Unqualified Offerings

Kenneth Pollack seems to have persuaded many fence-sitters to support war with his book, The Threatening Storm. I’ve been curious but cheap, basically hoping to get Pollack’s case for free, and Dr. Manhattan kindly pointed me to Pollack’s own condensation of his case in the New York Times of February 21. Pollack’s main business in this article is to refute the case that Saddam can be deterred – a case made, among other places, here on this website. Pollack:

With the Bush administration set to put a resolution on Iraq before the United Nations Security Council next week, those opposed to war will rally around the notion that Saddam Hussein can be deterred from aggression. They will continue to say that the mere presence of United Nations inspectors will prevent him from building nuclear weapons, and that even if he were to acquire them he could still be contained.

Unfortunately, these claims fly in the face of 12 years — and in truth more like 30 years — of history.

And most of the rest of the essay is Pollack’s reading of 30 years of history. A big question, though not the only question, is “How good is his reading?”

Right away there are problems. Pollack starts with establishing the mere fact of Iraq’s attempts to procure nuclear weapons. To his credit, he later troubles to deal with the distinction between acquiring weapons and using them, but the way he makes his case on the former problematizes his credibility:

Four years later, the international agency was so certain that it had eradicated the Iraqi nuclear program that it wanted to end aggressive inspections in favor of passive “monitoring.” Then a slew of defectors came out of Iraq — including Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who led the Iraqi program to build weapons of mass destruction; Wafiq al-Samarrai, one of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chiefs; and Khidhir Hamza, a leading scientist with the nuclear weapons program. These defectors reported that outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be. . .

In the late 1990’s, American and international nuclear experts again concluded that the Iraqi nuclear program was dormant: yes, the scientists were still working in teams; yes, they still had all of the plans; and yes, they probably were hiding some machinery — but they were not making any progress. Then another batch of important defectors escaped to Europe and told Western intelligence services that after the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Saddam Hussein had started a crash program to build a nuclear weapon and that the Iraqis had devised methods to hide the effort.

Anyone with even a layman’s interest in intelligence work knows defector reports must be approached with caution, for all sorts of psychological and political reasons. Defectors have, practically by definition, an ax to grind; they may feel they’ll get a better reception if they tell their interrogators what they think the interrogators want to hear; they may be right about that; they may be plants from the hostile country or have had wrong info planted on them; they may lie to puff themselves up. During the Cold War, disputes over which defectors to believe and disbelieve came close to tearing US intelligence apart. The basic principle is that, though the adversary nation may be bad (and Iraq is plenty bad), that doesn’t make every defector noble or reliable.

What concerned me when I first read the article is that Pollack must surely know this. He is “a former analyst of the Iraqi military at the C.I.A.” But his article gives no hint of the inherent difficulties. Quite the opposite: the pattern is, We thought X, but defector reports proved Not-X. That was disturbing in itself, because it suggests a certain bad faith on Pollack’s part. But it gets worse. Hesiod has done some legwork on Hussein Kamel and Khidir Hamza, in what will probably turn out to be the most genuinely important blog item of the month, reading the transcript of Kamel’s debriefing by UNSCOM.

Kamel calls Hamza “a professional liar. He worked with us but he was useless and was always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything.” He says documents that Hamza provided UNSCOM were forgeries. The UNSCOM debriefer allows that they, too, had concluded that Hamza’s information was worthless.

It gets trickier. As Hesiod notes, UNSCOM’s Rolf Ekeus says the same thing about Kamel (”liar!”). It’s entirely possible that Kamel was sent after Hamza to discredit him. It’s possible Hamza is the poltroon that Kamel alleges. The problems are that

1) They can’t both be telling the truth.

2) Quoting Hesiod again: “The Bush admninistration, and its pro-war allies, have been hyping the information provided BOTH from Khidir Hamza and from Hussein Kamal. The problem is…one of them has to be lying.”

3) But there’s one more problem. Pollack too touts both defectors to support his case, just as the administration does. And since Pollack was, after all, “a former analyst of the Iraqi military at the C.I.A.”, who has written an entire book on Iraq since (supposedly) leaving the Agency, he must have known that Kamel and Hamza conflict. But he gives his Times audience no hint of this. He must also know that Kamel told UNSCOM that

there was no decision to use chemical weapons [during the 1991 phase of the war] for fear of retaliation. They realised that if chemical weapons were used, retaliation would be nuclear.

