Powell on Preemption

Regular readers of this blog may be surprised by this news, but Secretary of State Colin Powell, writing in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs, asserts that the Bush administration has been “remarkably candid” about its foreign and security policy strategies. The September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, Powell says, succinctly and publicly lays out the Bush administration’s strategy, which he describes as “integrated…broad and deep, far ranging and forward looking.”

Despite releasing for public consideration an apparently frank and clear explication of US strategy, Powell notes that both domestic and foreign observers (including many partisans) have frequently misunderstood or actively distorted the meaning of US foreign policy strategy.

The Secretary points out that “U.S. strategy is widely accused of being unilateralist by design” and “of being imbalanced in favor of military methods.” Furthermore, Powell notes, “it is frequently described as being obsessed with terrorism and hence biased toward preemptive war on a global scale.” This last point receives even more direct attention, as the Secretary points out that “some observers have exaggerated both the scope of preemption in foreign policy and the centrality of preemption in U.S. strategy as a whole.”

According to Powell, while the NSS “made the concept of preemption explicit” its “novelty…lies less in its substance than in its explicitness.” There's more:

“As to preemption's scope, it applies only to the undeterrable threats that come from nonstate actors such as terrorist groups. It was never meant to displace deterrence, only to supplement it. As to its being central, it isn't. The discussion of preemption in the NSS takes up just two sentences in one of the document's eight sections.”

Contrast Powell's words to those of John R. Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. This is from a December 2003 speech:

“Rogue states such as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya and Cuba, whose pursuit of weapons of mass destruction makes them hostile to U.S. interests, will learn that their covert programs will not escape either detection or consequences. While we will pursue diplomatic solutions whenever possible, the United States and its allies are also willing to deploy more robust techniques, such as the interdiction and seizure of illicit goods. If rogue states are not willing to follow the logic of nonproliferation norms, they must be prepared to face the logic of adverse consequences. It is why we repeatedly caution that no option is off the table.”

I'll edit this later.

Strategic Voting?

As I write, with nearly 40% of the votes counted, John Kerry has 37% of the vote, John Edwards has 33%, Howard Dean 18% and Dick Gephardt only 11%.

Wow. No, WOW!

On CNN, they are spinning this as "electability." Those who decided late, and perhaps "soft" Dean supporters (not the "Deaniacs"), went for the guys who voted for the war -- even though 75% of the people attending the caucuses were anti-war.

CNN is switching to Larry King, so I've turned the channel to MSNBC. The talking heads there are spinning it as "electability too," though Chris Matthews is talking about Kerry's great TV ads.

I think this is good news for Wesley Clark too, so long as he can (a) demonstrate basic Democratic credentials and (b) overcome the apparent gender gap.

44% of the votes are now in and it's still 37-33-18.

Hey, just as I wrote that above, MSNBC is talking about Clark -- speculating that Kerry is passing Clark in New Hampshire.

Now 51%, 37-33-18.

This is going to be an interesting few weeks.

Gephardt's campaign is probably dead. Now the talking heads are saying this too. Maybe I should just stop posting, listen, and think.

Update: Over 90% of the votes are counted and it is still Kerry-Edwards-Dean 38-32-18. Gephardt is apparently dropping out of the race tomorrow.

On CNN at 10:12 pm ET, Jeff Greenfield said that the results hurt Clark. I wrote above that I think it helps Clark -- so let me explain. The Iowa result shows that Dean is vulnerable, even among an electorate that is anti-war. Kerry is the most national security-minded of the Democrats in Iowa (war hero record) and John Edwards is the southerner. Those guys nabbed 70% of the vote. Clark trumps Kerry's security record and he's from Arkansas (a state the Democrats can actually win).

If New Hampshire voting at all parallel's Iowa's, then Clark might grab a substantial portion of the majority voting base. Plus, Gephardt's 10% are up for grabs and I don't think those union guys are going to Dean. Actually, I can see those union guys going to Edwards.

I'm really looking forward to Arizona, Oklahoma and South Carolina. Kerry and Dean have home field advantage in New Hampshire, so these states are going to be more revealing.

Good Read: The Lie Factory

The January/February Mother Jones has a good article on "The Lie Factory," by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest. It's not on-line at the website, but it's apparently available at some non-subscriber sites.

