In a
previous (Part 1 of 3) diary I said that Stephen Hadley and Robert Joseph, as the authors of the now-famously discredited 16 words regarding Iraqi pursuit of Nigerian Yellow-cake uranium, may have had more complex motives than simply promoting the case for War with Iraq. I suggested that their
motive for the inclusion of the sixteen words and for their (and others) possible involvement in the leak of Plame's identity and job seems to lie in an ongoing campaign by key individuals in this administration...
to promote their vision for the use of nuclear weapons as a counter-proliferation tactic and to muzzle opponents of that vision - opponents that included the WMD team at the CIA.
Part 2 of this report (below) focuses on the competing visions at the center of this controversy and explores the revolutionary policy goals of the individuals currently guiding America's nuclear proliferation policy.
But before we begin, I remind you that Part 3 of this report will bring us back to how indictments in the Plame-leak case may affect whether the United States will pre-emtively use Nuclear Weapons during this Administration.
Non-Proliferation v. Counter-Proliferation
OK, let's begin with - as far as I can tell - an unexplored fact. On May 5, 2003, Bill Keller published an article in the New York Times Magazine about the battle between Non-Proliferation and Counter-Proliferation. (YES! That Bill Keller!... The day before Kristoff challenges the Yellowcake story in the NYT - based on Wilson's off-the-record assessment - Bill Keller, who would become Judy Miller's boss as NYT Editor, was identifying the rift between these camps IN THE NYT!... incestuous or what?... but more on that in Part 3.) Here is Keller's assessment of the battle lines.
The world of people who worry about nuclear weapons for a living is divided into two hostile camps, which sometimes seem more absorbed in fighting each other than in containing the spread of nuclear weaponry.
The traditional arms controllers are advocates of treaties, export controls, international agencies and sanctions -- an elaborate regime intended to avert the spread and use of nuclear weapons. They will tell you that arms control has worked, that the handful of countries we worry about as nuclear pretenders is the same handful we worried about 20 years ago. The number of nuclear states has held at eight (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan), plus, it is now presumed, North Korea. And several countries (Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan) have backed away. The arms controllers say that what is needed now is to shore up those multilateral disciplines, fortify their enforcement and restore the sense of taboo surrounding these weapons. At the heart of their argument is a conviction that nuclear weapons, per se, are a hazard of a unique kind, and that part of discouraging their spread is a willingness to reduce our own arsenals -- at least to minimal levels, and ideally, in some future verifiable realm, to nothing.
Opposing the arms controllers is a new and ascendant camp, which asserts that the old constraints have broken down. Against the ineffectual diplomacy of traditional arms control, they offer a relatively coldblooded self-interest and confrontation most fulsomely demonstrated by the invasion of Iraq, although the menu of options includes surgical intervention, blockades, economic sanctions and the purely political muscle of public exposure and brutal candor.
In the nuclear world, traditionalists talk about "nonproliferation." The new school prefers the more muscular term "counterproliferation," which refers to a subset of activities involving the military. It should not surprise you to learn that under President Bush, the White House office responsible for these issues has renamed itself to incorporate the word "counterproliferation." Iraq was the first "counterproliferation" war.
There are serious tactical differences within the administration about how thoroughly to purge the legacy of old-fashioned arms control. But the senior policy makers in the area of arms control -- at the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House -- are pretty uniformly of the diplomacy-has-failed school. The principal players, like Under Secretary John Bolton at State, Under Secretary Douglas Feith and Assistant Secretary J.D. Crouch at Defense and Robert Joseph, who runs the nuclear franchise at the National Security Council, have voluminous records as fierce critics of the arms-control gospel from their days on the outside.
The counterproliferationists put little faith in treaties. Last year they successfully discarded the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibited weapons to shoot down incoming missiles for fear that this kind of defense would ignite a new arms race. The White House has sworn that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would do what its name suggests, will never be ratified. As for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970 and is supposed to limit the spread of nuclear technology and material, the administration accepts it as a bequest from the past but regards it as pointless. Only those who find it in their interest to obey will do so, Bush officials say, and the rest will cheat.
To the counterproliferators, the main problem is not nuclear weapons; it is bad regimes armed with nuclear weapons. Treaties and test bans, they say, limit the behavior of only the kinds of law-abiding people who obey treaties -- people like us. Thus the administration opposes any treaties that might inhibit us from developing new additions to our nuclear arsenal. And counterproliferators insist on our right to explore new species of nuclear weaponry, like precision-guided bunker-busters to cope with defenders who have buried their defenses under thick layers of concrete.
The logic at times resembles the tautology of an N.R.A. bumper sticker: If nukes are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes. The Bush policy is to worry about the outlaws rather than the nukes.
In the January/February 2003 volume of the Multi-National Review, William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca had already assessed the implications of the counter-proliferationist's policy goals...
Today, the word coming from the Pentagon's recently released Nuclear Posture Review is that nuclear weapons are here to stay. If the recommendations from the Bush administration's review are carried out, the declared purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons could change from deterrence and weapon of last resort to a central, usable component of the U.S. anti-terror arsenal.
