Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

The Truth Shall Set Us Free — Or At Least Defend Us: Senate Hearing Must Make Record For U.S. Space Control

March 10, 1998Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): In a Senate hearing room tomorrow afternoon, the genius of the
Founding
Fathers should be on display. The wisdom of the Framers in fashioning a constitutional
government based on the principle of checks-and-balances between separate, but co-equal,
executive and legislative branches will likely be evident as the Armed Services Committee
examines one of the most dubious presidential decisions in recent memory: Bill Clinton’s line-item
veto of three technology development programs that would provide the Nation with the
capability to exercise military control of outer space, should the need arise.

A Pox on All Space Control-Relevant Technologies?

Last October, cancellation of two of these three programs — an asteroid intercept experiment
that
would have further validated the feasibility of space-based anti-missile technology developed
under the Strategic Defense Initiative (Clementine II) and the Army’s
Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite (KE-ASAT) program — was justified on policy
grounds. A programmatic rationale was
offered for the third, the Military Space Plane. As a practical matter, however,
the capabilities
inherent in a space plane optimized for military purposes would also have fallen afoul of
Administration opposition to technologies that enable the United States to neutralize or destroy
missiles and other objects flying through space.

For that matter, so would the Space-Based Laser (SBL) program. The
President’s advisors
reportedly decided not to include this item in last October’s veto message, though. A significant
portion of its development work is now being done in Mississippi and it was feared that the SBL’s
cancellation would precipitate a political backlash led by the Senate’s Majority Leader,
Trent
Lott (R-MS). (Such a backlash recently resulted in the override of Mr. Clinton’s first
line-item
deletions from Fiscal Year 1998 military construction legislation.)

The Administration nonetheless did the dirty deed last month when it ordered,
without
fanfare, the termination of all work on the nearest-term space-based laser, known as Zenith
Star. Perhaps calculating that Sen. Lott is only interested in “pork” for his state, rather
than real military capabilities for his country, the Clinton team has sent this program back
to the drawing board. To be sure, money will be spent for the next six months to study
two
new design approaches, but no technology will be mature enough to deploy — and thereby
jeopardize Administration space control policies — for the foreseeable future.

It stands to reason that, in due course, the same fate will befall another military laser program
that
would also pose problems given Mr. Clinton’s apparent antipathy to space control technologies:
the Air Force’s Airborne Laser. This 747-mounted laser is being developed to
intercept
missiles and aircraft; it should be able to damage or destroy orbiting satellites, as well. If the
policy enunciated at the time of the President’s line-item vetoes is allowed to stand, this program
too will likely die aborning.

Enter Jim Inhofe

Concerns about the Clinton policy on space dominance has prompted one of the Armed
Services
Committee’s leading members, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), to ask
Secretary of Defense William
Cohen and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Hugh Shelton some
probing questions about the
Administration’s view of the need for control of space and precisely how it is going to assure it. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
In a letter dated 4 February, Sen. Inhofe asked whether the Pentagon agreed with the finding of
the blue-ribbon National Defense Panel that the United States must have the
capability to “deny
enemies the use of space” and “whether the space-based laser and airborne laser technology
development programs can be brought to fruition and deployed without violating Administration
policy?”

Sen. Inhofe also asked whether, as reported, “the Administration [is] engaged in discussion of
new limitations on anti-satellite weapons with Russia…discussions that [could] lead to
arrangements that would create further impediments to the fielding of other space control
technologies?” (Interestingly, in a recent public
forum, one of the Nation’s most irrepressible
advocates of arms control, John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, declared
that he would oppose the Administration “wasting their time” on such a negotiation). href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
Finally, the Senator inquired if the Defense Department had “calculated what the impact would be
on our force structure requirements and warfighting capabilities if a hostile power were able to
deny us use of space for communications, intelligence, navigational or other purposes, to say
nothing of his being able to exploit space against us?”

What is at Stake

The latter point is of surpassing importance, as a symposium conducted by the Center for
Security
Policy in January made clear. Two former Secretaries of Defense (James Schlesinger
and
Caspar Weinberger), a dozen senior retired military leaders and a host of other experts
agreed
that, were the U.S. to lose control of space, the national security repercussions could be very
serious — and possibly catastrophic.⁽³⁾ This danger was
strongly affirmed by 43 of the Nation’s
most accomplished former flag officers in an Open Letter sent to President Clinton on 15 January
1998.⁽⁴⁾ They wrote, among other things: “We
can think of few challenges likely to pose a
greater danger to our future security posture than that of adversaries seeking to make
hostile use of space — or to deny us the ability to dominate that theater of operations.”

The Bottom Line

Given these stakes, it is all the more remarkable — and damning — that Sen. Inhofe
has, as of
this writing, received no response to his inquiries. It is to be earnestly hoped that he and
his
colleagues — notably, Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH) and a leader on space issues in
Congress who will
chair tomorrow’s hearing — will use the appearance by the Commander-in-Chief of U.S.
Space
Command, General Howell Estes, to good effect. At a minimum, Senators must make a
clear
record about just how critical control of space will be to future American military operations on
the land, at sea and in the air. General Estes should also be asked for his best
professional
military advice about the necessity of fielding as quickly as possible the means to exercise
such control.

Armed with such counsel, the legislative branch should ensure that whatever executive branch
policies currently impede the U.S. exercise of space control are promptly set aside, through the
enactment of binding statutory guidance, if necessary. To do otherwise will be to accede to Mr.
Clinton’s reckless disregard for the lives of American servicemen and women and his undermining
of their ability to protect the Nation’s vital strategic and commercial interests in space.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Senator Inhofe Engages Pentagon on Space
Control: Will U.S. Military Leaders Affirm They Can’t Live Without It? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_34″>No. 98-D 34, 24
February 1998).

2. This remarkable statement was made in href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_43at”>an exchange between Pike and the Center for Security
Policy’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., at a debate on anti-satellite weapons sponsored by the
George C. Marshall Institute on 26 February 1998.

3. See the Summary of the Center for Security Policy’s
High-Level Roundtable Discussion of
‘The Need for American Space Dominance’ (No. 98-P
16at, 23 January 1998).

4. See the Center’s Press Release entitled
43 of the Nation’s Most Eminent Military Leaders
Insist That the U.S. Must Be Able — And Allowed — To Dominate Outer Space
(No. 98-P 07, 15
January 1998).

Accept No Substitutes: Clinton Address On Iraq Signals Continuing Failure To Grasp Need For Toppling Saddam

February 17, 1998Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): In his remarks to a Pentagon audience and the Nation today, President
Clinton made a persuasive case — up to a point.

He described authoritatively the malevolent character of the Iraqi leadership, its determination
to
pursue weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and its attendant, repeated violation of
Iraq’s obligations under various cease-fire accords and UN resolutions. The President
impressively asserted his Administration’s determination to prevent Saddam Hussein from once
again wielding such deadly weapons.

Unfortunately, Mr. Clinton rendered his address ludicrous — if not contemptible —
by
repeatedly emphasizing that if only Saddam would make new promises, the crisis
would
pass. No serious observer can believe that any future commitment from Saddam’s
government to
allow “free, fair and unfettered access” to all locations in Iraq, as demanded by President Clinton
today, will be worth more than the earlier, repeatedly violated ones.

What is Wrong With This Picture?

Holding out the prospect of a “diplomatic solution” in circumstances like these — where
diplomacy can only postpone the day of reckoning, not prevent its occurrence — signals to friend
and foe alike that the United States lacks the strategic vision, will and/or military power to use
force effectively. Matters are made worse by the repeated contention that such power as the U.S.
does command is going to be sent on a fool’s errand: “We want to seriously diminish the threat
posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. We want to seriously reduce his capacity
to threaten his neighbors.”

The truth is that such an objective, even if it could be made less nebulous and more
achievable,
would be utterly ephemeral as long as Saddam Hussein and his ilk rule Iraq. It is in
the nature of
chemical and particularly biological weapons programs that within weeks — if not within days
or
hours — of an attack that “seriously diminished” Iraq’s WMD program, new dual-use and
covertly
stockpiled dedicated military equipment can resume production of lethal agents, toxins or viruses.

Far from bringing Saddam to heel, military action with this limited purpose will only
embolden the
Iraqi despot and his ruling clique. This is not conjecture; it is a forecast born of hard experience.
As syndicated columnist Tony Snow recalled in an article published in yesterday’s
Washington
Times: “Intelligence officers report that in the waning hours of the Gulf War,
Hussein asked
two questions: ‘Will they kill me?’ and ‘Will they cross the Euphrates?’ Upon hearing
that the answer to both queries was ‘no,’ he reportedly smiled and said, ‘Then I
win.‘“
(Emphasis added.)

Key Congressional Figures Get It, Why Not Mr. Clinton?

This reality is increasingly understood by leading Members of Congress. As the Center has
noted
in recent weeks, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Senate
Majority Leader Trent
Lott (R-MS) have made clear their view that Saddam is the problem. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ On 12 February,
Republican Representatives Dan Burton (IN), Chris Smith
(NJ), Dana Rohrabacher (CA)
and Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham (CA) added their influential voices in a letter
President Clinton.
It said, in part:

In order to be effective, any military action must not target the innocent
people of Iraq, but instead must be aimed at Saddam and the underpinnings of
his blood-stained regime

“To this end, and consistent with the national objective that you articulated in
your State of the Union address, there are three fundamental pillars of
Saddam’s strength and his ability to destabilize the region: 1) weapons of
mass destruction; 2) the Special Security and Special Republican Guard
security forces; and 3) a close circle of political and military decision-makers.

“These three components of Saddam’s power pyramid can be put at risk
using a combination of TLAMs, stealth F-117 and B-2⁽²⁾
bombers using their
most capable weapons, and B-52s with stand-off cruise missiles. We are
concerned that relying on non-stealth, non-standoff systems is a recipe for U.S.
and allied airmen being sacrificed and potential hostages to be paraded before the
media by Saddam. To risk mass casualties by blowing up chemical and biological
weapons bunkers, which would put at risk civilians, Iraq’s neighbors and
American troops stationed in the region, while leaving Saddam in power is
foolhardy. This would turn public opinion against the operation and threaten the
stability of our regional allies.

“There is no guarantee that air strikes will eliminate Saddam’s chemical and
biological stockpile or prevent him from replenishing his arsenal. A sounder
objective would be to disable Saddam. To this end, an intensive psychological
operation should be integral with military action. A psy-ops campaign may
include overriding Iraq’s national radio and television signals with programming
to assure that Iraqi people understand that we are trying to help them….

“…We now understand that we will never resolve the weapons of mass
destruction issue so long as Saddam remains in power. We will support
strong action. But it must be strategically sound and decisive, with the
ultimate goal to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.“
(Emphasis added.)