Basically, Dreyfuss and Vest recap the role of the neocons fomenting war against Iraq. They have a brief (if familiar) rundown of all the key players and included a nice flow chart of the bureaucracy. The neocon view isn't really all that shocking anymore, but it should be. Consider this:

Led by [Richard] Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."

Dreyfuss and Vest also interviewed a bunch of people who worked in intelligence before the Iraq war who say that intelligence was manipulated. For example, consider this:

[Lt. Col. Karen] Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together."

After cherry-picking what they wanted, the neocons embedded within the Pentagon (in the Office of Special Plans) made sure their intell found its way up to the very top of the administration:

According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, [Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William] Luti and [OSP director Abram N.] Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with [Douglas] Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.

Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.

"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."

In addition to these dubious administrative practices, the neocons also applied pressure on career intell people who were not parroting the party line:

According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."

As I've reported before, they also relied upon very unreliable information fed them by the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi.

According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism.

"Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."

Some of the people quoted in the piece were not in government now, but they too offer interesting insights. Bluntly, as Secretary Powell has recently confirmed, there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda (and 9/11):

While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact."

Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."

That link was trumped up. Obviously, this whole thread figures into my paper on "The Bush Doctrine and Norms of Deliberation."

Update on the Koufax Awards

Sandy Koufax is often considered the greatest left-handed pitcher in baseball history. While this may not be true, he was certainly an outstanding player (even if he was a Dodger).

Why am I telling you this? Well, in addition to the fact that I am a tremendous fan of baseball, the Wampum blog has been conducting the Koufax Awards -- for best lefty blogs -- for some weeks and finally posted a link for Best New Blog. I think interested readers are supposed to note their favorites in the "Comments" link. Several blogs I read regularly (see the links on the right hand side of this page) are nominated. Good luck to them -- and thanks again to the readers who nominated me.

Oh, and thanks to my new readers as well. Since the New Year started, traffic to this blog is up about 25-35% per day.

Habermas on the Bush Doctrine

I'm still working on my prospectus for "The Bush Doctrine and Norms of Deliberation," a paper for a conference I'm attending in DC in a few weeks.

Thursday, I found an interesting article in Constellations: an international journal of critical and democratic theory (September 2003) by Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas that addresses the Bush Doctrine and war on terror.

Surprise: Habermas thinks that America's new preemptive war doctrine creates deliberative requirements. He also offers a lethal critique, pointing out that its reliance upon unilateral use of military is bound to be illegitimate -- even if some advocates claim that they are helping to democratize the world.

First, by making new claims about self defense, the Bush Doctrine creates the need for public justification. This snippet is from a translation on-line at Interactivist Info Exchange:

this connection of hegemonic unilateralism with defense against an insidious danger mobilizes the additional argument of self-defense.

At the cost however of then being saddled with a new burden of proof. The American administration had to seek to convince world public opinion of contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida.

We know how that turned out.

A few paragraphs later, Habermas added this thought about the audacity of America speaking for the world on matters of shared security and democracy:

There's no way of avoiding the question of the justification of the war in general. The decisive controversy revolves around the question whether justification in the light of international law can and should be replaced by the unilateral global politics of a self-empowering hegemon.

Some of the criticisms offered by Habermas focus on practical concerns, while others are moral and legal:

A nation which reduces all options to the dumb alternatives of war and peace runs up against the limits of its own organizational powers and resources. It also leads the negotiation with competing powers and foreign cultures in false channels and pushes the coordination costs to dizzying heights.

Even if this hegemonic unilateralism were realizable it would still have side-effects which would, by its own criteria, be morally undesirable. The more that political power manifests itself in the dimensions of military, secret service and police, the more does it undermine itself -- the politics of a globally operating civilizing power -- by endangering its own mission of improving the world according to liberal ideas.

In the United States itself, the permanent regime of a "War President" is already undermining the foundations of the rule of law. Quite apart from the practiced or tolerated torture methods beyond its borders, the war regime is not only denying the prisoners of Guantnamo Bay the legal rights conferred on them by the Geneva Convention. It confers powers on the security services which encroach on the constitutional rights of its own citizens.

However, the best argument against the regime-toppling element of the Bush Doctrine is its failure to deliver on its own premises. After pointing out that Kuwait's "liberation" did not include democratization, the German scholar concludes,

"It is the very universalistic core of democracy and human rights itself which forbids its universal propagation by fire and sword....'Values' -- including those for which one could expect global recognition -- don't hang in the air; they become binding only in the normative order and practices of specific cultural forms of life....even the good hegemon (presuming for itself trusteeship in the name of the common good) has no way of knowing whether the actions it claims to be in the interests of others is indeed equally good for all.

