Tag Archives: Al Gore

Return of the ‘San Francisco Democrats’

(Washington, D.C.): In 1984, Jeane Kirkpatrick gave expression to a feeling of revulsion experienced by many of her fellow “Reagan Democrats” about their political party. Reflecting on the locus of its national convention that year, she described the party’s dominant, liberal wing as “San Francisco Democrats” who were inclined to “blame America first.”

It took the Democratic Party eight more years to learn that most Americans found this coloration objectionable. The party only regained the White House when Bill Clinton and Al Gore ran as “New Democrats” on a platform that was consciously centrist and, in particular, sharply critical of the then-incumbent President, George H.W. Bush, for his handling of Saddam Hussein. Although the Clinton-Gore Administration’s foreign policy failed to deliver on the promised improvement over its predecessor’s, in succeeding years, Democratic leaders have by and large eschewed public embraces of the sorts of policies that drove Dr. Kirkpatrick and so many others to vote Republican.

The Week That Was

Until last week, that is. The Democratic Party’s apparent reversion to form began with a speech given by former Vice President Gore — delivered, appropriately, in San Francisco. As the crowd hummed “Hail to the Chief,” Mr. Gore denounced President Bush for dealing with what the one-time-Veep believes is a less-than-immediate threat from Saddam Hussein in an unduly hasty, unilateral and politicized fashion.

Al Gore’s sudden transformation from one of the few Democrats who bucked the San Francisco wing to vote for Desert Storm to their standard bearer vis a vis Iraq sent shock waves through his party’s political firmament. In short order, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle caved to pressure from liberals in his caucus opposed to quick and favorable action on a war resolution against Iraq. He took to the Senate floor to deliver one of the most emotionally overwrought political appearances since 1972 when Senator Ed Muskie — another darling of the Democratic left — destroyed his presidential candidacy by weeping while campaigning in New Hampshire. The Majority Leader joined Mr. Gore in questioning whether President Bush was politically manipulating and exploiting the issue of war with Iraq.

Not to be outdone, the senior congressional champion of the Democrats’ left-wing, Senator Ted Kennedy, took up the baton on Friday with a speech at Johns Hopkins University. Like Messrs. Gore and Daschle, the Massachusetts legislator wants it both ways, averring that Saddam is a menace, but declaring himself unpersuaded that the Iraqi despot is an imminent one. If the United States acts without the UN’s blessing and cooperation, he suggests, the world will be justified in joining the San Francisco Democrats in blaming America.

Then there was the spectacle of three Democratic Representatives assailing Mr. Bush from Baghdad via Sunday television programs and other media outlets. Exemplifying what can most charitably be called the naivete of their wing of the party, Reps. David Bonior, Jim McDermott and Mike Thompson are confident that this time Saddam will live up to his promises of access for inspectors, obviating the need — and foreclosing the opportunity — for U.S. military action any time soon. In a vintage display of blame-America-firstism, Rep. McDermott went so far as to declare: “I think the president would mislead the American people” about the justifications for going to war with Iraq.

What the Democrats’ Leftward Lurch Portends

Taken together, these bellwether events suggest that the long-dormant, but never extinguished, left-wing of the Democratic Party has decided to make its bid for renewed dominance in the shadow of the 2002 mid-term elections. Al Gore is evidently going to run for President in the months that follow by positioning himself to appeal not only to his audience last week in San Francisco but to the leftist peace activists, Council of Churches types and environmental extremists that Jeane Kirkpatrick associated with that city for all time. Other Democrats with national aspirations are clearly tempted to follow suit.

There are, of course, Democratic leaders who have, thus far, resisted this temptation. At this writing, their numbers would include: Joseph Lieberman, Zell Miller, John Breaux, John Edwards and Evan Bayh in the Senate and Dick Gephardt in the House. It remains to be seen whether their centrist views are the product of conviction, rather than calculation, and, if so, whether they will be punished for deviating from the party line the current San Francisco Democrats will try to enforce on Iraq — as Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson was for his apostasy on Vietnam a generation before.

Alternatively, maybe the majority of the Democratic Party will finally conclude that aligning themselves once again with the blame-America-first crowd is not only bad for the national interest but bad for the party’s bids to be entrusted with control of the Congress, let alone the White House.

The Bottom Line

Until the Democrats sort it out, President Bush would be wise not to make concessions to the San Francisco crowd — either in Washington or at the UN — in the hope of creating the appearance of broad bipartisan support. While such support would be nice to have, it must not be obtained at the expense of clarity of purpose, objectives and means on matters of war and peace.

Let the “Loyal Opposition” declare itself publicly on the need to deal swiftly and decisively with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Then let the chips fall where they may.

On Trusting Putin

(Washington, D.C.): One blemish on a presidential visit of Europe that can otherwise only be described as a tour de force was George W. Bush’s declaration that he was able to “get a sense” of Vladimir Putin’s “soul.” While no fault could be found with Mr. Bush’s insight that Putin is “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country,” his statement that he deemed his Russian counterpart to be “an honest, straightforward man” is simply over-the-top.

Still, this might have been nothing more than a bit of bonhomie, attributable to Mr. Bush’s famous friendliness and courtesy to a foreign dignitary. Or perhaps he was merely waxing enthusiastic, having gotten through a two-hour meeting with Putin without the career KGB man going ballistic over America’s determination to deploy a missile defense.

It is harder to dismiss, however, the President’s description of Putin as “trustworthy.” Mr. Bush went so far as to say “I wouldn’t have invited him to my ranch if I didn’t trust him.” This statement conjures up memories of too many American leaders who have indulged in the popular, but generally fatuous, notion that warm personal relationships with the top man in the Kremlin creates a realistic basis for constructive and close ties between the two nations. As syndicated columnist William Safire notes in today’s New York Times, this hubristic practice on the part of U.S. presidents goes back at least to Franklin Roosevelt’s day. In recent years, it has induced Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder to prop up Mikhail Gorbachev and his dying Soviet Union. It contributed to Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s determination to ignore the corrupt and anti-reform behavior of Boris Yeltsin and Viktor Chernomyrdin.

The regrettable fact is that Vladimir Putin can be trusted only to pursue his vision of a Russia that is once again a great power — at the expense of the freedoms enjoyed by his own people, the security of their neighbors and the interests of the United States more generally. If that is what Mr. Bush meant when he said he trusts Putin, he has it about right. If not, some further clarification is in order lest he repeat errors made by his predecessors on the basis of reposing unwarranted confidence in their Kremlin counterparts’ honesty and straightforwardness and our ability to do business with them.

Putin’s China Card

By William Safire

The New York Times, 18 June 2001

“I like Old Joe,” said F.D.R. about Joseph Stalin. Carrying on that self-deluding tradition of snap judgments, George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin, announced, “I was able to get a sense of his soul,” and after two heady hours concluded he was “straightforward” and “trustworthy.”

Ever since the K.G.B. man emerged as the Russian oligarchs’ choice, President Putin has shown himself to be duplicitous (ask the Chechens), anti-democratic (ask the remains of Russia’s free press) and untrustworthy (ask the exiled oligarchs). We can hope that the Bush gush was flattery intended to show the U.S. president to be nonthreatening as his administration presses ahead with a missile defense.

The American gave the Russian what he most needs: public deference that salves Russia’s wounded pride, and respect to its leader abroad as Putin methodically chokes off opposition at home. Bush topped this off with a pre-emptive concession: agreement to exchange warm ranch- and-home visits, for which Putin was eager, even before any progress was shown in agreement to scrap the old ABM treaty.

The Russian partly reciprocated, as Bush hoped, by accepting the American formulation of “a new architecture of security in the world” and by hinting that “we might have a very constructive development here in this area.” That public optimism from Russia takes a little of the steam out of alarmist Franco-German protests that America, in defending its cities from rogue missiles, was starting “a new arms race.”

