to withdraw from the
Golan Heights, a strategic enclave captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war.
------
July 11-25, 2000, Camp David, Thurmont, Md:
-- Participants: Clinton, Arafat and Barak.
-- Details: Clinton meets with Arafat and Barak after the deadline for interim
accords expires. Israel offers a Palestinian state in Gaza and most of West
Bank, with a Jerusalem foothold, but disagreements remain, including a demand by
Arafat for a right to resettle Palestinian refugees in Israel. Fighting erupts
two months later and the effort eventually collapses.
A Glance at Past Mideast Peacemaking, NYT, 23.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mideast-Past-Glance.html
Rice's
Highs and Lows
November
20, 2007
Filed at 9:18 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
A look at
some of Condoleezza Rice's accomplishments and disappointments as secretary of
state:
LOW -- Rice's January 2005 Senate confirmation hearings turn unexpectedly testy
and her confirmation is held up by Democrats. The tally, though one-sided at
85-13, was still the largest ''no'' vote against any secretary of state nominee
since 1825.
HIGH -- In February 2005, Rice is warmly received by French and German leaders
on her first trip abroad as secretary, a fence-mending session with European
allies unhappy with the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
HIGH -- Rice presides over a potentially historic initial nuclear bargain with
North Korea in September 2005. The deal went dormant and nearly fell apart but
was revived last year -- after the North exploded a nuclear device.
HIGH -- Rice directly negotiates a November 2005 agreement to allow greater
movement of goods and people into the impoverished Palestinian territory of the
Gaza Strip. The accomplishment was short-lived, however. The agreement never
took full effect and Gaza later came under the full control of Hamas militants.
LOW -- Rice appears taken aback by the victory of Hamas militants in Palestinian
parliamentary elections in January 2006, but says the Bush administration
remains committed to democracy and elections in the Mideast.
HIGH -- In May 2006, Rice makes a bold offer of face-to-face talks with
adversary Iran, but Iran later rejects the terms.
LOW -- Israel goes to war with Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon in July
2006, a setback for Rice's diplomacy in the Mideast, including the fragile new
U.S.-backed democratic government in Lebanon. Rice appears exhausted and harried
during a trip meant to lower tensions and hold off international demands for a
U.S.-brokered cease-fire.
LOW -- North Korea tests a nuclear device in October 2006, proving it has
nuclear weapons material and know-how and increasing the pressure on Rice and
other diplomats to bargain with the Stalinist regime.
HIGH -- Rice draws Israeli and Palestinian leaders back into regular contact in
early 2007, despite the continued challenge posed by Hamas.
LOW -- Hamas routs rival moderate Palestinian forces in Gaza in June 2007 and
assumes control of the territory. This splits the Palestinian government and
removes a third of the Palestinian population from the direct control of the
moderate U.S.-backed government in the West Bank.
HIGH -- In July 2007, President Bush announces plans for a U.S.-sponsored
Mideast peace conference. The session is expected to take place next week in
Annapolis, Md.
Rice's Highs and Lows, NYT, 20.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rice-Highs--Lows.html
U.S.
Secretly Aids Pakistan in Guarding Nuclear Arms
November
18, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 17 — Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100
million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s
president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former
senior administration officials.
But with the future of that country’s leadership in doubt, debate is
intensifying about whether Washington has done enough to help protect the
warheads and laboratories, and whether Pakistan’s reluctance to reveal critical
details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing
security effort.
The aid, buried in secret portions of the federal budget, paid for the training
of Pakistani personnel in the United States and the construction of a nuclear
security training center in Pakistan, a facility that American officials say is
nowhere near completion, even though it was supposed to be in operation this
year.
A raft of equipment — from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear
detection equipment — was given to Pakistan to help secure its nuclear material,
its warheads, and the laboratories that were the site of the worst known case of
nuclear proliferation in the atomic age.
While American officials say that they believe the arsenal is safe at the
moment, and that they take at face value Pakistani assurances that security is
vastly improved, in many cases the Pakistani government has been reluctant to
show American officials how or where the gear is actually used.
That is because the Pakistanis do not want to reveal the locations of their
weapons or the amount or type of new bomb-grade fuel the country is now
producing.
The American program was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the
Bush administration debated whether to share with Pakistan one of the crown
jewels of American nuclear protection technology, known as “permissive action
links,” or PALS, a system used to keep a weapon from detonating without proper
codes and authorizations.
In the end, despite past federal aid to France and Russia on delicate points of
nuclear security, the administration decided that it could not share the system
with the Pakistanis because of legal restrictions.
In addition, the Pakistanis were suspicious that any American-made technology in
their warheads could include a secret “kill switch,” enabling the Americans to
turn off their weapons.
While many nuclear experts in the federal government favored offering the PALS
system because they considered Pakistan’s arsenal among the world’s most
vulnerable to terrorist groups, some administration officials feared that
sharing the technology would teach Pakistan too much about American weaponry.
The same concern kept the Clinton administration from sharing the technology
with China in the early 1990s.
The New York Times has known details of the secret program for more than three
years, based on interviews with a range of American officials and nuclear
experts, some of whom were concerned that Pakistan’s arsenal remained
vulnerable. The newspaper agreed to delay publication of the article after
considering a request from the Bush administration, which argued that premature
disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons.
Since then, some elements of the program have been discussed in the Pakistani
news media and in a presentation late last year by the leader of Pakistan’s
nuclear safety effort, Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who acknowledged receiving
“international” help as he sought to assure Washington that all of the holes in
Pakistan’s nuclear security infrastructure had been sealed.
The Times told the administration last week that it was reopening its
examination of the program in light of those disclosures and the current
instability in Pakistan. Early this week, the White House withdrew its request
that publication be withheld, though it was unwilling to discuss details of the
program.
In recent days, American officials have expressed confidence that Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal is well secured. “I don’t see any indication right now that
security of those weapons is in jeopardy, but clearly we are very watchful, as
we should be,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a
Pentagon news conference on Thursday.
Admiral Mullen’s carefully chosen words, a senior administration official said,
were based on two separate intelligence assessments issued this month that had
been summarized in briefings to Mr. Bush. Both concluded that Pakistan’s nuclear
arsenal was safe under current conditions, and one also looked at laboratories
and came to the same conclusion.
Still, the Pakistani government’s reluctance to provide access has limited
efforts to assess the situation. In particular, some American experts say they
have less ability to look into the nuclear laboratories where highly enriched
uranium is produced — including the laboratory named for Abdul Qadeer Khan, the
man who sold Pakistan’s nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
The secret program was designed by the Energy Department and the State
Department, and it drew heavily from the effort over the past decade to secure
nuclear weapons, stockpiles and materials in Russia and other former Soviet
states. Much of the money for Pakistan was spent on physical security, like
fencing and surveillance systems, and equipment for tracking nuclear material if
it left secure areas.
But while Pakistan is formally considered a “major non-NATO ally,” the program
has been hindered by a deep suspicion among Pakistan’s military that the secret
goal of the United States was to gather intelligence about how to locate and, if
necessary, disable Pakistan’s arsenal, which is the pride of the country.
“Everything has taken far longer than it should,” a former official involved in
the program said in a recent interview, “and you are never sure what you really
accomplished.”
So far, the amount the United States has spent on the classified nuclear
security program, less than $100 million, amounts to slightly less than one
percent of the roughly $10 billion in known American aid to Pakistan since the
Sept. 11 attacks. Most of that money has gone for assistance in counterterrorism
activities against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The debate over sharing nuclear security technology began just before
then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was sent to Islamabad after the Sept. 11
attacks, as the United States was preparing to invade Afghanistan.
“There were a lot of people who feared that once we headed into Afghanistan, the
Taliban would be looking for these weapons,” said a senior official who was
involved. But a legal analysis found that aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons
program — even if it was just with protective gear — would violate both
international and American law.
General Musharraf, in his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” published last year,
did not discuss any equipment, training or technology offered then, but wrote:
“We were put under immense pressure by the United States regarding our nuclear
and missile arsenal. The Americans’ concerns were based on two grounds. First,
at this time they were not very sure of my job security, and they dreaded the
possibility that an extremist successor government might get its hands on our
strategic nuclear arsenal. Second, they doubted our ability to safeguard our
assets.”
General Musharraf was more specific in an interview two years ago for a Times
documentary, “Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?” Asked about the
equipment and training provided by Washington, he said, “Frankly, I really don’t
know the details.” But he added: “This is an extremely sensitive matter in
Pakistan. We don’t allow any foreign intrusion in our facilities. But, at the
same time, we guarantee that the custodial arrangements that we brought about
and implemented are already the best in the world.”
Now that concern about General Musharraf’s ability to remain in power has been
rekindled, so has the debate inside and outside the Bush administration about
how much the program accomplished, and what it left unaccomplished. A second
phase of the program, which would provide more equipment, helicopters and safety
devices, is already being discussed in the administration, but its dimensions
have not been determined.
Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which
designed most of the United States’ nuclear arms, argued that recent federal
reluctance to share warhead security technology was making the world more
dangerous.
“Lawyers say it’s classified,” Dr. Agnew said in an interview. “That’s nonsense.
We should share this technology. Anybody who joins the club should be helped to
get this.”
“Whether it’s India or Pakistan or China or Iran,” he added, “the most important
thing is that you want to make sure there is no unauthorized use. You want to
make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can’t use them
without proper authorization.”
