Nine missing Pakistani scientists believed working on uranium enrichment in N. Korea
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Iran escalates rhetoric, deploys 4 divisions and missiles near Iraq border
The suicide recruitment effort which has enlisted 10,000 volunteer, is being directed by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, loyal directly to Khamenei. Officials said the IRGC wanted the first target to be the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. "We will burn the roots of the Anglo-Saxon race," Hassan Abbasi, director of the Center for Doctrinal Studies, said. Meanwhile, Arab diplomatic sources said Iran's military has moved troops to the southern Iraqi border over the last week

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OUR FRIENDS...

A capital idea to move the capital?
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Your starter for 10. What does South Korea's president, Roh Moo-hyun, regard as "the most important task facing the nation" at this juncture?
He has plenty to choose from. De-fanging North Korea, of nukes and more, surely tops anyone's list. Or relatedly, handling increasingly tetchy ties with the United States - whose new plan to withdraw one-third of its 37,000 troops from the peninsula by end-2005 means Roh's avowed quest for a more independent defense stance had better get into gear, fast.
Then there's the economy. How to get consumers spending again, after being burned in the recent credit card debt crunch? Or longer-term (but the clock is ticking): How to beat off Chinese competition and make the tough leap into services and top-end manufacture?
All these are weighty tasks. More than enough, you might think, to keep South Korea's newly restored leader occupied for the four more years in office,which the Constitutional Court's rejection in May of an opposition impeachment motion has vouchsafed to him.
But Roh Moo-hyun has other priorities. For him, "the most important task facing the nation is to ensure regional uniformity through decentralization." Forget Kim Jong-il; never mind the economy. The real problem is Seoul. It's gotten way too big for its boots.
A political outsider who plays up his provincial underdog roots, Roh Moo-hyun wants a more equal South Korea: be it socially, or between regions. To this end, he plans to move the capital, no less. By 2012, the whole government - the Blue House, national assembly, supreme court, all ministries, and more - is to relocate to a new site, some 100 kilometers further south. Four towns in the Chungchong region are vying to become the new Seoul.
Moving the capital could cost $100 million
This won't come cheap. Roh's airy first figure of US$4 billion, when he campaigned for this shift in 2002, has since ballooned 10-fold - officially. Independent critics reckon the real bill could top $100 billion. No one really knows: with no site yet, there are no blueprints.
Nor have there been any public hearings or consultation exercises for so vast a change. In his campaign Roh pledged a referendum - but is now backtracking, saying parliamentary approval suffices. That came last December, when the opposition Grand National Party (GNP), which then controlled the assembly, backed the bill - pressed, it now admits, by its Chungchong legislators, who feared losing their seats if the party opposed it. In the event, Chungchong votes were crucial in Roh's narrow win. (Is that smell pork-barrel?)
True, Seoul has long been likened to a vortex relentlessly sucking resources to the center. Greater Seoul, including Kyonggi province and Inchon port, is home to 40% of South Korea's 48 million people. But as this sprawl spreads, one fear is that Chungchong is too close - and would merely become the southern tip of a vast lozenge-shaped megalopolis.
At least four questions arise. One is how shifting the capital meshes with other policies. The slogan of making Korea east Asia's business hub is hard to pin down, but its major manifestation so far - New Songdo City, a planned $190 billion regeneration project near Inchon - involves heading west, not south. Nearby Inchon International Airport is already a long haul from downtown Seoul; it would be a whole lot further from Chungchong.
Second, can South Korea really afford this? Surging growth and fiscal discipline have left public finances healthy - for now. But many calls on the exchequer loom: $103 billion to compensate farmers for market opening; $21 billion extra on defense in the next decade, to make up for the US force drawdown; a pension system that will go bust without more infusions; and above all, the trillion-dollar question of eventual Korean reunification.
More sense to move the capital north for reunification
Whereby hangs a third objection. Seoul's mayor, Lee Myung Bak - a potential GNP presidential contender in 2007, not too late to scrap the move - is clearly no neutral. Yet it's hard to disagree when he notes that, come unification - "not so far away", in his view - a capital south from Seoul would be politically absurd. If anything, since the northern economy will need boosting, it makes more sense to build a new capital in the old north.
All this apart, Roh's stated motive is itself misconceived. "Uniformity," as a professed goal, is as depressing as it is utopian - so last century, so Korean. All development is unequal, but South Korea's (like Taiwan's) has in fact been much more egalitarian than most. Yet that proven fact cuts little ice with Koreans; many itch to hammer any nail that sticks out. Inequality, comrade? Look at China, India, Brazil, the US - or North Korea, whose regions really are ripped off so a small elite can lord it in a Potemkin Pyongyang.
Vox populi? Public opinion is predictably split. Chungchong is keen (surprise!), while Seoul, Kyonggi and Inchon are all lobbying hard against the move. Nationwide, pros and cons each have around 40% support - but 70% there should be a referendum first.
Despite denying one now, a referendum may be Roh Moo-hHyun's best way forward - or way out. (Last year, months after taking office, he called one on his own stewardship; this would have been unconstitutional, and it was dropped.) Otherwise, his not-so-capital idea threatens to become yet another long-running bone of contention in an already divided society - and a big distraction from South Korea's real security and economic challenges.
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea, Leeds University, England.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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Report: N. Korea, Iran to jointly test nuke detonators
Japan report says U.S. worried Koizumi 'over-optimistic' on N. Korea
Russia calls Japanese fears of N. Korea missile threat 'exaggerated'
This satellite image collected on Sept. 3, 2002 shows the 200-megawatt nuclear reactor in Taechon located near the 50-megawatt unit at Yongbyon plant in North Korea.
Kim Jong-Il's brother-in-law under house arrest as succession struggle rages
Witness in N. Korea reports 'hundreds' of executions over rail blast
Chinese general likens U.S. to 'whore,' Bin Laden for statement on Taiwan war plans

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Clinton Abandoned Trip to Pyongyang Due to Arafat
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton abandoned his plan to visit North Korea in December 2000 at the end of his term because the peace process in the Middle East was tensely developing then. He revealed this in his autobiography "My Life," released Tuesday.
He wrote in the book that after returning from North Korea, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was sure that a visit by Clinton to North Korea would lead to a missile agreement. He said he wanted to visit the North, but could not take the risk of traveling that far away because the peace in the Middle East was close to being realized, and especially Yasser Arafat, president of Palestinian Council, begged him not to go. He also wrote that when he handed over the presidency to newly elected President George Bush in 2000, he said the North needed to be more urgently dealt with than Iraq.
Concerning the crisis where North Korea refused the IAEA inspection in 1994, Clinton said he was determined to stop the North's nuclear weapon development even at the risk of war. To let the North know that the U.S. were serious about that, then Defense Minister William Perry told the North that the U.S. did not exclude the possibility of a preemptive military attack, and after that, negotiating were difficult for three days. In relation to this, he added in the book that at the same time, the U.S. clearly delivered its message of "right balance" by having Jim Laney, then U.S. Ambassador to Korea, express our position on the North of prudence, firmness and perseverance, while having then Secretary of State Warren Christopher clarify that the U.S. prioritized a peaceful resolution.
(Park Hae-hyun, hhpark@chosun.com )
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Six-Party Talks to Make Nuclear Dismantlement Ultimate Goal
BEIJING -- States participating in the six-party talks in Beijing agreed to make nuclear dismantlement of North Korea the ultimate goal, a South Korean delegate said. Delegates have concluded to hold specific discussions related to the first stage of the nuclear dismantlement, with their goal being to verifiably freeze the North Korean nuclear weapons program during the six-party talks on Wednesday, South Korean delegate said.
Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi exchange greetings before holding three-party talks at the Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) in the eastern Chinese port city of Qingdao on Monday night.
North Korean chief delegate Kim Kye-Gwan and U.S. chief delegate James Kelly are to meet for bilateral talks on Wednesday.
(Lee Ha-won, may2@chosun.com )
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North Korea Nuclear Talks: If at First You Don't Succeed, Meet Again
Paul Kerr
A U.S. official called a working group meeting of midlevel officials held May 12-15 in Beijing "useful," but there is scant evidence that the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula is closer to being resolved. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Liu Jianchao noted May 13 that the parties expressed "major differences" during the talks. Department of State spokesperson Adam Ereli acknowledged May 17 that the talks produced no "breakthroughs." The North Koreans expressed frustration.
The officials agreed to hold another working group meeting before the next round of six-party talks, to be held before the end of June, but no dates have been set for either session. Besides the United States, North Korea, and China, the working group meeting included representatives from Japan, South Korea, and Russia.
The crisis began in October 2002 when the United States reported that North Korea admitted to pursuing a covert uranium-enrichment program. As the crisis escalated, Pyongyang also restarted a plutonium-based nuclear program that had been frozen since 1994. Both programs can produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Two rounds of six-party talks have made little apparent progress. (See ACT, April 2004.)
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson said May 15 that North Korea at the mid-May talks repeated its offer to "freeze its nuclear facilities as the first-phase action and displayed utmost flexibility" but that the United States refused to discuss compensation until North Korea committed to dismantling all of its nuclear facilities. Another Foreign Ministry official described the U.S. position as "humiliating," Agence France Presse reported May 14.
North Korea has issued detailed proposals to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in a series of steps in return for U.S. concessions. Washington has not responded publicly with a similar counterproposal.
Still, the meeting may have made some marginal progress. A State Department official told Arms Control Today May 18 that the U.S. delegation, led by U.S. Special Envoy Joseph Detrani, "clarified its position [on the nuclear issue] quite a bit" during bilateral contacts held during the meeting. Additionally, Liu stated that there were "new contents in the statements of all parties," although he noted that "parties still have different views on the scope of denuclearization and the ways of verification."
U.S. officials have repeatedly asserted that the United States and other participants are united against North Korea in pressuring it to give up its nuclear programs, but there are differences among the parties as to the extent to which they should engage North Korea.
The View from Pyongyang
North Korea's UN ambassador, Han Song Ryol, implied in a May 12 interview that his government would address the "nuclear issue" in the six-party talks and reiterated North Korea's past proposals to freeze its plutonium-based program. (See ACT, March 2004.)
However, Han said Pyongyang first wants to conduct bilateral talks with Washington "within the context of the six-party talks" to conclude a "peace treaty." South Korea could also participate in such talks, he implied.
Han said a treaty is needed to end the U.S. "hostile policy" toward North Korea, which he said has motivated his government to develop nuclear weapons. Only when such a treaty has been concluded, he argued, can North Korea "negotiate disarmament issues" because otherwise the United States can "reverse" any other security assurances while North Korea is disarming. All other issues of bilateral concern could also be addressed at that point, he said.
The U.S. delegation informed North Korea during the last round of six-party talks that it "might" be willing to negotiate a "permanent peace mechanism" after resolution of the nuclear issues, the State Department acknowledged May 3.
Pyongyang has repeatedly argued that Washington plans a pre-emptive nuclear attack on North Korea and said it wants Washington to offer some sort of security assurance, although it has not always specified a peace treaty. (See ACT, January/February 2004.) The United States has repeatedly denied any intention of attacking North Korea and has offered to conclude a multilateral security agreement once North Korea achieves unspecified "benchmarks" in dismantling its nuclear programs. Undersecretary of State John Bolton suggested in a May 8 interview with Jiji Press Service that such assurances would take effect when North Korea has nearly finished disarming.
Han also discussed the contentious issue of North Korea's suspected uranium-enrichment program. The United States, Japan, and South Korea want North Korea to acknowledge the program, but Pyongyang denies it has one. North Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesperson expressed irritation that the U.S. delegation raised the issue of the program during the working group talks, calling the U.S. charges a "fabrication."
In the interview, Han also denied that North Korea has such a program but said that his government was willing to discuss the matter once the United States has shared evidence that the program exists. The United States has not yet done so, he claimed.
The State Department official stated that Pakistan has provided intelligence to the United States and other participants in the talks indicating that a clandestine network operated by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan provided North Korea with uranium-enrichment technology. (See ACT, March 2004.)
On May 19, Ereli reiterated Washington's policy of pressuring North Korea to commit to the "complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement" of its nuclear programs without offering North Korea "inducements" to do so. (See ACT, May 2004.) Washington has said that it "could" normalize relations with North Korea once Pyongyang has taken action to resolve the nuclear dispute and rein in other military activities, such as its large conventional forces and long-running missile program.
Some administration officials, however, have recently been somewhat more explicit in articulating the steps that Pyongyang must take, as well as the possible benefits it might reap.
For example, Bolton told the House International Relations Committee in March that "complete and irreversible dismantlement" means the removal of "all elements" of both North Korea's uranium- and plutonium-based nuclear programs. He added that some of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council would dismantle any nuclear weapons and "[extract] all weapons design information," as well as work with the International Atomic Energy Agency to verify dismantlement of the nuclear programs and remove "critical items."
In March, State Department Director for Policy Planning Mitchell Reiss issued the administration's most specific articulation of the benefits North Korea might receive through its compliance with U.S. requests. Reiss did not specify, however, which North Korean actions would be sufficient to realize these benefits and added little to previous U.S. suggestions that it would normalize diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. (See ACT, April 2004.)
The Arms Control Association is a non-profit, membership-based organization.