There is no meaningful alternative to the further cosmopolitan development of an international system of law in which the voices of all concerned are given an equal and reciprocal hearing."

Habermas can make for difficult reading, but I think his point is pretty clear. And spot on.

Recess appointment

Larry Solum just posted his thoughts on the recess appointment of Charles Pickering to the federal appellate bench.

On this blog, I tend to follow US foreign policy and the election, so I'm not quite sure what to make of this apparently major (and unprecedented?) political move. Pickering was filibustered by the Democrats in the Senate, so they are not going to be happy about this. Yet, I cannot see them filibustering all Bush's judicial appointments (that would be an open war with no winners). However, I can see them lowering the bar some and filibustering a few less controversial candidates.

Why would Pickering want the job for a year?

As someone with a sabbatical forthcoming next year, I have thought long and hard about how willing I'd be to uproot my family and move somewhere for an academic term or two. There are lots of social costs for my family, who now have many deep roots in the community, and a year is not a long time to accomplish much when moving and adjustment are factored into the equation.

I'd think that even an appellate judge would face adjustment issues. Would a recess appointed judge be kind of like a strike-breaking umpire? In baseball, those guys were never fully accepted by their cohorts on the diamonds.

In any case, after weighing everything, I've concluded that it would probably be worthwhile to leave town for a year -- or even for a semester, plus a summer.

So...if anyone knows of something good, let me know. That means I want time to research and write -- not teach.

Wesley Clark and Richard Perle

Howard Dean, who apparently once flirted with Wesley Clark to see if the General wanted to be his Vice President, now says Clark is a Republican. Josh Marshall reports that Ed Gillespie and Matt Drudge are quoting identical congressional testimony from Clark, September 26, 2002, ostensibly highlighting Clark's support for the Iraq war.

However, as Marshall points out, if one actually reads the entire testimony (and not just the blips pulled out by Drudge and the RNC), Clark argued for war only if backed by a broad and legitimate multilateral coalition (preferably with the full support of the UN Security Council) and only after prolonged inspections. Clark also said that war was a bad idea unless the US was fully prepared for the post-war environment, which was likely to be quite chaotic. He warned against sinister forces taking WMD before they could be controlled and against fundamentalist takeover of Iraq.

Neoconservative Richard Perle also testified that day and he accused Clark of being "wildly optimistic" about inspections and "wholly pessimistic" about the post-war situation.

Gee, which one has been proved closer to right?

IAEA inspectors said in 2003 before the war began that there was no nuclear program -- and there was no nuclear program.

As for the post-war situation. Get a load of what Perle said:

I think nearly 30 years of Saddam Hussein's rule will inspire in the Iraqi people a desire for decent, humane government, and with help from us, I see no reason to assume (inaudible) that that can't be done. I think it can be done and I think the chances of success in that regard are infinitely greater than the likelihood that we will find the weapons of mass destruction that even a good inspection regime would be incompetent to unearth.

Hey. Maybe Perle knew there were no WMD to find, so he could make this otherwise incredible comparison.

Clark also points out the lack of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda (other than minor contacts), while Perle says the lack of evidence reflects incompetent intelligence since real (and dangerous) links are surely there.

Bottom line: Clark clearly wasn't shying away from the possibility of war with Iraq, and seemed to support congressional backing to support US policy at the UN, but he clearly thought the US had plenty of time to deal with a threat that was neither imminent, nor more important than the threat from Al Qaeda. Clark advocates the "narrowing" of the congressional resolution so as to reflect a balance of domestic power between Congress and the executive (p. 24): "not giving a blank check but expressing an intent to sign the check when all other alternatives are exhausted."

And this: "I think it's not time yet to use force against Iraq, but it is certainly time to put that card on the table, to turn it face up and to wave it." But he worries openly about an "enfeebled" UN (p. 26) and says the US should "exhaust all of the non force of arms remedies. (p. 27). And later (p. 31): "I personally really mean that you (sic) got to exhaust all the options first" before using force.

Interestingly, Clark also asserts that the intell the administration was using about a nuclear device referred to a dirty bomb, not a nuclear weapon (p. 28).