In the past, officials say, the United States has shared ideas — but not
technologies — about how to make the safeguards that lie at the heart of
American weapons security. The system hinges on what is essentially a switch in
the firing circuit that requires the would-be user to enter a numeric code that
starts a timer for the weapon’s arming and detonation.
Most switches disable themselves if the sequence of numbers entered turns out to
be incorrect in a fixed number of tries, much like a bank ATM does. In some
cases, the disabled link sets off a small explosion in the warhead to render it
useless. Delicate design details involve how to bury the link deep inside a
weapon to keep terrorists or enemies from disabling the safeguard.
The most famous case of nuclear idea sharing involves France. Starting in the
early 1970s, the United States government began a series of highly secretive
discussions with French scientists to help them improve the country’s warheads.
A potential impediment to such sharing was the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, which bars cooperation between nations on weapons technology.
To get around such legal prohibitions, Washington came up with a system of
“negative guidance,” sometimes called “20 questions,” as detailed in a 1989
article in Foreign Policy. The system let United States scientists listen to
French descriptions of warhead approaches and give guidance about whether the
French were on the right track.
Nuclear experts say sharing also took place after the cold war when the United
States worried about the security of Russian nuclear arms and facilities. In
that case, both countries declassified warhead information to expedite the
transfer of safety and security information, according to federal nuclear
scientists.
But in the case of China, which has possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s
and is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Clinton
administration decided that sharing PALS would be too risky. Experts inside the
administration feared the technology would improve the Chinese warheads, and
could give the Chinese insights into how American systems worked.
Officials said Washington debated sharing security techniques with Pakistan on
at least two occasions — right after it detonated its first nuclear arms in
1998, and after the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001.
The debates pitted atomic scientists who favored technical sharing against
federal officials at such places as the State Department who ruled that the
transfers were illegal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and under
United States law.
In the 1998 case, the Clinton administration still hoped it could roll back
Pakistan’s nuclear program, forcing it to give up the weapons it had developed.
That hope, never seen as very realistic, has been entirely given up by the Bush
administration.
The nuclear proliferation conducted by Mr. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who
built a huge network to spread Pakistani technology, convinced the Pakistanis
that they needed better protections.
“Among the places in the world that we have to make sure we have done the
maximum we can do, Pakistan is at the top of the list,” said John E. McLaughlin,
who served as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time,
and played a crucial role in the intelligence collection that led to Mr. Khan’s
downfall.
“I am confident of two things,” he added. “That the Pakistanis are very serious
about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent
on getting their hands on it.”
U.S. Secretly Aids Pakistan in Guarding Nuclear Arms, NYT,
18.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/washington/18nuke.html?hp
Bush
Failed to See Musharraf’s Faults, Critics Contend
November
18, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 17 — In the six years since Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf,
joined President Bush in the fight against Al Qaeda, it has been an unlikely
partnership: a president intent on promoting democracy and a military commander
who seized power in a bloodless coup.
Mr. Bush has repeatedly called Gen. Musharraf “a friend.” In 2003, the president
invited the general to Camp David, a presidential perk reserved for the closest
of allies. Last year, at the general’s insistence, Mr. Bush risked a trip to
Pakistan, jangling the nerves of the Secret Service by spending the night in the
country presumed to be home to Osama bin Laden.
But now that the general has defied the White House, suspending Pakistan’s
Constitution and imposing emergency rule, old tensions are flaring anew. Mr.
Bush is backing away from the leader he once called a man of “courage and
vision,” and critics are asking whether the president misread his Pakistani
counterpart.
They said Mr. Bush — an ardent believer in personal diplomacy, who once remarked
that he had looked into the eyes of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and
had gotten “a sense of his soul” — was taken in by the general, with his fluent
English and his promises to hold elections and relinquish military power. They
said Mr. Bush looked at General Musharraf and saw a democratic reformer when he
should have seen a dictator instead.
“He didn’t ask the hard questions, and frankly, neither did the people working
for him,” said Husain Haqqani, an expert on Pakistan at Boston University who
has advised two previous Pakistani prime ministers, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir
Bhutto. “They bought the P.R. image of Musharraf as the reasonable general. Bush
bought the line — hook, line and sinker.”
White House aides said Mr. Bush is clear-eyed about his pact with the general, a
pact that was sealed on a Saturday evening in November 2001, over an intimate
dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. They had just met face-to-face
for the first time, during a meeting of the United Nations, and, despite past
tensions between their countries, an air of cozy familiarity filled the room.
“It was a lovely dinner, very sociable,” said Wendy J. Chamberlin, the former
ambassador to Pakistan, who attended. “I wasn’t nervous, because I knew
Musharraf and I knew how charming he is, and I could see that they would get
along fine. And besides, the mood was exuberant. Musharraf was like a conquering
hero, Musharraf had done the right thing. He was the man of the day.”
Today, the general is hardly the man of the day. On Saturday, Deputy Secretary
of State John D. Negroponte — who was the host at the Waldorf dinner as the
ambassador to the United Nations then — met with General Musharraf and pushed
him to end Pakistan’s state of emergency. Back in Washington, Mr. Bush was
close-mouthed, saying little about the man he once praised as “a courageous
leader and friend of the United States.”
The two have spoken just once, on Nov. 7 by telephone, in the two weeks since
General Musharraf imposed de facto military rule. Mr. Bush, who initiated the
call, termed it “a very frank discussion” — Washington code for a pointed airing
of differences.
“My message was very, very plain, very easy to understand,” the president said.
“And that is: the United States wants you to have elections as scheduled and
take your uniform off.”
The “Bush-Mush relationship,” as some American scholars call it, has always been
complicated, more a bond of convenience than a genuine friendship, some experts
said. When he was running for office in 2000, Mr. Bush didn’t even know General
Musharraf’s name; he couldn’t identify the leader of Pakistan for a reporter’s
pop quiz during an interview that was widely replayed on late-night television.
Relations between the nations had been tense over Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions
even before Mr. Bush took office, and American aid to Pakistan had been all but
cut off. But Sept. 11 threw the United States and Pakistan together. Mr. Bush
demanded General Musharraf’s allegiance in pursuing Al Qaeda — and got it.
General Musharraf demanded military aid that could help him maintain power — and
got it.
Experts in United States-Pakistan relations said General Musharraf has played
the union masterfully, by convincing Mr. Bush that he alone can keep Pakistan
stable. Kamran Bokhari, an analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence company,
who met with General Musharraf in January, said the general viewed Mr. Bush with
some condescension.
“Musharraf thinks that Bush has certain weaknesses that can be manipulated,” Mr.
Bokhari said, adding, “I would say that President Musharraf doesn’t think highly
of President Bush, but his interests force him to do business with the U.S.
president.”
In his autobiography, “In the Line of Fire,” General Musharraf writes glowingly
of the trust Mr. Bush placed in him. But he passed up a chance to praise Mr.
Bush on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” where he was promoting the book. Mr.
Stewart asked who would win a hypothetical contest for mayor of Karachi, Mr.
Bush or Mr. bin Laden.
“I think they’ll both lose miserably,” the general replied.
Mr. Bush, by contrast, was “favorably impressed” with General Musharraf,
according to Ari Fleischer, the president’s former press secretary. Mr.
Fleischer recounted one session where the general had been warned in advance not
to ask the president for F-16 fighter jets, because the answer would be no.
“Musharraf brought it up anyway,” Mr. Fleischer said, “and Bush told him the
answer is no. But I think Bush liked the fact that he does what he wants to do,
and says what’s on his mind.”
Their ties have not always helped General Musharraf; critics in Pakistan have
accused him of being a tool of the United States, and derisively call him
“Busharraf.” In Washington, Mr. Bush has faced criticism as well, from those who
say he should have been tougher on General Musharraf, especially with top Al
Qaeda operatives like Osama bin Laden still on the loose.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the ambassador to the United Nations under President
Clinton, said one of Mr. Bush’s biggest mistakes was not pressing General
Musharraf to turn over A. Q. Khan, the former chief of Pakistan’s nuclear
program, to American interrogators.
“I don’t see that the Bush administration was wrong in 2001 to put its chips on
Musharraf, who promised democracy and who promised to take off his uniform, but
something has gone very badly wrong,” Mr. Holbrooke said, adding, “The question
is, is this because Bush was soft on Musharraf the way he was soft on Putin?”
As the state of emergency drags on, the administration has begun thinking about
alternatives to General Musharraf, and is reaching out to generals who might
replace him. Mr. Haqqani, the Boston University professor, and Ms. Chamberlin,
the former ambassador, said the effort was long overdue.
Mr. Haqqani has been cautioning the administration for years not to “personalize
this relationship,” while Ms. Chamberlin said it is a mistake to view General
Musharraf as indispensable. “Our relationship with the army and with the people
of Pakistan is indispensable,” she said, “but it is not based on one man.”
Yet, having declared General Musharraf a friend and an ally, Mr. Bush is not
ready to give up on him. The president places a high premium on loyalty; when
top aides like Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, and Alberto R.
Gonzales, the former attorney general, disappointed him, he was reluctant to cut
them loose. So it is with General Musharraf.
