Tag Archives: Set America Free Coalition

Clinton Intel Panel Confirms that D.O.E. Security Melt-down, Begat by Hazel O’Leary, Continues Under Bill Richardson

June 15, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Today, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB)
released the findings of its 90-day study of security issues at the Department of Energy.
Although the report itself was unavailable at this writing, press reports indicate that the PFIAB
analysis not only paints a grim picture of past breaches of the most basic procedures for
safeguarding classified nuclear weapons data. It also reveals that the gross disregard for
elementary physical, information and personnel security — encouraged by Mr. Clinton’s
first Energy Secretary, Hazel O’Leary, and epitomized in her infamous December 1993
declaration that, “Someone else has the job of looking more carefully at the national
security interest” — continues to this day under her successor, Bill Richardson.

A ‘Denuclearizer’s’ Greatest Hits

Other highlights of then-Secretary O’Leary’s lengthy — and frequently incoherent — press
conference on Tuesday, 7 December 1993 ¹speak volumes
about the Clinton Administration’s
special responsibility for the present security melt-down at the Department of Energy. ² Indeed,
Mrs. O’Leary made no secret of her hostility to her Department’s most important function —
maintaining the Nation’s strategic deterrent and the thermonuclear weaponry that underpins it.

In particular, Mrs. O’Leary clearly took pleasure in disclosing theretofore secret information
concerning:

the total quantity and precise locations around the country of much of the Nation’s
stockpile of plutonium — an invitation to domestic or foreign acts of terrorism;

the fact that there were then “three miles” of (ostensibly) unduly classified
documents,
which Sec. O’Leary promised aggressively to declassify. (She did so, releasing, among
other sensitive information, nuclear weapons-relevant “Restricted Data” and “Formerly
Restricted Data” despite a specific statutory prohibition on doing so contained in the Atomic
Energy Act);

the number of secret underground nuclear tests that the United States had
conducted (the
government had previously chosen not to announce some 200 tests whose low yields could
not be detected by others) — a potential intelligence windfall for foreign powers; and

the explosive allegation that the Department of Energy’s bureaucratic predecessors
had
conducted radiological experiments on human beings without obtaining the
participants’
informed consent.

It was predictable — if not actually calculated by Mrs. O’Leary and her
anti-nuclear political
appointees ³ — that each and every one of these
‘revelations’ would undermine popular
support for these weapons in both the eyes of the American people — and perhaps
embolden America’s adversaries. While Secretary O’Leary has, mercifully, been gone
from
office for three years, ⁴ the legacy of her “denuclearization”
campaign continues to be felt to this
day.

Don’t Take Our Word for It

The ominous nature of the Clinton-O’Leary legacy is apparently evident from both the
bipartisan
congressional report by the select House committee chaired by Rep. Chris
Cox ⁵and, more
recently, by the PFIAB, led by former Republican Senator Warren Rudman.
According to
press accounts, the PFIAB study — entitled Science at its Best, Security at its Worst
reaches,
among others, the following, damning conclusions:

“The Department of Energy, when faced with a profound public responsibility, has
failed.”

“Our bottom line: DOE represents the best of America’s scientific talent and
achievement, but it has also been responsible for the worse security record on secrecy
that the members of this panel have ever encountered.”

“The report [issued in December 1990 by then-Secretary of Energy James Watkins]
skewered
DOE for unacceptable ‘direction, coordination, conduct and oversight’ of safeguards and
security…Two years later, the new [Clinton] Administration rolled in, redefined
priorities, and the initiatives all but evaporated.”

According to the Washington Times, “Mr. Clinton waited until 11 February
1998, to issue a
presidential directive responding to the security lapses. That was more than six months after
National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger received an in-depth briefing on the problem by
the Energy Department. That briefing ‘was sufficient to warrant aggressive White House
action,’ the PFIAB report said. ‘These issues had such national security gravity that [the
presidential directive] should have been handled with more dispatch.'”

According to the Washington Post, “Rudman, [a] White House official said,
told Clinton that
a presidential decision directive signed in 1998 was ‘the first really serious effort’ to tighten
security at the department, but that in the wake of espionage charges it was ‘late in coming.’
Rudman surprised the president by saying that ‘people [at the Energy Department]
were still trying to keep it from being implemented,’ the official said.”

“[Richardson] has overstated his case when he asserts, as he did several weeks
ago, that
‘Americans can be reassured: Our nuclear secrets are, today, safe and secure.'”

“Organizational disarray, managerial neglect and a culture of arrogance — both at DOE
headquarters and the labs themselves — conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to
happen.”

Arguably, most importantly, the PFIAB found that: “The Department of
Energy is a
dysfunctional bureaucracy that has proven it is incapable of reforming
itself.” (Emphasis
added.) Rep. Cox evinced a similar judgment when he declared this morning on National Public
Radio’s “Morning Edition” program that: “There may well have been an effort to show that the
[espionage] case was closed, the problem was solved and we could put it all behind us and load
all the burden on to the shoulders of one individual. But the problems that have been
identified go well beyond one individual.”

It should come as no surprise that Secretary O’Leary, her senior subordinates and their
successors proved indifferent to U.S. national security interests given that they were generally
selected to hold such high offices on the basis of “diversity” and leftist ideologies. Just as
straightforward should be the remedy: Create a new, free-standing agency whose
sole
mandate would be to maintain the safety, reliability and effectiveness of the nuclear
stockpile, staffed by people with the requisite technical skills and a shared commitment to
the competent fulfillment of this important responsibility.

The Bottom Line

Importantly, President Clinton’s own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was sufficiently
alarmed by DOE’s incompetence and malfeasance to recommend such an action or alternatively
that “The weapons research and stockpile management functions [to] be placed wholly within a
new, semi-autonomous agency within [the Department of Energy] that has a clear mission,
streamlined bureaucracy and drastically simplified lines of authority and accountability .”

Secretary Richardson flatly rejected even this less draconian approach for improving quality
—
and security — control at the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex. As the
New
York Times reported today, he has declared that “An independent agency is out of the
question”
and of the proposal to create a semi-autonomous agency, he has said “I don’t think [it] is a good
idea.” (Curiously, he rejected the latter on the contortionist logic that it would create ‘a new
fiefdom’ and conflict with his efforts to streamline and strengthen counterintelligence and
security directly under the energy secretary (read, create a new CI and security fiefdom!))

Now that Secretary Richardson’s judgment about how the success of his efforts to
improve
security within the DoE’s bureaucracy has been shown to be in error, there is no reason to
believe that he is more right — or entitled to congressional deference — with respect to
moving the nuclear weapons program out from under the malign neglect of the
Department of Energy political leadership. This should be done forthwith.

¹ See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
U.S. ‘De-Nuclearization’: Who is Minding the
Store? (No. 93-D 103, 9 December 1993).

² See Everybody Didn’t Do It: Clinton
Administration is in a Class by Itself on Damaging
Security Practices (No. 99-D 68, 11 June 1999).