Since the theme of Pollack’s Times piece is Saddam’s “containability,” that seems like a material omission. It would be one thing if Pollack never brought up Kamel’s name. Then he could argue, plausibly, “I always thought Kamel was full of shit.” Pollack could be right or wrong, but he would be consistent. As it stands, it’s hard to find a good faith explanation for Pollack’s particular pattern of inclusions and omissions. It sure looks like he throws the name in for the sake of authority while hiding the complicating details from his readers.

To his credit, Pollack also attempts to make the case, not just that Iraq is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, but that he will use them. Here his arguments are of mixed quality:

It is probably true that fear of retaliation kept Iraq from using chemical weapons against coalition forces during the gulf war. However, this should give us little comfort that he will be similarly deterred in the future. Before the 1991 war, Secretary of State James Baker warned his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, that Iraq faced “terrible consequences” if it used weapons of mass destruction, mounted terrorist attacks or destroyed Kuwaiti oil fields.

Yet despite this warning, Saddam Hussein tried to send terrorist teams to America and did blow up the Kuwaiti oil fields — he simply gambled on which two of the three things Mr. Baker mentioned were unlikely to result in America ending the regime. (Many officials from that Bush administration have suggested, in fact, that Saddam Hussein didn’t even make the right calculation.)

Really? (Speaking to the parenthetical.) Allowing for the limitations of the format, we should refrain from pressing Pollack too hard about which administration officials he means, when they made these suggestions, and what their reasoning was. But facts would appear to be facts: grant Pollack his claim that Iraq tried to infiltrate terror teams into the US and they were blocked with no contemporaneous publicity (or mention in hawkish circles until very recently). How did Hussein make the wrong calculation? He lit the oil wells. He refrained from using gas and germs on allied troops. He did not get nuked. He did not get deposed. That looks like making the right calculation. And really, how hard could it be? How hard is it for you? In advance, guess the circumstances in which the US is most likely to risk world opprobrium by using nuclear weapons for only the second time in 50 years:

1) A country with which it is at war dispatches a handful of kill squads.

2) A country sets some oil wells on fire.

3) A country attacks US troops with chemical and biological weapons when the US has always maintained that any country that did so riske a nuclear response.

Door Number Three doesn’t look like a tough conclusion somehow. Indeed, I’m a little miffed at Baker for somewhat casually devaluing our nuclear deterrent by hinting at its possible use in obviously frivolous circumstances. And again I have to wonder at Pollack’s good faith. “Terrible consequences” looks less likely to be diplospeak for “depose Saddam” than “nuking Saddam.”

Pollack is on superficially stronger ground in the next section, where he argues that, far from believing that they had a green light to invade Kuwait in 1990, Iraq expected the conquest of Kuwait to lead to military confrontation with the US and prepared for it:

Much of the evidence for this remains classified, but at least two points can be made using public material: Tariq Aziz has told reporters that this was what Saddam Hussein thought at the time; and we know that when the Republican Guards invaded Kuwait they moved quickly — even before they had consolidated control over the country — to set up defenses along Kuwait’s borders and against amphibious and airborne landings.

The PBS Frontline interview with Tariq Aziz confirms this. But while we’re taking Tariq Aziz at his word, the Frontline interview contains a number of other interesting passages as well, for instance, Aziz discusses Iraq’s dispute with Kuwait over oil production levels as the real motive for the invasion. (” If we had Kuwait in our mind for takeover, we could have done that in the ’70s….if you look at the political scene, regionally and internationally it allowed such things, more than it allowed in the ’90s.”) Not proven, but worth exploring. Also:

Q: And during the build up of American troops in Saudi Arabia, was there discussion among the leadership of ‘Let’s make a deal, let’s back down’?

Aziz: We were reviewing the situation all the time. Whenever there is a political or military development, we used to review the situation, but we didn’t think that there will be a change in the strategy and tactics of George Bush and Margaret Thatcher.

You know, at that time, until the resignation of Margaret Thatcher, she was telling everybody that ‘we will attack Iraq even if Iraq withdraws from Kuwait,’ you know that. She was asking for the dismantling of Iraqi armament even if Iraq withdraws from Kuwait. . .

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We’ll come back to “No Way Out” syndrome and its problems for deterrence.