“President Musharraf made a decision the president didn’t agree with,” said Dana
Perino, the White House press secretary. “We are disappointed with it, but the
president doesn’t want to pre-emptively throw up his hands. He wants to help him
get back on track.”
Bush Failed to See Musharraf’s Faults, Critics Contend,
NYT, 18.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/washington/18prexy.html
Iran
says ready to act if attacked
Sat Nov 17,
2007
5:56pm EST
Reuters
MANAMA
(Reuters) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday Iran was ready to
respond if attacked, but played down the prospect of war with the United States.
Ahmadinejad was speaking during a visit to Bahrain which came amid mounting
concerns in the Gulf that the United States could launch military action against
Iran, although Washington says it is committed to a diplomatic solution to a
crisis over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
"We never want any war in this region, but from another front, we have made all
preparations, and if there is any suspicion on this matter, then we are ready,"
said Ahmadinejad, speaking through an interpreter.
"I want to confirm again that we don't think there will be a war in the region,"
he told reporters, without giving reasons.
Ahmadinejad earlier told Al Arabiya television that the United States had no
political, economic or military grounds for attack, and dismissed the U.S.
military as "shabby".
The West accuses Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb, but Iran says its
nuclear ambitions are to generate electricity.
In a report on Thursday the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Iran had become more open
in outlining its nuclear activities, but key questions remained unanswered.
Washington says partial disclosure is not enough, and is pushing for sanctions.
Ahmadinejad challenged labeling the standoff a crisis, and said Iran had
cooperated fully with the nuclear watchdog.
"We do not feel there is a crisis in this region ... or do countries in the
region ... We think the crisis is in Washington," he said.
Ahmadinejad held talks on bilateral, regional and international issues with
Bahraini royals and politicians, he said, but no new initiative to dampen
tensions was announced. Bahrain's Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed
al-Khalifa called for more diplomacy.
Saudi Arabia this month proposed to set up a consortium that would provide Iran
with enriched uranium for peaceful purposes, but Iran said it would not halt its
own enrichment program.
Gulf Arab countries are among those with the most to lose in the event of a
conflict between Iran and the West, and have consistently warned against any
slide into war.
The Gulf is the world's top oil exporting region, and its economies are booming
on a near five-fold increase in oil prices since 2002.
Ahmadinejad called for greater cooperation with Gulf states to work together
against what he said were U.S. plans to foster tension in the region. He later
left Bahrain to attend an OPEC heads of state summit in the Saudi capital
Riyadh.
(Reporting by Mohammed Abbas)
Iran says ready to act if attacked, R, 17.11.2007,
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL1720246120071117
Letters
Our
Precious Liberties, Endangered
November
14, 2007
The New York Times
To the
Editor:
Re “The Coup at Home” (column, Nov. 11):
Frank Rich got it exactly right when he wrote that “we are a people in clinical
depression” regarding the continuing deterioration of our democracy and the
spineless performance of the Democrats in Congress in standing up for our
Constitution and against President Bush.
What the Democratic Party fails to factor in when considering its craven,
politically motivated lack of principle is that come the 2008 elections, the
public may feel so helpless and hopeless that we just don’t bother to show up to
vote as we did in 2006.
I believe that there was a current running through this country in the elections
last November that allowed us to believe that we had a voice and that we could
overturn this imperial presidency by electing those who wouldn’t let President
Bush continue to get away with the assaults on our country and our Constitution.
We had hope and belief.
Tragically though, one year later, we discover that the message we sent was
worthless and that those we elected were about as corrupt and morally complacent
as our president.
The Democrats take for granted a big voter turnout, especially from independent
voters like me, at their peril. They can count on us in ’08, the way we’ve
counted on them. Kate Schweizer
Harriman, N.Y., Nov. 11, 2007
•
To the Editor:
As a defender of civil liberties, I take issue with Frank Rich’s dire contention
that the erosion of our freedoms is the “new normal.” As far as I can tell, we
still have a right to free speech. Now is the time for freedom-loving Americans
to speak up louder than ever in order to support the democratic principles that
have made America great, and not vote for anyone who seeks to perpetuate the
fear that that has been fueled by the Bush administration.
Judge Michael B. Mukasey was wrong not to take an unequivocal stand against
waterboarding. But now that he is the country’s chief law enforcer, he should
not be afraid to ensure that the constitutional protections that were enacted to
guard against tyranny are firmly in place.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspended the Constitution in Pakistan. Are we next?
Diane Goldstein Temkin
New York, Nov. 11, 2007
The writer is a civil rights lawyer.
•
To the Editor:
Frank Rich condemns the Democrats (especially Senators Charles E. Schumer and
Dianne Feinstein) for approving the appointment of Michael B. Mukasey as
attorney general despite the fact that he would not condemn “waterboarding.” Mr.
Rich goes on to say that “this is a signal difference from the Vietnam era” when
“disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry
assault on American governmental institutions.”
But the difference between now and then was the military draft during the
Vietnam War! Also, confirming Mr. Mukasey is small potatoes compared with the
Democratic approval of the unwarranted war against Iraq in 2003.
Warner B. Huck
Hilton Head Island, S.C., Nov. 11, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Many thanks to Frank Rich for reminding people that after 9/11 Rudolph W.
Giuliani tried to destroy democracy in New York City by urging that our
elections be postponed so that he could overstay his term. In my experience,
many people here have forgotten this shameful attempt at a power grab.
Whenever Mr. Giuliani the candidate says that “they” attacked us because they
hate our freedoms and our rights, people should be reminded that his first
response to this hatred was to try to strip away our most precious right: the
right to vote.
The rest of America needs to know that the person they call “America’s mayor”
desperately tried to become “New York’s autocrat.” Mayor Giuliani responded to
an emergency by attacking the right of the people to vote. How would a President
Giuliani react to an emergency?
Eliot
Camaren
New York, Nov. 11, 2007
Our Precious Liberties, Endangered, NYT, 14.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/l14rich.html
Op-Ed
Contributor
Send the
State Department to War
November
14, 2007
By MAX BOOT
The New York Times
Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates
THE State
Department has announced that it will force 50 foreign service officers to go to
Iraq, whether they want to or not. This is the biggest use of “directed
assignments” since the Vietnam War, and it represents a long-overdue response to
complaints that diplomats aren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient
the department and the government as a whole for the global war on Islamic
terrorism. Yes, this is a war, but it’s a very different war from conventional
conflicts like World War II or the Civil War. It is, in essence, a global
counterinsurgency, and few counterinsurgencies have ever been won by force
alone.
While maintaining military power remains important, even more crucial goals are
aiding moderate Muslims, countering enemy propaganda, promoting economic growth,
flexing our political and diplomatic muscles to achieve vital objectives
peacefully, gathering intelligence, promoting international cooperation, and
building the rule of law in ungoverned lands.
The government developed expertise in many of these areas during the cold war,
but those skills were lost as budgets were slashed and jobs eliminated during
the “peace dividend” decade of the 1990s. Because civilian capacity has been so
anemic, an undue burden has fallen on the military — something that soldiers
understandably resent.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recognizes the problem and has tried to
reorient the State Department. She has, among other steps, moved diplomats out
of Western Europe and into the developing world, set up a “war room” where
Arabic-speaking diplomats can address the Middle Eastern press, and fostered a
clumsily named Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to
plan for nation-building assignments.
Such efforts, however, are unlikely to succeed because they run counter to
centuries of State Department tradition that emphasizes liaison work with
established governments rather than creating governments from scratch or
communicating with foreign citizens over the heads of their leaders.
Modern management theory holds that small, tightly focused organizations are
likely to be more effective than large conglomerates that try to do a million
different things. If we apply that insight to the State Department, it would
make sense to undo some ruinous consolidations that occurred after the cold war,
when the United States Agency for International Development was placed within
the State Department’s sphere of influence and the United States Information
Agency was folded into the department outright. No wonder our capacities in
nation-building and strategic communications have withered — their practitioners
are second-class citizens behind traditional foreign service officers.
The information and development agencies should be made independent again, and
their resources expanded. The Agency for International Development, in
particular, has seen a precipitous decline in personnel. In the 1960s, it had
1,900 officers in South Vietnam alone. Today it has only 1,200 to cover the
entire world, forcing it to rely mainly on contractors. If we expand its ranks,
it could become our lead nation-building agency, sort of a global FEMA,
marshaling the kind of resources that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To buttress the growing corps of government reconstruction experts, we should
have civilian reservists on call who could be summoned by the Agency for
International Development in an emergency like military reservists. They could
bring expertise in municipal administration, sewage treatment, banking,
electricity generation, and countless other disciplines needed to rebuild a
war-torn country. President Bush endorsed this notion in his last State of the
Union address, but too little has been done to turn it into reality.
One of the most important shortages we have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan is in
experienced police officers who can train local counterparts. Much of the job
has fallen on the military police, whose troops are too few in number, and on
civilian contractors, who are of uneven quality. We need to fill the vacuum by
creating a federal constabulary force — a uniformed counterpart to the F.B.I.
that, like the Italian carabinieri, could be deployed abroad.
Its efforts could be supplemented by municipal policemen if we pass a law
allowing the federal government to call up local police officers without loss of
pay or seniority and to compensate hometown police departments for their
absence. Along with these police officers, we need a deployable corps of
lawyers, judges and prison guards who could set up functioning legal and penal
systems abroad.