Here's what Perle said about Clark after the General left the room:

He seems to be preoccupied, and I'm quoting now, with building legitimacy, with exhausting all diplomatic remedies as though we hadn't been through diplomacy for the last decade, and relegating the use of force to a last resort, to building the broadest possible coalition...So I think General Clark simply doesn't want to see us use military force and he has thrown out as many reasons as he can develop to that but the bottom line is he just doesn't want to take action. He wants to wait."

In short, General Clark was making exactly the kinds of arguments advanced by France and Germany.

Yet, nobody is going around saying Chirac and Schoeder were really for the war.

The Disarmament Mission

The news stories about Paul O'Neill have again raised questions about the importance of "regime change" to US Iraq policy. Was the US planning to topple Saddam Hussein from the beginning of the Bush administration? Or, did 9/11 change the way the US thought about Iraq, as the President often asserts? Why do so many of the President's supporters now fall back on the humanitarian argument? Were 9/11 and WMD truly important, or not?

I've done a little digging...

First, consider the responses of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who had the following exchange with Tim Russert on his October 20, 2002 interview on NBC's "Meet the Press." Powell said US Iraq policy was focused on disarmament, not regime change:

MR. RUSSERT: Some who support the Iraqi position of allow us more time, give us inspections, are saying, "Mr. United States, you're saying to us in Iraq, `Give us complete unfettered access. And guess what? Even if you do, there's going to be a regime change.'"

I asked you when you were on a month ago, could you have disarmament without regime change? You told the USA Today that is it perhaps possible that if Saddam Hussein disarmed completely he could stay in power. True?

SECRETARY POWELL: What I said was that if Saddam disarmed entirely and satisfied the international community, that, in effect, would be a change in attitude and a change in the way the regime is looking at its situation in the world, and it was consistent with what the President has said previously and subsequently.

MR. RUSSERT: So he can save himself, in effect, and remain in power --

SECRETARY POWELL: All we are interested in is getting rid of those weapons of mass destruction. We think the Iraqi people would be a lot better off with a different leader, a different regime, but the principal offense here are weapons of mass destruction, and that's what this resolution is working on. There are many other resolutions that he has violated, with respect to human rights, with respect to threatening his neighbors, with respect to return of prisoners. All of those, I think, have to be dealt with in due course. But the major issue before us is disarmament. And remember where regime change came from. It came out of the previous administration; it came out of the Congress in 1998 when it was thought the only way to get rid of weapons of mass destruction was to change the regime. And we will see whether they are going to cooperate or not.

The issue right now is not even how tough an inspection regime it is or isn't. The question is will Saddam and the Iraqi regime cooperate, really, really cooperate and let the inspectors do their job. If the inspectors do their job and we can satisfy the world community that they are disarmed, that's one path. If we can't satisfy the world community that they are disarmed, that takes us down another path.

Based on Powell's remarks, it seems like Saddam Hussein could have remained in power had he disarmed (which he apparently did).

The President himself was a little more ambiguous in his statements on this matter, implying that Hussein had to meet a larger number of goals:

However, if he [Hussein] were to meet all the conditions of the United Nations, the conditions that I've described very clearly in terms that everybody can understand, that in itself will signal the regime has changed.

Bush said something very similar in the October 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech outlining alleged threats from Iraq.

There's more. In the famous "scripted" National Press Conference just before the war started in March 2003, President Bush pretty clearly focused on WMD as the primary justification for war. These are the responses to two questions (about whether Iraq might become like Vietnam and about the last-minute British proposal to set a deadline for Iraq to act:

Our mission is clear in Iraq. Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament. And in order to disarm, it would mean regime change. I'm confident we'll be able to achieve that objective, in a way that minimizes the loss of life. No doubt there's risks in any military operation; I know that. But it's very clear what we intend to do. And our mission won't change. Our mission is precisely what I just stated.

Anything that's debated must have resolution to this issue. It makes no sense to allow this issue to continue on and on, in the hopes that Saddam Hussein disarms. The whole purpose of the debate is for Saddam to disarm. We gave him a chance. As a matter of fact, we gave him 12 years of chances. But, recently, we gave him a chance, starting last fall. And it said, last chance to disarm. The resolution said that. And had he chosen to do so, it would be evident that he's disarmed.

Feel free to refer to these statements next time someone says that the Iraq war wasn't "just" about WMD.