The Military Gets It, Why Doesn’t Bill Clinton?

Today’s Washington Post reports that such an assessment is shared by senior
military leaders, if
not by all the President’s political appointees⁽³⁾:

“As bombing plans have expanded to encompass what one senior flag officer
described as ‘thousands of aim points’ in Iraq, a large share of the intended
violence is now directed at the apparatus maintaining Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein in power, from networks of secret police to Baath Party
organs. Apart from the long-shot hope of a change of government, officials said,
the aim is to crush Saddam Hussein’s defiance by threatening his most
valued assets of internal control.

“The 1991 Persian Gulf War featured a similar but largely abortive effort to
target Saddam Hussein’s power base. But the objectives of that war’s six-week
air campaign were largely elsewhere, and target planners then devoted less than
1 percent of their bombing missions — 260 of 36,046 ‘strike sorties’ — to the
category they designated ‘L’ for leadership.

“‘The emphasis is not just on chemical and biological [weapons],’ a top flag
officer said. ‘The emphasis is on, you’re going to make it hurt, and the best
way to hurt him is his core infrastructure. We’re not going to leave that alone
as we have in the past….If he feels threatened enough with his regime’s stability,
then he has no choice but to acquiesce. It’s typical dictator mentality that the
biggest thing that drives him is holding onto power.'”

The Military Bridles at Administration Disingenuousness

It is ironic that, according to the Post, “The administration does
not wish to advertise
this intention, according to several accounts, because it fears the plan may not work. ‘In
our
public discourse of this we need to focus on an achievable
objective,’ said one senior
administration official.”

Like the growing chorus in Congress, the U.S. military understands that “seriously
diminishing”
Saddam’s WMD program is, if anything, less achievable — and certainly less
efficacious — than
disrupting his “core infrastructure” or security apparatus. As the Post put it:

“There is broad dissatisfaction with that strategy in the military
establishment, several senior officials said. ‘We pay such a huge price
politically that we have fewer friends next time and even fewer the time after
that,’ said one military planner. ‘Every six months doing maintenance strikes on
Iraq for the next 10 years doesn’t seem to be good foreign policy or military
strategy.'”⁽⁴⁾

Another Presidential Blind Spot: Russia is No ‘Partner for
Peace’

In his remarks today, President Clinton glossed over one other natty problem with his Iraq
policy:
His continuing confidence that, as he put it, “the international community does have the wisdom
and the will and the way to protect peace and security in a new era.” This formula ignores the
fact that three out of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Russia, China
and France — are actively running interference for Saddam Hussein, or worse. href=”#N_5_”>⁽⁵⁾

Take, for example, the case of Russia. Even before Boris Yeltsin started warning that
U.S.-led
military action against Iraq could precipitate “World War III,” the Russians were materially
contributing to the problem posed by Iraq. According to the 12 February 1998 Washington
Post,⁽⁶⁾ “United Nations inspectors in Iraq last fall
uncovered what they considered highly
unsettling evidence of a 1995 agreement by the Russian government to sell Iraq
sophisticated
fermentation equipment that could be used to develop biological weapons, according to
sources.” What is more:

The evidence of an illicit deal is [but] one element of a close collaboration
between Moscow and Baghdad on matters of interest to the United Nations
Special Commission on Iraq

Russian intelligence operatives are spying on the commission and its
personnel in New York and overseas,

the Russian spy agency, which was formerly headed by Foreign Minister
Yevgeny Primakov, may have passed some of the information it collects directly
to Iraq.

“In some cases, Moscow has made little effort to conceal efforts to learn what
the commission is doing and to influence the scope and timing of certain sensitive
inspections, according to sources….In the summer of 1996, for example, a team of
inspectors retreated to a remote English town for a training exercise to prepare
for a surprise visit to a highly sensitive Iraqi site. After checking into a local
hotel, an inspector recognized a Russian official later identified as the London
resident for the Russian foreign intelligence service, according to three sources.
Each night, the official was observed attempting to debrief Russian
members of the inspection team, the sources said. When inspectors
eventually tried to reach the site targeted by the commission, they were
blocked by Iraqi military forces.

“In another incident cited by several sources, commission officials in charge of
another highly sensitive inspection in March 1996 deliberately disseminated false
information to members of their own team about which Iraqi site they had
targeted. Shortly afterward, a Russian political counselor in New York, Gennadi
Gatilov, who is now Moscow’s chief expert in New York on commission
matters, approached a senior commission official to complain that inspecting that
site would be highly disruptive.

“Gatilov further threatened that if the inspection went forward, Moscow would
oppose implementation of a U.N. plan for long-term routine monitoring of
imports and exports to Iraq related to weapons of mass destruction — a threat that
commission officials ignored, sources said.” (Emphasis added throughout.)

These are the sorts of problems that must be expected to intensify
if the Clinton
Administration allows a new “diplomatic solution” to be brokered by UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan that will permit representatives of the “Perm Five” (read, Russians,
Chinese
and French “diplomats”) to accompany UNSCOM inspectors on some or all of their future on-site
visits in Iraq.

The Bottom Line

The American people, their elected representatives and those who have volunteered to put
their
lives on the line for their country will readily support President Clinton in his bid to end the
danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — provided he addresses that
danger systemically, and not in a symptomatic, if not completely phony, fashion.

Should he chose, once again, to do otherwise, however, Mr. Clinton should be under no
illusion:
He will secure for himself no real, let alone durable, diminution in the threat from
Iraq. Instead,
he will likely secure a place in that circle of the Inferno reserved for those who recklessly sacrifice
their country’s interests and servicemen by compromising with, rather than effectively resisting,
unappeasable tyrants.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Clinton’s Huffing-And-Puffing On Iraq — But Lack
of a Coherent Strategy — Looks Like a Formula for Disaster ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_22″>No. 98-D 22, 4 February 1998).

2. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
What’s Wrong With This Picture? Clinton Doesn’t
Get the Need for Strategic Air Strikes — Or the Right Tool for Conducting Them
(No. 98-D
26, 9 February 1998).

3. See “Raids May Strike At Power Structure,” Barton Gellman,
Washington Post, 17 February 1998, p. A1.

4. A good policy in this area requires in addition to the military
strikes and psychological warfare
campaigns described above, what Richard Perle has called a “serious political program.” As
described in a Washington Post op.ed. article by former Assistant Secretary of
Defense Perle (See
No. 98-D 26) such a program would involve a concerted effort to
foster, empower and legitimate
a provisional government of Free Iraq and to delegitimate Saddam Hussein and his ruling clique.

5. A.M. Rosenthal’s syndicated column in today’s New York
Times brilliantly describes the double
travesty of so-called allies who subvert efforts to stop Saddam on the one hand and that of
an
American government that tries to conceal this practice: “Our real difference with Russia, China
and France [is] their decision to put lust for Mideast influence and Saddam’s trade above concern
about his chemical and biological weapons. The decision besmirches all countries who take it.
Prettifying it besmirches us.”

6. See “Did Russia Sell Iraq Germ Warfare Equipment?” by R.
Jeffrey Smith, p. A1.

Postmortem on the Pontiff’s Cuban Tour: On Balance, Freedom Benefitted More Than Fidel

January 29, 1998Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): On the eve of Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Communist Cuba, the
William J. Casey Institute issued a Perspective entitled Our Man in
Havana? Will John Paul II
Help Liberate Another Communist Country or Secure Life Support for Castro’s Regime? href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ The
early returns on this question are now in: It appears, happily, that the Pontiff remained
true
to his historic commitment to personal freedom and economic opportunity — a commitment
born of personal experience with Communist totalitarianism, a commitment that played an
indispensable part in the destruction of the Soviet empire.

Solidarity With Those Who Yearn for Liberty

Now, with his courageous words to the Cuban people — Catholic and non-Catholic alike —
the
Pope rekindled their hope that they will not be denied such fundamental liberties much longer.
Among the most inspiring of his statements were the following:

While speaking at the University of Havana on 23 January, the Pontiff lauded the legacy of
Cuba’s famed Father Felix Varela y Morales — a Nineteenth Century cleric the Holy Father
described as an “exemplary priest…and undeniable patriot”:

“He was the first to speak of independence in these lands. He also spoke of
democracy,
judging it to be the political project best in keeping with human nature, while at the
same
time underscoring its demands. Among these demands, he stressed two in particular:

“First, that people must be educated for freedom and responsibility, with a personally
assimilated
ethical code which includes the best of the heritage of civilization and enduring transcendental
values, so that they may be able to undertake decisive tasks in service of the community. And
second, that human relationships, like the form of society as a whole, must give people suitable
opportunities to perform, with proper respect and solidarity, their historic role giving substance to
the Rule of Law, which is the essential guarantee of every form of
human concourse
claiming to be democratic.

“I am confident that in the future Cubans will achieve a civilization of justice and
solidarity, of freedom and truth, a civilization of love and peace which, as Father Varela
said,
‘may be the foundation of the great edifice of our happiness.'”

On 24 January, the Pope discussed the individual’s vital role in bringing about freedom for
his
society:

“The Church calls everyone to make faith a reality in their lives, as the best path
to the
integral development of the human being, created in the image and likeness of God, and for
attaining true freedom, which includes the recognition of human rights and social
justice.

“In this regard, lay Catholics…have the duty and the right to participate in public
debate on
the basis of equality and in an attitude of dialogue and reconciliation. Likewise, the
good of
a nation must be promoted and achieved by its citizens themselves through peaceful and gradual
means. In this way each person, enjoying freedom of expression, being free to undertake
initiatives and make proposals within civil society, and enjoying appropriate freedom of
association, will be able to cooperate effectively in the pursuit of the common good.“

As to the Embargo

To be sure, the Pope also expressed on numerous occasions his strong opposition to the U.S.
embargo on Cuba and his concerns about the inhumane excesses of capitalism as practiced in
some countries. Fidel Castro obviously calculated that such statements would be worth the risks
associated with the Pope’s public calls for freedom in Cuba if they provided moral authority —
or
political top cover — to the Communists’ desperate, last-gasp bid for financial life support.

Ironically, if Castro’s ploy worked and the embargo were lifted, it seems quite
likely that the
effect would be precisely the kinds of capitalism that John Paul II most legitimately criticizes —
the crony capitalism or klepto-capitalism practiced by authoritarian regimes of the Left and the
Right. This mutation of the principle of free markets and economic opportunity amounts to an
odious Faustian arrangement, involving governments that ruthlessly guarantee “political stability”
and businessmen willing to pay handsomely for the opportunity thus afforded to exploit the local
workforce.

As it happens, President Clinton’s moral difficulties and the Pope’s courageous departures
from
Castro’s party line clearly upstaged those in the Administration and their motley allies — including,
in addition to Fidel’s usual apologists a number of captains of industry, past and present
politicians, libertarians, ex-diplomats, and retired general officers — who are championing the
early partial, if not complete, dismantling of the embargo.