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North Korea Nuclear Talks: If at First You Don't Succeed, Meet Again
Paul Kerr
China
China, the host of the six-party talks, maintains close economic and political ties with North Korea and appears intent on serving as an honest broker between Pyongyang and Washington. Although there are indications that Beijing has exerted pressure on Pyongyang to participate in the talks, it has withstood American attempts to isolate Pyongyang and has urged all sides to be flexible.
China has opposed U.S. efforts to raise the issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons program in the UN Security Council and is not a member of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a U.S.-led effort to interdict shipments of weapons of mass destruction and related goods to and from terrorists and countries of proliferation concern.
China has also supported efforts to offer North Korea incentives for cooperation. For instance, it backed South Korea's offer to provide energy assistance to North Korea if it freezes its nuclear program.
China has also expanded ties with North Korea over the course of the dialogue, agreeing in April to increase bilateral economic cooperation and hosting a visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Japan
Japan has publicly been the most supportive of the tough U.S. line on North Korea, but Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's May 22 visit to Pyongyang also indicates its willingness to engage Pyongyang directly. North Korea released five children of Japanese citizens that had been abducted during the Cold War, but the talks did not appear to resolve completely the outstanding issues surrounding the abductions.
Koizumi had hoped that would happen nearly two years after a September 2002 summit with Kim. During that summit, the two sides agreed to meet again the next month to discuss normalizing diplomatic relations and undertaking economic cooperation initiatives. Those efforts were set back after the Japanese public became outraged by fresh information about the abductions and U.S. accusations that Pyongyang had a secret uranium-based nuclear program. (See ACT, November 2002.)
A Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesperson told reporters May 21 that the two countries must resolve the abductions issue before resuming normalization talks but added that "normalization of...relations is one of the most important agenda items" for Japan. The spokesperson did not say that resolution of the nuclear crisis is a prerequisite for resuming normalization talks and also suggested that Tokyo would confine discussion of the nuclear issue to the six-party talks.
The Foreign Ministry spokesperson also said that Japan wants "reconfirmation" of Kim's pledge, made during his 2002 meeting with Koizumi, to extend indefinitely North Korea's moratorium on testing ballistic missiles.
Japan will consider economic aid to North Korea, but only after relations are normalized, a Japanese embassy official told Arms Control Today May 18.
Although Japan belongs to the PSI and has shown an interest in stemming North Korea's trade in illicit goods, such as illegal drugs, there is no public indication that Japan has committed to direct interdictions of North Korean vessels.
South Korea
South Korea has repeatedly expressed its opposition to a nuclear-armed North Korea but has pressed for a negotiated solution to the issue. Despite the strain that the crisis has placed on the countries' bilateral relationship, Seoul and Pyongyang have continued discussions about various bilateral issues for some time.
Most recently, North and South Korea held high-level military talks May 26, the first such discussions since the end of the Korean War.
South Korea has proposed a step-by-step negotiating strategy with Pyongyang to resolve the nuclear issue. For example, Seoul issued a proposal at the February round of six-party talks to provide energy assistance to the North in return for a freeze of the North's nuclear program and a promise to dismantle it. Moreover, President Roh Moo-hyun said in August 2003 that South Korea "will take the lead" in promoting North Korean economic development if Pyongyang gives up its nuclear weapons.
Russia
Russia, which had close ties to North Korea during the Cold War, has repeatedly expressed its support for a negotiated resolution of the crisis. Russian representatives also backed South Korea's energy proposal during the February round of six-party talks.
The Arms Control Association is a non-profit, membership-based organization.

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Bush Administration Talks With North Korea
Paul Kerr
April 23-25, 2003
The United States, North Korea, and China hold trilateral talks in Beijing. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly goes to Pyongyang with strict instructions not to have any bilateral contact with the North Koreans.
The North Korean delegation, however, still manages to tell the U.S. delegation that it possesses nuclear weapons--the first time that Pyongyang makes such an admission. In addition, North Korea threatens to transfer the weapons to other countries or "display them," Secretary of State Colin Powell tells the Senate Appropriations Committee April 30. The North Koreans also tell the U.S. delegation that they have completed reprocessing the spent nuclear fuel from the five-megawatt reactor frozen under the 1994 Agreed Framework, Powell adds.
Furthermore, the North Korean delegation tells their U.S. counterparts that Pyongyang "might get rid of all their nuclear programs...[and] stop their missile exports," State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher states April 28. Sun Joun-yung, South Korea's ambassador to the United Nations, states May 15 that, in return, North Korea has a number of demands. These include the "normalization of relations" between the two countries and an "assurance of non-aggression," as well as the resumption of heavy-fuel oil deliveries, and completion of the nuclear reactors promised under the Agreed Framework.
May 12, 2003
North Korea accuses the United States of violating the spirit of the 1992 Joint North-South Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, calling the agreement a "dead document" in a Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) statement. Yet, Pyongyang does not explicitly repudiate the agreement.
May 24, 2003
Pyongyang indicates in a KCNA statement that it will accept multilateral talks, but adds that it first wants to hold bilateral talks with Washington "for a candid discussion of each other's policies."
July 15, 2003
Boucher tells reporters that North Korean officials at the UN have told the United States that North Korea has completed reprocessing the spent fuel rods from its Yongbyon reactor.
August 27-29, 2003
The first round of six-party talks is held in Beijing. The talks achieve no significant breakthroughs.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi states Aug. 29 that the participants "share a consensus" on several items: a "peaceful settlement" of the crisis through dialogue, the need to address North Korea's security concerns, the continuation of dialogue and the six-party talks, the need to avoid actions that would escalate the situation, and a plan to solve the nuclear issue "through synchronous and parallel implementation." The same day, North Korea issues an explicit denial for the first time that it has a uranium-enrichment program.
A U.S. official tells reporters that the U.S. delegation "made clear that we are not seeking to strangle North Korea...we can sincerely discuss security concerns in the context of nuclear dismantlement, and...we are willing to discuss a sequence of denuclearization measures with corresponding measures on both sides."
North Korea proposes a step-by-step solution, calling for the United States to conclude a "non-aggression treaty," normalize bilateral diplomatic relations, refrain from hindering North Korea's "economic cooperation" with other countries, complete the reactors promised under the Agreed Framework, resume suspended fuel oil shipments, and increase food aid. Pyongyang states that, in return, it will dismantle its "nuclear facility," as well as end missile testing and export of missiles and related components.
The North Korean delegation also threatens to test nuclear weapons or "demonstrate the means that they would have to deliver" them, according to a senior State Department official. Additionally, North Korea issues a statement Sept. 1 that it does not intend to sell its nuclear weapons or provide them to terrorists.
Wang tells reporters the same day that Washington's policy is the "main problem" preventing diplomatic progress.
October 2-3, 2003
North Korea repeats a statement that it has completed reprocessing the spent fuel rods in June and "made a switchover in the use" of the spent fuel "in the direction increasing [sic] its nuclear deterrent force." North Korea also states that it will continue to produce and reprocess additional spent fuel when deemed necessary.
October 16, 2003
North Korea suggests that it may test nuclear weapons, stating that it will "take a measure to open its nuclear deterrent to the public as a physical force" if the United States refuses to change its negotiating stance.
October 19, 2003
President George W. Bush states during a trip to Asia that the United States is willing to provide a written, multilateral guarantee that the United States will not attack North Korea, but makes it clear that a formal nonaggression pact is "off the table." Powell had made a similar statement Aug. 1.
November 21, 2003
The Executive Board of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) announces that it will suspend construction of two light-water nuclear reactors for one year beginning Dec. 1.
KEDO says the project's future "will be assessed and decided by the Executive Board before the expiration of the suspension period," but the Bush administration believes there is "no future for the project," Department of State spokesperson Adam Ereli says Nov. 5.
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2004
January 8, 2004
North Korea allows an unofficial U.S. delegation to visit its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and displays what it calls its "nuclear deterrent." North Korean officials allow delegation member Siegfried Hecker--a senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory--to handle a jar containing what appears to be plutonium metal. North Korean officials claim that it came from reprocessing the spent fuel rods from its five-megawatt reactor.
The delegation also visits the pond that had contained the spent fuel rods that had been monitored under the Agreed Framework, and observes that the rods are no longer there. The North Korean officials tell the delegation that Pyongyang reprocessed all of the spent fuel rods between January and June 2003.
Hecker later tells the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he does not know for certain that the substance was plutonium and that he could not determine when it was produced.
February 25-28, 2004
A second round of six-party talks takes place in Beijing. Little progress is made, although both sides agree to hold another round of talks before the end of June 2004, as well as a working group meeting to be held beforehand.
According to Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang, North Korea reiterates that it is willing to give up its nuclear programs if the U.S. abandons its "hostile policies toward the country" and offers to "freeze its nuclear activities as the first step" if other participants take "corresponding actions."
Additionally, South Korea's deputy foreign minister, Lee Soo-Hyuck, issues a proposal--which China and Russia both support--to provide energy assistance to the North in return for a freeze of its nuclear program, along with a promise to dismantle it.
Wang, however, states afterwards that "sharp" differences remain between Washington and Pyongyang. According to the Japanese Foreign Ministry, two specific issues divide North Korea and other participants. The first is that the United States, Japan, and South Korea want all of North Korea's nuclear programs to be dismantled, but North Korea wishes to be allowed to retain one for "peaceful purposes." The second is that Washington and the other two governments want Pyongyang to acknowledge that it has a uranium-enrichment program.
May 12-15, 2004
A working group of midlevel officials from South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Russia, China, and the United States meets in Beijing. No breakthroughs are reported and Chinese officials say "major differences" persist. But officials agree to hold another working group meeting before the next round of six-party talks, scheduled for later this month.
The Arms Control Association is a non-profit, membership-based organization.
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Part 1: The 'arch-proliferator'