At home, Putin has cracked down on the new freedoms without curbing the old corruption. Example of the rule of lawlessness: his Duma passed a bill last week to make Russia the world’s nuclear waste dump, generating $20 billion over the next decade.

That would be the most dangerous boondoggle in history, with little control over 2,000 tons of radioactive garbage yearly. “One hundred million Russian citizens are against it,” says Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the few reformers left standing in the Duma, “and only 500 people are for it 300 members sitting here and 200 bureaucrats who will be getting the money.” (Fortunately for the world, the U.S. won’t bury our nuclear waste in Russia, where it could be reprocessed and sold to Iran for weapons production.)

Well aware of the weakness of his hand, Putin is emulating Nixon strategy by playing the China card. Pointedly, just before meeting with Bush, Putin traveled to Shanghai to set up a regional cooperation semi-alliance with Jiang Zemin and some of his Asian fellow travelers.

That deft maneuver puts European leaders on notice that Russia despite all the talk of becoming a “partner” in Europe knows that the center of America’s strategic concern in the coming generation will be Asia.

Putin is signaling Bush: European leaders may resent your economic competition and appeal to their voters by complaining about pollution, but that’s merely bickering within the Western alliance. A future recombination of China and Russia, however, would challenge America’s status as the world’s sole superpower. Therefore, you’d better prop up our Russian economy with none of your human- rights lectures and expansion of NATO to our borders lest we undermine your hegemony with a Beijing- Moscow axis.

I wonder if Bush and his advisers are catching that signal. If so, they don’t seem to have let Putin’s China card affect U.S. policy. In a strong and thoughtful speech in Warsaw, Bush sent a signal of his own: “No more Munichs, no more Yaltas.”

That means no more appeasement of threats of aggression (as at Munich just before World War II, or about Taiwan today) and no more carving up of the world into spheres of influence (as at Yalta at that war’s end, or blocking the entry of the Baltic nations into NATO today). I read that to mean we will support the entry of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania vigorously, despite Putin’s phony worry about NATO being “a military organization . . . moving toward our border.”

With the strongest hand any American ever held, Bush comported himself well. But he should remember Reagan’s “trust but verify.” When the manipulative Russian comes to visit at the Texas ranch this fall, I would hate to hear “I like ol’ Vlad.”

Accept No Substitutes on the Aegis Sale to Taiwan

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow is D-Day for Taiwan — the day the Bush Administration advises our democratic friends on Formosa whether it has decided to approve their request for four Aegis air- and missile-defense ships needed to protect the island against the large and growing threat posed by Communist China. Unfortunately, according to press leaks to the Wall Street Journal, the answer appears to be a “Maybe.”

The Journal reports that “a senior official familiar with the [internal U.S.] deliberations” told it that the leading option would be to forego the Aegis sale if “China cuts back the number of missiles pointed at the island.” This idea tracks with a suggestion made several weeks ago by the United States Pacific Command — whose commander (known by the acronym of his title, CINCPAC) once made clear his attitude towards Free China in an off-color, but revealing, comment to congressional staffers. He told them that Taiwan is “the turd in the punchbowl of U.S.-China relations.”

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

The Bush team should be under no illusion: The CINCPAC proposal is a non-starter. Not only are the Chinese — who strenuously oppose the U.S. sale of Aegis ships to Taiwan — unlikely to play along. Even if they were to do so, the idea would be unworkable and undesirable from the U.S. and Taiwanese points of view. Consider just a few of the problems inherent in such an approach:

What Baseline? First, the United States cannot be absolutely sure how many missiles Beijing has pointed at Taiwan right now. Intelligence reports suggest that there may currently be as many as 300 of them. Is that correct? Or have the Chinese successfully concealed some of their missile deployments? Given the great lengths to which the People’s Liberation Army goes to prevent us from correctly assessing their present and emerging order of battle (their deliberate take-down of our EP-3 is but the most recent and egregious example of their concealment and deception program), it would be an act of considerable hubris to believe we can and will know precisely what the PLA is doing.

Alternatively, can we be sure that other, longer-range missiles in the PRC’s inventory are not also targeted on Taiwan? If that is not the case today, in the exceedingly unlikely event China were actually to agree to relocate some of its shorter-range missiles away from locations where they could reach Taiwan, would other weapons be reassigned to cover the original targets? Would we have any inkling that the threat was thus being maintained, if not exacerbated?

See No Evil: Second, assuming we did have some way of knowing with confidence precisely how much of a capability to attack and destroy Taiwan Beijing was maintaining at any given time, there is the matter of what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Policy-makers who don’t want to be confronted with evidence that their policies are not working out make little secret of their preferences. Bill Clinton once notoriously admitted to engaging in a practice he called “fudging” the facts. For his part, Al Gore rejected an unwelcome intelligence finding that his favorite Russian interlocutor, then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was thoroughly corrupt by scrawling a “barnyard epithet” across it.

Giving the Bush team the benefit of the doubt, let’s just say they wouldn’t behave so irresponsibly as to discourage the intelligence community from speaking truth to power. Our cumulative experience with arms control agreements nonetheless suggests that there is a powerful tendency within the intelligence community to find only ambiguity when reasonable clarity might entail undesirable repercussions. A case in point has been the systematic failure by the U.S. intelligence community to acknowledge that first the Soviet Union and then Russia built and operated a territorial defense against ballistic missile attack impermissible under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Here’s how it would work in the current context: Analysts at the CIA or other parts of the intelligence community tasked with monitoring Chinese missilery within range of Taiwan would surely find ample grounds in the aforementioned uncertainties to avoid any conclusion or finding that would trigger Aegis deployments. As a result, the U.S. commitment to provide Taiwan with the defense the Bush Pentagon has confirmed it needs would never become operational.]

Picking Up Where Clinton Left Off? Finally, there is no getting around the fact that the Aegis component of the present arms package is the litmus test for the Bush policy towards China. Beijing has made blocking the Aegis sale the object of its most virulent criticism. The PRC’s allies in U.S. business and academic circles have, as usual, rallied to its side, arguing that the sale would be far too provocative [(although, interestingly, the ultimate “Friend of China,” Henry Kissinger has reportedly made known in private his view that the United States should sell Aegis ships to Taiwan.)] For these reasons, among others, the Administration was apparently inclined before the EP-3 episode to give Taiwan other weapon systems — including four, less-capable Kidd-class destroyers — but to turn down the Aegis sale.

The Bottom Line

China’s belligerence in taking down and holding our surveillance aircraft and the U.S. expression of regret required to extract our service personnel held hostage by the PRC have, however, indisputably changed the circumstances under which the Bush decision on the Taiwan arms package will be perceived in Beijing and in the region. Should the flagship (literally) element of that package — the sea- based air- and missile-defense systems Taipei urgently requires — now be stripped from it, or made subject to some specious Chinese missile movements, it will be seen as evidence that the U.S. practice of accommodating the PRC has not changed, even if the occupant of the White House has.

Until such time as the United States can construct and turn over Aegis ships ordered by Taiwan, it should provide her friends there not only with Patriot anti-missile systems, diesel submarines and other elements of the requested arms package. America should also immediately begin to equip and assign her own fleet of Aegis ships to provide interim anti-air and -missile protection to the people of Taiwan — as well as those of Israel, Japan, Europe, South Korea and those here at home.

Newsweek declares the missile defense debate Over’

Newsweek Magazine’s on-line service circulated this week a fascinating assessment of the missile defense debate by one of its most astute reporters, John Barry. His conclusion: "America is going to build a national missile defense" — and everybody who thinks otherwise better think again.