Even with increased participation from civilian branches of government, the
armed forces will still have a major role to play in what President Bush calls
the “Long War.” But not necessarily a kinetic role. If we can train and advise
foreign militaries, they can fight our battles for us. This model was
demonstrated as long ago as the 1950s when Edward Lansdale and other advisers
helped the Philippines put down a Marxist uprising, and has been repeated more
recently in Somalia and the Phillipines.
Yet, important as it is, the United States military has not put enough emphasis
on training and promoting experts in foreign military assistance. Such duty has
traditionally been seen as a hindrance to promotion, which has made it tough to
attract the best officers.
Lt. Col. John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, has suggested setting up an
“adviser corps” of 20,000 soldiers. His idea would make advisory service not a
career detour but a career in itself, equal, at least in theory, to infantry,
armor and other traditional specialties. Some advisers, in turn, could be
deployed as part of the “country team” at American embassies — something that
happened routinely in the 1950s and ’60s but has since fallen into disuse.
Along with pushing advisory expertise, the armed forces also need to promote
linguistic and cultural knowledge. Such skills are to be found primarily in
Foreign Area Officers, but that is another career field whose practitioners are
traditionally expected to commit career suicide. The military needs to increase
the ranks of Foreign Area Officers and to provide more rewards for their
much-needed service. We will have a hard time prevailing in today’s war as long
as fewer than one-half of 1 percent of all service members have any grasp of
Arabic.
Even while expanding governmental capacity, we also need to improve coordination
among various branches of government, and between the government and
nongovernmental and international organizations. That type of unified action has
been in short supply in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to nonstop complaints
about how broken the “interagency” process has become.
James R. Locher, a former Congressional aide who helped draft the 1986
Goldwater-Nichols Act that brought greater coordination among the different
branches of the military, is now leading a nonpartisan consortium of Washington
policy and research groups that is trying to devise legislation to enhance the
“unity of effort” among different branches of the government. Ideas under
consideration include forcing civilian bureaucrats to serve a “joint tour” in a
different agency and creating regional diplomatic coordinators who would marshal
civilian agencies in the same way that the Pentagon’s Central Command and
Pacific Command coordinate military units abroad. A partial prototype of this
concept may be tested with the Defense Department’s new Africa Command, which is
going to have a larger civilian component than the other combat commands.
Mr. Locher’s goal is to write a bill that would update the legendary National
Security Act of 1947, which created the bureaucratic instruments (the C.I.A.,
Defense Department, National Security Council and the like) used to win the cold
war. He hopes to have legislation ready in time for a new president in 2009.
That’s an ambitious objective, but it’s one worth striving for if we’re going to
adjust to the post-9/11 era of American foreign policy.
Some will no doubt object that to build up these capacities will encourage
reckless “imperialism” or “militarism.” But improving our abilities in
nation-building, strategic communications, security advising and related
disciplines will actually lessen the chances that we will need to mount a major
military intervention such as the one in Iraq. Our goal should be not just to
deal with the aftermath of wars (Phase IV, in military parlance) but to solve
problems before they grow into full-blown wars. In other words, to win Phase
Zero.
Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author
of “War Made New: Weapons, Warriors and the Making of the Modern World.”
Send the State Department to War, NYT, 14.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/14boot.html
Op-Ed
Columnist
The Coup
at Home
November
11, 2007
The New York Times
By FRANK RICH
AS Gen.
Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan
last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer
and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated
blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation
as attorney general.
So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding
is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing
to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the
terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive
synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.
In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as
the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House
hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for
years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to
9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on
Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection
of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.
General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does,
with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on
Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom
agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be
“regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came
in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book
tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he
said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum until it hit the stores —
thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the
president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his
recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern
Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there
won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.”
Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that
Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the
Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terrorist haven than ever.
Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid
to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking
India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf
released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander
the day after he suspended the constitution.
But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do
with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times
editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and
another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It
also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that
will not be so easily eradicated.
In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so
steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring
democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll.
We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to
power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.
This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the
better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and
sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions.
The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions
from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has
subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a
quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General
Musharraf’s.
More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s
championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word
“freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even
presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan
Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point
was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially
those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of
warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our
values.
Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer
any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than
set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of
unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.
Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be
so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon
official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by
implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to
defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s
Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys
and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl
Rove’s political agenda.
Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf
justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking
the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further
echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s
Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in
court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising
F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has
outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales
testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the
Constitution.”
To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency
is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six
years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been
internalized as the new normal.
This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the
candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re
falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture
and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy
Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs,
Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he
stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.
What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far
even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have
lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed
because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general
who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of
Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.
In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick
Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer
observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and
conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making
waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even
if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if
the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a
“signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a
bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.
That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that
Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs
the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The
judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them
than this.
Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the
Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout
the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the
right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval
ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9
percent).
Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans
know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been
vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a
restoration anytime soon.
The Coup at Home, NYT, 11.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11rich.html?ref=opinion
News
Analysis
U.S.
Strategy for Pakistan Looks More Fragile
November
10, 2007
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 9 — In pushing for the deal that took Benazir Bhutto back to Pakistan, the
Bush administration hoped to build a broader base of support that might help
Gen. Pervez Musharraf stay in power.
But General Musharraf’s sweeping crackdown over the last week has raised
questions about that strategy, not least when he sent thousands of police
officers on Friday morning to prevent Ms. Bhutto from leading a protest rally
against his imposition of de facto martial law.
The images coming out of Pakistan — of police forces blanketing the site of a
planned rally by Ms. Bhutto, the opposition leader, and then barricading her
inside her residence — were hardly consistent with the kind of cooperation the
United States promoted.
Bush administration officials and Pakistani experts say they still believe that
a power-sharing agreement between Ms. Bhutto and the general can survive. “We
hope we’re seeing a little bit of political theater here,” a senior State
Department official said.
By that the official meant Ms. Bhutto’s insistence on holding a rally, General
Musharraf’s decision to barricade her in her house, and the subsequent speech by
Ms. Bhutto to the nation that was broadcast on official Pakistani television.
But the danger, Bush administration officials said, is that the longer the
public conflict — whether choreographed or not — continues, the more likely the
chance that the proposed power-sharing deal collapses completely, leading to
even more chaos.
The White House has urged General Musharraf to reverse his emergency power
edicts. Publicly, the Bush administration complained in strong terms on Friday
about Ms. Bhutto’s detention, urging that “moderate political forces work
together to bring Pakistan back on the path to democracy.”
“In any decision-making with respect to getting Pakistan back on the road to
democracy and constitutional rule, the bias should be in favor of greater
openness and dialogue among those forces who want to take Pakistan in a positive
direction,” the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said. “The bias
should be in favor of allowing peaceful expression of views no matter what they
may be saying about the existing situation.”
But when speaking on the condition of anonymity, administration officials said
they were worried that if Ms. Bhutto had gone ahead with her planned rally, she
might have been killed.
Anne W. Patterson, the United States ambassador to Pakistan, urged Ms. Bhutto
not to go ahead with the rally because of safety concerns, and General
Musharraf’s subordinates told their American counterparts that they stopped the
rally because they were concerned that Ms. Bhutto might be attacked by suicide
bombers, as she was on the day of her arrival in Karachi last month, the senior
State Department official said.
“We were concerned about her safety, as well as others, given the attack that
occurred in Karachi,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
This summer, the Bush administration began working behind the scenes to
orchestrate a transition to democracy in Pakistan that would leave General
Musharraf in the presidency while not making a mockery of President Bush’s
attempts to push democracy in the Muslim world.
The American hope was that a power-sharing deal between General Musharraf and
Ms. Bhutto would be the best way to do that. Ms. Bhutto, a former prime
minister, is viewed as pro-American and is believed to have more popular support
than the general.
But events in recent days have underscored fragility of the power-sharing plan,
administration officials concede. For one thing, if Ms. Bhutto cannot hold a
rally in public without risking a suicide bombing, how would she be able to
campaign in an election, if General Musharraf ever gets around to scheduling
one?
Administration officials have already begun talking with members of Ms. Bhutto’s
Pakistan Peoples Party about staging political campaign rallies in stadiums and
arenas, and not out in the streets, in order to address safety concerns.
This has put the Bush administration in the position of choosing between
political freedom and security. So far, the United States has landed on the side
of security — both in Ms. Bhutto’s case and in the larger battle against
extremist forces in Pakistan.
In continuing to support General Musharraf even as he has cracked down on
political dissidents and the press, the Bush administration has acquiesced to
his argument that he is a bulwark helping to guard his country, and the United
States, from Islamist extremists in Pakistan’s frontier provinces.
Moderate Pakistani analysts argue that a concerted American push for fair
elections could produce a moderate pro-Western government with a stronger
mandate to fight terrorism.
These analysts include people like Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a military expert in
Lahore; Talat Masood, a political analyst and retired general; Rasul Baksh Rais,
a leading Pakistani political scientist; and Talat Hussain, the director of news
and current affairs at Aaj TV.
But continued discussion of a power-sharing agreement, they say, reinforces
perceptions that the United States is manipulating Pakistan’s politics and that
General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto are its pawns.
They fear that American officials, convinced that General Musharraf is their
only option in Pakistan, will eventually accept half-measures from the general.