Enter The New Republic

The case for ending the U.S. embargo has been further undercut by a devastating analysis
published in this week’s edition of The New Republic, reportedly Bill Clinton and Al
Gore’s
favorite public policy magazine. In an article entitled “Castro Inconvertible” (see the attached),
Charles Lane — the journal’s new editor — argued persuasively that the only thing worse than
perpetuating the embargo would be to dismantle it under present circumstances:

“Embargo-lifters believe the myth that trade and ‘engagement’ with the West
brought down the Soviet Union.

“[For example,] the results of our dealings with Beijing hardly support the view
that trade leads to the spontaneous generation of freedom.”

Lane dissects with devastating effect the several rationales being served up by the
embargo-busters. The first is especially noteworthy: “The one concession Fidel Castro most
fervently
demands from the United States is also the one policy change that would bring him down. If you
think this sounds too good to be true, I agree.”

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy applauds the most important parts of Pope John Paul II’s
message
to the Cubans — a message of hope and opportunity through political freedom and other basic
human rights. It also concurs with Charles Lane’s bottom line:

It sends a
message: the United States will have nothing to do with the tyranny 90 miles
from its shores. A definitive verdict on the hard line must await Castro’s
inevitable passing. My hunch, to paraphrase Castro himself, is that history will
absolve it.

– 30 –

1. No. 98-C 11, 21 January 1998.

How Bill Clinton Proposes To Spend The ‘Surplus’: Bailing Out Foreign Governments — And Their Western Underwriters

January 7, 1998Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): If the Clinton Administration has its way, the government-private sector
cronyism that contributed importantly to the present meltdown of currencies, banking systems and
economies throughout Asia by subverting the workings of free market mechanisms — a
phenomenon that will likely burst forth in China and Russia, as well — will be treated, ironically,
by a cronyist prescription: Led by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the Administration
hopes (among other, higher profile objectives) to protect his former Wall Street colleagues
and their counterparts overseas by off-loading their cascading debt crises onto U.S. and
other Western taxpayers.

‘Moral Hazard’

The latest manifestation of such cronyism can be found in the recent announcement by the
South Korean government that it is prepared to guarantee short-term private sector bank
debt. We are told that Seoul must take such a step in order to persuade foreign creditors to
extend maturities on the approximately $92 billion in combined private sector and sovereign obligations due over the next year. In point of fact, it was
the predictable product of a Clinton Administration strategy that initially offered levels of
assistance (through the International Monetary Fund and via direct “standby” loans) that were
predictably inadequate to staunch the hemorrhage of foreign capital from South Korea’s and other
“emerging markets.”

Matters are made worse by the stealthy manner in which these initiatives are being promulgated.
The absence of transparency with regard to the true magnitude of the problem — let alone its
ultimate implications for U.S. taxpayers — actually invites more of this costly cronyism.

Let’s be clear: The U.S. Treasury Department knew, or certainly should have known, that
the initial $57 billion International Monetary Fund package for Seoul would not restore
market confidence in South Korea, particularly given the structural character of the
problem. Low-balling the bail-out amount that would be required for Korea served two
troubling purposes, however: 1) It reduced somewhat the “sticker shock” with which the
Congress and the American people would react to the bail-out; and 2) it put South Korea in
extremis. The latter enabled Rubin and Company, the Japanese banks and other Western
creditors to euchre Seoul into extending government guarantees for the obligations of private
Korean banks, thus minimizing the exposure of U.S. and other Western creditors.

The Sound of Other Shoes Dropping

Unless it is stopped forthwith, this sort of creeping multilateral socialization of largely private
sector debt and investment is certain to be replicated throughout the region and beyond.
Thailand has already sought to renegotiate its $17.2 billion IMF package and tried to secure a
rescheduling of its short-term debt, an entirely understandable reaction to Seoul’s success in
renegotiating the size and terms of its deal.

A front page article in today’s New York Times suggests that Indonesia may be about to follow
suit with regard to its own $40 billion rescue package. Jakarta seems intent, however, on going
beyond where the South Koreans and Thais have dared to go. In so doing, it is telegraphing the
manner in which bad-debt-ridden nations like China and Russia can be expected to conduct
themselves: Rather than simply seeking a relaxation of IMF conditionality, debt rescheduling
and/or larger infusions of Western taxpayer-guaranteed cash, the Indonesians are simply
ignoring the IMF’s required economic and financial milestones. For example, as the Times
noted, “President Suharto said his government would increase spending by 24% next year despite
pledges of austerity.”

Here Comes China

The next shoe to drop in Asia is likely to be China. Notwithstanding the stunning absence of
official warnings or media commentary on this prospect, there is evidence that China’s banking
industry is nearing financial meltdown at a time when its much-touted reserves are judged to be
heavily encumbered. As the Casey Institute noted on 23 December 1997⁽¹⁾:

“…The highly regarded DRI/McGraw-Hill Global Risk Service during the second
quarter of 1997…warned that as much as ’20-40% of China’s outstanding stock of
loans, valued at $600 billion can be classified as non-performing. So far, the
problem has been contained. However, should things go wrong in China’s banking
sector, the ramifications in developing Asia could be huge.'” (Emphasis added.)

Even one of the principal proponents of Sino-U.S. economic entente — Robert Zoellick,
Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and Deputy White House Chief of Staff in the
Bush Administration — was obliged to observe in an appeal for greater American assistance to
Asian economies published in yesterday’s Washington Post: “…The United States should work
closely with China to defuse another economic time-bomb: the bad debts of China’s state-owned enterprises piling up year after year, and now totaling a shocking 25 percent of
China’s whole economy.” (Emphasis added.)

The only problem is that the cronyism that afflicts China is not simply a mutation of a free
market system, but the core structure of Beijing’s so-called “market socialist” system. This
reality may explain the deafening silence with respect to China’s impending addition to the rolls of
Asia’s “financially challenged”: If the cure is seen to require disentangling the government
from what passes for China’s “private sector,” there is no hope as long as the PRC remains,
in key respects, a centrally controlled economy with a communist political system. However
much the current Chinese leadership might try, like Mikhail Gorbachev before them, to abscond
with the lexicon of market capitalism, China will not be able to prosper over the long haul absent
wholesale political as well as economic structural change.⁽²⁾

Then There’s Russia

Also waiting in the wings is Russia — a nation whose smaller markets and financial requirements
may help it remain lower on the radar screen for a time. But the Kremlin’s hybrid
socialist/market/kleptocratic economy has already produced successive requests for IMF
interventions, to say nothing of a roughly $100 billion rescheduling of Western government and
bank debt to the former Soviet Union accomplished within the past few months. As Martin Sieff
reported in a front-page article in the Washington Times on 23 December:

“One Moscow-based financial analyst said the government was building a shaky
financial pyramid ‘like a drunken poker player who can’t read the cards.’ In all, Russia
has issued around $58 billion in three- and six-month GKOs [short-term government
bonds], of which $15 billion is held by foreigners. That is more than double Russia’s
$28 billion debt when Mr. Yeltsin was re-elected 18 months ago….The country has
been able to avoid a collapse in part because of fresh infusions of money from the
International Monetary Fund, which lends to Moscow at highly favorable
interest rates. ” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, the only reason Russia has not been a candidate for a new emergency
bail-out initiative by the IMF — and the Clinton Administration and other Western
governments assiduously politicizing it — is that there is already one underway. That
politicization, like the multilateral cronyism now so much in evidence in Asia, is ensuring that
Russia continues to receive disbursements from the IMF under its existing $10 billion standby
agreement, long after such outlays should have been suspended due to the Kremlin’s non-compliance with the IMF’s conditionality (particularly with regard to tax-collection).

What the United States Must Do — and Not Do — Now

If the United States is to avoid making further mistakes that are not only costly for the American
taxpayer but that are strategically harmful, important changes must be made by both the executive
and legislative branches:

Organizing the Executive Branch for Security-minded Economic Policies: On 4 January, the
New York Times reported that President Clinton has only recently begun to huddle with his top
foreign policy and national security advisors in the White House Situation Room to develop a
more comprehensive and integrated view of American policy options and equities in the
management of the Asian financial debacle. If such a grievous oversight is appalling, it is
hardly surprising, given the Clinton Administration’s studied inattention to the nexus of
economic, financial, energy and technology issues and traditional national security
concerns.⁽³⁾

The Center for Security Policy has long argued that this nexus will be at the heart of the foreign
policy and defense challenges this Nation is likely to face in the 21^st Century.⁽⁴⁾ Indeed, its William
J. Casey Institute was established in March 1995 expressly for the purpose of advancing public
awareness and official understanding of these increasingly complex problems — the sorts of
problems to which the distinguished public servant and Wall Street financier for whom it is named
devoted most of his professional career.

It is gratifying that there is growing awareness in some quarters of these realities. As the Times
put it on 4 January: “The newfangled financial crises that destabilize huge economies in a single
day appear increasingly connected to old-time political and security crises. In fact, there is
growing fear that 1997’s market calamities could beget 1998’s security crises.” Unfortunately,
the resistence exhibited by the Clinton Administration to addressing the national security
implications of economic, financial and related decisions is now not simply embarrassing
evidence of strategic myopia; it is a practice that the Nation simply can no longer afford.

The Reagan Model

A model for avoiding such costs to both U.S. national interests and to the Treasury can be
found in the Senior Interdepartmental Group — International Economic Policy (SIG-IEP)
operated by the Reagan Administration between July 1982 and April 1985.⁽⁵⁾ This Cabinet-level
interagency mechanism had several characteristics that would stand the present U.S. government
in good stead:

The Department of Defense, CIA and National Security Council were charter members
of the SIG-IEP, bringing to bear their respective insights and resources in addressing policy
matters brought before the Group. These agencies also participated regularly in the working-level interagency entities that supported the SIG-IEP.

Although the SIG-IEP was chaired by the Treasury Secretary, it reported to the President
through the National Security Advisor, assuring that the President was faithfully afforded
both economic and security perspectives on pending issues. Decisions for which no consensus
recommendation could be found were generally considered at full National Security Council
meetings chaired by the President.

Pre-crisis planning was an explicit part of the SIG-IEP’s mission and featured
prominently on its agendas.

In the present environment, a mechanism like the SIG-IEP would equip the U.S. government
with an alternative to reactive policy-making. It would also assist in devising policies that
differentiate between the help that can reasonably be provided by the United States to key allies
(e.g., South Korea) and that available for nations whose behavior requires that they continue to be
regarded as potential adversaries (e.g., China and Russia).