The following highlights of Mr. Barry’s analysis are particularly thoughtful. They add to the sense of inevitability about defending America, as well as her forces and allies overseas, that owes much to the "Rumsfeld effect" — the signal of serious determination conveyed by President Bush’s appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. When combined with poll data released earlier this week by McLaughlin and Associates that confirms anew the overwhelming, bipartisan popular support for U.S. missile defenses (see "The American ‘Mainstream’ Wants a U.S. Missile Defense; Guess That Makes its Opponents ‘Extremists,’" No. 01-D 11, 31 Jan. 2001), it is clear that the question is not if, but when, anti-missile systems are put into place. With proper presidential leadership, a can-do spirit and attendant budgetary priority and an innovative approach to shortening the time- lines to deployment (i.e., by modifying existing Navy Aegis fleet air defense ships to perform this new mission), the United States and her friends will not only be protected, but begin to be protected far more rapidly than many now think possible.

 

Excerpts of:

Looking Forward To NMD: America will definitely build a national missile defense. Here’s why – and what it means

By John Barry

Newsweek, 29 January 2001

World leaders – from Russian President Vladimir Putin to British Prime Minister Tony Blair – talk as if the issue is still unresolved. They act as if their arguments in Putin’s case, threats – could still have an impact. But it isn’t so. The political debate within the United States is over. Finis. America is going to build a national missile defense.

Sure, there will be shouting and even a few demonstrations by what passes for the left in the United States. The old-style arms control community will protest the abandonment of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty and prophesy a new arms race. The New York Times will follow received opinion in New York and denounce the decision. But nobody in Washington will pay the least attention. Al Gore’s lame "me too" stance on missile defense in the election campaign recognized the political reality of the matter – which is that America’s decision to deploy defenses was really made on August 31, 1998.

That was the day that North Korea test launched a Taepo Dong-1 missile which — to the surprise of America’s spooks — turned out to have a third stage. Though it didn’t succeed in launching a small satellite into orbit, as North Korea had hoped, that third stage meant that, theoretically at any rate, the Taepo Dong now had intercontinental range.

Only six weeks before, a bipartisan panel of defense heavyweights, chaired by a former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had concluded that hostile nations were working hard to develop missiles with which to threaten the U.S. and that the intelligence services were failing to keep abreast of their efforts.

The Taepo Dong third stage was thunderous proof of Rumsfeld’s verdict. Overnight, the politics of missile defense were transformed. Sceptics could, and did, claim that the Rumsfeld Commission had made "worst case" assumptions about other nations’ missile programs, whereas the intelligence community had been circulating "most likely" scenarios. But if North Korea — bankrupt, primitive, starving, isolated, paranoid North Korea — could develop something close to an ICBM, the world really was a more threatening place than it had seemed. America’s 35-year debate about the need for missile defenses was suddenly over.

So when President George W Bush and his new defense secretary, the same Donald Rumsfeld, reiterate — as both did this past week — that the U.S. is going to deploy missile defenses, listen up. They mean it.

What remains to be decided are the second-order questions: timeframe, technology, and cost. These are questions America will settle largely for itself. But what also has to be thrashed out – and here the rest of the world can and will have a voice – is the strategic context within which those defenses are deployed.

And that is why the new Administration is banging the drum so loudly so early. Behind the braggadocio is a clear-headed game-plan. President Bush’s advisers have persuaded him that Russia, China and Europe will not even start to negotiate seriously about a new strategic nuclear order – the new framework for deterrence which Bush & Co. believe is needed – unless and until the world accepts that the United States is going ahead with missile defenses no matter what.

This judgement draws heavily on the national security team’s personal experiences of the team. The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was a mid-level bureaucrat for the outfit she now runs under the first President Bush in 1990, and worked on the then-thorny issue of German reunification. Bush pushed for a Germany whole, free and integrated into NATO from the outset. He got it. Rice has since written that she took this as a lesson to "choose goals that are optimal, even if they seem at the time politically infeasible." Rumsfeld and the new Secretary of State Colin Powell have both negotiated strategic arms agreements. Both have concluded – as have many others over the years – that the Russians will accept a deal only when they become convinced that America is ready to walk away from the table.

The frustrations of the Clinton Administration have only reinforced these views. By 1996, President Clinton had come — grudgingly and under Republican pressure — to accept the case for defense. But Clinton wanted to negotiate a deal with Moscow that through minimal amendments to the ABM treaty would allow a minimal defensive system to protect against a minimal threat. Years of intensive discussions with Moscow to this end got nowhere, even though Russian generals were privately telling their U.S. counterparts that Russia herself was worried by the prospect of missile proliferation around its southern rim.

The incoming Bush Administration does not intend to walk the same path. Instead, the new Administration’s strategy is to go ahead with the development of missile defenses and invite the Russians and the Europeans to make constructive proposals on how best to integrate these into a new strategic framework. They have, of course, their own ideas what that could be. The Bush Administration is willing to think about moving from strategic arms agreements that limit offensive weapons and ban defensive ones to a new set of mix-and-match totals where offensive and defensive capabilities are somehow reckoned together. They are more willing than Clinton was to think about taking U.S. missile forces off alert status, and they are open to other suggestions for reducing nuclear risk. They would contemplate sharing intelligence, and welcome joint efforts to counter proliferation. They may reduce the size of the U.S. strategic arsenal unilaterally, urging Russia to follow suit but not insisting on it.

The message will be: If Moscow wants to join with the U.S. in these endeavors, fine. If not, that’s Moscow’s choice. Underlying this approach are two fundamental judgements. The first is that, at this point in history, the United States holds all the high cards. The second is that there is no need for haste.

Take Russia. The Russian nuclear submarine fleet rusts at its moorings. By U.S. calculations, Russia’s strategic missiles are so antique that by 2010 or shortly thereafter Russia will likely deploy only 500-800 warheads. So Putin can spend billions of rubles he cannot afford on a new generation of strategic missiles. Or he can do a deal.

Take Beijing. China’s leaders threaten "a spiralling arms race" if the U.S. deploys missile defenses. But to what end? Traditional state-to-state deterrence theory suggests that such a buildup would cost a lot economically while buying nothing of strategic value. China would not lose a deterrent if America installed a missile defense because China does not really have a deterrent against America today, presumably because it doesn’t really think it needs one. The fact that China’s current nuclear arsenal consists of aging, static, highly vulnerable, liquid fuelled ICBMs is proof of that. Why then, Bush’s advisers ask, should Beijing choose to waste resources on a fruitless enterprise ?

Take rogue states. The virtue of missile defenses — or so the Bush team’s thinking runs — is that defenses increase the price of admission to the strategic club. Take Iraq. As the sanctions on Iraq erode, Saddam Hussein will almost certainly be able to afford a clandestine program to develop a handful of missiles with ranges sufficient to hit European capitals. If he can develop even one with a range to hit the United States, Saddam has the tools for a strategy of blackmail. Defenses, even limited defenses, thwart that scenario — though only if both sides have faith in their ability to stop the incoming missile.

Jacoby Speaks Truth to Power about Colin Powell

(Washington, D.C.): President-elect George W. Bush is expected shortly to
name his national
security team and it is universally expected that he will nominate General Colin Powell to serve
as his Secretary of State. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is held in high esteem
by virtually everyone on both sides of the aisle and his speedy confirmation is assured.

Unfortunately, Gen. Powell’s laudable qualities, while numerous, are not necessarily those
required of a Secretary of State. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby
courageously points out
today, what will be needed, particularly in dealing with the world Bill Clinton and Al Gore
are
bequeathing to their successors, is:

    Someone who is not uneasy with the assertion of U.S. leadership or nervous about the
    projection of power abroad. Bush’s senior Cabinet official will need to assist him in
    making hard decisions — even unpopular or dangerous ones, if that is what the national
    interest and the pursuit of world peace require. He will have to be unshakable when it
    comes to first principles and able to recognize at once when they are threatened.

Mr. Jacoby argues persuasively that “That is not a job description Powell can meet.”
Three
factors make this a particularly troubling conclusion: First, like most Presidents who come to
office from a governor’s mansion, Mr. Bush is likely to rely especially heavily upon his foreign
policy experts. Second, Gen. Powell reportedly is favoring a choice for Secretary of Defense —
another governor, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania — whose selection would, among other things,
assure the former JCS Chairman’s absolute domination of the U.S. government’s security policy-
making machinery. And three, given Gen. Powell’s stature, it may prove even harder for Mr.
Bush to discipline him, should that prove necessary, than it was for Harry Truman to contend
with an insubordinate Douglas MacArthur.