³ See Waste, Fraud and Abuse: D.O.E.’s
Mismanagement of Nuclear Clean-Up Facilitates
Denuclearization Agenda (No. 95-D 29, 25
April 1995).

⁴ According to last night’s “O’Reilly Factor” program on Fox News,
Mrs. O’Leary joined the
board of an Energy Department contractor to whom she appears to have thrown a sweetheart deal
— keeping steady its remuneration for providing security at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons
facility in Colorado — but cutting the security workforce the firm was responsible for paying to
do that job. Interestingly, a personnel action has been taken by another anti-nuclear political
appointee in DoE’s senior ranks, Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller,
against Lieutenant
Colonel Ed McCallum, (a former Army special forces officer who has tried to warn
repeatedly
about DoE’s security shortfalls as the director of its office of Safeguards and Security) on the
trumped-up charge that he had had an indiscreet phone conversation with a Rocky Flats
employee in which they commiserated about the unnecessary dangers thus created to Rocky Flat
and the surrounding metropolitan Denver area.

⁵ See Cox Report Underscores Abiding Nuclear
Dangers, Should Caution Against Efforts
that Would Exacerbate Them (No. 99-D 62, 25
May 1999).

Al Gore’s Climate Treaty — Dead On Arrival

December 11, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s finale of the Kyoto Conference on Global Climate Change was
proof positive of the adage “You want it bad, you’ll get it bad.” Vice President Al Gore wanted a
treaty so badly that he directed the U.S. delegation not to come home without one. The result
was not just bad, it was appalling — so much so that it appears the treaty will be “dead on
arrival” in the U.S. Senate.

Such an outcome was predictable, and predicted, given the Veep’s public sabotaging of the
American position from the podium at Kyoto and the marathon negotiating sessions that action
precipitated.⁽¹⁾ It is almost inconceivable that anything palatable — to say nothing of something
good for you — can come of a broth produced by so many cooks working virtually around the
clock for three days running.

Based on the information available at this writing, however, the Kyoto Global Climate Change
Treaty (GCCT) would be a disaster for the United States. The following are among the reasons
why.

The Treaty Will Harm National Security

According to the Washington Times, among the concessions the United States made to create Al
Gore’s treaty entailed abandoning “its plan to exempt U.S. military training and overseas
operations from fuel cutbacks that would be needed for the United States to reach its
target.” The Times goes on to report that, “In the draft treaty, only overseas military actions
approved by the United Nations would remain exempt as would training and combat in
international waters.”⁽²⁾ (Emphasis added.)

If this arrangement fits all-too-well with the Clinton Administration’s enthusiasm for one-world
government, it nonetheless amounts to a stupefying subordination of national security and
sovereignty to the dictates of the UN.

Should the United States find itself obliged to fight wars in the future that have not been approved
by the UN and that are inconveniently located in other than international waters, it would appear
that America will either have to violate the treaty or accept even more draconian reductions in its
domestic energy consumption — with even greater adverse effect on the national economy. It is
hard to believe that the United States Senate would be prepared to go along with the imposition
of such a Hobsian choice on the American people.

The Treaty Will Impinge Upon Americans’ Individual Rights, National Sovereignty

In addition to allowing the UN to dictate which wars the United States can fight and — how
prepared it will be to fight them, Al Gore’s treaty will sacrifice American sovereignty and possibly
even the rights of U.S. citizens through a number of other measures.

For example, pursuant to this treaty, the United States as a whole would be required to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by 7% by 2012. Since the Federal Government is only responsible for a
tiny fraction of these emissions⁽³⁾, private citizens and enterprises will be obliged to make up the
overwhelming majority of the obligatory reductions.

It is unclear exactly how the Clinton Administration intends to compel such individuals and
companies to make their share of these reductions. If not by government edicts that deny them
the use, for instance, of minivans and sports utility vehicles or emissions-intensive manufacturing
techniques,⁽⁴⁾ then it will have to be accomplished through increased energy taxes. Whichever
approach is used, though, the question must be asked: How will penalties be apportioned if the
Nation as a whole fails to meet its mandatory reductions obligations? The answer, if also unclear,
surely translates into an infringement on Americans’ quality of life and economic freedoms — if
not their civil liberties, as well.

Al Gore’s treaty also imposes upon national decision-making the edicts of new international
bureaucracies being created to dictate, monitor and presumably enforce the new energy control
regime called for by the GCCT. The emissions trading scheme — which is expected to create
out of whole cloth a multi-billion dollar commodity market — will have to have some SEC-like
multilateral mechanism to regulate its operations. Who will be entrusted with such power —
power that could, in the wrong hands, prove highly injurious to national wealth and standards of
living?

The treaty also apparently calls for a new multilateral agency that will be responsible for defining
and orchestrating investment strategies concerning new greenhouse gas-reducing technologies.
According to the Washington Times report, it would also afford “UN bureaucrats some control
over U.S. agriculture and forestry policies. Is the United States Senate really ready to subject so
many national decisions to unaccountable international agencies?

The Treaty Will Involve Picking ‘Winners and Losers’

In addition to empowering an international organization with responsibility for directing
substantial American and other resources towards “green” technologies, the Clinton
Administration has indicated its determination to apply classic big-government “industrial
policy” techniques domestically in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through
technological advances. The billions of dollars earmarked for this purpose constitute a statist
approach to picking “winners and losers” — one that is rarely (if ever) as efficient or effective as
market forces.

What is more, as the recent Symposium on Global Warming conducted in New York City by the
William J. Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy established,⁽⁵⁾ it also is rife with
potential for abuse:

The Treaty Propounds a ‘Big Lie’

Perhaps as insidious as any of the individual liabilities of the Al Gore’s treaty is the fact that, by
definition, it legitimates the theory that the planet is warming. And yet, there is no scientific
consensus for such a conclusion.⁽⁶⁾ If anything, the evidence from the most accurate measuring
devices — earth-monitoring satellites and weather balloons — indicate that the earth has not
warmed appreciably over the past forty years, despite increases in greenhouse gas emissions.⁽⁷⁾

Yet, the public is being fed a steady diet of assertions to the effect that the planet is warming
catastrophically and that the scientific community agrees nearly unanimously that it is being
caused by human consumption of fossil fuels. Even though these contentions are unproven — and
their proponents demonstrate little willingness to debate the bases for them with knowledgeable
critics — they are endlessly repeated in the well-honed technique of the “Big Lie.“⁽⁸⁾

Just how much of a lie the Global Warming agenda entails was documented today by syndicated
columnist George Will. In a powerful essay entitled “More Government by Therapy” which
appeared in the Washington Post, Mr. Will cites a statement by made by some nine years ago by
Timothy Wirth, the Clinton Administration’s outgoing Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs
and a key architect of U.S. policy on the Kyoto treaty: “Even if the theory of global warming is
wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we
will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental
policy.” To which the columnist responds acerbically, “Which is why global warming and global
cooling hypotheses have been fungible as rationales for arguing that government must revise
American consumption and industrial practices.”