In that case, they said, the Pakistani leader would retain his post as army
chief, the central source of his power, and win tightly controlled elections.
The United States is underestimating popular discontent with military rule, they
say, and the ability of open elections to stabilize the country.
It remains highly unlikely that the United States will withdraw any aid from
Pakistan, administration officials said. Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the
National Security Council, said that a review of aid was under way, but that
there had been “some discussion of preliminary findings of that review.” That
said, he suggested there would be no cuts. “The ultimate goal is not to punish
the people of Pakistan; it’s to help them get back on a path to democracy,” he
said.
Ultimately, administration officials are counting on their belief that Ms.
Bhutto and General Musharraf need each other to survive politically.
“Benazir Bhutto desperately wants to be the prime minister, and Musharraf needs
her vis-à-vis the United States,” said Robert Oakley, a former United States
ambassador to Pakistan.
Mr. Oakley added: “Now I don’t think they’re going to make that work. But I
don’t think that doesn’t mean they won’t try.”
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Crawford, Tex., and David Rohde from
Islamabad, Pakistan.
U.S. Strategy for Pakistan Looks More Fragile, NYT,
10.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/world/asia/10policy.html?hp
U.S.
Prods Musharraf to End Emergency Rule
November 8,
2007
The New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
This
article was reported by David Rohde, Jane Perlez, Helene Cooper and Steven Lee
Myers, and written by Mr. Rohde.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 7 — Amid a deepening crisis in Pakistan, Bush
administration officials have begun pushing Gen. Pervez Musharraf on several
fronts to reverse his state of emergency, quietly making contact with other
senior army generals and backing Pakistan’s opposition leader as she carries out
back-channel negotiations with him.
Military attachés from the United States and several other Western nations are
discreetly contacting senior Pakistani generals and asking them to press General
Musharraf, the president, to back down from the emergency decree he issued
Saturday night, according to a Western diplomat.
On Wednesday, President Bush telephoned General Musharraf for the first time
since the crisis began and bluntly told him that he had to return Pakistan to
civilian rule, hold elections and step down as chief of the military, as he had
promised. Mr. Bush called him from the Oval Office at 11:30 a.m. Washington
time, and spoke for about 20 minutes, according to the White House.
“My message was that we believe strongly in elections, and that you ought to
have elections soon, and you need to take off your uniform,” Mr. Bush said
later, appearing at George Washington’s mansion in Mount Vernon, Va., with
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. “You can’t be the president and the head of
the military at the same time.”
General Musharraf sought to assure Mr. Bush that his power grab was temporary
and that he still planned to call for elections, Pakistani and American
officials said. At the same time, two aides to General Musharraf acknowledged
that aides to the general and the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto were engaged
in negotiations, even as her supporters clashed with police officers outside
Parliament and she threatened larger protests on Friday.
“Talks back channel are going on with her,” said Tariq Azim Khan, the
government’s minister of state for information.
Ms. Bhutto’s approach dovetailed with the American effort to defuse the
situation in Pakistan and avoid major unrest in the country. And it left open
the possibility that she and General Musharraf could yet return to the
power-sharing arrangement envisioned when she returned to Pakistan last month
after eight years in self-imposed exile.
For now, Bush administration officials are unanimous in saying that American
financial support for Pakistan will continue regardless of whether General
Musharraf reverses course.
A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of
diplomatic sensitivities, said Mr. Bush still held out hope that American
pressure could persuade General Musharraf to reconsider his moves. That
approach, the official said, was “Option No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3.”
Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte told a House committee on Wednesday
that “the bottom line is, there’s no question that we Americans have a stake in
Pakistan.”
But American support for General Musharraf himself is not limitless, several
administration officials said privately. “We want to believe he will come
around, and are giving him every opportunity to change his actions, but our
verbal support is not going to last for very long,” a senior administration
official said.
Among Western diplomats, there is rising concern that General Musharraf’s
declaration is also damaging the standing of the Pakistani Army as an
institution, which has long been seen as the force holding the country together.
Rumblings of discontent with General Musharraf exist in the armed forces, but
they are far from reaching the point where the army’s senior generals would turn
against him, according to Western officials and Pakistani analysts. But they say
sustained popular unrest against General Musharraf could cause the army to turn
on him.
“It’s the concern about how the military retains its position as an institution
of national respect,” said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of
anonymity. “These kinds of things can be damaging to the institution, the
respect for the institution and also the morale.”
Western officials have also begun praising Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, General
Musharraf’s designated successor as army chief. General Kayani, a moderate,
pro-American infantry commander, is widely seen as commanding respect within the
army and, within Western circles, as a potential alternative to General
Musharraf.
“He’s somebody we know well, and he’s tough on Al Qaeda,” said one Bush
administration official who works on Pakistan issues. “He’s somebody we can work
with.”
Known as a soldier’s soldier, General Kayani rarely mixes with politicians and
is not thought to have used previous senior postings — including heading the
country’s powerful military intelligence service — to expand his own wealth and
contacts.
During the recent religious holiday, he flew to embattled soldiers in the tribal
areas and celebrated the holiday with them. Tall, introverted and highly
professional, he received some of his key training in the United States. He
declined a request for an interview, but is believed to favor decreasing the
army’s role in politics.
Twice in Pakistan’s history, senior generals have asked military rulers to
resign when their popularity faded and their rule was viewed as damaging to the
army as a whole, according to American and Pakistani experts on the Pakistani
military. They said General Musharraf could find himself in that position too.
Retired officers said they had not spoken with many serving officers since this
weekend’s declaration, but said they believed it had worsened morale. “I do not
come across anyone who says this was the right thing,” said one retired officer,
who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I don’t think that they are very happy.”
Even as the pressure on General Musharraf builds, one Bush administration
official who works on Pakistan issues said that the White House was concerned
about any appearance that the United States was interfering in the country’s
politics. “We can’t reach ourselves into the Pakistani political process more
than we already have,” he said, referring to recent attempts to broker a
power-sharing arrangement between General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto.
In a sign of the closeness between Ms. Bhutto and Washington, the opposition
leader met after a news conference with the American ambassador to Pakistan,
Anne W. Patterson. The perception among Pakistani analysts is that Ms. Bhutto is
being guided by Washington. “She’s listening to the Americans, no one else,”
said Najam Sethi, the editor in chief of The Daily Times and a sympathizer to
her cause.
An American official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the United
States was not instructing Ms. Bhutto on how to proceed, and that American
officials were unaware of the details of her protest plan until she announced
them publicly.
Daniel Markey, a former State Department official who is now a senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations, said he understood she was getting advice from
the Bush administration to “sit tight and try to work things out and don’t do
anything rash.”
But Ms. Bhutto also runs a risk of being perceived as too close to the United
States, and too accommodating of General Musharraf. Many Pakistanis, weary of
General Musharraf’s military rule, are skeptical of Ms. Bhutto’s drive to end
the emergency and believe the two leaders will eventually strike a deal.
They are quick to note that Ms. Bhutto is the only opposition leader freely
operating since the emergency decree on Saturday. For days now her supporters
have mostly stayed on the sidelines as hundreds of Pakistan’s lawyers have led
street demonstrations against the decree and been rounded up by the police in
clashes.
In a telling sign of this mood, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the chairman in the Punjab
of Ms. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, was booed when he walked into a group
of lawyers preparing to demonstrate in Lahore on Monday morning. “They yelled at
him and called him a collaborator,” said a lawyer at the scene.
On Wednesday Ms. Bhutto finally appeared to strike a more aggressive stance. She
gave General Musharraf two implicit deadlines. She would go ahead on Friday with
a planned protest rally in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to the
capital, even though the authorities there have said the gathering is prohibited
under the emergency decree.
“I understand my liberty might be at stake,” she said. “But we are facing much
greater risks than the liberty of an individual.”
If the general does not agree to parliamentary elections on the January
timetable, she will lead a “long march” of more than 300 miles across the plains
of Punjab from Lahore to Islamabad. Threatening unrest in Punjab, the country’s
largest province and its political center of gravity, is a challenge to the
general’s authority.
In an indication of the potential for violence, after her news conference, the
police fired tear gas and carried out a baton charge against 100 of her party
workers when they tried to push through police barriers blocking public access
to the country’s Parliament building in Islamabad.
How General Musharraf will react to her challenge and the new pressure from the
United States is difficult to gauge, diplomats and analysts here said. Resigning
his post as army chief would greatly reduce his influence, and the general’s
already low public standing appears to have fallen substantially since his
declaration of emergency rule.
Discontent among Pakistanis has been rising throughout the year, particularly
after General Musharraf tried to remove the country’s chief justice from the
bench. That dissatisfaction, Western diplomats say, is also being felt in the
armed forces.
“There are a number of generals who feel that the time has come for the army to
get out of politics,” said a second Western diplomat. “Most importantly, that
the army has become unpopular and the image of the army is suffering in
Pakistan, largely due to the insurgency, but also that they are associated with
the president.”
David Rohde and Jane Perlez reported from Islamabad, and Helene Cooper and
Steven Lee Myers from Washington. Salman Masood contributed reporting from
Islamabad, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
U.S. Prods Musharraf to End Emergency Rule, NYT,
8.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/world/asia/08pakistan.html
Bush
Urges Musharraf to Hold Elections
November 6,
2007
Filed at 1:44 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- President Bush urged Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Monday to
''restore democracy as quickly as possible,'' choosing mild disappointment over
punishment or more pointed rhetoric to react to the declaration of emergency
rule in anti-terror ally Pakistan.