China has been widely reviled as the world's arch-proliferator, opening a Pandora's Box of weapons of mass destruction, and helping Pakistan, Iran and Algeria. The truth, as usual, is more complex, with valid arguments on both sides. China's record is mixed and at times decidedly unsavory, but its recent moves and noises are positive, and those who point fingers at Beijing have records that are far from spotless.
So, is China a proliferator or a nonproliferator, a one-time proliferator who has seen the light and now is a nonproliferator, or still something of both? Those are some of the questions asked as China, in this post-Cold War age of existential angst is hardly the only country often cited in regard to proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction". But it is the world's largest and a favorite whipping boy for military planners and political ideologues.
So, what is China's record? Any honest appraisal has to acknowledge that China has come a long way towards nonproliferation, certainly in word, and to a significant extent in deed.
By the definition of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, following its first nuclear test in 1964, China is one of the five de jure nuclear-weapon states because it declared and tested a nuclear weapon before 1967.
During its early years as a nuclear weapons state, China's rhetoric favored nuclear weapons proliferation, particularly in the Third World, as a rallying point for anti-imperialism. Through the 1970s, China's policy was not to oppose nuclear proliferation, which it still saw as limiting United States and Soviet power. But after China began to open up to the West in the 1970s, its rhetorical position gradually shifted to one opposing nuclear proliferation, explicitly so after 1983.
But China's years of isolation and disengagement from the rest of the world were costly, in terms of demonstrating its nonproliferation credentials. In particular its nuclear practices did not conform to international non-proliferation regime standards, and major efforts over 20 years were required to persuade China to bring its nuclear trade practices into alignment with the policies of the other nuclear supplier states.
Do as I say, not as I do
But it has been an uphill slog for China, since it has had to cope with a "do as I say, not as I do" situation. For example, consider that China joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1984, but it did not join the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) until 1992. During this period, the non-proliferation regime, at US urging, was itself raising the bar with stiffer export control requirements, making the standards applied to China today higher and stricter than those most Western states themselves lived by during the Cold War. Ironically, nowadays those higher standards are considered indispensable for nonproliferation regime effectiveness and Western states continue to pressure China to comply with them.
Bear in mind that after joining IAEA, China has declared that it conducts its nuclear trade according to the following three principles:
All exports should be used exclusively for peaceful purposes;
All exports should be subject to IAEA safeguards;
No exports should re-transferred to a third country without prior Chinese approval.
Most recently, on May 31, China was accepted into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) at a meeting in Sweden. The NSG is made up of 40 nuclear-capable nations that work with each other to control the trade of nuclear materials and technology for business purposes.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, in the past, "China posed challenges to the international non-proliferation regime because of the role of Chinese companies in supplying a wide range of materials, equipment and technologies that could contribute to NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] weapons and missile programs in countries of proliferation concern. Specifically, China disregarded international norms during the 1980s by selling nuclear materials to countries such as South Africa, India, Pakistan, and Argentina, without requiring that the items be placed under IAEA safeguards."
While China's record has been improving during the 1990s, especially since it acceded to the NPT in 1992, questions still are raised about its role in weapons proliferation. Since taking office, the administration of President George W Bush has imposed sanctions at least eight times on entities of the People's Republic of China, but not on the government itself, for transfers relating to ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, and cruise missiles to Pakistan and Iran.
China gave nuclear aid to Pakistan for 15 years
In regard to nuclear proliferation, the most serious charges center on the following: Chinese assistance to Pakistan over the past 15 years is considered crucial to Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons. According to the Carnegie Endowment, in the early 1980s China was believed to have supplied Pakistan with the plans for one of its earliest bombs and possibly to have provided enough highly enriched uranium for two such weapons.
China also assisted Pakistan's civilian nuclear program by helping to build a 300-megawatt (MW) power reactor, thus enabling Islamabad to circumvent a nuclear trade embargo.
Back in 1996 some in the US Congress called for sanctions against Beijing after reports that China sold non-safeguarded ring magnets to Pakistan, apparently in violation of both the NPT and various US laws. Specifically, a Chinese state-owned company transferred to the Abdul Qadeer Khan Laboratory in Pakistan 5,000 ring magnets that can be used in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. Khan is considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear program and admitted to selling nuclear technology to other countries.
What tends to be overlooked in discussions of Chinese assistance to Pakistan is its motivation. Chinese transfers derive largely from Chinese concerns about the regional balance of power: specifically China's effort to pursue a containment policy in regard to India.
Also, back in 1995, at US urging, China suspended a sale of nuclear reactors to Iran. China also built an electromagnetic isotope separation system for enriching uranium at the Kkarja nuclear facility.
Before that China had provided Iran with three zero-power research reactors and one very small, 30-kilowatt reactor.
China gave nuclear aid to Iran - with safeguards
China did continue until 1997 to assist Iran in constructing a plant near Esfahan to produce uranium hexafluoride, the material fed into gas centrifuges for enrichment. Chinese technicians also assisted Iran with uranium mining and processing and fuel fabrication. Yet these activities were carried out in accordance with NPT and IAEA safeguards.
China has also pursued a continuing nuclear export relationship with Algeria, dating back to 1983 when it was involved in the secret construction of the Es Salem 15-MW research reactor at Ain Oussera. Shortly after the reactor was discovered and publicized in April 1991, Algeria agreed to place it under IAEA safeguards, and a safeguard agreement for this purpose was signed in February 1992. Thus the reactor has been subject to IAEA inspections since its inauguration in December 1993. Although Algeria later acceded to the NPT, its interest in plutonium reprocessing and the possibility that China may have helped Algeria with this activity have kept Algeria on the watch-list.
China has signed agreements with Algeria covering nuclear cooperation between the two countries. China is apparently helping to construct the Algerian Center of Nuclear Energy Research, which will be placed under IAEA safeguards.
Earlier this year, Chinese nuclear weapons designs were reportedly discovered at Libyan facilities, probably the result of Pakistani proliferation according to the Washington, DC-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Still overall, while there are still frictions, when it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, China and the United States are increasingly finding areas of convergence, moving from Washington's condemnation of China and India's nuclear weapons tests in 1998 to cooperation in defusing the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
Tomorrow: All the right noises
David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues. The views expressed are his own.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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Putin Reshuffles Atomic Ministry Again
Christopher Madison
Two months after Russian President Vladimir Putin buried the former Ministry of Atomic Energy within the Ministry of Industry and Energy, he signed a new decree May 20 reshuffling the nuclear boxes once more, pulling the agency out of the bureaucracy and putting it directly under the executive's supervision, most likely through the prime minister's office. (See ACT, April 2004.)
Although many of the operational details remain unclear, the proposal won a warm reception from the head of the Atomic Energy Agency, Alexander Rumyantsev, who commented in Russian news reports, "I think it's very positive."
Putin's earlier decision to move the agency to the larger ministry caused some concern in Washington that it would affect bilateral nuclear threat reduction programs, particularly U.S. access to Russian nuclear facilities. It also worried analysts because U.S.-Russian cooperation had been improved through the close relationship between U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Rumyantsev.
This latest reorganization has raised hopes that the previous diplomatic channels and arrangements will be resumed.
Minatom, the predecessor agency of the Atomic Energy Agency, was in charge of producing and storing civilian and defense nuclear materials, as well as the development and testing of nuclear weapons and the elimination of excess warheads and munitions.
The Arms Control Association is a non-profit, membership-based organization.
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Private Contractors
As early as December 2000 the Army was aware of the risks of calling on the private sector for intelligence work
WASHINGTON, June 13, 2004 -- Reports on the use of contractors in Iraq have disclosed that private-sector employees have been performing sensitive intelligence work in and around combat zones. What's more, the report by Major General Antonio Taguba on the alleged abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib Prison noted the involvement of civilian contractors at the Baghdad facility.
These revelations have raised questions about the efficacy and permissibility of using private contractors to perform military intelligence functions, but a three-and-a-half-year-old memorandum shows that the Army has been well aware of the risks of calling on contractors for intelligence work. On December 26, 2000, Patrick T. Henry, assistant secretary of the Army, dispatched a memo to the Army's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence declaring a policy that not only restricted the use of contractors, but also cautioned against the threats to national security posed by reliance on such workers in sensitive intelligence functions.
"At the tactical level," the memo declared, "the intelligence function under the operational control of the Army performed by military in the operating forces is an inherently Governmental function barred from private sector performance." In addition, Henry's memo noted, the "oversight exerted over contractors is very different from the command and control exerted over military and civilian employees. Therefore, reliance on private contractors poses risks to maintaining adequate civilian oversight over intelligence operations."
Even at the "operational and strategic level," the memo notes, "the intelligence function ... should be exempted from private sector performance on the basis of risk to national security from relying on contractors to perform this function. ...
"Private contractors may be acquired by foreign interests, acquire and maintain interests in foreign countries, and provide support to foreign customers. The contract administration oversight exerted over contractors is very different from the command and control exerted over military and civilian employees. Therefore, reliance on private contractors poses risks to maintaining adequate civilian oversight over intelligence operations."
The memo was issued in compliance with a 1998 law--the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act--requiring that government agencies inventory the work officials perform and separate what is "inherently governmental" from what is commercial and may be contracted out.
According to Dan Guttman, a government contracting expert who serves as a consultant to the Center for Public Integrity, the memo confirms that, long before the Iraq war, the Army seriously thought about the use of contractors in intelligence roles, particularly in and around war zones. "The memo shows that the Army was well aware of the perils of calling on contractors for intelligence work, and barred or broadly counseled against their use except in certain defined circumstances," Guttman says. "In any case, the Army made clear that contractors should not be employed in intelligence activities where there is no assurance that they will be well supervised."
"If the decision was made to use contractors in intelligence functions notwithstanding the restrictions of the 2000 determination, what was done to protect against the risks to security?" Guttman asks.
? 2004, The Center for Public Integrity. All rights reserved.
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Indonesian tanker deal greases old wheels
By Gary LaMoshi

DENPASAR, Bali - Entering the home stretch of Indonesia's first direct presidential election on July 5, there are only a couple of sure bets. One is that all the candidates promise to fight corruption. You may find that hard to believe since the candidates are or recently were in leading positions to address this problem and neglected to act.
The fate of a tanker order from state oil company Pertamina will help set the betting line on whether the next presidential administration will take a different attitude toward corruption. Don't bet on any candidates racing to seize the opportunity to take the lead on this issue.
The tanker case illustrates the pervasiveness and persistence of KKN - korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme - in Indonesian business, particularly in the areas where it intersects directly with government. The chronology indicates how quickly the window for seriously combating corruption opened and how fast it can slam shut. The required marathon effort to reduce corruption seems to have been cut to a dash that's already been run.
Perky Pertamina
Pertamina has occupied a special place among Indonesia's state companies. Founded in 1968 just after Suharto's election to the presidency from oil companies formerly controlled by the military, Pertamina quickly became a cash cow for the connected. The monopoly ran up foreign borrowing of US$10 billion by the mid-1970s, much of it for projects that had no connection to the energy business, then prompted the New Order's first economic crisis when it tried to renege on some of that debt. While the methods and tactics changed over the years, Petramina produced steady gushers of graft.
In 2000, president Abdurrahman Wahid appointed an outsider, Baihaki Hakim, from petroleum rival Caltex Indonesia, as Pertamina's new top executive with a mandate to clean up the company. The appointment followed a special audit of Pertamina's books that turned up startling abuses.
Auditors counted losses of more than $6 billion in a period of just two years. That's more than a $250 million per month, $8.2 million a day, including Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. One leading driver of abuse was Pertamina's sweetheart contracts to transport oil. Pertamina paid about one-third above market to charter tankers, and a small circle of local operators comprised winning bidders. Those grateful shipping magnates could share the wealth with the Pertamina executives greasing the skids for them.
Hakim acted to remove the distortions and limit the drain on company - in this case, public - cash. He opened bidding to foreign shippers and applied greater oversight to the process. Hakim also persuaded the company's board to beef up Pertamina's own transport capabilities. Cutting down on tanker leasing would be the surest way to cut down on corruption.
In 2002, Pertamina signed a $130 million contract to buy two new tankers in the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) class from South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries. Each tanker measures 330 meters long - it could fit the Eiffel Tower and a 747 or two in its hold - with a capacity for 2 million barrels of oil. The first tanker is due to be delivered within weeks. The question now is whom to deliver it to.
Outsider out
While Hyundai was building the tankers, the old guard was rebuilding its influence at Pertamina. Like many other New Order interests, it found renewed sympathy when Megawati Sukarnoputri replaced Wahid as president.
Megawati's regime backed a management overhaul at Pertamina last September. Hakim was ousted as president in favor of Pertamina lifer Ariffi Nawawi, and Megawati loyalists took seats on the firm's oversight boards. One of their top priorities - while Indonesia was sliding from net oil exporter to importer - was scuttling the tanker deal. That would bring back the good old days of exorbitant profits for all.
Pertamina's new managers don't say that, of course. Nawawi argues that owning two VLCC tankers is a luxury that Pertamina cannot afford. He also claims leasing will save money and increase flexibility for the state company.
Even assuming Pertamina's assertion that it could negotiate charter contracts like a normal business instead of charity for the wealthy, outside experts dispute those savings estimates and other claimed benefits. With the impending end of its monopoly, many industry analysts assert that owning tankers could give Pertamina advantages on the home front to help it weather the transition.
Frontline report
Pertamina has reportedly reached an agreement to sell the tankers to oil-transport specialists Frontline Ltd for $184 million. (Pertamina has declined to confirm the agreement.) In the event of a sale, given the lack of VLCCs available at the moment, there's a strong chance Pertamina could lease back one of the tankers. The apparent premium in the price reflects that current supply gap - it takes about two years from order to delivery for a VLCC tanker - but it's not much after factoring in Pertamina's financing costs, as well the commission to investment bank Goldman Sachs for brokering the sale. (Nice to see how globalization lets Wall Street get a piece of Indonesian graft.)
In connection with the deal, 15 key legislators from the energy and mining committee of the House of Representatives went on a junket to Hyundai's shipyard in Ulsan, South Korea, and to the Goldman Sachs conference room in Hong Kong. They came away persuaded to support the sale. However, House Speaker Akbar Tanjung, who knows a thing or two about corruption cases himself (see Tanjung acquittal: Verdict against reform, February 14), has passed the decision to President Megawati, in the midst of campaigning for re-election.
After her party's lousy showing in the April legislative election with 49% fewer votes than in 1999, Megawati's campaign has taken to waving the reformasi banner once again. She's pledging to stamp out corruption, even promising to put Suharto on trial.
The Pertamina tanker deal would be a good place to start her war on corruption, if she is serious. Explanations from Nawawi about the advantages of selling aren't fooling anyone. Throughout the economy, the voters know what's going on. Foreign investors know - they cut their new investments in Indonesia by 41% in the first five months of 2004. It's time for politicians to show they're not getting fooled, or taking the public for fools, either.
It's a good bet that Megawati's government won't announce a decision before July 6, three days ahead of the first tanker's scheduled delivery date and one day after balloting in the presidential election. It's an even better bet that players with big bankrolls will know the answer in time to place their wagers before election day.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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In Iran, Terrorism Remains A Matter of Perspective
Tehran Tries to Shed Radical Image as 'Army of Martyrs' Forms