Establishing Principles that Should Guide Congressional Action: To the Congress falls the
responsibility to determine the full implications for American interests and taxpayers of the
Clinton Administration’s response to the present financial crisis. Urgent hearings are required in
both the Senate and House banking and foreign affairs committees. A priority item on the agenda
of such hearings should be the U.S. Markets Security Act (S.1315) introduced last October in
the Senate by Sen. Lauch Faircloth, Chairman of the Financial Institutions and Regulatory Relief
Subcommittee of the Senate Banking Committee, and in the House by Rep. Gerald Solomon,
Chairman of the House Rules Committee. This legislation would strengthen disclosure and
reporting requirements, specifically with regard to foreign governments and government-controlled entities seeking to enter the U.S. debt and equities markets.

Congress should also take steps to ensure that American policy is guided by three precepts so as
to minimize the strategic and financial costs of the present — and prospective — financial
meltdown in Eurasia:

First, the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) was designed for
largely overnight currency stabilization needs and foreign exchange swaps — not to be an
Executive Branch slush-fund for medium-term loans to foreign governments. The use of
the ESF should be restricted by legislation and all U.S. financial commitments and
disbursements to these, in effect, defaulted sovereign borrowers should require advance
approval by the Congress.

Second, the American taxpayer should no longer be subjected to the sort of “moral
hazard” involved in the recent Mexican bail-out and now in prospect in this one —
where private sector investors and bankers were repaid in full, in some cases with profit,
by the American people. As Lawrence Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor who is
now a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, put it to the Washington Post on 22
December: “…One of the reasons we have Asia is that we bailed out Mexico. We signaled to
creditors around the world that you could feel free to lend in Asia, and the U.S. Treasury and
the IMF would bail you out if you got in trouble. Now if we bail this one out, we’ll have
established a second precedent, and the next time, it will be bigger and arguably something we
can contain less easily.”⁽⁶⁾

These private investors and bankers understood the risks involved in the higher-risk
emerging market economies. They, not the American taxpayer, should be obliged to
absorb the totality of their losses.

Third, the U.S. should not engage in even a limited bail-out — including the IMF/World
Bank variety — for foreign governments engaged in activities harmful to vital U.S.
national security interests (e.g., Russia and China). Foes of freedom need to know they
cannot — and will not — have it both ways.

The Bottom Line

The fierce competition to increase Western exposure in the “emerging markets” has now evolved
into a contest by the sovereign managers of — and players in — those markets for ever-larger
taxpayer-underwritten bail-outs and less stringent repayment obligations. This profoundly
changed circumstance is giving rise to myriad recommendations that generally fall into two
camps:

On the one hand, some contend that the IMF has been monstrously transformed from its modest
beginnings as a valuable international monetary coordinating and supervisory body into a tool of
“corporate welfare.” According to this view, the IMF is now little more than a slush-fund for a
club of cronies — international bankers, politicians and capital market players. This perception is
feeding a growing demand to abolish the International Monetary Fund in order to return to
genuine free market capitalism.

On the other, there are those who see in the present crisis an opportunity to promote new and far
more insidious impediments to the workings of the international marketplace. Notably,
international financier George Soros wrote on 31 December 1997 in the Financial Times that
“International capital movements need to be supervised and the allocation of credit regulated by
an international authority.” His proposal: the creation of an International Credit Insurance
Corporation to police the world-wide flows of capital — a breathtaking new milestone in the
creeping multilateralism that is increasing impinging upon market forces and U.S. sovereignty.⁽⁷⁾

There is, of course, a sensible middle ground between disestablishing (as opposed to significantly
reforming and de-politicizing) the IMF and instituting global capital controls. Its ingredients are
to stay true to market forces — so long as doing so does not undermine U.S. national security
interests — and allow imprudent governments, bankers and investors to pay the price for ill-advised decision-making and crony capitalism.

There can be instances in which it is in the interest of the United States to offer indirect or
direct financial assistance to friendly governments struggling with legitimate liquidity
shortfalls (i.e., those catalyzed by forces other than crony capitalism and/or corruption). In
such instances, U.S. aid must be provided in a transparent manner, calculated to bridge the
recipient nation into renewed solvency and genuinely free market economic vitality. Disciplined
progress toward these objectives can only be assured, however, by matching disbursements
against clear performance milestones, so that all parties understand that the agreed “workout”
can — and will — be interrupted if such milestones are not met.

Finally, some fifty years after the Congress adopted legislation organizing the executive branch for
national security — involving, among other things, the creation of the National Security Council —
the legislative branch should take similar steps to ensure that the Nation is equipped with
the interagency mechanisms needed to deal with the dynamic economic and financial
security challenges evident today and likely to be even more threatening in the future.
President Reagan’s SIG-IEP offers a proven model for an effective Economic Security Council
(particularly in contrast to the feckless Clinton National Economic Council) that should be
promptly mandated by statute.

Should the United States fail to take these steps, it risks squandering not only whatever federal
“budget surplus” may now be in prospect but vastly more in terms of American economic
interests, national security equities and taxpayer resources.

– 30 –

1. See the Casey Institute’s Perspective entitled The Dog That Didn’t Bark: Moody’s, Et. Al.
Fail Investors in Asian Markets, Miss Warning Signs in China and Russia (No. 97-C 200, 23
December 1997).

2. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Kow-Towing to China: Clinton’s ‘Engagement’
Policy Means Joining Beijing in Stifling Human Rights in America (No. 97-D 198, 18
December 1997).

3. See the Center’s Transition Brief entitled Putting the Security into the New Economic
Security Council (No. 92-T 140, 9 November 1992).

4. See the following Center papers: An Ominous Strategic Development: “Perestroika
Bonds” and Soviet Entry into U.S. Securities Markets (No. 89-P 67, 28 October 1989), When
Deutsche Bank Talks Soviet Debt Default, The Bush Administration Should Listen (No. 91-D
113, 13 November 1991) and ‘Stop Payment’: The Case for Supporting Yeltsin by not
Disbursing Another $2.5 Billion Blank Check (No. 93-D 86, 4 October 1993); as well as the
following Casey Institute papers entitled: Dangerous Upshot of Clinton-Gore’s China
‘Bonding’: Strategic Penetration of U.S. Investment Portfolios (No. 97-C 47, 1 April 1997)
and Russian Bonds Rocked by Second Senate Hearing in a Week Focusing on Undesirable
Foreign Penetration of U.S. Markets (No. 97-C 169, 10 November 1997).

5. The now-declassified National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 48 that established the
SIG-IEP in July 1982 should be required reading for those in the Clinton White House, Congress,
the media and allied capitals who are serious about economic crisis resolution and pre-crisis
planning.

6. Mr. Lindsay authored a powerful elaboration of this thesis entitled “The Bad News About
Bailouts” which appeared in the New York Times on 6 January 1998.

7. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Will 1998 Be the ‘Year of Surrendered
Sovereignty’? (No. 98-D 1, 5 January 1998).

Clinton Legacy Watch # 16: Will America Be Defended?

December 17, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Suddenly, like the outbreak of a deadly flu, the threat posed by dangerous
germs is much in the news. Set aside reports of Hong Kong’s frightening bird virus, which has
begun felling humans, or the controversy surrounding the FDA decision to permit irradiation of
meat products to sanitize them. The real news is the growing attention being paid in some circles
to the prospect that lethal bacteria might be deliberately disseminated for military purposes or as
an instrument of terrorism — biological warfare (BW).

A Bill of Particulars

Consider a short sampler of the recent developments related to the BW threat:

Iraq’s ominous biological warfare capability — which Saddam Hussein has successfully
concealed for the past six years, despite the most intrusive inspection regime imaginable — was
vividly illustrated last month by Secretary of Defense William Cohen. In the course of a
national television appearance, he displayed a five-pound bag of Domino’s sugar that, if
filled with the anthrax virus, would be sufficient to destroy half the population of
Washington.

On 1 December, the congressionally mandated National Defense Panel warned that, “The
increasing…capability to fabricate and introduce biotoxins and chemical agents into the United
States means that rogue nations or transnational actors may be able to threaten our
homeland.“

A new study, entitled “Assessment of the Impact of Chemical/Biological Weapons on Joint
Operations in 2010″ prepared under contract for the Defense Department by a distinguished
group of retired general officers and other experts, calls attention to the crippling effect on
U.S. power projection capabilities that would arise if airfields and ports from which
American forces would deploy were subjected to chemical or biological attack.

According to press reports, a Defense Science Board analysis leaked this week “faults existing
military capabilities to detect and respond to biological attack and says efforts to improve
defenses have ‘stretched thin’ current personnel and capabilities.”

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Tuesday told a NATO meeting that the threat posed
by biological and other weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Middle Eastern
nations has to become a major focus for the Atlantic Alliance in the years ahead.

Last, but not least, the Pentagon announced this week that all military personnel would
be vaccinated against anthrax in what Secretary Cohen called a “force protection” measure.

What About America?

In light of all these developments, President Clinton was asked at his press conference on Tuesday
an eminently sensible question: “Should civilians be vaccinated against anthrax?” The
President responded, “I do not think that’s called for at this time. I couldn’t recommend
that.”

Why would the President decline to recommend a course of action deemed necessary for
everyone in uniform? Could it be simply a logistical issue? It takes eighteen months and six shots
to achieve significant protection against this virulent disease (with booster shots required
periodically thereafter). The Defense Department expects it will cost $130 million just to protect
its 2.4 million personnel.

Or could it be a function of the fact that an enemy who wishes to kill thousands, if not millions, of
Americans could easily end-run such a prophylactic action? That might be achieved should an
adversary substitute a genetically altered strain of anthrax, or some other infectious virus for
which no vaccine exists or has been administered. Of course, the same technique could be
employed to defeat the U.S. military’s newly announced BW preparations.

No, the real reason the President seems to be assuring the American people that there is no
need to act to protect themselves against biological agents at this time is that a more
realistic approach would knock his entire defense policy into a cocked hat.

‘Assured Vulnerability’

Specifically, Mr. Clinton opposes active defenses (i.e., weapons that counter attacking weapons)
and passive defenses (e.g., civil defense measures) for the U.S. homeland. After all, these run
counter to the present U.S. posture of “assured vulnerability.” Unbeknownst to most Americans
this bizarre policy was codified in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty — an accord that prohibits
the United States from having effective missile defenses and that the Clinton Administration
maintains constitutes “the cornerstone of strategic stability.”

Thus, while the United States’ military and allies might need defenses against missile attack, to the
American people Mr. Clinton keeps saying “For the first time in a generation, there are no missiles
pointed at our children.” Now, his Administration claims that our armed forces and NATO
partners should worry about biological warfare, but the public here at home has no need for the
sorts of expensive and systemic measures that might afford it some protection against BW attack.