Bush did not speak directly to Musharraf, a leader who took power in a 1999 coup
but whom he has previously hailed as a friend he trusts and as a strong defender
of freedom. Instead, the president handed that task to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, who spoke with the Pakistani leader on the developing crisis
for about 20 minutes from her plane en route home from the Middle East.
Bush said he directed Rice to deliver this message: ''We expect there to be
elections as soon as possible and that the president should remove his military
uniform.''
They were the president's first public comments on the situation since Musharraf
imposed a state of emergency, suspended his country's constitution, ousted the
country's top judge, stifled independent media and deployed troops to crush
dissent. He called it necessary to prevent a takeover by Islamic extremists.
Bush mixed concern for Musharraf's actions with praise for Pakistan's
cooperation in combatting al-Qaida terrorists believed to be rebuilding
strongholds on the largely lawless border with Afghanistan.
''President Musharraf has been a strong fighter against extremists and
radicals,'' Bush said at the end of an Oval Office meeting with Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Even a senior administration official, at a White House briefing, merely called
Musharraf ''a friend who we think has done something ill-advised.'' The official
spoke on condition of anonymity so he could talk more freely about the
behind-the-scenes thoughts of the White House.
Despite billions in U.S. aid to Pakistan since Musharraf declared himself a
war-on-terror partner after the 2001 attacks, Bush appeared resigned that the
United States has little leverage to influence Musharraf's behavior.
''Our hope now is that he hurry back to elections,'' Bush said. ''All we can do
is continue to work with the president as well as others in the Pak government
to make it abundantly clear the position of the United States.''
Even as Bush spoke, police in Pakistan oversaw a sometimes-violent crackdown on
lawyers and others opposing Musharraf's decisions, with hundreds, if not
thousands, of arrests. And Musharraf said he would return the country to ''the
same track as we were moving'' but gave no indication when parliamentary
elections would take place. They had been scheduled for January.
The Pakistani leader has ignored U.S. requests before, including not following
through on repeated promises to relinquish his post as head of Pakistan's army
and, most recently, for most of last week when officials up to Rice's level
unsuccessfully lobbied Musharraf not to declare a state of emergency.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., warned against being too soft.
''Pakistan will only be a reliable and capable ally against terrorism when its
government is not seen as an enemy by its own people,'' she said.
But Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the top Republican on the House Armed Services
Committee, warned against being too hasty with rebukes. ''As politics in
Pakistan continue evolving, we should not rush to abandon Musharraf but work
with him to get Pakistan back on the path toward democracy,'' he said.
The White House said it is reviewing U.S. assistance to Pakistan in light of the
developments. Such aid has amounted to $9.6 billion dollars since 2001, not
including another $800 million the administration is requesting from Congress
for the current budget year.
Bush would not discuss any consequences if Musharraf fails to reverse course.
''It's a hypothetical,'' he said.
But top officials suggested the money for the war on terrorism -- the large
majority of the aid -- is unlikely to be at risk.
''I think we're looking at all forms of assistance in terms of what requirements
there may be in terms of action,'' Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters
during a visit to Beijing. ''We also want to be mindful of the fact that
Pakistan continues to be an extremely important ally in the war on terror, so we
have an interest in an ongoing security relationship.''
At the White House briefing, the senior official said the administration was
focusing its review on exploring whether any of Musharraf's actions trigger
automatic aid cuts or suspensions, as required by the laws governing U.S.
foreign assistance.
The official said the administration is encouraged by some indications that
Musharraf intends for elections to happen on about the same timetable as
planned. But the official said Washington is waiting for clarification, which
could take weeks.
''The question is: What do you do when someone makes that mistake that is a
close ally?'' the official said. ''You know, do you cut him off, hit him with
sanctions, walk out the door? Or do you try and see if you can work them to get
them back on track?''
------
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor in Beijing contributed to this report.
Bush Urges Musharraf to Hold Elections, NYT, 6.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Pakistan.html
Deadline
Set for Mideast Peace Process
November 6,
2007
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER
RAMALLAH,
West Bank, Nov. 5 — Israeli and Palestinian officials have given themselves to
the end of President Bush’s administration to reach a comprehensive peace
agreement, Israeli, Palestinian and American officials said today.
The deadline of just over a year from now — first laid out by the Israeli prime
minister, Ehud Olmert, on Sunday night and then confirmed today by the
Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, gives a huge boost to the efforts of
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to push the two sides toward a peace plan
during her tenure. Mr. Abbas and Mr. Olmert indicated that the coming Middle
East peace conference in Annapolis would begin substantive talks on the four
contentious final status issues which have bedeviled peace negotiators since
1979.
“The American, Israeli and Palestinian sides are all insistent that we reach an
end before the end of President Bush’s term in office, and that is what we
wish,” Mr. Abbas told a news conference here at Yasir Arafat’s old compound.
Standing beside him, Ms. Rice nodded approvingly.
Mr. Abbas’s remarks followed an unusually strong endorsement of the peace talks
from Mr. Olmert before a Jerusalem audience the night before. While the
Palestinians have been pushing hard for the conference to tackle the final
status issues, the Israelis had balked, saying they wanted their security needs
met first.
While conceding nothing on the security question, Mr. Olmert, during his speech,
said that “Annapolis will be the jumping-off point for continued serious and
in-depth negotiations which will not avoid any issue or ignore any division
which has clouded our relations with the Palestinian people for many years.”
Palestinian and Israeli negotiators will continue to haggle over just how hard
and firm the Annapolis commitment to final status negotiations will be, but the
public endorsement of a timetable from both sides is a positive sign, senior
administration officials traveling with Ms. Rice said.
To be sure, Israeli and Arab officials say that Ms. Rice still has an uphill
battle ahead of her; Israeli and Palestinian negotiators haven’t decided just
how they will tackle the four final status issues: the status of Jerusalem, the
contours of a Palestinian state, the removal of Israeli settlements in the West
Bank, and the fate of refugees who left, or were forced to leave, their homes as
a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Israeli officials said that there remains deep concern in Israel that Ms. Rice
is pushing Israelis too hard and too fast, risking a collapse of the talks
before they are under way. Israelis are quick to draw a parallel to President
Clinton’s peace push during the closing months of his administration in 2000,
which collapsed and, many Israelis believe, led to the Palestinian intifada.
Ms. Rice was in Ramallah for talks with Mr. Abbas; the Palestinian prime
minister, Salam Fayyad; and other Palestinian officials.
Deadline Set for Mideast Peace Process, NYT, 6.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/world/middleeast/06diplo.html?hp
Gates in
China for Talks on Military
November 6,
2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
BEIJING,
Nov. 5 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates gazed today into two of the most
striking facets of modern China.
One is what Pentagon officials say is China’s aggressive modernization of its
armed forces. The other is its even more aggression expansion of the economy and
its growing global role.
“China’s increasing political and economic stature calls for this country to
take on a greater share of responsibility for the health and success of the
international system,” Mr. Gates, making his first visit to China since becoming
defense secretary, said during a news conference at the Chinese Ministry of
Defense.
Mr. Gates, standing alongside Gen. Cao Gangchuan, China’s defense minister, also
said he had raised “the uncertainty over China’s military modernization, and the
need for greater transparency to allay international concerns.”
Pentagon officials describe China as a “peer competitor” — hardly an adversary,
often a partner, yet not a reliable close ally. The defense secretary’s visit
was intended to nurture this complex relationship and press for more open
communication over military issues; no major breakthroughs on policy issues were
expected during two days of talks that conclude Tuesday after a meeting with Hu
Jintao, the Chinese president.
Mr. Gates said his discussions were marked by agreements and disagreements. The
two sides announced new steps toward establishing a telephone hotline to avert
misunderstandings between their militaries. This was viewed as significant by
senior Pentagon officials joining Mr. Gates for the talks here as the Chinese
government does not have such a line with any other nation.
Mr. Gates and his counterparts also announced an agreement to organize a new
joint naval exercise larger and more complex than previous exercises, a plan to
exchange military students, and a promise to open Chinese archives to help
account for American soldiers still listed as missing from the Korean War.
General Cao, the defense minister, asked to respond to American criticisms of
the military and expansion, replied, “It has been a normal deployment of our
military force in our own territory.”
Mr. Gates acknowledged that he had made little headway in getting answers from
the Chinese on their unannounced test of an antisatellite weapon in January in
which they destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite. Western governments
pressed for an explanation, but the Chinese government took nearly two weeks to
publicly confirm the test and to say it had no plans for a space race. Worries
over the circumstances and motive of the test remain.
“I raised our concerns about it, and there was no further discussion,” Mr. Gates
said.
Mr. Gates also raised with his Chinese hosts “the importance of increased
pressures” to persuade Iran to drop any plans to develop nuclear weapons.
China has growing economic ties with Iran. During today’s meetings, Chinese
officials expressed an understanding that Beijing’s goal of steady energy
supplies to power its economy could be threatened by nuclear proliferation in
the Middle East, according to senior Pentagon officials traveling with Mr.
Gates.
One senior official, speaking on standard diplomatic rules of anonymity to
describe the private talks, said late today that Chinese officials agreed that
“a nuclear-armed Iran is something we are united in opposing.”