The Bottom Line

The costs associated with Al Gore’s treaty — in terms of national security, individual rights and
national sovereignty, and the health of the American economy — are wholly unjustified by the
scientific evidence available at present. In the absence of a compelling scientific case, it
would be recklessly irresponsible for the United States to be bound by such a treaty and it
seems exceedingly unlikely that the Senate will agree to its ratification.

Knowing that, the Clinton Administration has signaled that it does not intend to submit the GCCT
until after the November 1998 meeting in Brazil at which further discussions about restricting
greenhouse gas emissions in developing nations are supposed to occur. (Surely it is coincidental
that this timing also means that it would be deferred until after the 1998 mid-term U.S. elections
where it could prove a serious liability to Democratic candidates!)

Such a prospect gives fresh urgency to a danger highlighted in the course of the Casey Institute
Symposium:

the President might try to finesse
the Senate, denying it the role of check-and-balance on executive action
contemplated by the Framers

executive actions

It is, therefore, enormously important that Senator Larry Craig of Idaho — an influential
member of the Republican caucus and former chairman of its Steering Committee — declared
yesterday that: “We’re going to ask the President and the Vice President to…bring [the
Kyoto treaty] to the Senate very, very promptly….” The stakes are sufficiently great that if
the Administration does not voluntarily agree to this request, it must be compelled to do so.

– 30 –

1. See the Casey Institute’s Perspective entitled Watch Your Wallet: Al Gore’s ‘Flexibility’
Bodes Ill For U.S. Interests At Kyoto — And Beyond (No. 97-C 189, 8 December 1997)

2. The reported language also raises the question as to whether a country can emit as much
greenhouse gas it wishes in the course of “training and combat in international waters” (and,
presumably, international airspace)? Such a proposition seems unlikely to pass muster with the
environmental zealots whose antipathy toward the U.S. military rivals their hostility toward the
modern economies that produce greenhouse gases. It must be asked, moreover, what would the
implications of this treaty be for the readiness of those American armed forces whose missions
are, of necessity, ground-based or that involve ground-attack or air superiority over contested real
estate?

3. As noted in a Casey Institute Perspective entitled Effects of Clinton’s Global Warming
Treaty on U.S. Security Gives New Meaning to the Term ‘Environmental Impact’ (No. 97-C
149, 6 October 1997), a recent Defense Department analysis found that the Federal Government
consumes 1.4% of the Nation’s fossil fuels. 73% of that amount is consumed by the Pentagon,
with fully 58% of that total being utilized by the combat arms.

4. The deferral to at least November 1996 of any corresponding constraints upon developing
nations — one of the most wildly controversial concessions made by the U.S. delegation in order
to achieve the treaty demanded by Vice President Gore — ensures that at least some such
manufacturing concerns will relocate from the United States to countries unburdened by
greenhouse emissions constraints. Naturally, this will only compound the other, unwarranted
economic costs of the GCCT.

5. See Casey Institute Symposium on Global Warming Suggests Case For — And Costs Of —
Kyoto Treaty Are Unsustainable (No. 97-R 188, 5 December 1997).

6. A participant in the Casey Institute Symposium on Global Warming reported that:

7. As one participant in the Casey Institute Symposium observed: “The satellite data — which are
the only good global data we have — actually show a cooling of the climate in the last 20 years,
which completely contradicts the theory and computer models. So the basic question really is
‘Who should we believe? Should we believe in observations or should we believe in computer
models? That becomes a matter of personal choice and philosophy. I will tell you that I believe in
observations.”

8. Adolf Hitler coined this term when, on the eve of his staging a “Polish” attack on Germany that
would serve as the pretext for his invasion of Poland, he declared: “The great masses of the
people…will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.”

Global Warming Fundamentalists This is nuclear winter without the nukes

December 8, 1997Center for Security Policy

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post, 05 December 1997

The world is meeting in Kyoto, Japan, to decide how much wreckage to visit upon the Western
economies to prevent global warming. Kyoto aims to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
which would seriously curtail energy use and, with it, economic growth. All under the premise
that humans produce global warming and that global warming will produce a human catastrophe.
Is this true?

There has been a very slight warming of the earth’s atmosphere in this century (although one
still has to explain why satellite and balloon data show no net temperature rise in the past 19
years). But first, it is not clear how much is caused by natural variation only. Second, even
assuming a substantial human contribution, it is not clear what, say, a doubling of carbon dioxide
(CO 2 ) emissions would do to temperatures.

You get can get answers by modeling. But scientific models are notoriously subject to the
tweaking of underlying assumptions. The predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change have already been significantly modified. In 1990 it predicted a 6-degree (F) rise by 2100.
The prediction now is down to a 3 -degree rise, a 40 percent drop. And there is a huge range of
uncertainty: The lower-end estimate is less than 2 degrees F.

But uncertainty is a feeling foreign to global warming fundamentalists, many of them now
gathered in Kyoto. Take that great American evangelist, Vice President Gore, a last-minute
attendee. Now, Gore may turn out to be the environmentalists’ villain because he fears infuriating
his labor allies at home if he agrees to serious curbs on U.S. CO 2 (and thus energy) production.
But whatever he ends up doing for personal political reasons, it is clear what he believes. Just two
months ago, he likened those who question global warming to tobacco executives who with a
“straight face” denied that smoking causes cancer. This is a serious charge: not just error, but bad
faith.

This attitude is echoed by many scientists. Stephen Schneider, a Stanford scientist and
participant at Clinton and Gore’s Global Climate Change Roundtable last July, has said that when
it comes to global warming it is “journalistically irresponsible to present both sides.”

It is worth noting that 25 years ago this same Schneider was vociferously denying global
warming. Even a tenfold increase in human production of carbon dioxide, he wrote, “which at the
present rate of input is not expected within the next several thousand years” is “unlikely to
produce a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth.” Indeed, “the doubling of carbon dioxide” —
which is what Kyoto is trying so desperately to prevent — “would produce a temperature change
of less than one degree [centigrade].”

Schneider argued then that the real threat was global cooling: The production of aerosols
screening earth from the sun could produce “a decrease of the mean surface temperature by as
much as 3.5 degrees centigrade,” which “if sustained over a period of several years . . . could be
sufficient to trigger an ice age.”

This is nuclear winter without the nukes. And this was no offhanded comment. This was a paper
in the prestigious journal Science, complete with equations containing a gaudy excess of
exponents and Greek subscripts.

Nor was Schneider alone. In the 1970s, which were — surprise! — cold, global cooling was the
vogue. Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, said in 1975 that “the threat of a new ice age
must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for
mankind.” And Science Digest declared that “how carefully we monitor our atmospheric pollution
will have direct bearing on the arrival and nature of this weather crisis” — i.e., a new “ice age.”

All this doom-saying provoked J. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration to remark in 1976 that “whenever there is a cold wave, they [the media] seek out a
proponent of the ice-age-is-coming school and put his theories on page one. . . . Whenever there
is a heat wave . . . they turn to his opposite number [for a prediction of] a kind of heat death of
the earth.”