What Clinton Hath Wrought

To the contrary, the Clinton Administration has just announced that it is eviscerating the strategic
doctrine that calls for a robust nuclear deterrent, in favor of a minimal deterrence posture.⁽¹⁾
Incredibly, it hopes that having a far smaller and more vulnerable nuclear arsenal will be sufficient,
not only to dissuade the sorts of strategic threats we used to face but also the emerging dangers of
biological and chemical attack on the United States. This will become an even more sporty
proposition if, as seems likely, the President announces in his State of the Union address that he is
going to “deposture” (read, dismantle or otherwise disarm) what remains of the U.S. deterrent
forces.

Oh yes, the Administration will point to an initiative to train “first responders” in the 120 largest
American cities so they won’t get wiped out in the initial wave of a biological or chemical attack.
Also the National Guard is supposed to play more of a role in dealing with such contingencies, as
are small Army and Marine units that have recently been established for this purpose.

And then there is arms control. The Administration maintains that the BW threat will become
more tractable if only we can improve the verification provisions of another hapless 1972 treaty —
the Biological Weapons Convention. Never mind that this treaty has been so universally violated
that the United States may be one of a handful of nations that is actually respecting its prohibition
on the production, stockpiling or use of biological weaponry.

The Bottom Line

Such whistling-past-the-graveyard is no basis for American security policy. Unless dramatic
changes are made over the adamant objections of the Clinton team, the people of the
United States are going to be condemned for the indefinite future to a state of vulnerability
that is morally reprehensible, strategically foolish and an invitation to attacks involving
biological or other weapons of mass destruction.

In calling for urgent action to defend the American homeland — the “principal task of
government” — the National Defense Panel correctly recommended that the United States
“develop integrated active and passive defense measures against the use of weapons of mass
destruction.” There is literally not a moment to lose. Bill Clinton must either become part of
the solution or get out of the way.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Clinton Legacy Watch # 14: A Doctrine for
Denuclearization (No. 97-D 190, 8 December 1997).

Washington Institute’s Satloff Correctly Assails Mideast Policy Being Forged by Its Alumni, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk

December 2, 1997Center for Security Policy

But Should Have Called Clinton Most ‘Pro-Labor,’ Not ‘Pro-Israel,’ President

(Washington, D.C.): Today’s Washington Post features an enormously important op.ed. article
by Robert Satloff, Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In this
article entitled “Target Saddam Hussein” (see the attached), Dr. Satloff takes the Clinton
Administration to task for its effort to offload onto the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu
blame for the United States’ manifest failure to deal effectively with the present — and growing —
danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

Israel is Not at Fault

As Satloff puts it:

“Blaming the peace process impasse (diplo-speak for blaming Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu) for the weakening of the anti-Saddam coalition sidesteps the
crass greed that motivates some, such as the French and the Russians, while it avoids
facing up to America’s own inadequacies that have turned off many others in the
Arab world. One thing is certain — for both Western and Arab allies — the state of the
peace process has almost never been a determinant of their willingness to follow
America’s lead vis-a-vis Iraq.

“As far as the former are concerned, the French and Russians stopped being
coalition members in any meaningful sense at the very height of the Oslo
process. It was in June 1993, three months before the Yitzhak Rabin-Yasser
Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, that the U.N. Security Council last
found Iraq in ‘material breach’ of U.N. resolutions. Not once during the halcyon
days of the peace process — from September 1993 to the Rabin assassination two
years later — did the French or Russians support any stiffening of U.N. spine on
Iraq.

“The Arab coalition partners have also been straying for quite some time….”
(Emphasis added throughout.)

Where Are the Washington Institute’s Alumni?

Dr. Satloff’s withering critique of the Clinton Administration’s policy toward Iraq and its assault
on the Netanyahu government is all the more remarkable since two of the most important
architects of these dismal policies are alumni of his institution: Special Middle East Envoy Dennis
Ross and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Martin Indyk. The former was
slated to replace the latter as the Washington Institute’s Executive Director at the end of the Bush
Administration — in which Ross served as Bush-Baker’s point man on the Mideast “peace
process” — and before he was “re-upped” by the Clinton team.

At present, the Ross-Indyk tag-team are playing central roles in promoting the policy of “keeping
Saddam in his box.” Martin Indyk takes substantial credit for articulating the policy of “dual
containment” against Iraq and Iran — a policy which has, at its root, the idea of sustaining
indefinitely international sanctions against the Iraqi regime.⁽¹⁾ Dr. Satloff correctly dismisses this
proposition:

“Today, the principal source of pressure against Saddam is the sanctions regime and
the related U.N. inspection system, both of which rely on the
lowest-common-denominator decision-making of international consensus. Arab
members of the Gulf War coalition — many of whom remain attractive targets for
Saddam’s ambitions — read the writing on the wall. With the United Nations as the
only arrow in the anti-Saddam quiver, no wonder that countries like Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia are covering their bets by distancing themselves from U.S. policy.”

Messrs. Ross and Indyk have also been associated for years with the practice of badgering
Israeli governments deemed to be impediments to the “peace process.” Ross was intimately
involved in such notorious Bush-Baker efforts to stigmatize Israel and otherwise to euchre it into
making concessions as the contemptuous invitation to the government of Yitzhak Shamir to “call
[the White House switchboard] when you are serious about peace.”⁽²⁾

For his part, Martin Indyk has repeatedly acted in a manner that gave offense to the Netanyahu
government — and comfort to Israel’s enemies. This behavior was much in evidence during his
tenure as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. As the Center for Security Policy noted on 17
September 1997 in arguing against his appointment to the State Department’s top Middle East
job⁽³⁾:

“U.S. policy-makers like Indyk have, however, compounded the risks by
dismissing legitimate concerns about Arafat’s non-compliance with his
obligations under the Oslo Accords and insisting that Israel scrupulously fulfill all
those it had assumed, while urging that it take on ever more risky ones in the
name of ‘moving the peace process forward.'”

An Administration that is ‘Labor-friendly’, Not ‘Israel-friendly’

The offensive conduct of Messrs. Ross and Indyk — and their superiors — toward certain Israeli
governments contrasts sharply with their behavior toward other governments of the Jewish State.
Specifically, the Clinton Administration missed no opportunity to promote the political fortunes of
the ruling coalitions led by the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, just as it went
beyond the bounds of diplomacy — and respect for a fellow democracy⁽⁴⁾ — to impede the Likud
Party’s bid for power, and subsequent exercise of it, under Benjamin Netanyahu. This practice
was most palpably and offensively on display recently when President Clinton found time to meet
with Peres and Rabin’s widow, Leah, having pointedly made known that his schedule would not
accommodate a meeting with Israel’s prime minister.

The fact is that Rob Satloff erred on one point only in his article: Bill Clinton has not “earned
the title of the most Israel-friendly chief executive in history.” He is, rather, the most
Labor-friendly President.

At a time when even such rabidly anti-Israeli critics as Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were
singing the praises of the Rabin-Peres governments — mostly for following policies 180 degrees
out of synch with those pursued previously by both Labor and Likud governments (e.g., dealing
with the PLO, surrender of territory on the West Bank, withdrawal from the Golan Heights, etc.)
— Mr. Clinton was perceived to be unstintingly supportive of Israel. When the people of Israel
exercised their prerogative to reject the Labor program by electing a government committed to a
different one, however, President Clinton showed himself to be, in effect, pro-Labor, not pro-Israel.

This practice is not only quintessentially Clintonian in its crudeness and contravening of
convention. It is also palpably inconsistent with U.S. interests in a strong and secure Israel.
Indeed, it is even inconsistent with the Clinton-Ross-Indyk sense of U.S. interests, namely
“moving the peace process forward” by extracting from the Netanyahu government
concessions a majority of the Israeli people do not support. After all, there is little chance of
“progress” towards a real peace as long as the Palestinian Arabs believe that the Americans will
apply further pressure on Israel if the Arabs declare its offerings to be unsatisfactory. To the
contrary, such a dynamic simply encourages Israel’s Arab interlocutors to hold out for more
concessions.

The Bottom Line

Apart from this small, but significant, misperception of the bias that animates Clinton
Administration policy towards Israel, Dr. Satloff’s op.ed. is a very salutary contribution to the
debate about what needs to be done concerning Iraq. Particularly noteworthy is its bottom line:

“For Arab leaders, the peace process stalemate is, at best, an excuse. The truth is that
many aren’t buying U.S. policy because it only treats the symptoms of the Gulf
crisis (the U.N. inspection team, sanctions, the coalition) rather than the cause
(Saddam Hussein himself). If the administration decided to pursue a new policy
using all available political, military, economic and clandestine means to compel
Saddam’s compliance or precipitate his demise — whichever came first — most
Arab leaders would fall in line and do their part.” (Emphasis added.)

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitle Take Out Saddam (No. 97-D 168, 10 November
1997).

2. Ross’ antipathy to legitimate Israeli security concerns have been on display more recently, as
well. See, for example, Will Dennis Ross Broker A Hebron Deal Right Into the Hands of the
De-Judaizers? (No. 96-D 134, 23 December 1996).

3. From the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Martin Indyk: Wrong Man, Wrong Job (No. 97-D
137, 17 September 1997). For additional details on Indyk’s reprehensible behavior toward the
United States’ most important and reliable ally in the Middle East, see the Zionist Organization of
America’s analysis entitled “Martin Indyk’s Record on Israel.”

4. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Besmirching the Oval Office: Clinton-Arafat
Meeting Propounds the ‘Big Lie’ (No. 96-D 43, 3 May 1996).

Clinton Policies Would Disarm U.S. Space Capabilit

November 20, 1997Center for Security Policy

By Frank Gaffney
Defense News, 17-23 November 1997

Of all the wrenching challenges facing the U.S. military, one that threatens to do particularly serious and lasting harm to its ability to fight and win the nation’s next war is going practically unremarked. On Oct. 14, President Bill Clinton exercised his line-item veto, for the first time, on policy grounds, to eliminate three programs essential to the future U.S. capability to exercise military control of space.

The programs in question are the Clementine II asteroid intercept experiment, the Army’s Kinetic Kill Anti-Satellite Weapon and the Military Space Plane. These technology development initiatives have the potential to afford the armed forces the means to exercise space dominance. Recent war games have established that such a capability will be decisive to the future conduct of terrestrial operations.

The president’s veto message nonetheless declared that, “I have been assured by the secretary of defense that none of the cancellations would undercut our national security or adversely affect the readiness of our forces or their operations in defense of our nation.”

In order to conform to such an irresponsibly naive, if not Luddite, view, the Air Force has responded to the veto by rewriting its doctrines, mission requirements and budget requests to delete references to the need for such capabilities.

As a result, what proudly was declared as recently as a month ago to be the visionary “Air and Space Force” for the 21st century is rapidly mutating into an Air and No Space Force. If allowed to proceed unchecked, the Pentagon will be unable to assure its ability to operate robustly in space and, if necessary, deny such an ability to an adversary.