Gates in China for Talks on Military, NYT, 6.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/world/asia/06china.html?hp
US Navy
Frees Ship From Pirates
November 5,
2007
Filed at 12:55 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
NAIROBI,
Kenya (AP) -- The U.S. Navy on Monday helped free the fifth ship in a week
hijacked by Somalia pirates, attempting to bring security to crucial shipping
routes between the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
Pirates released the Taiwanese fishing vessel 5 1/2 months after seizing it.
U.S. naval personnel have been telling the pirates by radio to abandon hijacked
vessels, get back in their small skiffs and return to Somalia.
''We encourage pirates to leave the ships,'' said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson of the
U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. ''We tell them, you get in the skiff, you leave,
you do not take any hostages.''
Robertson said the Navy was in contact with two remaining ships held by pirates
in Somali waters.
The latest fishing vessel freed by the U.S. Navy had two Taiwanese and 12
Chinese crew members aboard when it was hijacked 137 miles off the coast of
Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, in May.
Pirates killed one of the crew members in June, according to Andrew Mwangura,
head of Seafarers Assistance Program's Kenyan chapter. The International
Maritime Bureau said it had heard reports of a shooting but had no official
confirmation of the death.
Two other boats hijacked by Somali pirates in May were freed after U.S. Navy
personnel spoke to them by radio.
U.S. sailors also boarded a North Korean ship to treat crew members who
overpowered their hijackers, and a U.S. naval vessel fired on pirate skiffs tied
to a Japanese-owned ship.
Somalia's lawless coastlines are a haven for heavily armed pirates who use
speedboats with Global Positioning System equipment, anti-tank rocket launchers
and grenades. The country has lacked a functioning government since 1991, when
rival warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and turned on each other.
US Navy Frees Ship From Pirates, NYT, 5.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Somalia-Pirates.html
U.S. Is
Likely to Continue Aid to Pakistan
November 5,
2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID ROHDE
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 4 — The Bush administration signaled Sunday that it would probably keep
billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of
human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, the country’s president.
In carefully calibrated public statements and blunter private acknowledgments
about the limits of American leverage over General Musharraf, the man President
Bush has called one of his most critical allies, the officials argued that it
would be counterproductive to let Pakistan’s political turmoil interfere with
their best hope of ousting Al Qaeda’s central leadership and the Taliban from
the country’s mountainous tribal areas.
Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said
that while the United States would “have to review the situation with aid,” she
said three times that President Bush’s first concern was “to protect America and
protect American citizens by continuing to fight against terrorists.”
“That means we have to be very cognizant of the counterterrorism operations that
we are involved in,” she said. “We have to be very cognizant of the fact that
some of the assistance that has been going to Pakistan is directly related to
the counterterrorism mission.”
In Islamabad, aides to General Musharraf — who had dismissed pleas on Friday
from Ms. Rice and Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior military commander in the
Middle East, to avoid the state-of-emergency declaration — said they had
anticipated that there would be few real consequences.
They called the American reaction “muted,” saying General Musharraf had not
received phone calls of protest from Mr. Bush or other senior American
officials. In unusually candid terms, they said American officials supported
stability over democracy.
“They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms —
than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists,” said Tariq
Azim Khan, the minister of state for information. “Given the choice, I know what
our friends would choose.”
It was a sign of their confidence that Pakistani officials announced that
parliamentary elections set for January might be delayed for as long as a year.
Just before she learned of that announcement, Ms. Rice said, “We have a very
clear view that the elections need to take place on time, which would mean the
beginning of the year.”
Visiting Beijing today, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the United States
was reviewing its programs for military assistance to Pakistan, although he
noted that the Bush administration also would take into serious consideration
the need to continue counter-terrorism efforts in the region.
“Pakistan is a country of great strategic importance to the United States and a
key partner in the war on terror,” Mr. Gates said during a news conference at
the Chinese Ministry of Defense. “However, the actions of the past 72 hours have
been disturbing. We urge President Musharraf to return his country to law-based,
constitutional and democratic rule as soon as possible.”
Mr. Gates said the United States had begun “reviewing all of our assistance
programs” to Pakistan. But, he noted, “We are mindful not to do anything that
would undermine ongoing counter-terrorism efforts.”
In a further sign of American concern over the situation in Pakistan, the United
States postponed annual security consultations between the two nations that were
to have been held for two days this week in Islamabad. The chief of the American
delegation, Eric Edelman, the under secretary of defense for policy, already was
on his way to the meeting when the Bush administration decided it would not
allow its representatives to attend the bilateral session.
“We have taken the initiative to postpone it,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon
press secretary, who accompanied Mr. Gates to Beijing. Mr. Morrell said the
American decision illustrated “a degree of disappointment” with Mr. Musharraf’s
declaration of a state of emergency on Saturday. The bilateral security talks
could be rescheduled, Mr. Morrell said, “as soon as conditions are more
conducive.”
In Washington, officials acknowledged that they were trying to balance the
American insistence that Pakistan remain on the path to democracy and General
Musharraf’s unwillingness to risk chaos that would allow Al Qaeda and the
Taliban to operate more freely.
“The equities in Pakistan are huge,” said a senior official deeply involved in
trying to persuade General Musharraf to fulfill his promise to hold elections
and run the country as a civilian leader. “We’ve got U.S. and NATO troops dying
in Afghanistan, and a war on terrorism” that cannot be halted while General
Musharraf tries to shore up his powers, he said.
It was unclear to what extent General Musharraf perceived an urgent threat to
the country in deciding to declare an emergency that suspended civil liberties.
But several administration officials said they were struck by the heavy-handed
nature of the crackdown announced Saturday. Until a few days ago, they said,
General Musharraf had been offering private assurances that any emergency
declaration would be short-lived. “They have made this crisis more acute by the
way they’ve done this,” the official concluded.
President Bush has made spreading democracy a major foreign policy theme and his
administration has quietly pushed General Musharraf for months to be more open
to sharing power, going so far as to help broker talks between him and Benazir
Bhutto, the leader of Pakistan’s largest opposition party.
But Mr. Bush has said nothing in public about General Musharraf’s latest action.
His silence contrasts sharply to his reaction to the crackdown on dissidents in
Myanmar last month. In that case, Mr. Bush announced specific steps against
Myanmar rulers. But Pakistan, officials argued, is a different case: it is a
nuclear-armed nation that Mr. Bush had designated a “major non-NATO ally,” even
though its enthusiasm for counterterrorism has been episodic.
In Islamabad, Western officials said Mr. Bush’s limited choices could worsen if
protests erupted, and they complained that in the past few months General
Musharraf had focused more on weakening his rivals than fighting Islamic
extremists.
For more than a year before Saturday’s declaration, American officials have
seethed over Pakistan’s poor performance against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
General Musharraf’s effort to strike a deal with Islamic militant groups in the
tribal areas failed. When he ordered troops back into the tribal areas in recent
months, many were killed or kidnapped.
In interviews before and after the emergency declaration, Western diplomats and
former Pakistani military officials said General Musharraf had done a poor job
countering growing militancy, particularly this year. The military-led
government has moved too slowly, prepared poorly for operations and often
appeased militant groups.
“Initially, this was not complicated,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier
who was the senior Pakistani government official in charge of security in the
tribal areas until last year. “Now, this is a very complicated situation.”
Through it all, the United States has continued pumping money to the country.
While the total dollar amount of American aid to Pakistan is unclear, a study
published in August by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
estimated it to be “at least $10 billion in Pakistan since 9/11, excluding
covert funds.” Sixty percent of that has gone to “Coalition Support Funds,”
essentially direct payments to the Pakistani military, and 15 percent to
purchase major weapons systems. Another 15 percent has been for general budget
support for the Pakistani government; only 10 percent for development or
humanitarian assistance.
General Musharraf’s supporters argued Sunday that his government — now
unencumbered by legal constraints and political concerns by the emergency decree
— will be in a better position to eradicate extremists and that if the United
States wants that security, it must back him.
“If your agenda is to save attacks in the U.S. and eliminate Al Qaeda, only the
Pakistani Army can do that,” said the close aide to General Musharraf. “For
that, you will have to forget about elections in Pakistan for maybe two to three
years.”
Pakistani opposition groups argue that General Musharraf has failed and that his
emergency declaration will increase instability and militancy in the country.
They say nationwide elections would produce a moderate government with popular
support to crack down on militancy.
There is little question that General Musharraf has failed to develop broad
domestic support for battling terrorists. His political party is divided, has
not carried out promised reforms and would likely lose an election.
A poll in September by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based nonprofit group,
showed that Osama bin Laden was more popular in Pakistan than General Musharraf,
with 46 percent of respondents giving him a “favorable” rating against 38
percent for the president. Ms. Bhutto got a “favorable” rating from 63 percent.
The nationwide poll surveyed 1,044 adults and had a margin of sampling error of
plus or minus three percentage points.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, David Rohde from Islamabad, Pakistan,
and Thom Shanker from Beijing.
U.S. Is Likely to Continue Aid to Pakistan, NYT,
5.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/world/asia/06diplo.html
News
Analysis
Straying
Partner Leaves White House in a Lurch
November 4,
2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON,
Nov. 3 — For more than five months the United States has been trying to
orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep
Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s
promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.