It’s very likely that Pollack knows Aziz said this too:

Q: Why didn’t you use your chemical weapons?
Aziz: Well, we didn’t think it wise to use them.

Q: Can you tell me in more detail….?
Aziz: That’s all I can say. It was not wise to use such kind of weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy.

Q: Because they had nuclear weapons?
Aziz: You can……. make your own conclusions…

That’s two different Kuwait-War era Iraqi officials admitting that the threat of US retaliation kept them from using chemical or biological weapons against the coalition. That’s also two more than Pollack admits too.

There is a further problem when Pollack attempts to extend his accurate statement that Iraq expected a confrontation with the US over its Kuwaiti conquest:

In other words, Saddam Hussein thinks we tried to deter him, and that we failed. He was ready and willing to fight the United States for Kuwait.

The second part is true enough. The first deserves looking into. Another passage from the Aziz interview:

Q: In August or July 1990, if George Bush had said, ‘Do not invade Kuwait or we will fight you’, what would you have done?
Aziz: We would have told him, tell the Kuwaitis to stop threatening Iraq, to stop their wrong policies, deliberate wrong policies against Iraq and we will not go to Kuwait, very, very simple.

Q: And if they didn’t stop?
Aziz: That means that the war has already started and you have to act.

Let’s be clear: an on-the-record statement to a reporter by the official of a totalitarian regime can by no means be considered definitive. Far from it. (Nor can the statements of officials of democratic regimes.) At best it’s an interesting starting point. Pollack brought Aziz into the conversation in the first place, and we know about the mythical status of enough other aspects of the run-up to the Kuwait War that we can’t dismiss it out of hand. But at minimum, Aziz’s response suggests that there never was an unambiguous prewar attempt by the United States to dissuade Iraq from attacking Kuwait. (”IF George Bush had said . . . “) Aziz’s frankness earlier in the interview about not being surprised about America’s hostile reaction to the invasion strengthens the suggestion. Had there been a pre-invasion deterrent effort it’s the kind of thing Aziz would have brought up in response to the question, given the pattern of his other responses.

Moving on. Pollack:

Even that crushing defeat, however, didn’t dim his adventurism. Just two years later he attempted to assassinate the emir of Kuwait and former President Bush. This was not a rational act but a meaningless bid for revenge.

This may have happened. Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article casts some serious doubt. I’m agnostic. If it was real it was a true confederacy of dunces, going by the Hersh report. It’s interesting nevertheless to assume that Hussein really did try to assassinate GHW Bush and ask, would such an act be irrational and meaningless? Tough question. We know that Lyndon Johnson believed that Fidel Castro had Kennedy killed for trying to kill him. We know that Lyndon Johnson called off our “damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean.” We know that GHWB signed a “lethal finding” right after the end of the Kuwait War that “ordered the CIA, in essence, to get rid of Saddam.” (See this Washington Post story from 1998. History did not begin on September 11, 2001. Nor did it skip ahead to that date from the Munich Agreement.) How “irrational” (as opposed to “unkind”) is it, really, to attempt to kill the man who set in motion a machinery of attempts to kill you? If there really was an assassination attempt against ex-president Bush, and Iraq really was behind it, Saddam might have hoped that Clinton would pull an LBJ and back off.

Or not. But you can forgive Brink Lindsey, when he writes about the importance of the alleged assassination attempt, for not knowing about the context of the lethal finding, and the circumstantial case (at best) for the attempt even happening. Pollack, based on his background, must know these things. And he keeps them to himself when writing his article.

Pollack is not done contradicting his own claims:

Then, in October 2000, he dispatched five divisions to western Iraq. All of the evidence available to the American government indicated that, with the acquiescence of Damascus, he intended to move them through Syria and into the Golan Heights. In response, Washington began preparing a military strike far greater than Desert Fox of 1999 (which itself prompted revolts throughout Iraq for six months), and the Israeli military planned its own crushing response. Only American and Saudi diplomatic intervention with Syria, combined with the Iraqi military’s logistical problems, quashed the adventure.

