Bush's new Iraq: Rhetoric vs. reality

2004-05-25T20:00:00-04:00

President Bush’s Monday night speech—the first of six on the transition in Iraq—was aimed primarily at a U.S. audience whose confidence in his handling of the war has hit record lows. The president’s upbeat rhetoric about a free and democratic Iraq contrasted sharply with the ambiguous provisions of the draft UN resolution presented to the Security Council earlier in the day.p.

The president promised “full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens,” and a security role for U.S. troops “as part of a multinational force authorized by the United Nations.” But the actual resolution introduced at the Security Council offers neither Iraqi sovereignty nor a new international force, save for a contingent to protect UN officials.p.

A new interim Iraqi government will be created, but it will neither command its own security forces, nor have authority over foreign troops on its soil. Its successor, a democratically elected government, will inherit the arrangement.p.

The multinational force specified in the resolution is not a new body, but the same force authorized in previous UN resolutions. It will remain exclusively under U.S. command. Such a formulation falls dramatically short of the demands made by a number of Security Council members for greater internationalization of the transition. The plan is unlikely to produce additional forces so badly needed to assist and relieve U.S. troops.p.

The draft resolution notes “the importance of the consent of the sovereign government of Iraq” but contains no procedures for giving Iraqis a say in whether foreign troops should remain or how they should operate. This contradicts Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recent statement that the U.S. would comply in the unlikely event that an interim Iraqi government requested our departure.p.

The president said “we have no interest in occupation,” but the draft UN resolution authorizes an open-ended military commitment. The operations of the U.S.-led force are to be reviewed after 12 months, but there is no mechanism for renewing the force’s mandate, which could be terminated only by an affirmative vote of the Security Council, where the United States has veto power. Previous Security Council provisions for limiting the mandate of the U.S.- led force are absent in the current draft.p.

The president did not tell the American people about some of the obstacles ahead. The previous Iraqi draft constitution has collapsed amidst factional disagreements and left two critical questions unanswered: How will the interim government function and organize elections in the absence of a legal framework? Will the decrees previously issued by the U.S.-led coalition remain legally binding?p.

Also unmentioned was the legal status of those arrested and held by U.S. forces in Iraqi prisons, as well as the administration of the prisons themselves. Whatever the merits of tearing down Abu Ghraib and building a “humane, well-supervised prison system,” most Iraqis (and Security Council members) would interpret sovereignty to mean control over prisons and the administration of justice. This is not specified.p.

Since 2002, the Bush administration has undermined the UN’s role in arms inspection, war prevention and—until recently—postwar reconstruction. It has now turned most of the foreseeable political future of Iraq over to a small cluster of UN experts. Yet barely a month before the hand-over of power, United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has not recruited a willing and capable slate of nominees for the leadership positions the president so proudly announced by title. This should send chills down the political spines of every member of Congress.p.

U.S. citizens can only hope that the next presidential speech will provide details about an Iraqi future that is acceptable not only to them, but to the international community being asked for its support.p.

_Credit: George A Lopez is director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace 91��Ƶ at the University of Notre Dame. David Cortright is president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and a fellow of the Kroc Institute. _

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(Opinion): The real failure in intelligence on Iraq

2004-03-10T19:00:00-05:00

|p. IN THE PAST two weeks, CIA Director George Tenet has testified behind closed doors at the Senate Intelligence Committee and publicly at the Senate Armed Services Committee about his agency’s pre-war knowledge of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Tenet was asked why, in the words of former weapons hunter David Kay, US intelligence agencies had “gotten it wrong” about Iraq.p. In this and other inquiries, however, the senators should stop asking why Washington saw weapons where there weren’t any. Rather, they must ask — and have answered - why a plethora of publicly available information on the destruction and deterioration of Iraq’s weapons capability was not processed into the equation about the scope of Iraqi firepower.p. Without question, verifiable “on the plus side” data about the success of economic sanctions and the destruction of WMD materiel supervised by UN inspectors from 1991 to 1998 was consistently neglected by war planners, the press, and politicians. And classified intelligence should have augmented this data. But the inability or unwillingness to properly debit the 1990 estimates of Iraqi weapons with the discount factor of their degradation due to our own successful policies constitutes an intelligence debacle.p. No more glaring example of this exists than the failure of analysts to properly prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell for his Feb. 5, 2003, presentation before the Security Council. A number of prohibited materials mentioned by Powell were, in fact, known to have been intercepted before entering Iraq. These materials included specialized aluminum tubes, vacuum tubes, a magnet production line, a large filament winding machine, fluorine gas, and other goods that could have nuclear weapons-related applications. Senators need to examine how and why such flawed testimony was permitted to move forward.p. They also must assess why Washington continually miscalculated the findings of the UN’s first inspection team about the destruction of chemical and biological agents in the mid‘90s. Then there is the question about the muted report of the UNMOVIC team of Hans Blix, which, in more than 230 unimpeded on-site inspections of suspected biological or chemical sites, found neither alleged stockpiles nor remnants.p. The senators would do well to examine a proposition that eludes others in Washington: that the system actually worked. The inspections and sanctions programs that the United States vigorously enforced with many and varied partners successfully kept dangerous items out of Iraq despite Saddam’s intentions. This reality was confirmed by more than UN sources. The British Joint Intelligence Committee report of September 2002 provided ample documentation of effectiveness but worried about post-1998 developments that could not be directly inspected. Various think tanks and our own research project detailed how and why sanctions made the reconstruction of what inspectors had destroyed highly unlikely.p. Unless policy makers and the American people know why and how these accomplishments were not factored into prewar assessments of Iraqi capabilities, we will repeat the same intelligence and judgmental errors in the future.p. This concern could not be more relevant as the United States engages in sensitive negotiations with Iran, Libya, Syria, and North Korea about nonproliferation. The Bush administration maintains that Libya’s leader Moammar Khadafy has come clean on his WMDs due to successful preemptive war in Iraq. The Libyans and others note the importance of the sanctions against Libya in convincing Khadafy to surrender such weapons.p. In light of the real intelligence failure regarding Iraq, will the CIA or the Senate actually ask the questions most relevant to arriving at a definitive answer about Khadafy?p. George A. Lopez, of the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and David Cortright, president of the Fourth Freedom Forum, are coauthors of “Winning Without War” and “Sanctions and the Search for Security.”

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Bush's new Iraq: Rhetoric vs. reality

(Opinion): The real failure in intelligence on Iraq