On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now the White
House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity
about the way forward.
General Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution
left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare: an American-backed
military dictator who is risking civil instability in a country with nuclear
weapons and an increasingly alienated public.
Mr. Bush entered a delicate dance with Pakistan immediately after the attacks on
Sept. 11, 2001, when General Musharraf pledged his cooperation in the fight
against Al Qaeda, whose top leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to
be hiding out in the mountainous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The United States has given Pakistan more than $10 billion in aid, mostly to the
military, since 2001. Now, if the state of emergency drags on, the
administration will be faced with the difficult decision of whether to cut off
that aid and risk undermining Pakistan’s efforts to pursue terrorists — a move
the White House believes could endanger the security of the United States.
Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American military commander in the Middle
East, told General Musharraf and his top generals in Islamabad on Friday that he
would put that aid at risk if he seized emergency powers.
But after the declaration on Saturday, there was no immediate action by the
administration to accompany the tough talk, as officials monitored developments
in Pakistan. Inside the White House the hope is that the state of emergency will
be short-lived and that General Musharraf will fulfill his promise to abandon
his post as Army chief of staff and hold elections by Jan. 15.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, traveling in the Middle East, called Mr.
Musharraf’s move “highly regrettable,” while her spokesman, Sean D. McCormack,
said the United States was “deeply disturbed.”
Teresita Schaffer, an expert on Pakistan at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, called General Musharraf’s action “a big
embarrassment” for the administration. But she said there was not much the
United States could do.
“There’s going to be a lot of visible wringing of hands, and urging Musharraf to
declare his intentions,” she said. “But I don’t really see any alternative to
continuing to work with him. They can’t just decide they’re going to blow off
the whole country of Pakistan, because it sits right next to Afghanistan, where
there are some 26,000 U.S. and NATO troops.”
The hand-wringing began even before General Musharraf imposed military rule. Ms.
Rice said she has had several conversations with General Musharraf in the past
few weeks — the last one two days ago — in which she appealed to him not to
declare emergency powers. The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W.
Patterson, had also been exhorting General Musharraf and his top deputies
against making that step, Ms. Rice said.
“We were clear that we did not support it,” Ms. Rice said, speaking to reporters
aboard a flight from Istanbul to Israel, where she is traveling for regional
talks. “We were clear that we didn’t support it because it would take Pakistan
away from the path of democratic rule.”
But even as she criticized General Musharraf’s power grab, Ms. Rice stopped
short of outright condemnation of General Musharraf himself, even going so far
as to credit him for doing “a lot” — in the past — toward preparing Pakistan for
what she called a “path to democratic rule.”
That seeming contradiction highlights the quandary in which the Bush
administration now finds itself.
There has long been a deep fear within the administration, particularly among
intelligence officials, that an imperfect General Musharraf is better for
American interests than an unknown in a volatile country that is central to the
administration’s fight against terrorism. In recent months the White House had
been hoping that a power-sharing alliance between General Musharraf and
Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, would help the general cling
to power while putting a democratic face on his regime.
Now, experts predict that the United States will be watching Pakistan closely in
the coming days to see how hard General Musharraf cracks down on his opponents —
and whether opposition political leaders, journalists and scholars are
imprisoned. Much of the attention will be on Ms. Bhutto, who strongly condemned
the emergency declaration and quickly cut short a visit to Dubai to return to
Pakistan during the crisis.
Officials will be watching to see whether Pakistan’s fractured opposition,
including Ms. Bhutto and her political party can unite and pose a serious
challenge to General Musharraf. They will also be watching the reaction of the
military, which has been demoralized by a spate of suicide bombings against
military targets.
Whatever happens, experts say that General Musharraf’s decision was not good
news for the Bush administration Even if Pakistan does get back on the path to
democracy, Saturday’s action will likely tarnish the Pakistani leader, as well
as the legitimacy of any election organized by his government.
Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said
the current situation could easily plunge Pakistan into chaos, leading to an
increase in violence by Islamic fundamentalists or provoking demonstrations by
opposition political parties.
“You could have chaos in the street, or a situation where it would be suicidal
for Bhutto to try to participate in the process,” he said, adding, “Either of
those scenarios puts the U.S. in a very difficult position.”
Ginger Thompson contributed reporting.
Straying Partner Leaves White House in a Lurch, NYT,
4.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/world/asia/04assess.html?hp
Rice:
Kurdish Rebels Are ``Common Threat''
November 2,
2007
Filed at 9:38 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
ANKARA,
Turkey (AP) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Turkish officials
Friday that Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq were a ''common threat'' and
that the United States would help Ankara in its fight against them.
Speaking after meeting with both Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign
Minister Ali Babacan, Rice said she had emphasized that the United States is
''committed to redoubling its efforts'' to help Turkey in its struggle against
the rebel fighters.
''We consider this a common threat, not just to the interests of Turkey but to
the interests of the United States as well,'' she said at a joint news
conference with Babacan. ''This is going to take persistence and it's going to
take commitment -- this is a very difficult problem.''
En route here, Rice told reporters in her traveling party that the United
States, Turkey and Iraq will counter any attacks on Turkey by the rebels.
She didn't specify just what that meant but did warn against doing anything that
might worsen the volatile situation on the Turkish-Iraqi border.
Washington worries that a cross-border incursion would bring instability to what
has been the calmest part of Iraq, and could set a precedent for other
countries, like Iran, who also have conflicts with Kurdish rebels.
But Ankara has been resolute in saying that, unless it hears concrete measures
the United States will take against the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK,
it will launch an attack.
''We have great expectations from the United States, we are at the point where
words have been exhausted and where there is need for action,'' Babacan said.
But he also signaled that Turkey might be willing to consult with Washington
before moving ahead with a cross-border attack on the rebels.
''We hold a common view about taking up all problems together and creating
solutions for them,'' Babacan said.
Rice said the U.S. was looking at enhancing its intelligence and information
sharing with Turkey and that she had begun talking with the Turkish leaders
about longer term solutions.
''The United States is committed to redoubling its efforts, because we need a
comprehensive approach to this problem...'' she said. ''No one should doubt the
United States in this situation.''
Rice: Kurdish Rebels Are ``Common Threat'', NYT,
2.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Rice.html
Rice
Presses Diplomats on Assignments
November 2,
2007
Filed at 9:32 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the U.S. envoy to Baghdad
reminded diplomats on Friday of their duty to serve their country amid a revolt
among some who are resisting forced assignments to Iraq.
In separate comments, Rice and Ambassador Ryan Crocker said that foreign service
officers are obligated by their oath of office to work at any diplomatic mission
worldwide, regardless of the risks involved or their personal feelings about the
policies of any given administration.
''We are one foreign service and people need to serve where they are needed,''
Rice told reporters aboard her plane as she flew to Turkey for a weekend
conference of top officials from Iraq's neighbors. Crocker also is attending the
conference.
She noted that more than 1,500 of roughly 11,500 foreign service officers had
already done Iraq duty voluntarily and, while expressing an understanding of the
safety and security concerns of those who might be ordered to go, said they must
uphold their commitments.
''I would hope others would think about their obligation not just to the country
but their obligation to those who have already served,'' said Rice, who is
sending a worldwide diplomatic cable explaining the situation and appealing for
volunteers to fill the 48 vacancies that the State Department must fill next
year in Iraq.
On his way to the meeting in Turkey, Crocker offered an even blunter assessment,
saying that diplomats have a responsibility to prioritize the nation's interest
over their personal safety and that those who don't are ''in the wrong line of
business.''
Joining the foreign service ''does not mean you can choose the fight,'' he told
reporters in Dubai. ''It's not for us to decide if we like the policy or if the
policy is rightly implemented. It's for us to go and serve, not to debate the
policy, not to agree with it.''
Crocker, a 36-year veteran diplomat who has worked throughout the Mideast and
was personally skeptical of the Iraq war, has been the U.S. ambassador to Iraq
since early this year.
Since his arrival, he has repeatedly asked for more and more experienced
personnel to work at the Baghdad embassy and in Provincial Reconstruction Teams
in outlying areas.
His requests have been given top priority by Rice and State Department
management officials who have offered generous incentives, including extra
danger pay, leave time and preference on next assignments to attract diplomats
to volunteer for Iraq duty.
But facing a shortfall in volunteers, the department announced last week that it
would identify 200 to 300 foreign service officers as ''prime candidates'' for
48 unclaimed positions in Iraq and that if not enough of them agreed to go, some
would be ordered to do so under threat of dismissal.
The move is the largest diplomatic call-up to an active war zone since Vietnam
and on Wednesday several hundred diplomats angrily complained about the step in
a town hall meeting, with many applauding when a colleague likened it to a
''potential death sentence.''
The State Department says three foreign service personnel -- two diplomatic
security agents and one political officer -- have been killed in Iraq since the
war began in March 2003.
The union that represents diplomats says the security situation is precarious
and the completion of a new, heavily secured embassy compound and living
quarters in Baghdad has been beset by logistical and construction problems.
The move to so-called ''directed assignments'' is rare but not unprecedented.
In 1969, an entire class of entry-level diplomats was sent to Vietnam. On a
smaller scale, diplomats were required to work at various embassies in West
Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
Rice Presses Diplomats on Assignments, NYT, 2.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Embassy.html
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