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A09
ALAMUT, Iran -- One man's terrorist is another man's herbalist, Ali Reza Safari said, leaning against a wall of the ancient castle that illustrates his point.
From the daunting fortification that looms over the valley here, a ruler named Hassan Sabah 900 years ago dispatched young men who believed so ardently in his vision of Islam that they gave up their own lives in order to snuff out those of their enemies. Hassan Sabah's sect first defined the word "assassin."
But in recent years, scholars have seized on the way Hassan Sabah managed to make fear a weapon in itself. Using stealth, discipline and patience, his small group of fanatics spooked governments into restricting the entry of camel caravans, among other immigration barriers.
"They may well be the world's first terrorists," wrote Bernard Lewis, a Middle East scholar and Princeton University professor emeritus.
"I am illiterate," said Safari, 75, gazing diplomatically at the ground before him. "I haven't read any books. What I know I heard from my father and grandfather.
"Hassan Sabah was a good man," he declared. "He helped the poor. He planted herb gardens. And because he was a saint, he could make the medicine himself. He treated everybody."
When it comes to terrorism, perspective is almost everything in Iran.
The Islamic government that rules this country routinely rates as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism in the State Department annual report. Iran rejects the label and insists the organizations that it supports, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, are resistance groups.
And if that distinction often ends up lost in the bloody debris, in recent years Iran has nonetheless taken conspicuous pains to shed its radical image. It arrested al Qaeda operatives from neighboring Afghanistan who had found refuge here, discontinued attacks on U.S. targets and, earlier this year, erased from street signs the name of the man who assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981.
So heads turned this month when the Army of Martyrs of the International Islamic Movement made its public debut.
The group, which claims to be private, began gathering the signatures of Iranians who would be willing to become suicide bombers. So far, the group says, 15,000 people have completed a one-page form headed "Preliminary Registration for Martyrdom Operations." The form has space for a phone number and asks applicants to indicate whether they would prefer to explode themselves against U.S. forces in sacred Shiite Muslim cities in Iraq or Israeli forces in the Palestinian territories, or to kill Salman Rushdie, the author who went into hiding for years after a religious edict demanded his death for mocking Islam in his book "The Satanic Verses."
Mohammad Ali Samadi, the group's spokesman, said he believed the number of volunteers "could rise to a million, and we have serious concerns about our capacity to support that many people."
The gravity of this threat is widely questioned here.
Diplomats, Iranian analysts and -- when pressed -- even Samadi acknowledge that the Army of Martyrs movement exists chiefly for public relations. The group solicited news coverage when U.S. troops were pursuing insurgents in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, the two most sacred cities in Shiite Islam, the official religion of Iran. But as the troops receded, so did what Samadi called the "sensitivity" of the Iranian public.
"By threatening them, we wanted to remind the Americans of the potential we have against them," Samadi said from behind a desk in Tehran where he was, at times, clearly bored to be giving yet another interview. Three young associates sat in, occasionally suggesting talking points.
"The core of this organization," Sadami said, "is writers."
Still, the group's public emergence was widely noted in Iranian political circles, where it was taken as particularly vivid evidence that religious conservatives were in firm control once again.
"There's no way this could have happened six months ago," said Saeed Laylaz, a reform economist and analyst.
Since reformist candidates were disqualified from parliamentary elections last February and hard-liners swept to power, the only question has been how hard of a line they will adopt. The Army of Martyrs is seen as a sign, having thrust itself onto a public stage already featuring a revival of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Revolutionary Guard has long been the primary bastion and incubator of hard-line resolve here. Formed by the Muslim clerics who came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution distrusting the army left behind by the monarchy, it has its own divisions, intelligence branch, prisons and responsibilities ranging from disaster response to, according to diplomats here, supervision of Iran's shadowy nuclear program.
It is also increasingly visible in politics.
Several dozen former pasdaran, as the Revolutionary Guards are known in the Persian language, were sworn into parliament last month on the slate approved by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who as supreme leader holds ultimate authority in Iran's theocratic system. Khamenei recently named a retired Revolutionary Guard chief to head state television and radio, one of the most powerful positions in government.
Last month, the Revolutionary Guard took over a new international airport near Tehran only hours after it opened. A public statement had called the hiring of a Turkish firm to operate Imam Khomeini International Airport a threat to "the security of the country as well as its dignity." The airport has remained shuttered.
"I think the airport thing was very significant," a foreign diplomat here said. "It had the form of a coup. I think it was the IRGC saying publicly, 'We can do what we want.' . . . The question is whether they're pressing their own agenda or doing Khamenei's bidding."
Others are more sanguine. Calling the Revolutionary Guard a "maturing" organization, another diplomat noted the restraint it had shown in Iraq, where it is the lead Iranian agency. But at a June 2 public conference, a brigadier in the guards lauded the effectiveness of "martyrdom operations," citing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as tactical operations that produced far-reaching strategic results, according to Iranian media accounts. But any formal link between the Revolutionary Guard and the Army of Martyrs is denied by both the government and Samadi.
Samadi said the Army of Martyrs was formed to protest a visible slackening in revolutionary zeal. A photo of flag-draped U.S. coffins decorates his office wall, beside a portrait of a Palestinian suicide bomber and her infant daughter. A third photo shows Khaled Eslamboli firing an automatic weapon at Sadat's reviewing stand during a military parade on Oct. 6, 1981. Samadi said the group's first act was a protest against dropping Eslamboli's name from street signs.
"We realized this was the initial step toward creating a gap between the revolutionary Iranians and other Muslims in other parts of the world, especially those fighting the Israelis in Palestine," he said.
Like many Islamic militants, Samadi describes suicide bombings as asymmetrical warfare, a military tactic that levels the battlefield between a technologically superior army and an oppressed population. He lamented that Iran is rarely credited with pioneering the form by sending car and truck bombs against the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s. When a reporter observed that Iran appeared to have forsaken the practice since a truck bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was traced to Iranian agents, the spokesman smiled.
"The U.S. has not really recognized that we have successfully transferred a good method of resistance to other countries," he said. "We do not have to mount foreign operations ourselves."
And yet, he said, Osama bin Laden threatens to give martyrdom operations a bad name. "What's the point of blowing up a civilian train in Spain, or the U.S. embassies in Africa where a lot of Africans are killed?"
The Army of Martyrs wants nothing to do with Hassan Sabah's Assassins, either. "The nature of the things they did is quite in line with what Osama bin Laden is carrying out," Samadi said.
No such talk is heard in Alamut, northwest of Tehran. "If Hassan Sabah was the ruler, it would be excellent," Safari said. "God bless him.
"Really. God bless him."
? 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Death Stalks An Experiment In Democracy
Fearful Baghdad Council Keeps Public Locked Out
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A01
Last of three articles
BAGHDAD -- The weekly meeting of the Rashid district council began last Wednesday with a prayer for two of the group's 33 members. One was in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital after being shot seven times in an assassination attempt. Another was in hiding after gunmen attacked her house and killed her brother.
"Let us remember our martyrs," Sami Ahmed Sharif, the council chairman, intoned as his fellow members stood, turned their palms to the ceiling and bowed their heads.
There were no other residents of the Rashid district to observe the moment of silence or the rest of the proceedings. Council members voted to close the meeting to the public because of fears that assassins would slip in and mark members for death. To enforce the decision, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers surrounded the council building and stationed snipers on the roof.
The nascent political institutions designed to replace the U.S. administration of Iraq are beset by challenges to their popular legitimacy and effectiveness, and by grave risks to Iraqis who have joined the experiment in representative government. As Iraqis prepare for their country to regain sovereignty, it is uncertain how much their political future will be shaped by the $700 million program in democracy-building that has been at the core of the U.S. occupation.
Inside the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, which will dissolve with the handover on June 30, some officials express doubts that Iraq's political system will conform to the American blueprints. "Will this develop the way we hope it will?" a CPA official involved in promoting democracy said. "Probably not."
New political institutions to replace Saddam Hussein's Baath Party dictatorship are among the chief legacies of the U.S. occupation. Every city and province has a local council. New mayors, provincial governors and national cabinet ministers have been chosen. The Shiite Muslim majority, shut out of power in Hussein's government, is widely represented, as are religious minorities and women. Hundreds of political parties have formed, and thousands of people have participated in seminars on democracy.
But Iraqis criticize the local councils and the interim national government as illegitimate because their members were not elected. The country's top Shiite cleric has repudiated the interim constitution drafted by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council. In several recent meetings about the country's political future, Iraqis who favor a Western-style democracy have been drowned out by calls for a system governed by Islamic law.
The cabinet, appointed by a U.N. envoy three weeks ago, has had little time to prepare to govern. Local councils, whose authority had been restricted for months by U.S. military commanders, are also stepping into uncharted areas, uncertain about their responsibilities and powers under a system whose inauguration is a week away.
Yet these uncertainties are overshadowed by the imminent threat of violence. Local council members who once welcomed constituents into their homes now keep armed guards at the front gate. Leaders of the national government travel in armored vehicles and work inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, an area off-limits to ordinary Iraqis. Many foreign contractors hired by the U.S. government to promote democracy have either relocated to Kuwait or hunkered down in protected compounds.
Despite those precautions, more than 100 Iraqi government officials have been killed during the occupation, including two members of the Governing Council. Over the past two weeks, the deputy foreign minister and a senior official in the Education Ministry have been assassinated. On Sunday, masked gunmen shot and killed the council chairman of Baghdad's Rusafa district and his deputy as they sat in a cafe.
Teaching Iraqis about democracy has also been risky. Scott Erwin, a 22-year-old CPA staff member, was critically wounded in an ambush this month as he drove away from a Baghdad university where he was teaching a class on democracy. Two CPA employees who worked on civic education initiatives, Fern Holland and Robert Zangas, were shot to death in March near the city of Hilla.
"Iraq may get to a semi-democratic outcome. But the more-democratic outcomes that were possible a year ago are much more difficult to imagine now because of the security situation," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who worked on democracy issues for the CPA before leaving Iraq this spring, in part because of concerns about safety. "This is the biggest tragedy of Iraq."
The Central Mission
The transformation of Iraq from dictatorship to democracy was the central mission of the CPA. Everything else -- the efforts to rebuild infrastructure, train police, revise the school curriculum -- was aimed at building a democratic government that would be a model for the rest of the Middle East.
The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, initially planned to supervise the entire process. He wanted the CPA to oversee the drafting of a constitution and the convening of general elections. Bremer insisted last summer that the United States would relinquish sovereignty only to a stable, independent, democratically elected Iraqi government.
When escalating violence and dissent by Iraqis led the Bush administration to abandon that plan in November and accelerate the handover, Bremer ordered the CPA to advance democratic goals as far as possible by June 30. He promulgated an interim constitution that included a bill of rights and a commitment to hold elections by January. Local councils whose members had been chosen by the military were authorized to select new members through caucuses. Bremer augmented the $30 million set aside by Congress for democracy promotion with another $700 million to fund political parties, nongovernmental organizations and civics programs to advocate such political values as the separation of church and state, women's rights and federalism.
A key component of the U.S. strategy, starting at the beginning of the occupation, was to create effective grass-roots government. When Hussein was in power, governors, mayors and even municipal police chiefs were appointed by Baghdad. The CPA wanted to change that, starting in the capital city.
The CPA's plan for Baghdad envisioned three tiers of local government: a city council, eight district councils and dozens of neighborhood councils. The councils were limited to advising U.S. officials about reconstruction needs in the city. They had neither the power to enact legislation nor budgets for municipal improvements.
Despite calls from Iraqi politicians for the participants to be chosen by popular vote, the CPA deemed municipal elections too risky last summer. They worried that religious extremists and Baathists would manipulate the process. Instead, the CPA asked the Research Triangle Institute, which had a U.S. government contract to promote democracy in Iraq, to organize neighborhood caucuses to select the councils.
Participants in the caucuses were screened by Americans who supervised the entire process. As a result, the councils were filled with people who owed their jobs more to the CPA than to the public. "The community saw us as tools of the Americans," said Ali Aziz, the secretary of the Rashid council. "It was the beginning of our problems."
Nurturing New Leaders
American officials hope local council members, almost all of whom lived in Iraq while Hussein was in power, will emerge as prominent political figures and potential challengers to the clique of national politicians who opposed Hussein from exile.
"The councils have been a very successful experiment in democracy," said Andrew Morrison, a U.S. diplomat who speaks Arabic and has served as the CPA's governance coordinator for Baghdad.
The composition of the Rashid district council would seem to bear out that assessment. The council, responsible for a large swath of Shiite-dominated southern Baghdad, includes several members with doctoral degrees. Others have important tribal and business connections. Four of the 33 members are women.
Despite their aspirations to seek an elective seat in an eventual national parliament, several council members said that the CPA's limits on their authority had kept them from building the respect they needed to earn the trust and respect of their constituents.
"How can we win the support of the people if we have no money?" said Sharif, the council chairman, a voluble real-estate broker who was encouraged to participate in politics by his friends and neighbors. "If we cannot help them, they will not support us."
When not focused on security, the council's meetings are devoted to discussing work they want the Americans to perform, instead of work they can accomplish themselves. Although they will shed their advisory status to the Americans after June 30, members worry that their limited influence could weaken because there will be fewer U.S.-funded projects and they will have no budget of their own. Over the past four months, the CPA has consulted with the council in allocating more than $56 million for public works projects in the district.