Under these circumstances, even those who admire Colin Powell and applaud his willingness
to
render further service to his country would hope that he might do so in a position consistent with
his current interests and, arguably, less fraught with potential problems for the Nation and its
new President — for example, as Secretary of Education and/or Health and Human Services.

THE WRONG MAN FOR THE STATE DEPARTMENT

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
December 7, 2000

George W. Bush has made it all but official that — assuming he becomes president — Colin
Powell will be his nominee for secretary of state. It is a nomination sure to generate much
applause. Herewith a dissent.

In many ways, of course, Powell would be an admirable addition to any president’s Cabinet.
By
all accounts he is a man of fine character. His reputation could hardly be more lustrous. When he
considered running for president himself five years ago, both parties vied for his favor and
Americans of every political stripe acclaimed him a hero. He is dignified, tough, patriotic, and —
not a small thing after two terms of Bill Clinton — manifestly an adult.

His personal story is wonderfully inspirational. Born in Harlem, reared in the South Bronx,
Powell started out mopping floors in a Pepsi-Cola plant and wound up a four-star general, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the first black American to be seriously thought of as
presidential material. It is a classic only-in-America saga, straight out of Horatio Alger.

But would he make a good secretary of state?

George W. Bush, it is clear, has no more of “the vision thing” than his father did; when it
comes
to foreign affairs, he has even less. More than most presidents, he will depend on his secretary of
state for insight into international developments and for guidance in setting America’s course in
the world.

After the irresolution of the Christopher-Albright years, the next secretary of state must be
someone who is not uneasy with the assertion of US leadership or nervous about the projection
of power abroad. Bush’s senior Cabinet official will need to assist him in making hard decisions
— even unpopular or dangerous ones, if that is what the national interest and the pursuit of world
peace require. He will have to be unshakable when it comes to first principles and able to
recognize at once when they are threatened.

And when the United States has to rally reluctant allies or face down menacing foes, the
incoming secretary of state will need the skill to make America’s case, as Thomas Jefferson once
put it, “in terms so plain as to command their assent.”

That is not a job description Powell can meet. He has many terrific qualities, but strategic
vision
and innovation have never been among them. He is a company man who plays by the rules — the
company in his case being the Army, in which he spent nearly all his adult life. He is a classic
consensus-seeker, a cautious insider who rarely moves until he knows that everyone is on board.
Thinking “outside the box” is not a Powell trademark; his instinct is always for the status quo,
and time and again it has occluded his judgment.

No chapter in Powell’s life illustrates the problem better, ironically, than the one that made
his
reputation: the Gulf War.

To this day he is routinely described as a “hero” of that war, and yet if his advice had been
followed when the crisis with Iraq erupted, the result would have been disaster.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Powell was prepared to let him keep
it.
As Michael Gordon and retired General Bernard Trainor reported in “The Generals’ War,” their
detailed account of the war in the Gulf, Powell was adamant that Kuwait was not worth fighting
for. “The American people do not want their young dying for $1.50-a-gallon oil,” he insisted to
then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. “We can’t make a case for losing lives for Kuwait.” Only if
Saddam attacked Saudi Arabia did Powell think America should act. When President Bush
bluntly vowed that Saddam’s aggression would be rolled back — “This will not stand” — Powell
was dismayed.

Even when the decision was made to confront Iraq, Powell opposed the use of military force.
He
was convinced, he told Britain’s air chief marshal in October 1990, that economic sanctions
would bring Saddam around, and he was willing to wait 12 to 15 months, and maybe as long as
two years, for them to work. In Powell’s view, wrote Gordon and Trainor, “war with Iraq …
would be politically damaging to Western interests in the Middle East.”

And as soon as Iraqi forces were out of Kuwait, Powell called for ending the war at once.
Saddam’s Republican Guard was allowed to escape — and then to brutally cut down the countless
Iraqis who rose up in desperation to topple the dictator.

This reluctance to act in the face of Saddam’s aggression was not an uncharacteristic lapse.
Powell has repeatedly counseled passivity and nonintervention.

During the Reagan administration, he was against arming the Afghan rebels with Stinger
missiles
— weapons that would prove critical in driving out the Soviet occupiers and beginning the end of
the Cold War. In 1989, he opposed the use of US troops to help Panamanian rebels depose
strongman Manuel Noriega. The result was that the coup failed, resulting in a massive and costly
invasion 10 weeks later.

And as Serb killers were slaughtering Bosnians by the tens of thousands, Powell rejected any
American use of force to stop the bloodshed — or even, at first, to airlift food to civilians. “When
the fighting broke out, should the West have intervened militarily?” he asked in 1995. “Nobody
really thinks it has a vital interest.”

A U.S. general who cannot discern a vital Western interest in stopping genocide in the heart
of
Europe is not the man to run the State Department.

Once the crucial decision to act has been made and a leader is needed to carry it out, Powell
is
superb. But muaking that decision — especially in the absence of strong public support — takes
vision, boldness, and clear strategic judgment. Powell’s gifts are many, but those are not among
them.

Free Pope Now

(Washington, D.C.): The 20-year prison sentence handed down today to U.S. businessman Edmond Pope following a Soviet-style show trial is more than a death sentence for the ailing American. It is yet another sign of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to put U.S.- Russian relations squarely back on the path of confrontation and potential conflict.

This grotesque outcome is also an opportunity for President-elect George W. Bush to demonstrate that — in contrast to the Clinton-Gore Administration’s malign neglect of this case — such hostage-taking and blackmail will entail real costs for the Kremlin. There is an interesting parallel to events twenty years ago: Within hours of President Reagan’s 1980 inauguration, the Americans who had been held in Iran for 444 days were released, sending a strong message to the world that America was back on its game.

The Pope situation presents the new president with an opportunity to send a similar and much-needed signal, making it very clear that the U.S. relationship with Russia can only proceed after this matter has been satisfactorily resolved. Were Gov. Bush to do otherwise, he would be inviting not only more of the same from the Russians; he would also be announcing an “open season” on U.S. citizens traveling, doing business or living elsewhere around the world.

A Travesty

Mr. Pope is a retired U.S. Navy officer and the founder of CERF Technologies International, a company specializing in studying foreign maritime equipment. He was arrested in Moscow in April 3 and accused of illegally acquiring classified plans for a high-speed torpedo, the Shkval. Pope insisted on his innocence throughout the trial and contends that the plans were not only not classified, but had been sold abroad and published in open sources. He operated under a contract with the Moscow Bauman Technical Institute and the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. Pope’s lawyers claimed that under a contract, signed by Pope, the documents he received were supposed to contain no secret data. They were able to establish in the course of the trial that the information he solicited had, in fact, been openly available on the arms market.

Mr. Pope’s conviction on spying charges was the first of its kind since the height of the Cold War, when U.S. U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. In the manner of Soviet “justice,” it was a “closed trial”; neither the media nor outside observers were allowed to monitor its proceedings.

The outcome is all the more Kafkaesque insofar as the State’s case collapsed when Anatoly Babkin, a Moscow professor who had been the star witness against Pope, wrote a letter stating that his earlier testimony was given “under duress.” He recanted entirely his earlier claim of collusion with Pope to pass him classified material, stating that he was handed a confession by the successor to the notorious KGB and forced to sign it.

The Russian government’s handling of the Pope case reads like a Solzhenitsyn novel: According to the respected Russia Reform Monitor — which has been closely following developments in the trial — the judge, who was appointed by the successor of the KGB, the FSB: rejected Pope’s request for an independent medical panel to determine his fitness to stand trial; denied his request for an independent court translator; refused to allow the hearings to be recorded for a later review of the translations; threw out Pope’s request to subpoena a Moscow university from which Pope had been granted permission to acquire the technology he sought; and refused to call Babkin, whose recantation essentially gutted the Russian government’s case. All in all, the defense filed some 200 petitions for the defense, but the FSB judge threw out all but a handful. By contrast, petitions filed by the prosecution were routinely granted.