It is one thing to change your mind. It is another to then, with the zeal of the convert, write the
view you have just abandoned out of polite society, as does Schneider by saying that journalists
shouldn’t even present the non-global warming view, and as does Gore when he makes skeptics
into the moral equivalent of tobacco executives. Ironically, as climate change predictions become
more malleable and contingent, climate change activists become more inflexible and intolerant.

The ease with which politicians, popularizers and even scientists can be caught up in popular
enthusiasms for one doomsday or another should give us pause. This is not a call for ignoring
climate change. It is a call for a modicum of humility before we go ahead and wreck the good life
we’ve developed over 200 years in the name of a theory.

Caspian Watch # 9: Emboldened By Iraq ‘Victory,’ Russia Intensifies Effort To Undermine Azerbaijan

November 26, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The direct effects of the Clinton Administration’s strategic error in
contracting-out responsibility for finding a “solution” to Russia are now pretty obvious: an
emboldened Saddam; a renewed lease on life for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program; a
further discrediting of American leadership and credibility; and untold opportunities for the
KGB’s Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, to subvert U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf.⁽¹⁾

Less obvious is the trickle-down effect of this multi-dimensional debacle that Moscow is
exploiting in the potentially pivotal Caspian Basin. Of particular concern is the opening thus
presented to outflank the U.S. and its allies in the southern Caucasus by undermining the former
Soviet republic — Azerbaijan — that has most successfully resisted Kremlin efforts to secure
control of some $4 trillion in estimated Caspian hydrocarbon reserves.

Worse yet, should Moscow be successful in its operations against Azerbaijan, it would secure a
still greater ability to interfere with efforts being made by other countries of Central Asia to
export their oil and natural gas to the West. In this fashion, Primakov’s Iraqi gambit threatens to
restore much of the Kremlin’s erstwhile leverage and control over this vast region.

The First Step

The first priority in the Russian strategy for undermining Azerbaijan, as the Center has long
argued,⁽²⁾ remains the fostering of regional political upheaval designed to destabilize the southern
Caucasus and to impede the Azerbaijani leadership’s ability to consolidate its nation’s
independence from Moscow. So transparent has this campaign become that Azerbaijan’s Minister
of National Security was obliged in a recent meeting with Russia’s Federal Security Service (read
KGB), to make a formal demarche. According to the Azerbaijani newspaper Baku Zerkalo⁽³⁾:

“The Azerbaijan side is concerned about information that armed groups [the Lezgin nationalist
movement Sadval and the Union of Muslims of Russia] are undergoing special training in the
woodland areas [surrounding Azerbaijan]. It was noted that it was necessary to find and hand
over those who were conducting the training of leadership of the Armenian secret services and
those who were committing the crimes.”

By promoting uncertainty and turmoil in the region — a prime purpose of Russia’s transfer of a
reported $1 billion in arms in recent years to Armenia for use against Azerbaijan — Moscow is
able to advance three priority goals:

Instability forces the Azerbaijani leadership to focus on military concerns rather than
addressing socio-economic challenges and barriers to the efficient and secure transportation of
its oil and gas reserves.
Russia is afforded an excuse to increase its military deployments to the region. And

Moscow’s claim to a role in the resolution of “regional conflicts” — another pretext for
asserting its influence and legitimating its “peacekeeping” presence in the Transcaucasus — is
enhanced.

Enter Iraq

Russia may not have dreamed it would be so successful when Iraq brazenly made its latest move
to break out of the UN sanction regime — a move many believe was pre-cooked with Primakov
(who previously served as Saddam Hussein’s KGB handler). Far from precipitating actions that
would seal Saddam’s fate, and thereby jeopardize the prospective reconstitution of one of the
Kremlin’s most valuable client relationships,⁽⁴⁾ the Clinton Administration made a minimal
response. Better yet, from Moscow’s perspective, Washington actually made Primakov its
mediator.

The KGB operative promptly declared that he had a mandate to identify a “compromise” to end
the stand-off, on terms acceptable to Moscow and Baghdad (and Paris and Beijing) and presented
more-or-less as a fait accompli to the United States, Britain and the rest of the international
community. On 20 November, the pro-democracy Russian newspaper Moscow Novaya Izvestiya
published an article offering penetrating insights into Russian thinking about the strategic windfall
President Clinton has handed the Kremlin:

“The United States is turning for assistance to the very countries which united with
Hussein in the Security Council. They are signing major trade deals with Iraq and
seeking the lifting of sanctions, so that these deals can be implemented. The
‘Primakov peace plan’ came into being following an exchange of private messages
between Yeltsin and Saddam. People have started talking about a complete success
for Russian diplomacy, the coming settlement of the Iraq crisis, and even the final
peacemaking between Baghdad and the United Nations.

“By all outward signs, this is almost tantamount to a victory over the laws of
physics. Moscow whistles and world leaders fly to an extraordinary meeting from
all parts of the planet. No one had succeeded, but we have done it – we have
talked Saddam round.” (Emphasis added.)

Naturally, the realization of the Russian and Iraqi gambit to bring about the loosening or
elimination of international sanctions would result in huge financial benefits for countries like
Russia, France and China. They stand to profit handsomely from myriad arms-supply and energy-related opportunities similar to the Total/Gazprom project in Iran’s South Pars offshore gas
fields.⁽⁵⁾ Russia also longs to score substantial political gains in terms of international prestige vis
á vis a United States increasingly regarded as feckless and ineffectual.

The geopolitical consequences of the current standoff with Iraq cross-cut the entire region and
multiple interests, as Moscow’s Novaya Izvestiya went on to point out:

“Tremendous benefits are looming for Russia: the repayment of Iraqi debts from Soviet
times; riches resulting from new oil extraction. Also, how much Russian weaponry
will be required to rebuild the local army, which has fallen to pieces during the
seven-year blockade? It is, in total, a sizable package, worth tens of billions [of
dollars].” (Emphasis added.)

Moscow Strikes at Azerbaijan’s Lifeblood — Hydrocarbons

In addition to these relatively obvious geopolitical and financial gains for Moscow, Primakov’s
“solution” of the Iraq crisis affords the Kremlin another critical benefit: an opportunity to
influence the world oil market to Azerbaijan’s detriment. Oil prices currently stand at roughly
$20 per barrel, yet the Azerbaijani asking price is some $22 per barrel. While a two-dollar
difference may appear modest to the layman, that spread translates into a multi-billion-dollar
impact given the enormous quantities of oil at issue.

If Russia and Iraq succeed in having the Iraqi sanctions substantially eased (to say nothing of
getting them lifted altogether), the end-result would probably be a significant drop in world oil
prices. Such a decline would broaden the existing gap between Azerbaijani and Middle Eastern
oil prices, the effect of which could seriously complicate an already fragile Azeri economy.⁽⁶⁾
Here again Novaya Izvestiya discerned Moscow’s ulterior motives:

“If it were really possible to free Iraq from the yoke of sanctions in a very short space
of time and to bring this mighty flow of oil to market, it would not be at all pleasant for
our southern friends in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Prices would
collapse still further. The gap would increase to a disastrous one. Given such a
development, the Azerbaijani project as such would be called into question.”