Moseley Braun

According to the AP, Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun is dropping out of the Democratic race and will endorse Howard Dean.

Moseley Braun was on "The Daily Show" last night and though I was doing some other things, I'm pretty sure she did not mention this.

John Edwards, in contrast, officially announced his candidacy for President on Jon Stewart's outstanding TV program.

Perhaps this is why Moseley Braun is out and Edwards is up?

Dean's camp is hoping that Braun's likely endorsement of the Governor will help insulate him against some of the race issues Reverend Al Sharpton has been raising.

Most importantly, the National Organization of Women (NOW) is freed to endorse one of the other candidates. Conceivably, the high profile candidates might now start paying more attention to issues of greater concern to women in hopes of winning NOW's endorsement.

Since some polls show that General Clark suffers a "gender gap" (Howard Dean would say this is because he's the candidate most like a Republican, who suffer the same problem) he seems to have the most to gain by going out of his way to talk about these issues. Of course, this might not mean what you think it means. Garance Franke-Ruta argued last year that women can be fired up by Clark's anti-terror message, if framed in the right way.

In South Carolina, by the way, Clark is beating Dean among women -- but Dean is leading among male voters. Is this because men in SC likely to be sympathetic to Clark's appeal are registered Republicans?

Presidential update

There's a lot of last minute movement in the Iowa and New Hampshire polls. I won't put all the data here, especially since I get most of it from the DailyKos or Mark A. R. Kleiman. However, I will talk about the data and candidates.

Mark Kleiman is especially interested in New Hampshire, since he backs General Wesley Clark. In the ARG tracking poll from NH, Clark has surged to 22% in the latest tracking polls. Governor Howard Dean is 32% and Senator John Kerry only 13%. In a national tracking poll from Rasmussen, Dean leads Clark 21% to 19%. Representative Dick Gephardt is third at 11%.

Meanwhile, Senator Kerry is surging in Iowa. I just saw reference to an MSNBC/Zogby poll on CNN that showed Kerry leading a tight pack. Kerry, Dean and Gephardt were around 20 to 21% and Senator John Edwards was 17%. Both Kerry and Edwards got important endorsements from Iowa newspapers last weekend and many analysts credit that with their significant recent uptick.

I should note that as recently as late July 2003, I was supporting Kerry in discussions with my progressive friends. While I've focused a lot of attention on frontrunners Dean and Clark, I've said much less about the other candidates. Why was I pro-Kerry?

Here's what I wrote in an email from June 27th (the pre-blog era):

Concerning Kerry's Iraq vote:

Kerry was a decorated Vietnam war hero -- who became a well-known and outspoken young critic of that war. He is certainly not an outlandish hawk. This spring, I assigned his Georgetown foreign policy address in class. He's essentially a genuine multilateralist who supports human rights and various other international norms (Kyoto, arms control, etc).

On the campaign trail, Kerry has clarified his Iraq war vote in a fairly reasonable way -- arguing that the resolution called for UN support and proof that Iraq had WMD. This is from the January Georgetown speech:

"As I have said frequently and repeat here today, the United States should never go to war because it wants to, the United States should go to war because we have to. And we don't have to until we have exhausted the remedies available, built legitimacy and earned the consent of the American people, absent, of course, an imminent threat requiring urgent action.

The Administration must pass this test. I believe they must take the time to do the hard work of diplomacy. They must do a better job of making their case to the American people and to the world.

I have no doubt of the outcome of war itself should it be necessary. We will win. But what matters is not just what we win but what we lose. We need to make certain that we have not unnecessarily twisted so many arms, created so many reluctant partners, abused the trust of Congress, or strained so many relations, that the longer term and more immediate vital war on terror is made more difficult. And we should be particularly concerned that we do not go alone or essentially alone if we can avoid it, because the complications and costs of post-war Iraq would be far better managed and shared with United Nation's participation. And, while American security must never be ceded to any institution or to another institution's decision, I say to the President, show respect for the process of international diplomacy because it is not only right, it can make America stronger - and show the world some appropriate patience in building a genuine coalition. Mr. President, do not rush to war."

I voted for Kerry at MoveOn and think he can both win the democratic nomination and squash Bush like a bug.

A lot of material in that speech could have been spoken by Clark, except Kerry was saying it long before Clark entered the race.