U.S. Moves: Too Little Too Late

In the weeks following Edmond Pope’s arrest, his family became increasingly frantic about his failing health but was told by the Clinton Administration officials that they were working feverishly behind the scenes to secure Pope’s release. The family was strongly advised to keep a low profile since the U.S. government believed that quiet diplomacy offered the best chance of freeing the incarcerated American. These were lies. In fact, the U.S. government let Pope sit in the Russian prison for months, until August, before it made any move at all on his behalf.

It took the death of another U.S. citizen in a Russian prison and the persistence of Pope’s wife and other family members before the Clinton Administration bestirred themselves to take up the case. Even then, if U.S. Ambassador to Russia James Collins made any moves to attempt to secure Pope’s release, they were not evident. Indeed, many of Pope’s defenders began to wonder which government Collins was really representing — the United States or Russia. President Clinton also failed Ed Pope. Although he promised to bring up the issue in his June summit with Putin, Clinton did not evince before, during or after that meeting anything like the kind of interest in or insistence upon Pope’s release to free the ex-KGB officer’s American hostage.

Interestingly, starting in May, Vice President Al Gore refused numerous verbal and written requests for help from Pope’s family. In three different telephone conversations and once in writing, Gore’s staff told Pope’s sister, Brenda Linstrom, that he would not help her.

As Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) said today, “The conviction wasn’t a conviction of Ed Pope but a conviction of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Ambassador Jim Collins. They let him languish for months and didn’t demand to free this innocent man.”

On 2 October, however, the House International Relations Committee unanimously approved a resolution calling on the Kremlin to release him immediately out of concern over Mr. Pope’s deteriorating health and the failure of the Clinton-Gore Administration to secure appropriate medical care for him. The call went unheeded.

The Bottom Line

The Clinton-Gore team’s fecklessness in the face of this outrageous provocation continued today in the wake of Pope’s conviction and harsh sentence. White House spokesman Jake Siewert could only muster, “There’s no doubt this [outcome] has cast a shadow over U.S. Russian relations.”

Now, the Nation and the world will get — one way or the other — a taste of the kind of leader George W. Bush will be in international affairs: Will he choose to continue down the Clinton-Gore path of appeasement and accommodation with Moscow by letting Edmond Pope die in a KGB prison or purchase his freedom at some exorbitant price (trading a real Russian spy for their American hostage or perhaps for huge amounts of cash)? Or will he put to the Russians — and rogue states and other thugs all over the planet — that the next President, like Ronald Reagan, will not be one to trifle with and that the costs of attempting to do so, by seizing or otherwise harming American citizens and interests will meet with certain and disproportionately harsh responses.

Clinton Legacy #52: The Perils of ‘Nation-Building’

(Washington, D.C.): One showcase of the Clinton-Gore foreign policy legacy was supposed
to
be Haiti, where in 1994 some 20,000 American troops were sent to “restore democracy.” The
problem with this and all subsequent attempts at “nation-building” over the past eight years, as
amplified in the article below, is self-evident: Doing it half-heartedly and “on the cheap” does
not work. It generally proves to be enormously expensive relative to the minimal and ephemeral
benefits obtained. It forces U.S. troops into a role to which they are poorly suited and ill-applied.
It squanders in particular military resources and assets already in too short supply. And, in the
end, the fecklessness of the intervention generally serves to erode whatever positive attitude
towards or respect for the United States that might have previously existed among the affected
population.

Worse yet, as the editor of Newsweek‘s on-line edition, Joe Contreras makes
clear, these
interventions have actually detracted from U.S. foreign policy interests. In 1994, we installed an
anti-American leftist former priest in Haiti, only to see that nation metastasize ever since into an
increasingly authoritarian narco-state. According to Newsweek, the amount of
cocaine entering
the U.S. from Haiti since Aristide was installed has more than doubled — a particular outrage
insofar as a principal justification for the U.S. action against the previous, military-run
government in Haiti was that it had, at the very least, turned a blind-eye to drug trafficking.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Under the Clinton-Gore team, America has
also
engaged in a number of other misguided initiatives, including: using its influence in support of a
Marxist coup d’etat in Albania; supporting a Communist thug’s takeover of the
“Democratic Republic of Congo”; aiding the Communist government of Angola in its
civil war against America’s Cold War ally, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA; intervening in a
civil war in the former Yugoslavia in such a way as to prop up Serbian dictator Slobodan
Milosevic; and making common cause with the drug-running Kosovo Liberation Army in
Yugoslavia.

In every instance, the Clinton Administration’s “nation-building” has been a dismal failure,
not
the least because genuine and stable democracies are not imposed from above by foreigners.
They do not come about by artificially ending the outward manifestations of civil strife or by
elections engineered to produce results favorable to the West’s preferred politicians. Real
democracies require legal, political and social institutions. Their absence virtually ensures that
there will be no freely elected and durable governments.

By pretending otherwise over the past eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration has
bequeathed to the next president a world much more wary of U.S. intentions and much less
inclined to view America as a reliable partner in bringing about democratic transformations. As
a candidate, President-elect Bush was harshly and properly critical of such insubstantial, yet
exceedingly costly “nation-building” exercises abroad. It is to be hoped that, as President, Mr.
Bush will apply this principle. If he does so, it will likely save American lives, treasure and
standing internationally.

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE, 28 November 2000

Haiti: A Shabby Epilogue:

After a distinctly undemocratic election, drug lords may have become the real
rulers of this
island nation

By Joe Contreras

Nov. 28 – It was an election that most voters ignored, that the international community
disavowed and whose outcome was never in doubt. In many respects, Sunday’s presidential vote
in Haiti was the polar opposite of the U.S. election that continues to garner headlines around the
world.

Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide faced no serious challengers in a cakewalk contest
that
was boycotted by the country’s main opposition parties. Polling precincts that drew long lines of
voters for a legislative election only six months ago stood empty throughout much of the day.
And when Aristide begins his five-year term next February he will enjoy little legitimacy beyond
the shores of the impoverished Caribbean island nation.

But none of that stopped the onetime apostle of Haitian democracy from hailing the vote and
promising a role for the opposition in his future government. “We observed a huge majority of
the Haitian people expressing their right through their vote,” the 47-year-old Aristide told
reporters on Monday, during his first press conference in six years. “To have a peaceful Haiti, the
opposition is indispensable, and there will be a place for everyone in my government.”

But the nation’s main opposition leaders quickly spurned Aristide’s invitation, and his victory
provides a shabby epilogue to what the Clinton Administration once touted as one of its greatest
foreign-policy triumphs. In 1994, the United States dispatched 20,000 troops to oust a military
regime accused of involvement in drug trafficking and restore Aristide as Haiti’s first
democratically elected president. Washington then poured hundreds of millions of dollars in
development aid into the country as a sign of support for Aristide, who continued to wield
effective power after he was succeeded as president by a hand-picked political lackey named
Rene Preval in 1996.

By last May, though, the White House had run out of patience. The amount of cocaine
streaming
into the United States through Haiti had more than doubled since the years of military rule, and
Preval’s government was a democracy in name only. Haiti’s return to the ranks of the world’s
pariah states appeared complete-and as a sign of their displeasure, U.S. officials refused to
provide financial assistance or election observers to this week’s presidential vote in which an
estimated 15 percent of eligible Haitians bothered to take part. “The United States bet on a horse
that disguised itself as the (champion) of democracy,” says opposition politician Gerard
Pierre-Charles. “But the state doesn’t function, and drug traffickers could become the masters of
the country.”