The Great Game

It goes without saying that this outcome could be a most debilitating one, not only for Azerbaijan
but for the West’s future energy security, as well. That would be the practical effect were the
Kremlin to succeed in its efforts to impede the development of a secure, main export pipeline to
transport oil from Azerbaijan to international markets. Here again, Russia’s latest play in “the
Great Game” is illuminated by Novaya Izvestiya:

“Whatever people there may say, the opinion of Azerbaijan and/or President Aliyev
personally in determining the route of the of the main export pipeline is of interest to
few people. Everything will be decided by the operators involved in constructing
and servicing the main company pipeline. Economic considerations are most
important to them.“

In other words, if Azerbaijan were faced with a new round of economic and political
hardships, Russia would enjoy increased leverage in forcing Azerbaijan’s government to accept
pipeline routes squarely within Moscow’s sphere of influence.

The Bottom Line

The arguments for the United States to take military and other actions necessary to remove
Saddam Hussein from power are compelling, even if the implications beyond the Persian Gulf of
doing otherwise are not taken into account.⁽⁷⁾ When they are — notably, with respect to the
myriad strategic repercussions in the Caspian Basin — the case is that much more conclusive.
Ample notice has been served, if not by Yevgeny Primakov’s machinations then by the play-by-play depiction of those maneuvers offered by Novaya Izvestiya:

“Two new players are to appear approximately simultaneously in the world market in
the very near historical future: Baghdad, when the sanctions are ultimately lifted; and
Baku, which is experiencing serious problems with technical support for its own
project. Two natural competitors, the outcome of whose confrontation could well
be decided by Moscow by taking advantage of the present situation.”

As Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland observed in a trenchant column last week
concerning the Clinton Administration’s hapless mishandling of the Iraqi crisis, President Clinton
has a personal aversion to “balance-of-power” calculations and dismisses the possibility that
others — especially the Russians — may not share his view as “Old Think.”⁽⁸⁾ Such an attitude on
the part of the President of the United States translates into what might be called “Unthink”; it
engenders a posture that is as out of touch with reality as it is inconsistent with long-term U.S.
national interests in an increasingly dangerous world.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled Take Out Saddam (No. 97-D 168, 10 November
1997) and ‘Iraqi Roulette’: Dodging a Bullet Must Not Be Confused with Ending the Threat
Posed By Saddam (No. 97-D 171, 17 November 1997).

2. See the Perspective by the Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy entitled Sen. D’Amato’s Committee Serves Notice On
Those Who Aid And Abet U.S. Adversaries: No Fund-Raising On American Markets (No. 97-C 161, 30 October 1997).

3. See “Azerbaijan, Russia Discuss Security Issues,” Baku Zerkalo, 8 November 1997.

4. Iraq currently owes Russia as much as $10 billion in outstanding loans, not to mention
contingency contracts for oil development worth billions of dollars more.

5. See the Casey Institute’s Perspectives entitled Sen. D’Amato’s Committee Serves Notice On
Those Who Aid And Abet U.S. Adversaries: No Fund-Raising On American Markets (No. 97-C 161, 30 October 1997), 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) and The French and Russians Certainly ‘Don’t Get It’ on Iran — The Question Is:
Does the Clinton-Gore Team? (No. 97-C 148, 2 October 1997).

6. Azerbaijan’s economy is struggling to cope with the burden of caring for some one million
refugees from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia.

7. See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled Clinton Legacy Watch # 10: Administration
Ineptitude, Appeasement Put Saddam, Primakov Back in Driver’s Seat (No. 97-D 173, 20
November 1997) and Clinton Legacy Watch #11: Dangerous Absurdities on Iraq (No. 97-D
176, 24 November 1997).

8. See “Russia Into the Vacuum,” Washington Post, 21 November 1997.

CEI Letter to President William J. Clinton

September 30, 1997Center for Security Policy

COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE
INSTITUTE

September 26, 1997

President William J. Clinton
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I want to commend you for your decision to host a White House
conference on global climate change, in Washington, on October 6.
This event has the potential significantly to improve public
understanding of the scientific, economic, and political issues
connected with the ongoing negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol.

Such potential can be realized, however, only if participation
in your conference is open to the full spectrum of informed
opinion and recognized expertise on these complex subjects.
Unfortunately, it appears that invitations are now being extended
predominantly, if not exclusively, to those who advocate
increased government control over U.S. and world energy markets.
The public interest would be poorly served by such an exercise in
“preaching to the choir.” It goes without saying that
the associated taxpayer expenditures would be unjustified.

In the interest of assisting you and your staff in making this
event a White House conference truly worthy of the name, I urge
you to include, in numbers equal to the Climate Treaty’s
proponents, distinguished individuals drawn from the ranks of the
scientific, business, public interest, and national security
communities, who have expressed skepticism about the science of
global warming and/or the mandatory energy-use restrictions the
Treaty would entail.

For example, a strong case can be made that the best way to
prepare for the possible consequences of climate change is not to
restrict wealth creation or lock mankind into politically-correct
paths of economic and technological development but to improve
the overall resilience and adaptability of human societies by
making the world freer and, hence, wealthier. That viewpoint,
however, has been all but ignored by most commentators and policy
makers. The White House Conference would be an ideal occasion to
give this neglected alternative a fair hearing. I have taken the
liberty of attaching an illustrative list of prominent
individuals who could help provide balance to the proceedings.

We at the Competitive Enterprise Institute hope that you share
our desire for a genuine and informed debate on climate change
prior to the completion of the Kyoto Protocol and decisions about
whether the United States will be subject to its constraints. If
so, we look forward to working with you to ensure the success of
the upcoming conference.

Sincerely,
/Signed/
Fred L. Smith, Jr.

Center Asks: Are White House Climate Change Extravaganzas Meant To Facilitate Informed Debate — Or Just The Party Line?

September 30, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, the
Clinton Administration will hold the
first of a series of events at or
involving the White House to dramatize
its case for a treaty imposing mandatory
reductions on greenhouse gas emissions.
This event will involve some 100
‘meteorologists’ from around the country
and will feature presentations on the
“science” of global warming
from officials of the National
Oceanographic and Science Administration
(NOAA). This will be followed by what
White House Press Spokesman Michael
McCurry called “a sales pitch”
from the President and Vice President for
the Global Climate Change Treaty.
Participants will then be given an
opportunity to broadcast from the White
House lawn.

Unfortunately, McCurry appears
thoroughly disingenuous in suggesting
that the sales pitching of the
meteorologists will start after
the NOAA briefing — where he declares
they will get nothing but “good,
hard factual information.” In fact, no
effort has been made to expose these
weather reporters to the considerable
body of scientific opinion that does
not agree with the so-called
“consensus” view that the
Clinton Administration cites to justify
its support for agreements that will
require radical cuts in fossil fuel
consumption in the United States.