The impetus behind the president’s space control veto, and the Air Force’s scorched-earth reaction to it, appears to be political. In mid-September, Russian President Boris Yeltsin proposed that the United States and Russia initiate negotiations leading toward a series of antisatellite (ASAT) bans. The White House evidently has accepted, despite the fact that the U.S. military cannot permit hostile satellites to be used in time of war to locate, track, target or enable attacks upon American forces.

While some argue it would be worth foregoing such capabilities if attacks upon U.S. satellites could be precluded, a study submitted to Congress 13 years ago by President Ronald Reagan established there was no way to verify an antisatellite prohibition.

As a result, the sort of ASAT negotiations the Clinton White House already quietly has begun with the Russians likely are to produce the worst of both worlds — limitations that will inhibit, if not preclude, American space control capabilities without significantly diminishing the threat posed to vital U.S. space assets.

This prospect must focus the minds of the U.S. armed forces. After all, few, if any, competent military officers believe the United States will be able to conduct successful terrestrial operations in the future without enjoying unhampered use of space, and the ability to deny it to adversaries.

The question of space control represents a sort of IQ test — short for integrity quotient — for today’s uniformed leadership. Those responsible for preparing to fight the nation’s wars must not shrink from offering their candid, professional military advice just because it runs counter to the president’s perceived political imperatives.

For its part, Congress must afford them opportunities to do so in a manner consistent with officers’ constitutional oaths and in keeping with the imperative of civilian control of the military.

A cautionary example of what can happen when such advice is not forthcoming occurred on Nov. 10. In an appearance before the House National Security military research and development subcommittee, the director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), Air Force Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles, clung to the White House policy line when he knew the facts to be otherwise.

Subcommittee Chairman Curt Weldon took him to task for failing to testify honestly concerning additional steps Weldon previously had been told by BMDO could be taken to enhance a variety of U.S. theater missile defense programs.

In an interview conducted the day after Weldon disgustedly gaveled the hearing to an early close and sent Lyles packing, he put the U.S. military on notice:

“This administration is more [concerned] about having generals and admirals be ‘politically correct’ than it is about having generals and admirals tell the honest story to the Congress and the American people about the severity of threats that are emerging. I don’t want to over-state the threat, but I don’t want some general looking to get his fourth star . . . coming in and trying to be careful about what he says, as opposed to us being able to protect our kids.”

It behooves legislators and military leaders to enter into an honest dialogue, and if necessary, protect the latters’ careers from retribution by political commissars in the executive branch.

The place to start would be a public discussion of the unvarnished facts concerning the U.S. need for space dominance, and what will be required to assure it.

Frank Gaffney is director of the Center for Security Policy, Washington.

Well Done, Weldon: Senior Legislator Refuses to Accept Factually Incorrect ‘Political Correctness’ From Gen. Lyles

November 6, 1997Center for Security Policy

Syndrome Evident in Wake of Vetoed U.S. Space Control Programs

(Washington, D.C.): A hearing called yesterday by the House National Security Committee’s
Military Research and Development Subcommittee was the occasion for an unusually acrimonious
exchange between a senior executive branch official and an influential legislator — an exchange
that may prove to be the Shot-across-the-bow Heard ‘Round the Pentagon. When the
Director of the Defense Department’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO),
Lieutenant General Lester Lyles (USAF), “lied” to the Subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Curt
Weldon (R-PA), the latter terminated the hearing and made a point of personally remonstrating
with the General about his “politicized” testimony.

In remarks on Blanquita Cullum‘s nationally syndicated radio show today, Rep. Weldon
explained that Gen. Lyles personally offended him and showed himself to be untrustworthy with
his testimony. Specifically, the General denied the existence of a letter concerning options that
could enhance U.S. military capabilities for defending against emerging Iranian missile threats — a
letter the Congressman knew for a fact was in preparation in BMDO. Indeed, information that
went into that draft correspondence identified specific amounts that could usefully be added to
accelerate, or otherwise improve, ongoing missile defense programs and that was drawn upon by
Rep. Weldon in preparing his new legislative initiative, the Iran Missile Protection Act of 1997
(IMPACT).

‘A Personal Crusade’

Rep. Weldon minced few words in the course of his broadcast remarks about Gen. Lyles’
politicized conduct — and the fact that it is all-too-typical of senior military leaders seeking
promotion from the Clinton Administration:

[Describing what he said to Gen. Lyles after gavelling the hearing to a close:] “When I took
the oath of allegiance [for] my job I swore to uphold the Constitution and when you took the
third star [of a lieutenant general]…you…agreed to serve the military. Your allegiance is to
the Constitution, not to some political partisan rhetoric given out by the White
House….I said you’re doing a disservice to our Country, General, and I don’t trust you. I said
this is more like Russia to me than the U.S.”

“This administration is more about having generals and admirals be politically correct
than it is about having generals and admirals tell the honest story to the Congress and
the American people about the severity of threats that are emerging. I don’t want to
overstate the threat, but I don’t want some general looking to get his fourth star…coming in
and trying to be careful about what he says, as opposed to us being able to protect our kids.
The largest loss of life that we had during Desert Storm was when those 26 kids were killed by
that SCUD missile….I think it’s outrageous that we have a general in charge of missile
defense who’s playing games, in my opinion, with lives of those troops who are going to
be at risk in the Iranian theater…over the next one to two years.”

“The Pentagon has become a politically correct entity where the generals and the
admirals who are so concerned about their advancement don’t want to say anything
that…they perceive might run contrary to what Bill Clinton and the Administration
party line is. That is not their job. And I’m not going to stand for that kind of testimony
before my committee. And I can tell you what they saw yesterday is just the beginning as
far as I’m concerned and I’m not going to let this pass.”

“I am for one going to make it a personal crusade to stop this. And I’m going to start with
this general who offended me personally and who I think offends every American by basically
the political testimony he presented yesterday.”

“I will pursue this to whatever level I can to hold him, and more importantly, the
Department of Defense accountable. Because I know what happened. The Secretary of
Defense and the White House…got to him and said you go in there and tow the party
line and you tell them that you don’t have dollar amounts.”

“We’re talking about the security and safety of our American military — 25 thousand of them
who… are stationed around Iran today. It is not the right of any general or [any] White
House to politicize the data that we need to adequately protect them and that is what
occurred yesterday. It’s unconscionable and I’m going to hold accountable both those
individuals in the White House and the Pentagon if any blood is shed on the part of any
of our troops from an Iranian missile if one is deployed 12 months from now. This is
outrageous.”

The Counterpart Problem with ‘Politicized Intelligence’

Rep. Weldon has been equally forthright — and perspicacious — about other manifestations of the
Clinton politicization of key national security institutions. Specifically, he was one of the most
vocal congressional critics of the 1995 National Intelligence Estimate on the emerging long-range
ballistic missile threat, an analysis that relied upon preposterous assumptions to support the pre-determined conclusion that no such threat to the United States would emerge for at least 10-15
years.⁽¹⁾

Rep. Weldon has also expressed concern about the “politicization of intelligence” in connection
with the recent, unexpected departure from the CIA of the director of its Non-proliferation
Center, Gordon Oehler. The New York Times reported on 21 October that “[Rep. Weldon]
asserted that Mr. Oehler was being punished for giving ‘honest and forthcoming briefings’ to
Congress about Russian and Chinese exports of dangerous materiel, technology and missiles to
countries like Iran and Pakistan. ‘This is a watershed event and I’m going to make this a test
case.’ Rep. Weldon said. ‘It’s a pattern of this Administration, when it gets information that
runs counter to the policy, they try to destroy the person that brings the message.'”

Now, The Military is Being Politicized on Space Dominance

In the wake of the first exercise of the line-item veto by President Clinton on “policy” grounds for
the purpose of eliminating three programs essential to future U.S. capabilities to exercise control
of space as a theater of military operations⁽²⁾ — the Air Force is frantically rewriting its doctrines,
mission requirements and budget requests to delete references to the need for such capabilities.
What was proudly described as recently as a month ago to be the visionary “Air and Space
Force” for the 21^st Century is rapidly mutating into an Air and No Space Force.

The impetus behind the Administration’s policy initiative appears to be its desire to be responsive
to a proposal from Russian President Boris Yeltsin to initiate negotiations leading toward a
series of anti-satellite bans. (Two pages of excerpts of President Yeltsin’s letter, which set in
train at least one set of meetings between senior Russian and American officials, are attached.)
While such negotiations will do nothing to enhance the security of U.S. space assets,⁽³⁾ it can
reliably be expected to preclude the United States from developing and fielding virtually all
systems relevant to space control.

The Air Force’s frantic effort to conform without objection to such a pernicious and reckless
policy is just one more example of the politicization of the U.S. armed forces. Few, if any,
competent military officer believes that the United States will be able to conduct successful
terrestrial operations in the future without enjoying unhampered use of space and the
ability to deny it to adversaries. This insight was already apparent in Operation Desert Storm;
it will only become more so in the future.

The Bottom Line

Accordingly, it is of enormous importance to the future security of the country — not to mention
to the efficacy of the ballistic missile defense programs in which Rep. Weldon has commendably
taken such a formidable interest — that his “personal crusade” against suborning politicization turn
immediately to an examination of the issue of space control. The Center for Security Policy
urges Mr. Weldon to convene hearings during the coming congressional recess for the
purpose of promptly establishing whether the uniformed services will tell the truth about
the need for U.S. dominance of the military theater of space. If necessary for their protection
from spiteful political commissars, witnesses should be subpoenaed and asked to testify under
oath.

The alternative is for Congress to acquiesce in this travesty, denying the military any alternative
but to become party to the Clinton Administration’s reckless pursuit of a scorched earth policy, a
policy that will have the effect of denying the Nation the space control doctrine and capabilities it
will so clearly require in the years ahead.

It is ironic that President Clinton’s line item veto of the three space control-relevant programs
came fifty years to the day after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier — an event that opened
the Space Age. This age will not come to an end with President Clinton’s efforts to zero out
American technologies needed to dominate space as a theater of military operations. What may
end, however, is the United States’ ability to prevail on the battlefields, on and under the seas and
in skies of this planet when the next conflict comes. We can only pray that Representative
Weldon and those who share his belief in a strong and secure America will prevent such a tragic —
and avoidable — disaster.

– 30 –

1. See the following Center products: It Walks Like A Duck…: Questions Persist That Clinton
CIA’s Missile Threat Estimate Was Politically Motivated (No. 96-D 122, 4 December 1996)
and ‘There You Go Again’: More Chinese Proliferation, More Clinton Politicization of
Intelligence (No. 96-D 56, 12 June 1996).