Many believe that has already occurred with the consent of corrupt Haitian judges, legislators
and police. The State Department estimates that nearly 70 tons of cocaine moved through Haiti in
1999, and Drug Enforcement Administration officials say that at least 15 major Colombian drug
trafficking syndicates have set up shop in recent years.

Drug-related corruption is flourishing throughout the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
The
head of police at Port-au-Prince International Airport was fired last March after he allegedly
failed to seize a 405-kilogram shipment of cocaine, and U.S. officials have linked three
prominent senators from Aristide’s Lavalas Family party to drug trafficking activity. A senior
police commander says that up to three-quarters of the country’s 4,500-member police force have
accepted bribes from drug lords and their lieutenants, and the country’s justice minister says the
going price for a judge starts at $5,000. “There is no element of that system in Haiti you can’t buy
your way out of,” says one frustrated DEA agent. “(Traffickers) face a greater law enforcement
infrastructure anywhere else in the Caribbean.”

But Haiti’s newfound status as an emerging narco-state isn’t the only cloud hanging over
Aristide as he prepares to return in triumph to the gleaming white Presidential Palace in
downtown Port-au-Prince. Any remaining pretense of democratic rule under Aristide’s
designated stand-in Rene Preval evaporated nearly two years ago when the figurehead president
dissolved parliament. U.S. officials criticized the move, and their concerns hardened into loud
condemnation after Haitians went to the polls last May to elect a new legislature. A controversial
vote-counting formula awarded 18 of the 19 seats at stake in the national senate to candidates
from Aristide’s Lavalas Family party. Independent election observers argued that ten of those
seats should have been decided by a runoff vote, but the Preval government refused to hold a
second-round election. Washington retaliated by suspending aid for this month’s presidential
election and announcing plans to channel $75 million in US economic assistance exclusively
through private, non-governmental organizations. “Seldom in recent history has a country
received such a level of international support in its effort to establish democracy,” Luis Lauredo,
the U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, said last September. “The Haitian
people deserve better than this.”

Aristide is likely to get an even colder shoulder from George W. Bush if the Texas governor
is
sworn in as president next January. In one of his few clear-cut disagreements with Vice President
Al Gore on foreign policy, Bush vowed never to use American troops in any future
“nation-building” exercise and publicly cited Haiti as a failed example of that approach.
Republican Congressmen started taking aim at Aristide and his inner circle for alleged
involvement in drug trafficking long before the Clinton Administration soured on him. One of
their recurrent targets is Dany Toussaint, a former army major and longtime Aristide loyalist who
was elected to the senate last spring. Toussaint reportedly engineered the removal of a police
inspector general earlier this year who was investigating several police superintendents
implicated in the cocaine trade. The 43-year-old legislator dismisses those accounts as part of a
Republican smear campaign aimed at portraying the charismatic Aristide as a closet leftist who
will cozy up to Fidel Castro in short order. “All they are talking about is garbage,” shrugs
Toussaint. “They have to go through me to attack Aristide.” Now that he is president-elect,
Aristide may find himself more directly in the firing line.

The United States Cannot Maintain a Safe, Reliable and Effective Nuclear Deterrent Without Nuclear Testing

(Washington, D.C.): One of the early agenda items for the next President will be the matter of what to do about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — an accord that was negotiated and signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 but considered to be so fatally flawed that it was rejected by a majority of the U.S. Senate in 1999.

The CTBT will require priority attention even if, as seems likely at the moment, the 43rd President is not Al Gore — who explicitly promised, if elected, to try to ram the CTBT through the Senate as his first order of foreign policy business. George W. Bush, who expressed his opposition to the Treaty when it was being considered by the Senate, must nonetheless address this accord as soon as possible for two pressing reasons:

1) Notwithstanding blithe assurances by the Clinton-Gore Administration and other CTBT proponents, the U.S. nuclear deterrent cannot be sustained indefinitely without a resumption of nuclear testing; and

2) the Administration has stealthily proceeded with the Treaty’s implementation, as though the Senate had approved its ratification, rather than rejected it. As a result, the United States is being inexorably drawn into legal, technical and political arrangements that will make it difficult, if not as a practical matter impossible, for the next President to resume nuclear testing if and when he decides to do so.

The New York Times Confirms Critics’ Warnings about Stockpile Stewardship

Incredibly, the gravity of the problem confronting the Nation’s nuclear forces was documented in a lengthy article in today’s New York Times1. The following are among the more noteworthy points made in the course of the Times‘ documentation of the inadequacies of the Administration’s so-called Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) (Emphasis added throughout):

  • The SSP is not up to the job. “Since [1992, when the United States began a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing], the Nation has evaluated the thousands of warheads in its aging arsenal in a program called science-based stockpile stewardship, using computer simulations, experiments on bomb components and other methods to assess the condition of the weapons without actually exploding them.

    “Program officials have been confident that the stockpile is safe and secure and that the stewardship program can fully maintain the weapons. Now, however, some of the masters of nuclear weapons design are expressing concern over whether this program is up to the task. Concerns about the program take a variety of forms, including criticisms of its underlying technical rationale and warnings that the program’s base of talented scientists is eroding….”

  • “A stewardship program with no testing is a religious exercise, not science,’ said Dr. Merri Wood, a senior designer of nuclear weaponry at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Wood said that as the weapons aged, it was becoming impossible to say with certainty that the stockpile was entirely functional. I can’t give anybody a safe period,’ she said of the possibility that some weapons could become unreliable. It could happen at anytime.‘”

    “Dr. Charles Nakhleh, another weapons designer at Los Alamos, said doubts about the stewardship program were widespread among weapons designers. The vast, vast majority would say there are questions you can answer relatively definitively with nuclear testing that would be very difficult to answer without nuclear testing,’ he said.”

  • The arsenal was built for a limited shelf-life. “The program is a fiendish technical challenge, and even its backers concede that science-based stockpile stewardship can never offer the certainty of the big explosions. The thousands of bombs in the stockpile are highly complex devices. Each is made up of a forest of electronics and missile components surrounding a sort of atomic fuse, or primary,’ that holds chemical explosives and a fission bomb containing a fuel like plutonium. In addition, there is a secondary,’ whose thermonuclear fusion reaction is set off when the primary explodes.

    “Most of the weapons in the stockpile were not built with longevity in mind. It was expected that they would be replaced by a continuing stream of new and improved designs, checked in tests until weapons production abruptly stopped in 1992. But the basic design of the newest of the bombs, a version called the W-88, received crucial tests in the 1970’s and was fully designed by the mid-1980’s. Production of the weapon ended by 1991. The oldest of the bombs date from 1970.”

  • Uncertainties abound. “Assessing the changes can be bewilderingly difficult. The degradation turns symmetrical components shaped like spheres or cylinders into irregular shapes whose properties are a nightmare to model in computer simulations. Inspectors, who typically tear apart one weapon of each design per year and less intrusively check others, find weapons components deteriorating in various ways because the materials age, and because they are exposed to the radioactivity of their own fuel. Even tiny changes in those materials can lead to large changes in bomb performance, weapons designers say.”
  • Whistling past the graveyard. “Supporters of the program say that regular inspections of the weapons will turn up any serious problems as the stockpile ages and that those problems can be addressed. You’ll get the warning bell and you’ll know what to do,’ said Dr. Sidney Drell, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, who led a study in 1995 that underlies the stewardship program. Dr. Drell said he remained optimistic about scientists’ ability to limit that element of doubt, which he called genuine and serious.’

    “But other experts at the nation’s weapons laboratories are challenging this view. Designers say the sensitivity of the bombs to slight changes means that age could modify the bombs so that they do not work as they are supposed to. While program supporters believe those problems can be found and fixed, virtually everyone agrees that if any major redesign is needed, those new bombs could not be certified as reliable under the current program.

    “Dr. Harold Agnew, a former director of Los Alamos, said that to consider putting those things in the stockpile without testing is nonsense.'”