Members faulted the CPA for not keeping a commitment to give a large share of power to local officials. The Rashid council has no control over police officers or many other government employees because they report to national ministries.
Morrison said the division of power between national and local officials would be decided when Iraqis write a permanent constitution. "The Iraqis are going to debate this out over the course of the next year," he said. "We tried to give them the building blocks, but it's one area I'm not sure where it's going to come out."
Among the things the Rashid council plans to do after June 30 is assert its independence from its American sponsors. It has politely disinvited U.S. civilian and military officials, who have attended every council meeting so far, from sessions after that date.
Council members said they envisioned a democracy different from what they have read about the United States, suggesting that many of the concepts Americans have been preaching here have not been accepted. For instance, many said that a separation between religion and the state makes little sense in Iraq.
"We can't act this way," insisted Murthada Younis, the deputy chairman. Outside the room in which he was speaking, several photocopied pictures of a deceased Shiite cleric were taped to the wall. "Religion is part of our life and it should be part of government," he said.
Men on the council said they supported allowing women to vote and hold elective office, but several scoffed at the notion of giving women the same personal freedoms they enjoy outside the Arab world. "In the West, women have absolute freedom to do what they want," said Abbas Taie, an X-ray technician who has attended several U.S.-sponsored democracy workshops. "The Iraqi women refuse such kinds of freedom."
Sharif, the Rashid chairman, said one of the most important items before the council after June 30 will be scheduling local elections. "Right now, many people do not think we are legitimate," he said. "That would change if we were elected by the people."
But Sharif said he recognized that holding an election before the end of the year would be impossible because of the security situation. Campaigning for a January national election will be hard enough, he said. Right now, he said, only a fool would attempt to go door to door or hold a community meeting to meet with constituents. "It's far too dangerous," he said.
Asked who he thought his chief rival would be, he did not pause.
"Terrorism," he said.
'We Need Protection'
After the prayer and the approval of the previous week's minutes, the Rashid council got down to work. The first order of business was to hand out military permits to each member allowing them to carry handguns.
"Our lives are in jeopardy," Sharif said as he distributed the laminated cards.
The U.S. Army had given council members .38-caliber pistols for their protection. But the licenses had expired on April 30, exposing members to arrest if they were searched at a military checkpoint. Sharif said he had continued to pack his pistol, as well as carrying two unlicensed AK-47 assault rifles in his car.
"I'm the chairman, but I violate the law so I can protect myself," he said.
For months, the Rashid district council avoided the violence that had plagued other groups. In the district as a whole, five neighborhood council members have been assassinated this year. In Sadr City, a large Shiite slum, the chairman of the district council was killed and strung from a pole. A sign hanging from his neck accused him of being an American spy.
Rashid council members learned to live with threats and close calls. Yacoub Youssef, the chairman of the education committee, said he had received 14 threats, some written and others by telephone, accusing him of collaborating with U.S. forces. Younis, the deputy chairman, said he was almost gunned down on his way to work last month. "We had been very lucky," he said.
This month, the luck ran out. On June 5, gunmen opened fire on council member Ali Ameri, a professor at Baghdad University, as he drove to work, killing two of his bodyguards and leaving him near death. On June 11, assailants sprayed bullets into the house of a colleague, biologist Nisreen Haider, killing her brother and forcing her into seclusion.
"Serving on this council has become very risky," said Adel Fahdil, a contractor. Although Fahdil insisted he was not worried because he had 20 guards, all armed with AK-47s, other members were not as confident. Most cannot afford a large security detail and are forced to rely on one or two relatives with weapons. They have asked for protection, but U.S. officials answered that they did not have the resources to guard more than 1,200 district and neighborhood councilors across the capital.
"We need someone to help us," said council member Majid Mamouri, who said he could not pay for guards with his salary as a professor of veterinary science. "We need bodyguards. We need protection."
At Wednesday's meeting -- held at a former hunting lodge once run by Hussein's son, Qusay -- only 18 of the council's 33 members were in attendance.
Reached in hiding, Haider said in a telephone interview that she had no intention of returning to the council. "I will not work there anymore," she said. "The people do not deserve to be served."
She said she could no longer live in the Rashid district and planned to move elsewhere in Iraq. "They are watching me, and I expect to be killed," she said.
Ideals and Necessities
Despite the threats, some council members said they were uneasy about excluding the public from their meetings.
"We're working in the name of the citizens," said Youssef, who also serves as a senior official in the Education Ministry. "The public should be able to attend even if we're afraid of them. The citizens have a right to hear what we're doing. We should not be having secret meetings."
But Sharif, a trim man with close-cropped hair and large glasses, argued that the safety of the members was more important. "We must protect the council," he said. "This is not ideal but it is necessary."
These days, he said, "we must do what is necessary for democracy, not what is ideal."
Sharif said he expected the threats to abate after June 30, when the occupation ends and the council assumes greater authority in southern Baghdad. He said he hoped residents and the insurgents would change their opinions of the members when they are working without Americans in the room.
"I don't have any trust in the Americans anymore," Younis said. "I trust my nation to achieve democracy despite terrorism. People know what they want."
While the threats and attacks have scared off some members, they have strengthened the resolve of at least a quorum on the council. With the CPA dissolving and U.S. troops assuming a lower profile, they regard themselves as front-line fighters for democracy.
"If we quit now, the terrorists win," said Youssef, who has been threatened 14 times and was shot at on his way to work last month. Each attempt at intimidation, he said, "gives me the strength to be more determined."
Special correspondent Huda Ahmed Lazim contributed to this report.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Cutting Through the Fog
From the June 22, 2004 Los Angeles Times: Did the 9/11 commission staff statement really say that there was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda?
by Stephen F. Hayes
06/23/2004 12:00:00 AM
LAST WEDNESDAY, the September 11 commission issued a staff "statement" that further complicated an already confusing issue: the nature of the relationship between the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda.
On the one hand, the statement confirmed several contacts between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda terrorists, including a face-to-face meeting between a senior Iraqi intelligence official and Osama bin Laden in 1994. Then, calling into question its own findings, the statement reported that two al Qaeda terrorists denied the existence of any ties whatsoever. Finally, in very sloppy language, the statement seemed to conclude that there had been "no collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda. The media took that nuanced and self-contradictory analysis--which, by the way, constituted only one paragraph in a 12-page report--and found certainty where none existed. "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie," blared a four-column headline in the New York Times. An editorial flatly declared that the commission had "refuted" any connection.
Nonsense. The staff statement was a model of muddle, but this much is clear: There is nothing in it that reliably or categorically "refutes" a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. What's more, in the days since its release, members of the 9/11 commission--including co-chairmen Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean--have appeared eager to distance themselves from the statement issued by their staff.
"Members do not get involved in staff reports," Kean cautioned, promising more on the subject in the commission's final report.
So was there or wasn't there a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda?
CIA Director George Tenet certainly believes so. "Credible reporting states that al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities," he wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 7, 2002. "The reporting also stated that Iraq had provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." When Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 12, 2003, he said that although his agency could not show "command and control" between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime--something the Bush administration never claimed--it could demonstrate "contacts, training and safe haven."
Top Clinton administration officials also suggested a "collaborative" relationship. On Aug. 7, 1998, al Qaeda terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 257 people--including 12 Americans. The Clinton administration struck back 13 days later, hitting a pharmaceutical plant, an al Qaeda-linked facility in Sudan. On Aug. 24, 1998, a "senior intelligence official" made available by the White House told reporters that U.S. intelligence had found "strong ties between the plant and Iraq." Among that evidence: telephone intercepts between top officials at the plant and the head of Iraq's chemical weapons program. In all, six top Clinton administration officials argued that Iraq had provided the chemical weapon know-how to the plant demolished in response to the al Qaeda attacks.
TODAY, top Clinton officials are still not backing down from these claims. William Cohen, former secretary of Defense, defended the strikes as recently as March 23, 2004, in testimony before the September 11 commission. Cohen said an executive from the Sudanese plant had "traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of [Iraq's] VX [nerve gas] program."
Other recent intelligence, including communications intercepts and interviews with Iraqi intelligence detainees, indicates that Iraq provided funding and weapons to Ansar al Islam, an al Qaeda affiliate in northern Iraq.
These connections seem pretty compelling--Tenet's testimony, the intelligence surrounding the 1998 Sudan strikes and the Iraqi support for Ansar al Islam. But the September 11 commission's staff statement didn't deal with any of them.
The September 11 commission cannot be expected to write the definitive history of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. But having contributed greatly to the confusion with one paragraph in Staff Statement 15, the commissioners owe it to the American people to give it a thorough and sober examination in their final report.
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America, (HarperCollins).
? Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved
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Enemies Together
Clinton was right: Saddam and al Qaeda had numerous connections.
BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Tuesday, June 22, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Last fall I spoke on a panel at a Washington think tank. The topic was Iraq, and the moderator wanted my reaction to what he termed Americans' "misperceptions" about the war. Among those he cited was a poll showing that 48% of Americans believed there had been a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
I responded by saying that the American people were perhaps wiser than the pundits who mock them. But hadn't President Bush just said there was no link? No, I replied, he had said that there was no evidence, so far, of a link between Iraq and 9/11, which was a very different thing. At least one of the audience members whose minds I didn't succeed in changing serves on the staff of the 9/11 Commission, which last week released an interim report attempting to muddle the same issue.
Editorialists and headline writers seized on the report as evidence that the Bush administration had exaggerated the Iraq-al Qaeda link. Some even demanded an apology. They didn't get one. "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda," the president responded, is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."
A reader wanting to make sense of all this couldn't do better than Stephen Hayes's "The Connection." In this balanced and careful account, Mr. Hayes describes dangerous liaisons so numerous that, it is clear, leaving Saddam in power was not a responsible option after 9/11. Mr. Hayes also shows how most Democrats and much of the Washington media and foreign-policy establishment have studiously avoided the evidence of such ties, lest they be forced to concede a justification for what they'd rather write off as Mr. Bush's war.
It is often claimed that the "secular" Saddam would never have worked with the fundamentalist Osama bin Laden, and vice versa. But Mr. Hayes shows how Saddam increasingly turned to Islam as a legitimizing force for his regime--adding, for example, allahu akhbar ("God is great") to the Iraqi flag. In any case, Saddam and bin Laden found mutual hatred of the U.S. reason enough for an extensive array of contacts stretching over a decade. These include, among much else, Saddam's sending emissaries to bin Laden when the terrorist was holed up in Sudan and later in Afghanistan. Far from exaggerating the evidence linking Iraq and al Qaeda, the Bush administration has soft-pedaled two of the most suggestive connections between Saddam's regime and the 9/11 plot itself.
One of these goes by the name of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and is the subject of Mr. Hayes's first chapter. On Jan. 5, 2000, the Iraqi was photographed welcoming one Khalid al Mihdhar to the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Shakir, it is true, was employed as an airport "greeter." But he then proceeded to hop into a car with Mihdhar and drive to a condo owned by a known al Qaeda associate. The CIA would later conclude that over the following three days al Qaeda planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Also believed to have been present were Nawaf al Hazmi and Ramzi bin al Shibh. Mihdhar and al Hazmi were both 9/11 hijackers. Bin al Shibh later boasted of being "coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation."
Shakir told associates that he had obtained his airport job via connections at Iraq's Malaysian Embassy. It isn't known whether he was present at the January 2000 meeting at the behest of the Iraqi government or as a freelance Islamist. But we appear a bit closer to an answer since Mr. Hayes's book went to press. Last month the Journal's Review & Outlook column broke the news that multiple Iraqi documents now in U.S. custody list someone named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir as having been an officer of the Saddam fedayeen.
Then there's the matter of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta's possible April 2001 meeting in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent/diplomat named Ahmed Ibrahim Samir al Ani, who was later expelled from the Czech Republic in connection with a plot to bomb Radio Free Iraq/Radio Free Europe. The establishment media have gone to great lengths to discredit the story, and the 9/11 Commission staff dismisses the possibility on the grounds that someone made calls in the U.S. from Atta's cell phone during the period in question. But the fact remains that Atta undoubtedly visited the Czech Republic under suspicious circumstances in 2000 and that the Czech officials who know best about their surveillance of al Ani stand by their story of a 2001 meeting. As Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross put it: "I believe the counterintelligence services more than I believe journalists."
But of course no such explosive links to 9/11 need be shown for one to reasonably conclude that it would have been impossible "to wage a serious Global War on Terror," as Mr. Hayes puts it, "leaving the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in power." Saddam's long history of sheltering terrorists, including Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas--as well as 1993 World Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yassin--is a matter of undisputed public record. So is his funding of Palestinian terror and his attempt to assassinate President George H.W. Bush--not to mention numerous smaller attempts at anti-American terror abroad following the first Gulf War.
Damningly, Mr. Hayes reminds us that Saddam's connections to terrorism and al Qaeda were taken as a given before the 2000 election by both the establishment media and former officials--such as Richard Clarke and Al Gore--who are now at pains to deny them. The connection was even cited in the Clinton administration's 1998 indictment of bin Laden. Surely the former president will want to remind Americans of this fact as he embarks on his book tour.
Mr. Pollock is a senior editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal.
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Al Qaeda Link To Iraq May Be Confusion Over Names

By Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A13
An allegation that a high-ranking al Qaeda member was an officer in Saddam Hussein's private militia may have resulted from confusion over Iraqi names, a senior administration official said yesterday.
Former Navy secretary John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Sunday that documents found in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda." Although he said the identity "still has to be confirmed," Lehman introduced the information on NBC's "Meet the Press" to counter a commission staff report that said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no "collaborative relationship."
Yesterday, the senior administration official said Lehman had probably confused two people who have similar-sounding names.
One of them is Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, identified as an al Qaeda "fixer" in Malaysia. Officials say he served as an airport greeter for al Qaeda in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, at a gathering for members who were to be involved in the attacks on the USS Cole, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Iraqi military documents, found last year, listed a similar name, Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, on a roster of Hussein's militia, Saddam's Fedayeen.
"By most reckoning that would be someone else" other than the airport greeter, said the administration official, who would speak only anonymously because of the matter's sensitivity. He added that the identification issue is still being studied but "it doesn't look like a match to most analysts."
In an interview yesterday, Lehman said it is still possible the man in Kuala Lumpur was affiliated with Hussein, even if he isn't the man on the Fedayeen roster. "It's one more instance where this is an intriguing possibility that needs to be run to ground," Lehman said. "The most intriguing part of it is not whether or not he was in the Fedayeen, but whether or not the guy who attended Kuala Lumpur had any connections to Iraqi intelligence. . . . We don't know."
Allegations that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi was under Iraqi intelligence control were raised last year in an article in the Weekly Standard by Stephen F. Hayes, and later discounted by U.S. intelligence officials. No such tie was indicated in the commission report.
The commission staff report, released Wednesday, prompted a vigorous response from the Bush administration, which had cited since 2002 an al Qaeda-Hussein link as one reason for going to war. Just last week, Vice President Cheney said in a television interview he "probably" knew intelligence about Iraq's ties to terrorists that the commission had not received, but added, "I don't know what they know."
On Sunday, Lehman said, "The vice president was right when he said that he may have things that we don't yet have."
Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton have asked the administration to provide any additional information it has. Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said no new requests for information have been sent, but the panel has long-standing requests for documents. Cheney's spokesman, Kevin Kellems, said that, to his knowledge, the vice president has received no new requests.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Learning the Hard Way
The oil market is trying to teach policymakers a lesson. While they learn it before it's too late?
by Irwin M. Stelzer
06/22/2004 12:00:00 AM
WHEN MARKETS TALK, politicians would do well to listen. The oil markets are doing more than mere talking--they are shouting for the attention of policymakers who seem determined not to listen.
First, we have the recent run-up in crude oil prices, which fluctuate around $40 per barrel. That rise was in part due to the fabulous growth of the U.S. and Chinese economies, which sent demand for oil soaring. But a further driver is OPEC's manipulation of the market, creating a situation in which rising demand cannot elicit the increased supplies that would flow in a competitive market.
Lesson number one for policymakers: It is no longer prudent to ignore the OPEC cartel, or to rely on it for mercy. Trust busters have had time to worry about less important price conspiracies--the commissions charged for selling old master paintings is less likely to affect the economy than is a conspiracy to fix oil prices--but have shied away from attacking the OPEC cartel. Now would seem to be the time for the voice of the Antitrust Division to be heard above that of the State Department, ever-eager to avoid a diplomatic row with the house of Saud.
The markets are also saying something about the state of the gasoline market. The margin between crude oil prices and gasoline prices has doubled in the United States, driving refining profits up several hundred percent. Yet, refining capacity has not increased. Oil industry executives with whom I have spoken say that environmental and other restrictions make it virtually impossible to build new refineries. Lesson number two for policymakers: Restrictions that were appropriate when crude oil was selling for $10 per barrel and gasoline for $1 per gallon are not economically sensible at current price levels. Revise them to allow more refineries to be built.
These are important messages from the market. But not as important as the persistence of the so-called risk premium of between $5 and $10 per barrel that seems to be built into crude oil prices. Part of that premium is a response to the continued disruption of supplies from important producers. Terrorists in Iraq periodically sabotage that nation's pipelines. Unrest and violence in Nigeria, Africa's largest producer, make that country an unreliable source of oil. Islamic terrorism casts doubt about the reliability of supplies from Kazakhstan.
Add self-inflicted wounds by important producers. In Russia, which rivals Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer, Vladimir Putin and his old KGB buddies have frightened foreign investors by jailing the country's richest oil baron, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Venezuela's Castro-loving president, Hugo Ch?vez, has replaced the nation's skilled oil industry managers with political appointees, causing a loss of 500,000 barrels per day of production from that important supplier of the low-sulfur oil most suitable for use in U.S. refineries. Iran's mullahs have stifled the foreign investment that Iran's oil industry so desperately needs.
Yet even these multiple threats to a steady flow of oil pale by comparison with developments in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom sits on 25 percent of the world's known reserves, but that figure understates its importance. The Saudis can tap their reserves for over 80 years without slowing output. And it is well known that the Saudis haven't really attempted to explore for new reservoirs because they already know precisely where some 260 billion barrels are located. "You don't plant potatoes when you have a cellar full of spuds," a grizzled denizen of America's "oil patch" once told me. Not only are the Saudis sitting on the largest known reserves, and on the cheapest, most easily discovered as-yet "unknown reserves," they are also the only country in a position to increase production quickly should some other supplier be knocked out of action.
But Saudi Arabia is no longer the stable rock in a turbulent Middle East sea. Terrorists funded by the Saudis have turned on their benefactors, and are killing foreigners to cause a flight of oil-industry and other trained personnel. They are winning because they seem immune to capture, because many top Saudis insist that it is the Zionists, rather than al Qaeda, who are causing the mayhem, and because hundreds of thousands of unemployed youths see no future for them so long as the royal family siphons off the nation's wealth to support its opulent lifestyle.
Whatever the reason, it is far from certain that the corrupt geriatrics who run the country will be able to head off the threat to the Saudi industry's ability to produce a steady flow of oil. True, the production facilities are well protected, but by troops of uncertain loyalty. And pipelines are difficult to protect, as are port facilities.
A final lesson for policymakers: Prepare for the day when bin Laden and associates are in a position to topple the Saudi regime and withhold supplies of oil, causing a major economic trauma in industrialized countries and a humanitarian catastrophe in the undeveloped world. That means continuing to build strategic reserves, but much more. Alternative sources of energy for transportation uses cannot be available in the relevant time frame, if ever; places such as Alaska take a long while to develop, and anyhow don't have enough oil to matter; renewables such as solar and wind power are not replacements for gasoline; conservation can be useful when prices rise gradually, giving consumers time to adjust to higher prices, but not when there is a price explosion.
I was asked many years ago at a gathering of government and industry experts to lay out an energy policy for America, to cope with a supply interruption. Two words: "aircraft carriers." That remains true today. Iraq is not a war for oil. The next U.S. intervention in the Middle East may well be.
Irwin M. Stelzer is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, a columnist for the Sunday Times (London), a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.
? Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
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Unfairenheit 9/11
The lies of Michael Moore.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 21, 2004, at 12:26 PM PT
Moore: Trying to have it three ways
One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.
Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something--I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now--has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.
Recruiters in Michigan

Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:

1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States.

3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.

6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all--the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002--or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar--an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building--is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left--like the parties of the Iraqi secular left--are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal.
He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that--as you might expect--Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies."
A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.
The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say--that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box.
But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then--wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)
That this--his pro-American moment--was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled--Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more--the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported--and the David Kay report had established--that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)
Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable "warnings."
The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warnings--not exactly an original point--the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic "security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments that don't have the means or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.) So--he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing. Again--simply not serious.
Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist.
I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others. Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground. There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I won't dwell on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated Army that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this: In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.) Well, where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft--the most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think--as he seems to suggest--that parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do? Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians to pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported the antidraft (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one realizes that it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It would be too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once and see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer.
Trying to talk congressmen into sending their sons to war
Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how many black passengers were on those planes--we happen to know what Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a trolley, fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the White House or the Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything.
Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.
However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers--get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of.
Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (...), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.
Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ...
And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.
If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.
Correction, June 22, 2004: This piece originally referred to terrorist attacks by Abu Nidal's group on the Munich and Rome airports. The 1985 attacks occurred at the Rome and Vienna airports. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, is out in paperback.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Confronting the Biological and
Chemical Weapons Challenge:
The Need for an
"Intellectual Infrastructure"
Michael Moodie
.:  
International efforts to address the challenges posed by the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) and the threat of terrorist use of such weapons are at a loss regarding where to go next. The effort to negotiate a legally binding compliance protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) ended in 2001 without producing an acceptable outcome. The Action Plan agreed upon at the Fifth Review Conference of the BWC in December 2002 is a minimalist agreement that might produce useful results, but results that can hardly be called dramatic in light of the severity of the challenge. Similarly, the First Review Conference of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in April 2003 provided a distinctly undramatic outcome that suggested little interest in new initiatives to address a profound challenge. It is incumbent on the international community to explore novel ideas-- both substantively and operationally--that might yield concrete actions nations and others can take to strengthen efforts to address the challenge that chemical and biological weapons pose in the hands of states or terrorists. The need for new thinking is especially strong in the community of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Governments are likely to spend most of the next several years focused on the issues that were addressed at their review meetings. While potentially useful, these measures are likely to be limited in terms of the policy outcomes they produce. This makes it incumbent on the NGO community to be the source of Michael Moodie is president of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington, DC and a former Assistant Director for Multilateral Affairs at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He is the co-author of "Alternative Routes to the Cemetery," which was the lead article in the very first issue of The Fletcher Forum.

new thinking with respect to both substance and operations for addressing the complex CBW challenges. Many NGOs, however, invested considerable effort in traditional arms control and nonproliferation approaches to these problems in recent years, and they have few, if any, alternatives in the wake of these unsuccessful efforts. It is now time to move beyond those failed exercises and to push new conceptual and operational paths that can lead to concrete government action.
  
On July 25, 2001, the United States announced that it would not support the draft protocol negotiated by the Ad Hoc Group (AHG) of states that are parties to the BWC as presented in the "composite text" offered by the AHG Chairman.1 The U.S. statement made clear that further negotiation of specific language in the draft would not address the major concerns it had with the proposed protocol, which it felt was based on a fundamentally flawed conceptual approach and unwarranted assumptions. Five months later, the Fifth BWC Review Conference suspended its efforts in light of a U.S. demand that the Ad Hoc Group be brought to an end. This last-minute standoff was the culmination of three weeks of sometimes bitter disputes over how best to strengthen the BWC and to carry forward the fight against biological weapons proliferation. Between these two events, the United States was the victim of unprecedented anthrax attacks in the wake of the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001. The anthrax attacks transformed what had been a theoretical concern for some people into a very real security threat for the entire country. In doing so, they created a fundamentally new context within which the challenge of chemical and biological weapons had to be addressed.
Fifteen years ago, these challenges were primarily the province of a small group of technical experts. The policy community, including government policymakers and the broader strategic community, had little familiarity with--and less understanding of--the security problems created by the use of chemicals and living organisms as instruments of violence.
However, a number of developments emerged in the early 1990s that
began to change the situation including:
* Iraqi use of chemical weapons in its war with Iran in the mid-1980s and, more important to policymakers, the fact that coalition forces confronted a chemically- and biologically-armed Iraq during the first Gulf War. This confrontation transformed what had been a rather uninteresting potentiality for many members of the coalition into a concrete security problem.
* Emerging intelligence about a massive illicit biological weapons program in the Soviet Union. Information provided by defectors described a program
     
.:  

involving dozens of facilities, tens of thousands of people, and billions of rubles that was previously unknown to Western intelligence sources.
* Ongoing concerns about North Korea, which was believed to have had a chemical and biological weapons program for decades.
These events combined to create an impetus for bringing the negotiations of the CWC to a successful conclusion in 1992. The treaty was opened for signature in early 1993 and entered into force in April 1997. At the same time, efforts were also made to strengthen the BWC, both through new confidence-building measures and through agreement on a process for supporting these measures that would bolster confidence in compliance with the convention. Throughout the 1990s, a litany of events continued to push CBW issues further up the post-Cold War security agenda. These included continuing discoveries about the Iraqi CBW program by the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), the difficulties of getting the new Russian government to address problems left behind by the Soviet CBW program, and the March 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway. This last event in particular transformed the security landscape. Occurring soon before the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it created a new mentality among policymakers and the public alike that the United States was not invulnerable to terrorism, that such terrorism could entail the use of chemical or biological weapons, and that the United States was not prepared. This mentality triggered the initial efforts that became the foundation for what is now the government's focus on homeland security--an orientation reinforced by the anthrax experience in the autumn of 2001. Because of these anthrax attacks, the threat of bioterrorism--nearly overnight--crashed its way into the national consciousness through the most mundane of daily events, delivery of the mail. As a result, in contrast to the last half of the twentieth century when nuclear weapons were the paramount concern, public opinion polls today report that what scares Americans most is the threat of biological or chemical attacks. CBW issues--and biological challenges in particular--are now near the top of the nation's security agenda. Despite this ascendance, understanding of the issues among policymakers and the public remains limited. This limited understanding translates into an absence of innovative approaches to deal with these demanding challenges, whether they relate to the state proliferation or to nonstate terrorism dimensions of the problem.
Despite increased recognition of the CBW problem, the security community
is not prepared to address it, especially in conceptual terms. The situation
      :
    " "
.:  

Throughout the 1990s, a
litany of events continued
to push CBW issues further
up the post-Cold War
security agenda.
regarding chemical and biological weapons stands in strong contrast to efforts directed at the challenge of nuclear weapons when it first emerged. From the onset of the nuclear age, the strategic studies community recognized that the world was confronted by a potential future of unspeakable horror. In response, it created an intellectual infrastructure to live in that world and deal with its problems. It developed new concepts and new analytical tools, fostered new ways of conceptualizing issues and defining the world so that governments and their publics could cope with the realities that nuclear weapons had created. Indeed, it was largely through its work on nuclear weapons issues that modern strategic studies and the security community were defined. Nothing similar emerged with respect to chemical and biological weapons. To the extent that they were considered at all during the Cold War, CBW were often assessed in the same category as--yet of lesser importance than--nuclear weapons, with the argument that anything that is useful for dealing with the challenge of nuclear weapons would have the additional benefit of managing chemical and biological challenges. That may have been true in a Cold War context, but once the nuclear standoff ended, it became an unwarranted assumption. Limited experience yielded a limited range of tools to address them. At a time when the world had changed and priorities had shifted, governments--and the broader community--were not prepared. Today, confronting a situation in which the old conceptual, analytical, and policy tools have been found wanting in their ability to manage the CBW challenge, the policy community is largely empty-handed.
    
The case for needing new thinking and new approaches to CBW rests on
four rather simple arguments:
* First, the old ways and old tools have not worked--at least not very well--in recent times. What might be called the "Geneva process"--formal multilateral negotiations by governments of legally binding agreements with inputs from NGOs and others--has not yielded major results since the conclusion of the CWC negotiations. Equally, the system of using the UN as the last resort to deal with problems of noncompliance, which is a key feature of these agreements, is not satisfactory. Members of the Security Council, and the five permanent members in particular, have done almost
     
.:  

The situation regarding chemical and biological weapons stands in strong contrast to efforts directed at the challenge of nuclear weapons when it first emerged.
nothing to give content to the declaration at the 1992 Security Council
Summit that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a threat to
international peace and security.
* Second, there is no reason to believe that the ongoing contentious political disputes that were obstacles to progress in the past will not continue to seriously hinder any new attempts based on the usual practices and procedures. One of the most destructive elements in this regard has been the dispute carried by radical members of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) over security requirements in treaties on one hand and demands for cooperation and assistance in the peaceful uses of technologies covered by these agreements on the other.
* Third, old methods fail to accommodate inputs from important players who should now be making contributions to solving the problems. Industry, in particular, was not well integrated into past efforts, yet it stands at the cutting edge of the application of remarkable advances being witnessed in chemistry and the life sciences that are shaping the environment within which these issues must be addressed.
* Finally, old methods sometimes confuse intermediate goals with the ultimate objectives of global efforts. In particular, strengthening the BWC or CWC through the Geneva process seemed to become more important than effectively dealing with CBW proliferation or terrorism using such weapons. By emphasizing what is in essence an intermediate goal, the international community tended to lose sight of the full range of tools needed to address the challenge. This is not to argue that the BWC and CWC are not important or that they should not be strengthened. They are and they should be, but focusing exclusively on that objective arbitrarily limits the potentially useful efforts. Beyond these specific challenges, a range of other issues reinforces the need for new thinking and novel approaches.
The Terrorists' Arrival
The events of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks suggest that the connections between the state proliferation and terrorism dimensions of the unconventional weapons challenge are more important than ever before. This linkage is especially acute with respect to biological weapons. In the past, analysts have tended to conceptualize and address the two dimensions along separate tracks. This split approach has produced different strategies and different policy tools for dealing with what were considered distinct aspects of the problem, if not separate problems altogether. In the world after September 11, such a stovepipe approach will no longer suffice.
      :
    " "
.:  

The distinction between war and terrorism and terrorists and the state has become increasingly blurred and the concepts are now inextricably linked. Confronting this complex challenge, the United States and the international community must implement a response that is strategic in nature and multifaceted in action. A range of tools must be exploited. Arms control is important in this context, but classic multilateral arms control is unlikely to yield significant results on its own. Nor does it provide a sufficiently wide perspective to facilitate all of the varied actions that will be required by the necessary actors--from both the public and private sectors--to deal effectively with the new realities that the convergence of state and non-state challenges present. The combination of politics, science and technology, and the treaty language of the CWC and BWC ensures that these conventions will be insufficient on their own. What is needed is an approach that goes beyond the traditional modalities of arms control to new ways of thinking about how to strengthen the conventions and the norms against CBW that these conventions embody.
Advancing Science and Technology
Both chemistry and the life sciences have produced incredibly rapid scientific and technological advances in recent years, and, if anything, the pace of change is likely to accelerate. Today's Nobel Prize-winning experiment is tomorrow's high school science fair project. Classic arms control will have difficulty in capturing this dynamism in the underlying science and technology, which has the potential for contributing to remarkable advances in the human condition but which could also be used for malign purposes.
Rapid changes in science and technology will shape new scientific and business methods and practices far removed from those of today. Moreover, many of the breakthroughs in science and technology are likely to be achieved by combining them with other technologies such as nanotechnology, cutting-edge information technologies, and new materials science. Creative scientists and technologists could find new ways of putting such things together to advance their CBW capabilities. In essence, advancing science and technology will allow future proliferators to enter the CBW game with a more solid scientific and technological base on which to build their efforts.
The potential injury to mankind resulting from the exploitation of advancing science and technology is almost inconceivable, but conceive it we have, from stealth viruses to ethnic weapons to behavioral modification techniques.2 They are all now deemed to be in the realm of the possible.
Government bureaucracies are notoriously slow to adapt. International organizations are no less so. Because of the vastly different rates of scientific advancement and government adaptation a broader approach is required that
     