2. The three programs in question are the Clementine II astrophysics experiment, the Army’s
Kinetic Kill Anti-Satellite Weapon and the Military Space Plane. For more on the implications of
these systems’ cancellation, see Clinton Watch # 8: Denying U.S. Military the Ability To
Dominate The Next, Critical Theater of Operations — Space (No. 97-D 153, 15 October 1997).

3. See the Center’ Decision Brief entitled Test the MIRACL Laser Against A Satellite: The
Outcome of the Next War May Turn On A Proven American A.S.A.T. Capability (No. 97-D
122, 2 September 1997).

“A Policy for Freedom in China”

October 31, 1997Center for Security Policy

Full Remarks by
Hon. Chris Cox

On the Occasion of His Acceptance of
the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame”

28 October 1997

Thank you, Fred [Thompson]. I hope you do understand that the reason all these people came here is to hear your introduction – not to hear me. That’s the same reason I had you out in California! We’ll just keep doing this, as many times as it takes. I suppose that, since the rule in politics is you can accomplish anything as long as you don’t care who gets the credit, Fred Thompson showing up here as my introducer makes a lot of sense for a man this humble. Fred Thompson care about who gets the credit? After all, he co-starred with Clint Eastwood!

For my part, I used to co-star with Jon Kyl, and I am delighted, now that you are over in the Senate, to be up here with you again.

It is an honor and a great pleasure to see so many good and old friends here, many of whom worked in the Reagan Administration, where I had my first political job. Not only did we get to participate in the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, but I also got a chance to meet my wife in the Reagan White House. I am forever indebted to Ronald Reagan for introducing me to Rebecca. I may be this year’s “Keeper of the Flame” winner, but Rebecca is my flame, this year and every year. Thank you very much, Rebecca, for all your support. By the way, Rebecca out-ranked me in the White House, as most of you who worked there recall. I have found that was good preparation for marriage.

It was my privilege to introduce Jon Kyl when he won this “Keeper of the Flame” award. It is an honor for me to be here for that reason. And of course, as we all know, Frank Gaffney is the real “Keeper of the Flame,” and these annual dinners are actually our opportunity to show up and thank Frank Gaffney and all of your colleagues at the Center for Security Policy for all of the hard work that you do, day in and day out. The advice that Congress routinely gets from the Center for Security Policy is always timely, insightful, well-researched, and reliable. You never let America down, and you never let us down. We are very, very grateful for all that you do.

As we meet tonight, America’s security policy toward Asia – and the Center’s own advice on this subject – are much on the minds of people in Washington and across the country because of the visit of Jiang Zemin to Washington. For those of us who have long been working on Asia policy, and China policy in specific, this is a great opportunity. Since I have been Chairman of the House Policy Committee, with the help of Mark Lagon (whom we have courtesy of Jeane Kirkpatrick – thank you very much Mark, and especially thank you, Jeane, for giving us Mark), we have put out nine white papers on the People’s Republic of China alone. This year I have traveled twice to the People’s Republic of China and met myself with Jiang Zemin. Since I have been Chairman of the Policy Committee, we have introduced several pieces of legislation relating to East Asia policy, nine of which will come to the floor of the House a week from tomorrow in a full-day session of over 12 hours devoted to China policy – an unprecedented opportunity.

In early 1996, at the time of the Taiwan missile crisis, the Policy Committee produced, and I introduced on the floor of the House, a very pointed resolution that stated that if the People’s Republic of China were, without provocation, to attack Taiwan, the United States would defend Taiwan. And that resolution passed the House of Representatives with – 369 votes in favor, and only 14 votes against it. Immediately following this, the Clinton Administration abandoned its policy, which they described as “strategic ambiguity,” and sent two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait – immediately following which the People’s Republic of China lifted the blockade of Taiwan, and called off the balance of the missile tests. The scheduled Presidential elections on Taiwan went forward as planned. The months following have been peaceful. That is all to the good.

But it is ironic that the Clinton Administration described its own policy as “strategic ambiguity,” because that is exactly what I would say about it in criticism. How was the government in Beijing to know what would be the United States’ response if the PRC did attack? And why would we want to keep that a secret from them? Yet there were even sharper ambiguities than that. The Clinton policy was ambiguous about our security perimeter in the region, recalling Dean Acheson’s tragic misstep concerning South Korea in 1950. And the policy was morally ambiguous. It equated the kind of provocation for which the People’s Republic of China was responsible in launching missiles into the Taiwan Strait with the supposed provocation of the government of Taiwan’s holding democratic presidential elections or sending its leader to receive an honorary degree from Cornell University.

Strategic ambiguity is a dangerous policy, because uncertainty risks war. A security policy of strategic ambiguity is the opposite of a policy of peace through strength: it risks war through weakness. But even ambiguity doesn’t quite capture the Clinton policy, which is, even more than ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable.

In 1992, when Vice President Al Gore was still in the United States Senate, Congress passed the Gore-McCain Act. The Gore-McCain Act prescribed sanctions for the sale of advanced conventional weapons by any nation to Iran. That same year, Bill Clinton criticized President Bush for a policy of coddling dictators in Beijing. But over the last three years, Communist China has transferred at least 60 C-802 cruise missiles to Iran, and the Clinton-Gore Administration has entirely waived the Gore-McCain Act and its application to the People’s Republic of China – even though the Clinton State Department has found that “these cruise missiles pose new, direct threats to deployed U.S. forces,” and Admiral Scott Reed, the former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, reported that these new missiles give Iran a “360-degree threat that can come at you from basically anywhere.”

This vacillating policy apparently applies throughout East Asia. In 1993, when unmistakable evidence of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development was uncovered, President Clinton took what appeared to be a clear stand: “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. We have to be firm about it.” That is very clear. But today, North Korea, according to published CIA analyses, has a nuclear bomb. And according to testimony last week in the U.S. Senate, Kim Jong Il is frantically working to complete building the long-range missiles to carry it 3,100 miles away, as far as Alaska.

What then does being “firm about it” mean? For the Clinton Administration, it means that for the first time, North Korea is a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid. President Clinton is using millions in taxpayer dollars to provide the Stalinist regime in North Korea with two nuclear reactors and fuel in return for Kim Jong Il’s empty promise not to make nuclear weapons – a promise that is not only unverifiable, but almost certainly already broken.

But the President’s China policy remains the clearest example of a lack of constancy.

In the face of Communist China’s ongoing export of chemical weapons technology to Iran, even the Clinton State Department cited seven Chinese violations in May of this year. The CIA has designated the People’s Republic of China “the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) related goods and technology to foreign countries.” In August, of this year, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency concluded that it is “highly probable” Communist China is violating the biological weapons convention. Just last month, the United States Navy reported that China is the most active supplier of Iran’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons program. What will be the Clinton response to all of this at the summit tomorrow?

The answer is that Bill Clinton is expected to activate the 1985 Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with China – an agreement that requires a presidential certification that the People’s Republic of China has become a responsible member of the non-proliferation community. A more self-defeating example of coddling dictators in Beijing, to use Bill Clinton’s words, would be hard to find.

The Clinton policy of so-called engagement – unilateral and unconditional engagement, to be sure – is premised on the sound notion that the United States should wish China to be our friend. That is indeed a sound notion. We should, and we do, wish China to be our friend. But we must seek more than that. We must also desire to have friendly relations not with the largest Communist nation on earth, but with a free China.

While the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union gives us hope that China, too, will one day be free, the current government of the People’s Republic of China exercises control over more people than any one-party dictatorship in history. Communist China, with two-thirds of its urban work force employed in state-owned industries, is anything but a free market. The notorious Laogai prison system, on which my colleague Rep. Chris Smith has held hearings today, holds between six and eight million Chinese citizens captive and employed in slave-labor industries – some 140 export industries that ship to 70 countries around the world. There is no rule of law in China. Transparency International recently declared that China is the fifth most corrupt nation in the world. Private rights of ownership in real property are negligible. And the People’s Liberation Army, whose official military budget has more than doubled in the 1990s, supplements that spending with off-budget subsidies through the ownership of an enormous conglomerate of commercial firms that themselves are significant marketplace actors. This is not free enterprise.

Yes, China is changing. But it’s not changing any more than anyone would expect a modern Communist state to change. Many people in the Clinton administration and in the business community argue that China’s economic progress is miraculous. It means, they say, that China cannot be Communist. If China still has a Communist economy, they say, how could it grow by 10 percent a year?

Well, that’s an old and meaningless argument, considering the base of poverty against which Chinese economic growth is measured. Communist China reported a growth rate in 1958 of 22 percent at the height of the tragic “Great Leap Forward.” Twenty-two percent annual economic growth is simply fabulous – provided you are more interested in statistics than food. During this same period, China’s economic policies led to a man-made famine that claimed 20 million lives.

Yet throughout this period, even up to the time of Mao’s death in 1976, foreign business people were saying exactly what they are saying today. Many U.S. investors expressed open admiration for what was going on under Mao. David Rockefeller, for example, praised “the sense of national harmony,” and argued that Mao’s revolution “succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose.”

But while the enthusiasm for Chinese Communism is remarkably long-enduring (and seems willing to endure anything), such endorsements, just as in the case of Stalin’s Russia, have borne little or no relation to the truth. Just as “miraculous” as these reported economic growth figures is that after so many years of such progress, Communist China is still so poor. The truth is that today, even after all of these years of “miraculous” growth, the per capita gross domestic product of the People’s Republic of China ranks it below such emblems of Third World poverty as Lesotho, the Congo, Senegal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Even today, the People’s Republic of China needs our help. And they deserve it. All of this history means not that we should refuse to engage China, but rather that America should seek to influence China for the better.

But following the Clinton Administration’s policy of passivity has coincided with a trend away from freedom and the rule of law. We should do the opposite. We should actively promote freedom.

What more reason could we have to act than the most recent State Department Human Rights Report on China? It offers a brutal assessment: “All public dissent against the Communist Party was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at year’s end.”

The antidote to Communist corruption, slave labor, and the denial of commercial freedoms in China is free enterprise. U.S. policy should be based on promoting it.

Yes, we have seen the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Empire, so that Bill Clinton could say in February 1995, “We won the Cold War.” (Note the “we.”) But the fight against Communism is only half finished. Today, we need a new policy not of ambiguity, but of clarity. And a “Policy of Freedom,” which is what our new initiative in Congress is called, begins with a policy of clarity of language.

Today, Jiang Zemin conversed with an actor portraying Thomas Jefferson at Williamsburg. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, when he served as governor of Virginia in Williamsburg, wrote his Statute of Religious Liberty, which became the basis for the freedoms of conscience in our own Bill of Rights. This is the person to whom Jiang Zemin “spoke” today; yet the irony was not even noticed by our own Administration.