  • Decline is inevitable. “In a blink, I would prefer to go back to testing,’ said Dr. Carol T. Alonso, a weapons designer for 20 years who is now assistant associate director for national security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

    “Thomas Thomson, a weapons designer at Livermore, said that under the current program, I think you just accept the fact that you’re going to have a decline” in the reliability of the stockpile. “You try to make it as gradual as possible,’ he added.”

  • No comparable experience by which to be guided. “Even with all the [advanced diagnostic tools the SSP is supposed to provide], critics say, crucial questions about the performance of aging bombs must still be answered directly by data from old tests. Because bombs this old were never tested, they say, computer simulations cannot definitively determine the seriousness of new types of changes caused by continued aging….

    “Serious questions about the operation of the stockpile program are being heard at all three of the major American weapons laboratories: Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia.

  • Brain drain. “As a result [in part of security investigations at the labs and their repercussions] according to officials at the weapons labs and at the Energy Department, which runs them, there has been a flight of scientific talent and a decline of top-flight applicants, problems exacerbated by a rise in lucrative job offers from the private sector. Weapons experts say the frustration over tighter security procedures comes at a particularly unfortunate time, as the scientists who designed and tested the weapons in the stockpile try to pass their knowledge and experience to new caretakers before retiring or dying. We have a five- year window to make this transfer,’ Dr. [Michael] Bernardin, [a senior weapons designer at Los Alamos], said.”
  • Remanufacturing not an option. “One way to get around all these criticisms of the program and still avoid testing, some scientists outside the laboratories say, would be simply to remanufacture’ new, nearly exact replicas of existing weapons in the stockpile and replace them on a regular basis as they age. Neither very much science nor underground testing would be necessary.

    “But Dr. Jas Mercer-Smith, a former weapons designer who is deputy associate director for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, said that was easier said than done, since many manufacturing techniques of the past were no longer available, and the copies could in reality be significantly different from the originals. Without the sophisticated scientific analysis of the stockpile stewardship program, he said, nuclear experts could not be sure what effects the changes might have.

  • The need for modernization of the stockpile. Dr. Bernardin of Los Alamos said possible new military needs, anything from building nuclear-tipped missile interceptors to replacing an existing weapon completely if it became too old to function, could someday require entirely remade designs as well.

    Supporters of re-manufacture insist that no new designs are needed because the nation’s nuclear deterrent is sufficient. If they are needed, however, the uncertainties and complexities involved in any new designs would inevitably require underground tests, and not just computer simulations, several weapons designers said. Those complexities, Dr. Wood of Los Alamos said, mean that even existing designs are now coming into question. “If this was somebody’s hair clip, I wouldn’t mind as much,” she said. “But it’s not.”

Changing Facts on the Ground

In one of the most brazen of its many affronts to the U.S. Constitution, the Clinton-Gore Administration has spent millions of dollars and untold man-years on the implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the year following its rejection by the Senate. Thanks to the work of the U.S. interagency, official representatives to various international forums and special interests, this country has provided critical technical expertise and other forms of support essential to the operations of the multilateral organization being set up to backstop the CTBT.

A President Bush will inevitably be confronted, as a result, with the argument that this entity has been established with U.S. assistance and requires its continued leadership in order to function. The temptation will be great to go along by avoiding a public repudiation of the Treaty and the domestic and international criticism sure to follow.

It would be a serious mistake to accede to this pressure, though. The more the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is institutionalized and the U.S. is implicated in its work, the more illegitimate will appear actions by this country needed to safeguard and modernize its deterrent forces but that contravene the letter and/or the spirit of the CTBT. This back-door Clinton-Gore ratification of the CTBT must not be allowed to go unchallenged.

The Bottom Line

As long as U.S. national security depends upon even a single nuclear weapon, the Nation, and its potential adversaries, are going to have confidence that it will work if it is needed to do so — and, no less importantly, that it will not work under all other circumstances. There is no getting around it: Periodic, safe underground testing is required to have and maintain that confidence.

Candidate Bush pledged to conduct a comprehensive review of America’s nuclear posture. In addition to weighing carefully the wisdom of further deep reductions in the U.S. arsenal and the idea of de- alerting such weapons as remain, President Bush must redirect the Nation’s policy towards nuclear testing.

Specifically, he should make clear — as President Reagan and Mr. Bush’s father did in the past, that nuclear testing is a necessary part of maintaining a credible American nuclear deterrent, not an evil to be curtailed. The United States will not test any more often than is absolutely necessary, but it will conduct such tests when they are deemed necessary.

Mr. Bush should, accordingly, renounce the CTBT and secure its formal removal from the Senate’s calendar of pending business — the only way to establish that this fatally flawed accord will not be allowed to undermine U.S. security in the future.




1It would have been a public service had the Times seen fit to blow the whistle before the election on the inherent inconsistency between a permanent, “zero-yield” ban on nuclear testing and the requirement to maintain a safe and effective American deterrent for the foreseeable future. Still, given the Times editorial board’s vociferous support for the CTBT, however, and its castigation of Republican Senators many of whose criticisms have now been vindicated by this article, it is little short of a miracle that the paper ran it at all.

Time to Raise the General Knowledge Level’ on China

(Washington, D.C.): Hong Kong’s still-independent press is having a field day with an unusual PDA (public display of aggressiveness) by the new master of the former British colony: China’s President Jiang Zemin. Evidently, Jiang was upset at the impertinence of a journalist who asked whether Beijing’s endorsement of a second term for the highly unpopular shipping magnate it had installed to run Hong Kong amounted to “an imperial order.”

According to today’s Washington Post, the Communist emperor — furious that someone had accurately described the nature of his clothes — “flew into a rage. You media need to raise your general knowledge level, got it? You should not say we have an imperial order and then criticize me. Got it? Naive. I am so angry.'”

Tung Chee-wha, the chief executive of Hong Kong in question, subsequently demonstrated his subordination to China by telling the press that “President Jiang actually loves you all very much. He merely gave you a kind of encouragement.” Like their journalists, the people of Hong Kong are under no illusion: the kind of “encouragement” Beijing’s emperor has in mind would give “tough love” a whole new meaning.

Americans — journalists, politicians and the public alike — should take to heart Jiang’s call for raising the “general knowledge level” about his government and what it is doing. Yet there is strong resistance to any such educational effort, as was evidenced by the reaction from both the two presidential campaigns and the Fourth Estate to the one, fleeting focus on China in the entire 2000 campaign.

Thank Heaven for Special Interest Advertising

Last week, a mysterious group had the temerity to run a television ad suggesting that viewers vote Republican because Al Gore had received illegal campaign contributions from Communist China and the PRC had, under the Clinton-Gore Administration, secured access to sensitive military secrets that have greatly increased the Chinese threat to the United States. It concluded by reprising one of the most effective political spots in the history of television advertising — the “Daisy” ad employed against Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid that showed a little girl whose enumeration of flower petals morphs into a countdown to a nuclear detonation.

The Gore campaign denounced it; the Bush campaign asked that it be pulled; and the press gave it huge quantities of free air time in the course of expressing its shock, shock that someone would run such a spot — often sneeringly declaring that the ad’s allegations had never been proven.

This episode is a terrible indictment of the “general level of knowledge” about China. The American people are entitled to be reminded that Al Gore did indeed raise money from illegal Chinese sources, as did his mentor, Bill Clinton. To be sure, he maintains that he did not know he was doing so. Yet, e-mails from his office, conveniently unavailable until very lately, suggest that he did.

Neither is there any doubt that Communist China secured highly secret information about U.S. weapon systems and militarily relevant technology during the Clinton-Gore years. An indication of just how much has become evident now that the U.S. intelligence community has finally gotten through the laborious process of translating 13,000 pages of information about Chinese nuclear and missile programs provided unsolicited in 1995 by a so-called “walk-in” — an individual whom it had dismissed, until very recently, as a Chinese double-agent.