The origins of this dramatic shift in U.S. nuclear policy trace to corporate-financed think tanks like the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP). NIPP's January 2001 report, "Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control," served as a model for the Bush administration's review. There are a number of parallels in the two reports. Both recommend developing a new generation of "usable" lower-yield nuclear weapons, expanding the U.S. nuclear "hit list" and expanding the set of scenarios in which nuclear weapons may be used.
Three members of the study group which produced the NIPP report are now in the administration. These include National Security Council members Stephen Hadley and Robert Joseph and Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Stephen Cambone.
You will recall from the previous installment that William Arkin published an article in the LA Times in January 2003 called The Nuclear Option in Iraq. In that article he stated...
One year after President Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea the "axis of evil," the United States is thinking about the unthinkable: It is preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iraq.
At the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Omaha and inside planning cells of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, target lists are being scrutinized, options are being pondered and procedures are being tested to give nuclear armaments a role in the new U.S. doctrine of "preemption."
According to multiple sources close to the process, the current planning focuses on two possible roles for nuclear weapons:
attacking Iraqi facilities located so deep underground that they might be impervious to conventional explosives;
thwarting Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction.
Nuclear weapons have, since they were first created, been part of the arsenal discussed by war planners. But the Bush administration's decision to actively plan for possible preemptive use of such weapons, especially as so-called bunker busters, against Iraq represents a significant lowering of the nuclear threshold. It rewrites the ground rules of nuclear combat in the name of fighting terrorism.
Hadley and Joseph would have been central to such planning of course. And - according to William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca - they were guided in their planning by the policy goals of a group of neo-conservatives who - as members of the William Kristol's Project for A New American Century (PNAC) - placed "counter-proliferation" on the map. (Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby and Dick Cheney were all signatories to the PNAC.)
As we move towards possible confrontations with Iran and North Korea over their pursuit of nuclear weapons, and as we face the ever-increasing possibility of civil war within Iraq, these counter-proliferationists will be increasingly tempted to follow their own policy statements and "un-cork the nuclear bottle" by use tactical nuclear weapons.
In fact, there are already reports that such planning may be under way. In January of this year, Jefferson Morely wrote a piece for the Washington Post which explored the "growing possibility" of military conflict between the U.S. and Iran over Iran's nuclear aspirations. The combination of the situation in Iran with the Counter-proliferationists' stated goals and tactics, seems to be a recipe for "uncorking the nuclear bottle."
In the meantime, the proponents of counter-proliferation have systematically been neutralized by the Administration.
We do not know Valerie Plame's exact roll or responsibilities within the WMD team. There have been unconfirmed reports that she was onto intelligence related to the A.Q. Khan investigation which made the counter-proliferationists uncomfortable. But there seems little doubt - especially after reading Sy Hersh's piece from October 2003 - that the CIA was primarily made up of non-proliferationists, and the counter-proliferationists wanted that to change.
What is very clear is that Valerie Plame's boss, Alan Foley, a 26 year CIA veteran who had the WMD and Non-Proliferation brief at the Agency tried repeatedly to keep the references to Nigerian Yellowcake out of the State of the Union. Foley quit the CIA in October of 2003.
Alan Foley, who heads the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center, told colleagues in a note dated Aug. 29 that he had been "thinking about life after the agency for some time" and decided to leave after 26 years to enter the private sector. - He alluded to this summer's finger-pointing between the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House over who was responsible for an unsubstantiated claim in President Bush's State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.
John McLauglin, who was deputy DCI to George Tenet, made these remarks in June of 2004 during the final month of his tenure before he too resigned.
I will not say that everything stamped classified should be--secrecy is a grant of trust, not power. And I know that the overwhelming majority of American journalists are not only exacting, but courageous and patriotic. And the American people--through the press and their representatives in Congress--need to understand what we do on their behalf. What we do well, where we fall short, and what we are doing about it.
But they also need to understand -- and I believe they do -- that, taken to extremes, exposure of the nuts and bolts of our work undercuts our ability to do that work. I just wonder sometimes if everyone inside the Beltway or the media does understand this. Replacing a collection capability lost to leaks takes both time and money. But the real loss must be measured in a country that is less safe and less well defended.
In fact--and this is one of the most important points I can leave you with--our adversaries, not possessing the conventional power of the United States, search for ways to gain an asymmetric advantage over us. Think about this. Their ability to keep a secret is one of those ways. Especially now, when we have nearly lost our ability to do so.
A reasonable extrapolation of McLauglin's comments might be that - like terrorists - the proponents of counter-proliferation were engaged in their own brand of asymmetrical warfare... they used leaks and innuendos to undermine and pressure the work and opinions of those who did not agree with their policy goals or with their interpretation of intelligence.
Meanwhile, Robert Joseph has taken over John Bolton's job as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs and Steven Hadley is now Bush's National Security Advisor. Are there the two Administration positions more relevant to advising the President on dealing with the emergence of a nuclear Iran or on "uncorking the nuclear bottle" by using tactical nuclear weapons? Well, maybe Secretary of Defense and Vice President of the United States.
Join me in a week or so for Part 3 of this series, where I will tie it all back to the importance to our national security of promptly prosecuting the revealers of Valerie Plame's name and identity.