That’s one version of events. GlobalSecurity.org has another:

The best assessment of the US was that it was indeed training activity, and that the Iraqi forces had not postured themselves to be in a threatening posture from which they would do some threatening act towards any of their neighbors. The forces did not have with them the essential elements of logistic support that would be required in order to use them in an offensive or a threatening manner. There was still a lot of Iraq to the west of where the forces were located. The movements seem to be local and training and administrative in nature. In the Middle East this was being interpreted as a massing of Iraqi troops on their western border in support of Palestinians. But the US Defense Department did not agree with that characterization.

But let’s grant Pollack the stronger fact set anyway. What’s he saying, then? To repeat, Pollack writes:

. . . the Israeli military planned its own crushing response. Only American and Saudi diplomatic intervention with Syria, combined with the Iraqi military’s logistical problems, quashed the adventure.

Translation from the hawkish: If there was a serious intention on Iraq’s part to attack Israel with Syria’s cooperation, the combined efforts of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria successfully deterred an attack.

And this is what Pollack does over and over again in his article: adduce, as evidence that Saddam can not be deterred, instances where Saddam was deterred.

We are almost done with Pollack’s handling of the evidentiary context. We need to repeat an earlier theme:

With more than 150,000 American soldiers taking positions on his borders he continues to run the international inspectors in circles, foolishly confident that his minor concessions will stave off an invasion. Is there any other person on earth who wouldn’t turn his country inside out to prove that he did not have more weapons of mass destruction?

Yes, someone who believes, on the basis of months and months of statements from the US government – really, years and years – plus actions of the US government, that it doesn’t matter what he does, that no action he takes can “appease” the United States. The Post reports this weekend that

One sign of the innovative nature of the plan is that, without much public notice, its first phase is already underway. Special Operations troops are executing missions inside Iraq to prepare the way for later attacks. U.S. and British warplanes ostensibly enforcing the “no-fly” zones in northern and southern Iraq have increased the number and intensity of airstrikes, and recently expanded their list of targets to include Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles. They were attacked, defense officials said, not because they were in the “no-fly” zones and threatened U.S. aircraft but because they were in range of U.S. troops mustering just over the border in Kuwait.

“We’ve already got a lot of stuff underway — the air campaign, psychological operations, Special Ops,” said Robert Andrews, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Special Operations activities.

It ain’t deterrence if there’s no reward for being deterred. Pollack must know this too. If even much of the US antiwar movement believes, on the evidence available to them, that war is inevitable, surely Iraq, which knows perfectly well what our special ops troops and bombers are doing, could rationally believe it too.

One more very odd claim by Pollack before we jump from context to metacontext:

Our experts may be split on how to handle North Korea, but they agree that the Pyongyang regime wants nuclear weapons for defensive purposes — to stave off the perceived threat of an American attack. The worst that anyone can suggest is that North Korea might blackmail us for economic aid or sell such weapons to someone else (with Iraq being near the top of that list). Only Saddam Hussein sees these weapons as offensive — as enabling aggression.

I don’t know about you, but Pollack is not making me feel better about the North Koreans here. Worst they can suggest is that North Korea might blackmail us for economic aid? As for the someone else North Korea might sell its nukes too, how about Al Qaeda? He seems strangely blithe about the DPRK. Perhaps the CIA’s former Korea analysts are blithe about Iraq.

Now to the metacontext. Pollack sounds a theme familiar from some of the franker hawks:

Most ominous today, we have heard from many intelligence sources — including some of the highest-level defectors now in America and abroad — that Saddam Hussein believes that once he has acquired nuclear weapons it is the United States that will be deterred. He apparently believes that America will be so terrified of getting into a nuclear confrontation that it would not dare to stop him should he decide to invade, threaten or blackmail his neighbors.

Or dare to follow through on its twelve-year old policy of regime change by one means or another. Here’s the metacontext: Pollack takes it for granted that it is our right and duty to intervene in the Gulf, the “we have to intervene so we can continue to intervene” argument. That Iraq’s neighbors include a nuclear power, a near-nuclear power and a large conventional power that could probably go nuclear if it felt the need, and that the ordering of the region might more properly fall to them (Israel, Iran and Turkey are their names), never seems to occur to Pollack. He takes for granted that our proper place is there.

On the evidence of his Times article, there’s nothing special about Pollack or his case. I got into this because Dr. Manhattan asked, quite politely I should stress, if I knew of any doves who had responded to Pollack’s arguments. It turns out the answer is yes, but only because Pollack’s arguments are the same ones every other war proponent has made. They are no more convincing coming from him.