What would Ronald Reagan have said? Ronald Reagan made a career of speaking truth to evil. He did it when he was President of the United States, and it made America an even greater country. It’s well known that President Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” but that wasn’t the only occasion when plain speaking served him well. On July 8, 1985, President Reagan spoke to a very distinguished and educated group, the American Bar Association. And whatever else one might say about the American Bar Association, it is a group comprised exclusively of men and women with advanced degrees. (Laughter.) All of whom appreciate refined language.

In his prepared remarks, the President – I call him the President, and you all know whom I mean – said this, in his prepared remarks, about five nations, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Libya: He branded them members of “a convention of terrorist states.” A convention of terrorist states. One has difficulty imagining Bill Clinton being so judgmental. But he didn’t stop there. They were “outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney toons and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.” (Laughter.)

We needn’t be so undiplomatic in our conversations with Jiang Zemin. Just as President Reagan on national television demanded the release of Nelson Mandela, we should demand the release of Wei Jingsheng.

And the American President should say simply to Jiang Zemin what the American President should say to the world: We wish an end to Communism to China. Because we love the peoples of China, we wish them to be free.

Last year, the then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Winston Lord, paid a visit to my office. We discussed these matters, and I asked him why it is that the President of the United States cannot say that we wish that China were not Communist. He replied that of course we wish it were so – but we just can’t say it.

And thus, with a silence as eloquent as President Reagan’s international appeals for freedom that helped topple the Soviet Empire, the Clinton Administration has forsworn a policy of anti-Communism.

We have an opportunity to do better. Next Wednesday, November 5, 1997 we will spend 12 hours on the floor of the House o f Representatives debating nine bills covering nearly every major aspect of the United States-PRC bilateral relationship. These bills together embody a clear Policy for Freedom.

The legislative approach in each case is tailored to the particular subject matter: enforcing the ban on slave labor, demonstrating our commitment to religious freedom, expanding Radio Free Asia, denying normal commercial status to the Communist Chinese military, reporting to Congress on Communist Chinese espionage and active measures in the United States, enforcing the Gore-McCain Act against China’s sending cruise missiles to Iran, assisting Taiwan with defense against China’s missile attacks, and so on. Yet despite the breadth of this legislation’s coverage, the well-known and well-worn vehicle of Most Favored Nation status is nowhere to be found in this debate.

It is possible to pursue a Policy for Freedom that works.

Communism is not something that must be tolerated in China. It’s not something that we must accept if only we were to understand Chinese history, because the truth is, Communism is alien to China.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin are hardly the fountainheads of Chinese culture. At the same time, obedience to the state is hardly a uniquely inbred value of Asia. It is something that we have known all to often and for too many years in the West, just as it was known under China’s imperial monarchy. Philip II, Louis XIV, Bismarck, Hitler, Mussolini – they were all fond of this so-called value. The truth is that in 5,000 years of history, and in 22 dynasties covering four millennia, China’s cultural experience has prepared it for almost anything. Certainly the Chinese people are prepared now for freedom.

From the year 618 forward, when the T’ang Dynasty welcomed Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and opened up ties to India, China grew rich in art and literature, and became technologically advanced. By the year 1000 – one thousand years ago – China had reached a population of 65 million (about the same one-fifth of the global population it represents today) and was easily the most technologically and culturally advanced civilization on the planet. This China was tolerant, commercially and scientifically advanced, and open to the world. Only Western Europe at that time had experienced five centuries of Dark Ages. China had not. Our world was then the least important area of civilization on earth, by far. This rich Chinese heritage, and not a bastardized “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” represents China’s birthright.

I’d like to conclude with a further story from Chinese history, and a thought.

When the Ming Dynasty replaced the Mongols in the 14th century, China embarked on its own Age of Exploration-an era that antedated, and rivaled in all respects, anything that was going on in Europe. Chinese fleets scoured the Indian Ocean, visiting Indonesia, Ceylon, even the Red Sea and Africa – where they picked up giraffes and brought them back to the amazement of the people back home.

But this is where Chinese exploration ended. Who knows? With a little more wind, the Chinese might have rounded the Cape of Good Hope. They might have reached Europe. They might even have discovered America.

Today, the irrepressible dreams of human freedom live on in China’s diverse and tolerant peoples. But China’s explorers and discoverers are kept down by worst of the 20th century’s legacies, the last vestiges of totalitarianism, which also live on still in Communist China.

It’s my hope that as we close the 20th century, America – whose unique mission in world history is to promote freedom – can provide the Chinese people with a little more wind to fill their sails, so that this time they will round the corner, so that this time they will actually be free. When that happens, China and the United States of America will truly be friends. And the world will be a much safer place.

End of Full Remarks

Chris Cox 1997 Keeper of the Flame remarks

October 31, 1997Center for Security Policy

On the Occasion of His Acceptance of
the Center for Security Policy’s "Keeper of the Flame"

28 October 1997

As we meet tonight, America’s security policy toward Asia — and the Center’s own advice on this subject — are much on the minds of people in Washington and across the country because of the visit of Jiang Zemin to Washington. For those of us who have long been working on Asia policy, and China policy in specific, this is a great opportunity….This year, I have traveled twice to the People’s Republic of China and met myself with Jiang Zemin. Since I have been Chairman of the [House Republican] Policy Committee, we have introduced several pieces of legislation relating to East Asia policy, nine of which will come to the floor of the House a week from tomorrow in a full-day session of over 12 hours devoted to China policy-an unprecedented opportunity.

The Lesson of the Recent Taiwan Crisis

In early 1996, at the time of the Taiwan missile crisis, the Policy Committee produced, and I introduced on the floor of the House, a very pointed resolution that stated that if the People’s Republic of China were, without provocation, to attack Taiwan, the United States would defend Taiwan. And that resolution passed the House of Representatives with 369 votes in favor, and only 14 votes against it. Immediately following this, the Clinton Administration abandoned its policy, which they described as "strategic ambiguity," and sent two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait — immediately following which the People’s Republic of China lifted the blockade of Taiwan, and called off the balance of the missile tests. The scheduled Presidential elections on Taiwan went forward as planned. The months following have been peaceful. That is all to the good.

But it is ironic that the Clinton Administration described its own policy as "strategic ambiguity," because that is exactly what I would say about it in criticism. How was the government in Beijing to know what would be the United States’ response if the PRC did attack? And why would we want to keep that a secret from them? Yet there were even sharper ambiguities than that. The Clinton policy was ambiguous about our security perimeter in the region, recalling Dean Acheson’s tragic misstep concerning South Korea in 1950.

And the policy was morally ambiguous. It equated the kind of provocation for which the People’s Republic of China was responsible in launching missiles into the Taiwan Strait with the supposed provocation of the government of Taiwan’s holding democratic presidential elections — or sending its leader to receive an honorary degree from Cornell University.

The Folly of Inconstancy and ‘Strategic Ambiguity’

* * *

…The President’s China policy remains the clearest example of a lack of constancy. In the face of Communist China’s ongoing export of chemical weapons technology to Iran, even the Clinton State Department cited seven Chinese violations in May of this year. The CIA has designated the People’s Republic of China "the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) related goods and technology to foreign countries." In August, of this year, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency concluded that it is "highly probable" Communist China is violating the biological weapons convention. Just last month, the United States Navy reported that China is the most active supplier of Iran’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons program. What will be the Clinton response to all of this at the summit tomorrow?

The answer is that Bill Clinton is expected to activate the 1985 Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with China — an agreement that requires a presidential certification that the People’s Republic of China has become a responsible member of the non-proliferation community. A more self-defeating example of "coddling dictators in Beijing," to use Bill Clinton’s words, would be hard to find.

China is Not Free

The Clinton policy of so-called engagement — unilateral and unconditional engagement, to be sure — is premised on the sound notion that the United States should wish China to be our friend. That is indeed a sound notion. We should, and we do, wish China to be our friend. But we must seek more than that. We must also desire to have friendly relations not with the largest Communist nation on earth, but with a free China.

While the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union gives us hope that China, too, will one day be free, the current government of the People’s Republic of China exercises control over more people than any one-party dictatorship in history. Communist China, with two-thirds of its urban work force employed in state-owned industries, is anything but a free market. The notorious Laogai prison system, on which my colleague Rep. Chris Smith has held hearings today, holds between six and eight million Chinese citizens captive and employed in slave-labor industries — some 140 export industries that ship to 70 countries around the world. There is no rule of law in China. Transparency International recently declared that China is the fifth most corrupt nation in the world. Private rights of ownership in real property are negligible. And the People’s Liberation Army, whose official military budget has more than doubled in the 1990s, supplements that spending with off-budget subsidies through the ownership of an enormous conglomerate of commercial firms that themselves are significant marketplace actors. This is not free enterprise.

Will Economic Determinism Work?

Well, that’s an old and meaningless argument, considering the base of poverty against which Chinese economic growth is measured. Communist China reported a growth rate in 1958 of 22 percent at the height of the tragic "Great Leap Forward." Twenty-two percent annual economic growth is simply fabulous — provided you are more interested in statistics than food. During this same period, China’s economic policies led to a man-made famine that claimed 20 million lives.

Yet throughout this period, even up to the time of Mao’s death in 1976, foreign business people were saying exactly what they are saying today. Many U.S. investors expressed open admiration for what was going on under Mao. David Rockefeller, for example, praised "the sense of national harmony," and argued that Mao’s revolution "succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose."

But while the enthusiasm for Chinese Communism is remarkably long-enduring (and seems willing to endure anything), such endorsements, just as in the case of Stalin’s Russia, have borne little or no relation to the truth. Just as "miraculous" as these reported economic growth figures is that after so many years of such progress, Communist China is still so poor. The truth is that today, even after all of these years of "miraculous" growth, the per capita gross domestic product of the People’s Republic of China ranks it below such emblems of Third World poverty as Lesotho, the Congo, Senegal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras.

A ‘Policy of Freedom’

But following the Clinton Administration’s policy of passivity has coincided with a trend away from freedom and the rule of law. We should do the opposite. We should actively promote freedom.

* * *

…The American President should say simply to Jiang Zemin what the American President should say to the world: We wish an end to Communism to China. Because we love the peoples of China, we wish them to be free.

* * *

When the Ming Dynasty replaced the Mongols in the 14th century, China embarked on its own Age of Exploration-an era that antedated, and rivaled in all respects, anything that was going on in Europe. Chinese fleets scoured the Indian Ocean, visiting Indonesia, Ceylon, even the Red Sea and Africa-where they picked up giraffes and brought them back to the amazement of the people back home.

It’s my hope that as we close the 20th century, America — whose unique mission in world history is to promote freedom — can provide the Chinese people with a little more wind to fill their sails, so that this time they will round the corner, so that this time they will actually be free. When that happens, China and the United States of America will truly be friends. And the world will be a much safer place.