What ‘Consensus’?

For example, two of the Nation’s most
prominent and media-experienced
meteorologists — Norman J.
Macdonald, a Certified
Consulting Meteorologist and former
Senior Meteorologist at Accu-Weather,
Inc., and Dr. Joseph
Sobel, currently Accu-Weather’s
Senior Vice President — are neither on
the agenda nor invited to be among the
participants in tomorrow’s events. This
is all the more extraordinary since they
co-authored for Accu-Weather one of the
most informative and user-friendly
analyses of the subject of global warming
entitled Changing Weather? Facts and
Fallacies About Climate Change and
Weather Extremes.

Concerned that the White House
extravaganza might mislead some of his
former colleagues in the media
meteorology industry, Mr. Macdonald sent
them copies of his study with a cover
letter dated 23 September 1997 that said,
in part:

You will note, if you take the time to
read this short report, that statistics
on hurricanes, tornadoes, and
temperatures are not quite up to date.
But there is no evidence of any
significant change in any of the trends
in the data presented in the report over
the past 2 to 3 years. In fact, the
satellite lower troposphere temperature
observations continue to show absolutely
no evidence of any increase in global
temperatures over the period from January
of 1979 through the Spring of this year.

The conjecture that the atmosphere
will not only warm up dramatically over
the next one hundred years and the
warming will be accompanied by
substantial changes in the climate is
based only on climate, numerical models.
As meteorologists, we know that in order
to change the climate there must be a
change in the time and spatial
distribution of the weather elements that
enter into the climatological statistics.
As meteorologists we also know that those
changes can only be produced by changing
the tracts, intensity and frequency of
cyclones and anticyclones.

Therefore, in order for the models to
predict climate change the models must be
able to forecast the changes in the
tracks, intensity and frequency of
cyclones and anticyclones over long
periods of time. When you consider the
skill in the extended range models used
today (whether it be the European model,
or the MRF), in predicting the basic
weather pattern, especially cyclogenesis,
beyond two or three days, why can anyone
give any serious consideration to
accurate forecasting beyond that point?

Additional Evidence of
Widespread Non-Consensus

Further evidence of the lack of
consensus among scientists about the
reality and implications of global
warming was provided to congressional
staff, members of the press and others in
a briefing on “The Other Side of the
Story” held yesterday in the Senate
Dirksen Office Building under the
sponsorship of the National
Center for Policy Analysis and
the Competitive Enterprise
Institute. Following
introductory comments by one of the
Senate’s most knowledgeable members on
this subject, Sen. Chuck Hagel
(R-NE), two of the Nation’s leading
experts — Dr. Sallie Baliunas
and Dr. Roy Spencer, the
latter a senior U.S. government scientist
employed by NASA — convincingly
challenged the assumptions and
conclusions of the global warming
theorists. Among the other briefers to
address the packed hearing room was the
Center for Security Policy’s director, Frank
J. Gaffney, Jr. who discussed
the myriad and potentially serious
repercussions the Global Climate Change
Treaty (and/or executive orders requiring
significant reductions in greenhouse gas
consumption) could have for the U.S.
military and national security. (See Mr.
Gaffney’s prepared
remarks.)

Will the Meteorologists
Find the White House Fair Weather
Friends?

Given the actual lack of consensus, it
is puzzling why Michael McCurry would try
to mislead his audience by suggesting
that “There’s not, among
serious scientists and experts, not a lot
of disagreement.” In fact,
in an implicit confirmation that there
would be no attempt made at balance in
the NOAA and White House presentations,
he claimed, “We hope [the media
meteorologists] do [go to the Heritage
Foundation afterward for another point of
view]….They should. Good journalists
should test their information in their
search for truth, and in doing so,
they’ll find out what a consensus
there is on climate change.”

One possible explanation can be
inferred from McCurry’s repartee with
members of the White House press corps —
who were clearly chagrined over the
attention (and air-time) their colleagues
would be getting as a result of the
Administration’s global warming
“dog-and-pony show” tomorrow. The
press made no effort to conceal their
contempt for their meteorologist
colleagues and McCurry appeared to pander
to that sentiment. If such an
attitude is shared widely within the
Administration, fears that the weather
reporters are simply being exploited
would appear well founded.

The Bottom Line

There will be another of these
extravaganzas next week. It is being
billed as a White House Conference on
Global Climate Change featuring Messrs.
Clinton and Gore and several hundred
participants, including many who will be
connected via satellite downlinks to
locations around the country.

It currently appears that the Clinton
team has no more interest in making that
event a vehicle for informed debate and true
public education than it does in giving
the media meteorologists just “good,
hard factual information.” In the
absence of respected scientists like Mr.
Macdonald and Dr. Sobel, physicians,
economists and national security experts
who challenge the “science” of
global warming and have well-founded
concerns about a treaty that is based
upon it, such a meeting will amount to a
propaganda event unworthy of government
sponsorship and taxpayer underwriting.

In the hope that at the eleventh hour
such an outcome could be avoided, Fred L.
Smith, Jr., President of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute wrote the president
on 26 September urging that the White
House Conference be made a balanced and
constructive dialogue about global
climate change. (See href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_146at2″>the attached
letter.) He included the names of
some 90 prominent, respected individuals
with expertise in a wide variety of
relevant areas who are on the record as
skeptics about the Administration’s
analyses and policy responses in this
field.

The Center for Security Policy urges
the President to serve the public
interest by having a real
dialogue on global warming, not a
dialogue of the deaf or the one-way
non-dialogue of a master propagandist.
After all, as Michael McCurry himself
said today:

“[I]f you do this the wrong way,
the economic consequences could be
devastating. The cost that Americans
would pay in increases for fuel would be
extraordinary if you don’t get the
science right and you don’t figure out
what are the most efficient ways to get
the reductions in gas emissions that you
want.”

Caspian Watch # 8: ‘Silk Road’ Legislation Opens New Opportunities For U.S. Strategic, Commercial Interests In The Caspian Basin

September 23, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): America’s
long-term interests in the Caspian Basin
will be the focus of action in the Senate
today thanks to initiatives by two of
that institution’s rising stars —
freshmen Senators Chuck Hagel
(R-NE) and Sam Brownback
(R-KS). In his capacity as Chairman of
the Foreign Relations Committee’s
Subcommittee on International Economic
Policy, Export and Trade Promotion,
Senator Hagel will be presiding this
afternoon over an extremely important
hearing on the strategic and economic
stakes associated with the energy-rich
Caspian Sea region.

Senator Brownback — who chairs the
Committee’s Near Eastern and South Asian
Affairs Subcommittee — will use the
occasion of his testimony before the
Hagel Subcommittee to introduce “The
Silk Road Strategy Act of 1997.”
This valuable legislation is designed to:

Assist the region in
developing intra-regional
economic cooperation and friendly
relations which may stabilize the
Caspian Basin and help fortify
the area against future conflict;

Support U.S. strategic
and commercial interests by
providing urgently needed
economic, technical and financial
assistance, as well as
help with the development of
telecommunications and
transportation infrastructures in
Azerbaijan and other nations in
the region;

Provide security-related
assistance in the form of
military education,
counter-proliferation training
and surplus U.S. military
equipment and supplies; and

Encourage democratic and
free-market institutions.