Information in the public domain makes clear that some of what China received was transferred with the explicit permission of President Clinton (for example, supercomputers that wound up in the PRC’s nuclear and military-industrial complex). Other equipment and know-how was either stolen or diverted. How much the Administration knew about the latter may never be fully known. There can be no doubt, however, that the cumulative effect of this hemorrhage of high technology was very detrimental to American security interests.

Now that the secret agreement Vice President Gore signed in 1995 with then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to conceal from Congress information about Kremlin weapons deals with Iran that, under U.S. law, would otherwise have triggered sanctions, the question must be asked: Was a similar agreement forged between the Clinton White House and Beijing to withhold documentation about technology transfers to China from the legislative branch that would have adversely affected bilateral relations?

The “general knowledge level” about China could also be usefully raised with respect to two other items:

  • On October 10, one of the most influential members of the United States Senate on national security matters, Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, placed in the record fourteen pages of quotes — which he described as “but a small sample of the bellicose statements that China’s government has made recently.” On that occasion, he remarked:

    Time and time again, Chinese officials and state-sponsored media have made bellicose and threatening statements aimed at the United States and our long-standing, democratic ally, Taiwan. They have even gone so far as to issue implied threats to use nuclear weapons against the United States. The question is, will we take them at their word on these defense matters as we did when they made trade commitments?

  • Even as China is making such threats, it is displaying the vulnerability of its economy by mounting a renewed effort to secure billions of dollars in largely undisciplined, non-transparent stock and sovereign bond offerings on the U.S. capital markets.1 As former NSC official, Roger W. Robinson, Jr., who now chairs the Center’s William J. Casey Institute, has observed, there is reason to believe that Beijing is coming to Wall Street to fund technology theft, espionage proliferation and repression of human rights and religious freedom at home and in places like Sudan and Tibet. Since the Securities and Exchange Commission has declined to date to insist on full disclosure of the uses to which such proceeds are being put, American institutional and other investors may actually unwittingly wind up subsidizing these activities.

The Bottom Line

It has been reported that Communist China prefers that Al Gore rather than George W. Bush be the next American president. It would help raise the standards of the American people’s understanding of what China is about if, in the final week of the campaign, the Texas governor would help explain why.



1See Casey Institute Publications: Sinopec Case Again Points to Beijing’s Deception in U.S. Equity Market (No. 00-F 52, 27 October 2000); Sinopec Comes to Market as China Taps Unsuspecting U.S. Investors for Funds to Support Nefarious Activities ( No. 00-C 84, 19 October 2000); Senate’s Approval of P.N.T.R. Sets the Stage for China to Renew its Penetration of the U.S. Bond Market (No. 00-C 70, 20 September 2000).

When Security Fails

(Washington, D.C.): The recriminations have begun in connection with the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Unfortunately, the real scandal is not that a government with Yemen’s longstanding ties to international terrorism was given over a week’s worth of notice that one of the United States’ premier capital ships would be placed in a highly vulnerable position in its waters for four-to-six hours.

Rather, it is that the reckless disregard of the fundamentals of physical, information and personnel security that contributed to this debacle are all-too-common practices under the Clinton-Gore Administration.

Consider the following illustrative examples culled from the just the past few weeks’ headlines:

  • North Korea: President Clinton is about to compound the mistake of pretending that Yemen is no longer a nation closely associated with terrorism by dropping North Korea from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT). This is all the more preposterous insofar as North Korea is arguably the most aggressive abettor of international terror, thanks especially to its aggressive proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ever longer-range ballistic missiles around the world.

    The reason is similar to that used to justify removing Yemen from the SSOT list a year or so earlier: The Clinton-Gore Administration finds it expedient to politicize or otherwise disregard the relevant intelligence in the service of other priorities. In the case of North Korea, Mr. Clinton attaches more importance to his effort to secure a “legacy” via a visit to Kim Jong-Il’s prison-state and normalized relations with Pyongyang than he does to an accurate portrayal of the North’s continuing contribution to international instability and terror.

  • Middle East: The Clinton-Gore Administration is compounding its practice of politicizing the intelligence community by making CIA Director George Tenet the personification of the United States’ self-declared role as “honest broker” in the Palestinian-Israel conflict. By putting the CIA in the position of mediating between the parties, the Agency’s ability to perform its principal mission — namely, providing U.S. decision-makers with objective information and analysis about the situation on the ground in the Middle East and elsewhere — is inevitably compromised.

    This is, of course, only a part of what is wrong with the Administration’s approach to the Middle East. But, as Fred Hiatt — the recently appointed and impressive editor of the Washington Post’s editorial page — put it in an op.ed. article on Sunday, it is a critical defect: “A failure to speak the truth not only damages America’s moral standing; in the long run, it will also damage its effectiveness as a mediator. A minimum requirement to be an honest broker is honesty.”

  • Russia: Another example of the “failure to speak the truth” in a manner that impinges on the Nation’s vital interests came to light in the New York Times last week. It turns out that, in 1995, Vice President Al Gore signed a secret agreement with then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin “which essentially exempted Russia from American sanctions on arms deliveries to Iran,” sanctions that were ironically required pursuant to a statute Mr. Gore co-sponsored when he served in the U.S. Senate. As a result, the Kremlin apparently sensed it has been given a green light to continue to sell advanced conventional weapons to Tehran to this day.

    According to the Times, moreover, former top CIA expert on nonproliferation Gordon Oehler believes that “this deal likely emboldened Moscow to ignore other agreements, particularly on sales of missile and nuclear technology to Iran. It was one more of these strange deals that Gore and Chernomyrdin had that were kept from people. If this had been disclosed to Congress, the committees would have gone berserk, absolutely. But the larger problem is, if you have these under-the-table deals that give the Russians permission to do these things, it gives the signal that it’s O.K. to do other things.'”

    Currently, the Administration is proposing to proceed with progress payments to the Russian Space Agency for the International Space Station, even though it cannot — or, in any event, will not — make the certification required by the Iran Nonproliferation Act (one of whose prominent sponsors was Senator Joseph Lieberman) that the Russian agency is not helping Iran with ballistic missile technology. As a consequence, the effect would be not only that Clinton and Gore are turning a blind eye to Russian malfeasance, but actually subsidizing it!

  • John Deutch: The low regard in which senior Clinton-Gore officials hold the fundamentals of national security is particularly evident in the behavior of George Tenet’s predecessor as CIA Director, John Deutch. As the Washington Times’ intrepid National Security Correspondent, Bill Gertz, reported last week: “[Dr.] Deutch compromised some of the most sensitive defense programs by improperly transferring data about ultrasecret Pentagon programs to computers he used to send e-mail and access the Internet.” There is no way of ascertaining now how great the resulting damage will be, but it could be as defense officials who spoke to Mr. Gertz on background put it — that “the case is potentially the most damaging security breach in the Pentagon’s history because of the secrets involved.”
  • Bill Clinton: Regrettably, security practices in a government like fish tend to rot from the head. We now know that Bill Clinton is personally responsible for truly appalling misconduct in this arena.

    One of the juicier tidbits in Boris Yeltsin’s memoir published last week is his noting that he was aware of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky before it became public knowledge. The former Russian president allows as how he felt it unnecessary to bring it to the President’s attention because he believed Mr. Clinton could “handle it.” It may or may not be true that Mr. Yeltsin was so discreet, but it strains credulity that others, like the Communist Chinese, would fail to take advantage of such information if the need arose. Might this leverage — in addition to the illegal campaign contributions, hush money, post-government service employment opportunities and other inducements — help explain Mr. Clinton’s kowtowing and concessions to Beijing?

The Bottom Line

The President’s behavior is especially reprehensible since he knew at the time that foreign intelligence services might be monitoring his phone sex and other telecommunications with Ms. Lewinsky. The fact that he nonetheless engaged in it speaks volumes about not only his reckless disregard for national security but the low standard with respect to security that he set for the rest of his Administration. It will be nothing short of a miracle if all that such personal and collective security malfeasance costs the Nation are the lives of the men and women murdered last week on the U.S.S. Cole.