.:  

facilitates an ongoing appreciation of the evolving scientific and technological landscape in as close to real-time as possible.
Another key issue related to science and technology is the pace at which this knowledge is spreading around the world. Scientific activity in chemistry and biology is a genuinely international endeavor, as is the development of chemical and biotechnology industries. Developing countries such as Singapore and India are looking to such advanced technology industries to facilitate their economic development. Singapore, for example, has committed itself to becoming a biotechnology hub in East Asia, and it has already succeeded in attracting foreign companies. The drive of developing countries to exploit advanced technology is another dimension of the chemical and biological challenge that complicates efforts to apply old approaches and, likewise, demands new thinking. Casting the issue as one of managing technology diffusion changes the perspective of both policymakers and analysts whose traditional approach would emphasize controlling exports. Nonproliferation export control regimes have their origin in the Cold War's emphasis on nuclear weapons, for which access to fissile material is the critical factor. Looking at the problem as one of technology diffusion, economic development promotion, and risk management, however, leads to the conclusion that controlling material and equipment is becoming less important than managing the risks of transferring knowledge. The commercial, medical, or agricultural ubiquity of the material and equipment needed to develop at least a limited chemical or biological weapons capability makes technical know-how the essential element. In such a world, it is obviously not realistic to suggest that flows of knowledge can be strictly controlled, especially with so many means of direct communications with global reach.
It is not the knowledge per se that is important, however, but the people with that knowledge. Therefore, in managing the potential risks greater attention should be given to what people do with the knowledge they acquire, especially in academic and industry settings. CBW scientists in places like Iraq received at least some of their training in the West. It is impractical, however, to try to track every foreign student or scientist studying or conducting research in the life sciences or chemistry at European and North American universities. Restricting research is no less difficult. Despite the difficulties, some sensitivity to the issue of managing the risks associated with people involved in such research should be promoted.
      :
    " "
.:  

Casting the issue as one of managing technology diffusion changes the perspective of both policy makers and analysts whose traditional approach would emphasize controlling exports.
Engaging Industry More Productively
Those involved in industries based on science and technology that can also yield chemical and biological weapons emphasize the vast contributions their rapidly advancing capabilities make to improving the quality of life for many people, and they are right to do so. Not everyone shares the view, however, that this science and technology, especially biotechnology, is an unalloyed positive. Unscrupulous drug companies or other biotechnology enterprises, for example, have recently become the villains in popular novels and movies. Although such depictions exist in the domain of fiction, the fact that advanced science is portrayed negatively in the popular culture captures a sentiment among the public that reflects uncertainty and uneasiness with issues generated by the advancing life sciences and related technology.
The issues involved, including cloning, gene patents, eugenics, genetically modified food, genetic testing, and privacy are many and difficult. The public perception of industry "fiddling around with nature" suggests a view that advanced science and technology could contribute to a more serious threat to public safety and security. As the drivers of much of the critical science and technology developments, industry must be made to understand its stakes in the challenge and be fully integrated into the necessary strategic response. The direct contribution that industry can make to dealing with the problem is obvious. It should be the source of some of the more technical tools that could be deployed to help manage the risks associated with CBW, including sensors for detection and identification, new medical treatments, or improvements in passive and active protective gear. The indirect contributions of industry, however, should not be overlooked. Even companies that have no direct relationship to the security sector engage in activities with risks attached, and managing the risks associated with advances in chemistry, biology, and the associated specialties is an increasingly vital element of future action. A device for the needle-less application of medical treatments, for example (involving absorption of the drug through the skin), could be of great medical value, but in some contexts it might also be useful for terrorists.
The rapid movement of personnel in a highly volatile industry could create opportunities for those who want to do wrong to operate without close observation (just as participants in national proliferation programs such as those in Iraq received their training in European and North American universities). Given the growing public and governmental concerns over developments in biotechnology, it would also be very much in the interest of the biotechnology industry to cooperate in promoting proper, safe, and ethical practices around the world.
Increasing awareness within industry of the risks associated with critical develop-
     
.:  

ments in the relevant sciences and their commercial application is an area in which industry and government could work closely together. A similar effort to raise awareness of security-related concerns should be pursued with the scientific community. From the beginning of the nuclear age, with the active participation of Einstein himself, physicists have understood that they must think about the negative implications of atomic power to avoid the catastrophic consequences of the knowledge they uncover. That recognition has been lacking in the life sciences community. Their single-minded focus on the good they are trying to do for humanity or scientific discovery for its own sake too often blinded life scientists to the risks that stood alongside the benefits they were seeking. Security issues were kept at arm's length.
While attitudes within the life sciences community appear to be changing in this regard, they still have a long way to go before they can provide the requisite strong leadership and sustained engagement. Life scientists should now help strengthen the norms against chemical and biological weapons research, acquisition, and use. Codes of conduct, peer reviews and panels, and self-regulation that defines appropriate restrictions in scientific research are all ways in which the scientific community can contribute to an environment that does everything possible to foster the apposite use of the biological and chemical sciences in the service of public safety and security.
  :
   
As has been argued, there is no intellectual infrastructure that provides a common framework for understanding the chemical and biological challenge similar to the one that evolved with respect to nuclear weapons in the second half of the twentieth century. In and of itself, such a framework will not generate answers, but the development of reasonable policy must begin with shared understandings, a common language, and useful conceptual tools. This conceptual infrastructure is important because concepts shape our constructs of reality, and they can prompt a sense of new opportunities with respect to what can be done to address major challenges. In other words, it both opens up new policy options and promotes either the identification of new policy tools or the application of existing tools in novel ways.
Threat Assessments
The process of constructing an intellectual infrastructure must begin with a shared appreciation of the problem. Today, a common view of the threat does not exist. Are chemical and biological weapons strategic or tactical? What is their
      :
    " "
.:  

military utility on the battlefield, against operational in-theater targets, or against an adversary's home base? Do states or terrorists pose the greater threat? Is such a dichotomy even useful, or does the relationship between the state and non-state dimensions of the problem require recasting how we think about both? What are the best ways to classify the critical components of an effective response? How are those components related and how do they interact? These are only some of the questions on which it would be hard to reach a consensus let alone a shared set of concepts or common language for addressing them.
The first requirement of an intellectual infrastructure, then, must be better threat assessments. Such assessments today often explain the chemical or biological threat in terms of a single factor such as the agent (whose potential lethality is emphasized in most vulnerability assessments), or the actor seeking to use such weapons (which historical assessments usually stress). Single factor analyses, however, are inadequate. The CBW threat is the product of a complex interaction among several categories of factors--actors, agents, targets, and operational considerations--each of which includes many variables. Taken together, these variables can produce a large set of combinations and permutations, some of which will yield significant results and some of which will not. Examining so many variables together and integrating their interaction into a meaningful analysis is not easy. Better threat assessment methodologies, therefore, should be one of the building blocks of this intellectual infrastructure and a valuable tool to promote new thinking.
Risk Assessment
Threat is not the same as risk; however, better risk assessments, particularly in the biological arena, are as badly needed as better threat assessments. The biological weapons challenge--that is, the deliberate misuse of the life sciences-- should be seen as one end of a spectrum of risks associated with the life sciences. This spectrum begins with natural developments such as the outbreak of disease, continues through accidents and "misadventure," as in the unforeseen negative consequences of what are otherwise beneficial activities such as medical research, to deliberate use at the other extreme. Public safety and security risks emanating from developments in the life sciences are converging. The growing realization of the links between infectious disease and biological weapons or the potential implications of scientific research (advanced genomics, for example) for shaping the biological weapons problem are examples of why it is more difficult to draw a clear dividing line between safety and security risks. Casting risks associated
     
.:  

The process of constructing an intellectual infrastructure must begin with a shared appreciation of the problem.
with the life sciences across the full spectrum--from those that occur naturally to those that are the result of deliberate human choice--not only better reflects reality, but it also creates a means for identifying the critical cost-benefit tradeoffs associated with particular courses of action. Cost-benefit analysis is a crucial part of the risk assessment process. Considering the full risk spectrum facilitates an appreciation of costs and benefits in a way that merely doing threat assessments does not. A cost-benefit analysis of applying strict regulations to the publication of contentious research, for example, might deem such limitations sensible if one were only concerned about the security implications of such research. But when the broader spectrum of affected activities is considered, including the need for sharing knowledge generated by new research for medical, commercial, or other legitimate reasons, the cost-benefit calculation is likely to yield a different policy outcome.
Impact Assessments
In addition to better threat and risk assessments, a useful contribution to the intellectual infrastructure would come from elaboration of alternative measures of the impact of breaches of biological or chemical security. Developing such measures could contribute to a better and more widely shared view among policymakers of just how serious biological and chemical risks and threats are. They could also foster a better appreciation of the full range of how such capabilities could be used.
The most obvious measure of impact is casualties, which is useful because it is quantifiable, but the level of casualties is a useful indicator of impact only if the goal of using chemical or biological weapons is to kill people. If killing people is a means to some other objective, such as disrupting military operations or inciting widespread public panic, then casualty levels are at best an indirect indicator of the utility of such weapons. In some cases, killing people may be neither the objective nor the outcome. The economic cost of biological weapons use is probably the next easiest impact to measure, again because it is quantifiable. Models can be developed, for example, which assess the costs of various attack scenarios against agricultural targets or business operations.
A particularly helpful impact metric would address the psychological effect of biological or chemical weapons threats and use under a variety of conditions. Biological weapons, in particular, seem to be especially distressing to people, perhaps because of the prospect of an unpleasant death from an infectious disease or because biological weapons are viewed as a result of manipulating nature. Whatever the reason, a better understanding of the potential psychological impact of chemical or biological weapons use could have important benefits. In urging the development of better metrics for assessing the impact of
      :
    " "
.:  

breaches of biological or chemical security, one should not expect a high degree of precision or a predictive capability. Casualties or economic costs are attractive metrics because they can be quantified, but other results do not lend themselves to numerical representation. Working on better impact assessment methodologies, however, would yield yet another set of tools for understanding the nature of the problem and pointing toward potentially useful responses.
Infrastructure is defined as "the underlying foundation or basic framework" of a system or the "resources required for an activity."3 Physical infrastructure makes a particular way of life possible in a given natural environment. In the same way, a new conceptual and policy environment within which to address chemical and biological security requires an intellectual infrastructure. The components of such an infrastructure discussed here--better threat assessment methodologies, risk assessments based on cost-benefit analyses, development of impact metrics--are obviously not exhaustive. Other components are also needed. These three are each important because they address some of the most basic needs on which other capabilities can be based. Some hope should be taken from the nuclear experience. It was not until after the elaboration of that intellectual infrastructure that breakthroughs in nuclear arms control became possible. Likewise, in the chemical and biological arena, we must be sure we are thinking about the problem and the potential solutions in the right way before the best routes for dealing with it can be determined.
Developing an intellectual infrastructure to support a conceptual and policy environment that stresses the proper role of science and technology in the service of safety and security requires contributions from many more actors than diplomats in Geneva or government policymakers and bureaucrats in national capitals. Through this more universal effort, the task of building bridges to the industrial and scientific communities can be advanced by acknowledging the value of their contributions and through involving them early in the process. The challenge in confronting the potential catastrophes inherent in the use of chemical and biological weapons--whether by states or non-states--is not to prevent those international actors from acquiring the capabilities to exploit chemistry and the life sciences for malign purposes. That is not possible. Rather, that challenge is, as UK Ministry of Defense analyst Paul Schulte put it, "to keep it out of their behavioral repertoires."4 The job is to shape the behavior of those who might be interested in such capabilities. We will only be successful in doing so if we have the right tools, not only in policy terms but in conceptual and analytical terms as well. Developing the right tools will not be easy. It is difficult to break out of familiar and comfortable ways of thinking about problems and to replace them with ideas that may not be refined and whose value remains unproven. It is also hard to combine the requisite insights from politics, economics, science, and technology, as well as security, which will be required for dealing with this problem.
     
.:  

Yet if there is to be success, both of these difficulties must be overcome. Changing the way we think can be the most difficult problem of all.

1 Donald Mahey, "Statement by the United States to the Ad Hoc Group of Biological Weapons Convention States Parties," delivered July 25, 2001 in Geneva, Switzerland, available at (accessed November 20, 2003).
2 Ethnic weapons are weapons using biological materials or the life sciences (such as growing knowledge of the human genome) to attempt to target genetic differences between ethnic groups with the goal of developing a capability that would have an impact on one ethnic group but not others. A debate exists within that scientific community about how close the ability for developing such a weapon is.
3 This definition is according to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster International, 1995.)]
4 Comment made during a presentation at a conference at Wilton Park on "Chemical and Biological Weapons: The Threats of Proliferation and Use." Schulte's presentation was on "Revising the CBW Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Agenda: Essential in the New International Security Environment."
      :

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