In addition to Senator Brownback, the
Hagel Subcommittee will hear testimony
from: Stuart Eizenstat,
Under Secretary of State for Economic,
Business and Agricultural Affairs; former
Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger; and Charles
Pitman, the Chairman and
President of one of the pre-eminent
American businesses doing business in the
region, Amoco Eurasia Petroleum Co.

The Great Game

The Hagel-Brownback initiatives come
at a critical moment. Moscow’s
denials notwithstanding, Russia is
increasingly cooperating with Iran on a
broad array of activities inimical to
U.S. and Western interests. Not
least among these is the effort the two
governments have mounted in recent months
to undermine the pro-Western government
in Azerbaijan through the infiltration of
intelligence agents and special forces.⁽¹⁾

Unfortunately, the Russian-Iranian
gambit in Azerbaijan has enjoyed a
greater chance of success thanks to the
inability of the United States to provide
various forms of direct assistance —
including even humanitarian aid — to the
government in Baku, thanks to the
pernicious Section 907 of the Freedom
Support Act, which has to date prohibited
such assistance flows.⁽²⁾
The Brownback “Silk Road”
legislation will go a long way toward
restoring balance to U.S. policy towards
states of the Caspian Basin and, in
particular, towards Western-oriented,
secular Muslim Azerbaijan.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
applauds the efforts of Senator Brownback
to craft a strategically and economically
sensible U.S. policy toward the Caspian
Sea region and Senator Hagel’s decision
to hold timely — and much needed —
hearings on this matter. The Center also
recognizes the work of Senators
Alfonse D’Amato, Lauch
Faircloth and Jon Kyl
who have done much in recent weeks to
focus public and congressional scrutiny
on the dangers inherent in the
intensifying Russian-Iranian strategic
relationship. Taken together, these
initiatives may set the United States on
the Silk Road to a new, more
strategically robust and more mutually
beneficial relationship with states in
this increasingly important region.

– 30 –

1. See the Casey
Institute of the Center for Security
Policy’s Perspective
entitled The French and
Russians Certainly ‘Don’t Get It’ on Iran
— The Question Is: Does the Clinton-Gore
Team? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-C_148″>No. 97-C 148, 2
October 1997).

2. See previous
Center papers in this ‘Caspian Watch’
series, including: Caspian
Watch # 7: President Aliyev’s Visit
Should Translate Into The ‘Beginning Of A
Beautiful Friendship’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_107″>No. 97-D 107, 29
July 1997) and Caspian Watch
# 6: Weinberger Issues Timely Alert
Against Interest Group’s Highjacking Of
U.S. Caspian Policy ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_66″>No. 97-D 66, 12
May 1997).

Caspian Watch #7: President Aliyev’s Visit Should Translate into the ‘Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship’

July 29, 1997Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Caspian Watch #7: President
Aliyev’s Visit Should Translate Into The
‘Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship’

(Washington, D.C.): The past ten day’s
events made one thing, as Richard Nixon
used to say, perfectly clear: The
“Great Game” is on once again
in the strategically critical and
increasingly turbulent Caspian Sea Basin.⁽¹⁾

In previous eras, that term has been
used to describe the periodic struggles
in this region between great powers
competing for territory, resources and
influence. The stakes are today higher
then ever before. By some estimates, the
Caspian Basin is the locus of between 100
and 200 billion barrels of oil and
natural gas deposits that could total
more than those of the North Sea and
Alaska’s North Slope combined. Figured
conservatively at today’s prices, this
equates to between two and four trillion
dollars worth of exploitable hydrocarbon
assets — a figure that does not include
the tens of billions of dollars that will
ultimately be invested in the region for
the infrastructure needed to extract and
transport these resources.

You Can’t Tell the Players

Until very recently, official
Washington has been on the sidelines of
the momentous contest taking place to
shape, if not control, the destiny of the
Caspian Basin. In its absence, Russia,
China and Iran have been jockeying for
position. Russia, in particular, has been
employing every tool at its disposal —
from financial incentives (including
bribes) to violent intimidation (notably,
via the arming of proxy forces to
destabilize or coerce those in the
region) to realize Moscow’s goal of
dominating the exploitation of Caspian
oil.

Perhaps the most egregious
example of such intimidation has been the
assistance which Russia has provided to
Armenian military operations against
neighboring Azerbaijan and the contested
Azerbaijani enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Thanks to copious quantities of
everything from Russian-made small arms
to deadly missiles, Armenia has wrested
substantial territory from Azerbaijan
while imposing enormous economic hardship
on a nation ill-equipped to contend with
the needs of hundreds of thousands of
refugees.

These actions have afforded Russia
leverage on the one oil-rich nation in
the Caspian Basin intent on pursuing a
pro-Western course. Azerbaijan has made
clear its desire to do business with
American petroleum firms and has sought
repeatedly to develop cordial diplomatic
and military ties with the United States.
Here too Russia’s machinations in Armenia
have proved helpful to the Kremlin:
Citing the conflict between Azerbaijan
and Armenia, the politically
well-connected Armenian-American
community has prevailed on successive
U.S. Congresses to bar the provision even
of direct humanitarian assistance to Baku
— something for which a pariah state
like North Korea is eligible.

Where’s Washington?

The Clinton Administration’s reflexive
deference to Moscow has only slowly begun
to give way to an appreciation that an
economically successful, pro-Western and
secular Muslim state in Azerbaijan is in
the U.S. interest, even if it is not
in the Kremlin’s. As a result, none
other than the chief architect of
Clinton’s Russo-centric policy, Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott,
was heard last week emphasizing the
importance of improved American ties with
Azerbaijan, calling for the repeal of the
legislation (Section 907 of the Freedom
Support Act of 1992) that effectively
makes impossible any direct U.S.
involvement with Azerbaijan and warning
Russia against “infringement on the
independence of its neighbors.”

Secretary Talbott’s speech was only
one of the indications that Washington is
finally awakening to what is at stake in
the Transcaucasus and Caspian Basin. Senator
Sam Brownback, chairman of the
Foreign Relations Mideast subcommittee
(Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs),
recently traveled to Baku and returned
determined to recast U.S.-Azerbaijan
relations. Within the past few days, the
Senator: introduced a Sense of the Senate
resolution calling for a more balanced
American policy toward the southern
Caucasus and Central Asia; made a major
address of his own on the subject at the
Heritage Foundation; and convened
important hearings into U.S.
geopolitical, strategic and economic
interests in the region. Forceful
testimony taken from, among others,
former Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger, is expected
shortly to result in further legislative
recommendations for corrective action.

Perhaps most importantly, the
Administration has finally seen its way
clear to invite President Aliyev to make
an official visit to Washington,
complete with a luncheon with Mr.
Clinton. It can only be hoped that this
occasion will mark the beginning of what
Bogart once called “a beautiful
friendship” — replete with more
active U.S. leadership in ending the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict,
alleviating its counterproductive
repercussions for relations between this
country and Azerbaijan and introducing a
new, and far more engaged, American
policy in the region.

Such a policy is all the more
necessary in the wake of the Clinton
Administration’s deplorable announcement
on Monday that it would have no objection
to the construction of a $1.6 billion
pipeline to carry natural gas from
Turkmenistan to Turkey via Iran. This
step will not only unmistakably signal an
American willingness to ease Iran’s
international isolation under
circumstances in which that is still most
ill-advised. It will also serve to
facilitate Teheran’s ambition to
penetrate and exercise influence over the
Caspian Sea Basin.

The Bottom Line

The United States needs to bend every
effort to finding the means to bring the
oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea
Basin to market through routes that will
not enrich the Iranians, or, for that
matter, the Russians or Chinese, and that
are not subject to possible coercive
manipulation by such powers. The
obvious place to start is by forging a
strong strategic partnership with
Azerbaijan — the best hope that an
independent, pro-Western state will
survive the current, deadly iteration of
the Great Game — and nurturing regional
arrangements that will permit its
hydrocarbon assets to transit safely to
Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, via
Georgia.

– 30 –

1. For more on this
strategically important part of the
world, see some of the Center’s
additional output in its Caspian
Watch series of papers: Caspian
Watch #6: Weinberger Issues Timely Alert
Against Interest Group’s Hijacking of
U.S. Caspian Policy ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D66″>No. 97-D 66, 12
May 1997); Caspian Watch #5:
Senator Byrd Takes the Lead in Securing
US Access to 200 Billions of Barrels of
Oil in the Caspian Sea ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D32″>No. 97-D 32, 25
February 1997).

Russia’s Oil Grab

May 9, 1997Center for Security Policy

By Caspar W. Weinberger and Peter Schweizer
New York Times, 09 May 1997

As the West celebrates the apparent expansion of NATO into Central Europe, Russia is making a concerted bid to achieve a strategic victory of its own: dominance of the energy resources in the Caspian Sea region. If Moscow succeeds, its victory could prove more significant than the West’s success in enlarging NATO.

The stakes in the Caspian are enormous. There are reportedly up to 200 billion barrels of oil and natural gas in the region. Azerbaijan alone could produce as much as two million barrels a day by 2010.

Open access to the Caspian is critical if the United States is to diversify its energy sources and reduce its dangerous reliance on Middle Eastern supplies. Oil in the Caspian region is now channeled principally through pipelines to Russian Black Sea ports, and Moscow wants to keep it that way, because that means it controls the flow.

At the center of the new Great Game is Moscow’s effort to put the squeeze on Azerbaijan, a secular Muslim state whose President, Heydar Aliyev, once a member of the Soviet Politburo, welcomes Western investment. Over the past few years Russia has tried to push Azerbaijan to allow Russian military bases and to join the Commonwealth of Independent States, the confederation of former Soviet republics. At the same time, Russia has given critical military aid to neighboring Armenia, allowing it to occupy 20 percent of Azerbaijan.

Most disturbing is the admission by Aman Tuleyev, a Russian Government minister, that more than $1 billion in arms were shipped illegally to Armenia, apparently to be used against Azerbaijan. The Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported that Armenian military experts were trained in the use of advanced rocket systems last year at a Russian missile range.

The Kremlin is also pressuring the United States to modify a new section of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, which sets limits on troop levels. Russia wants to place more troops in the southern tier.

Moscow has struck a strategic bargain with Iran, the other player in this drama. Iran stands to lose enormously if oil is allowed to flow freely from the Caspian. Russia has provided Teheran with nuclear-related technologies, missile components and other advanced equipment. In June 1996, Russia and Iran issued a joint statement: “Iran and Russia should cooperate with regional states to prevent the presence of [United States] power in the Caspian Sea.”

Iran sees the Azerbaijanis as a threat because they may provoke separatist sentiment among its large ethnic Azeri population. Azerbaijan, for its part, has pointedly denied Iran entry into the consortium of countries invited to develop oil in the Caspian Sea. The Aliyev Government has also resisted Iranian demands that it terminate friendly relations with Israel.

If Russia and Iran succeed in their designs on the Caspian, they will have potential leverage over Western economies, which will be left to rely on the unstable Persian Gulf region for oil.

But American policy has thus far failed to reflect the strategic interests we have in the region. Armenia, which has welcomed Russian troops, has received more aid from the United States per capita than any nation but Israel. And after lobbying by Armenian-Americans, Congress made it illegal to give direct American assistance to Azerbaijan.

The Clinton Administration needs to encourage closer relations with Azerbaijan and persuade Congress to change its priorities on aid. Our long-term security interests are at stake.

Robinson To Congress: Use Oil Reserves To Protect The Taxpayer From Price Gouging

August 7, 1990Center for Security Policy

Roger W. Robinson, Jr., former chief economist on the National Security Council and member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors, told Congress today that the United States and its allies have an alternative to crippling price hikes and speculation in oil prices.

In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Robinson reminded legislators of a Reagan Administration initiative developed in the winter of 1983-84 when the Iran-Iraq conflict entered into its "tanker war" phase and oil facilities were coming under periodic attack. In order to head off a round of sharply higher energy prices — spurred by anticipation of future supply disruptions and the activities of speculators — the United States obtained the agreement of its allies to release Western oil stocks at the first sign of significant price hikes.

Robinson testified, "I believe that this proven alliance policy of early stock releases calculated to help keep oil price increases manageable should have been publicly reaffirmed by the Bush Administration at the outset of this crisis. Such an action could already have contributed importantly to avoiding the 10-15 cent per gallon increase in gasoline prices which has occurred over the past six days — to say nothing of the sharp upward spiral of world oil prices now underway."

Robinson also urged Congress to reject the Bush Administration’s willingness to seize on the Middle East energy crisis as its latest pretext for providing extremely ill-considered assistance to the Soviet Union’s energy sector. He observed:

…The Soviet Union has amply demonstrated just this year, its willingness to withhold oil and natural gas deliveries as an instrument of repression against Lithuania. It is also in the midst of cutting back desperately needed oil supplies to countries in Eastern Europe such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria by some 20-30 percent.

Accordingly, I would urge [the Energy and Commerce] and other congressional committees to place this policy option — which can only enhance Moscow’s future ability to exploit for political, strategic or economic purposes resulting dependencies on Soviet energy supplies — near the bottom of the list of numerous, more sound proposals to reduce U.S. and Western exposure to cut-offs of Middle East oil supplies.

The Center’s proposal that the Reagan approach to oil stock sales be adopted at once was favorably reviewed in the prestigious trade publication Energy Daily which carried an article entitled "U.S., Allies Should Plan to Avoid Oil Price Run Up Fed by Speculation." Copies of this article and Robinson’s testimony are attached.