Since that date, I've been following Dean and Clark closely, but I still think Kerry would be a good President. His voting record in the Senate has been very good, particularly on environment and foreign policy, two issues that I care about a great deal.

Back to summer 2003. In several followup emails sparked by what I said above, I wrote this a month later (July 23), after including a copy of the Iraq War Resolution passed by Congress:

It's clear that the administration neither gained Security Council resolutions nor agreed with the majority that thought the inspections process was working.

The [Congressional] resolution, in fact, authorized Bush to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." War was authorized only if peaceful and diplomatic approaches failed.

Since the UNSC didn't pass any new resolutions, the war was pretty clearly illegal internationally -- and Congress didn't specifically authorize it (making it unconstitutional). International lawyers widely agree on the first point.

Domestic politicians might point to other parts of the resolution for cover, but they'd be lying. The more general statement on Presidential determination of national security threats is followed by "and" prior to the specific reference to UNSC resolutions.

Kerry's January speech that I cited earlier is pretty critical of the administration on Iraq. He clearly called for greater attempts to build cooperation, work through the UN and support the inspections process.

Iraq was long a rogue state. Saddam Hussein was a very bad guy. It would have been good to work through the UN to keep him from possessing WMD (chemical weapons are easy to make, by the way, and essentially require only a pesticide factory). If the UN voted for war, it would have been legal to go to war. Kerry and other members of Congress voted for that.

Bush went to war and Congress was a minor player that got trampled.

....[second email of July 23 starts now]...

Rest assured, my point was not to argue that the resolution was a good idea, nor that I would have voted for it.

Rather, I am arguing that the vote was not egregious, requiring Democrats to blackball all those who voted for it. In fact, 29 Democratic Senators voted for it, only 21 opposed (plus one Republican and Jeffords).

I'm very interested in foreign policy and security issues, but am not prepared to make the 2004 election a referendum on the war. Highly motivated anti-war Democrats and Greens would vote with you and me, but I'm not at all confident that the American public would agree. What if there's another horrible terrorist attack late next summer or early next fall?

Put simply, the opposition to Bush and the Republican Congress needs to be united and cannot afford to disqualify fine (perhaps even exceptional) candidates based on a contestable interpretation of a particular vote.

In broad terms, Kerry is a progressive, certainly more so than the American electorate. On the specific question of Iraq he clearly disagreed with the Bush administration months before the war started -- and has continued to pursue this issue. The vote on the congressional resolution did not mean "please attack Iraq ASAP," even if mediots and Republicans spun it that way.

Note what I am not doing -- isolating Kucinich or any other candidate for potentially stupid positions they've held in the past. I suspect Kucinich scored lower than Kerry on every ADA voting analysis because he was pro-life until about 15 minutes ago. Do you want progressives to blackball him because of this past voting record? Given the real-world consequences of those votes, I suspect it left a lot of "blood on his hands," to use your phrase.

Bush must be defated. We can have reasonable debate about the viable alternatives without demonizing needed allies. I love the fact that Kucinich, Dean and other candidates are invigorating the Democratic left. Realistically, however, there are not enough votes in that group to win.

The center is also going to have to be invigorated -- and they are going to have to be convinced by smart reframing of issues.

Let's work on that problem.

Oh hell, since I'm quoting myself so much, this is from yet another email on July 23 (obviously, it was a vigorous exchange). And remember, I wrote this before Clark was in the race:

Like it or not, Democrats are going to have to confront security issues in the campaign, and no one in the field is better positioned than Kerry -- a decorated war hero who was an outspoken anti-Vietnam leader. He's also been opposed to the Bush foreign policy consistently. He was NOT for war against Iraq. Had Congress been asked to sponsor a declaration of war in February or March 2003, I'm very confident Kerry would have voted no.

The context clearly changed from October to March. UN inspectors were roaming Iraq uncontested and the IAEA had reported that Iraq almost surely did not have a nuclear program and that some of the intelligence was clearly wrong. Those are key distinctions "pro-war" Democrats HAVE MADE in contesting Bush's ongoing foreign policy.

....[another email of July 23 starts now]...

Actually, Iraq has long been on the nation's list of states sponsoring terror -- since the 1980s. There are historically only 7 states. And Iraq really did have WMD, including a nuclear program that was close to being operation in the early '90s. The past wasn't manufactured.

In 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act calling for regime change. Kucinich, incidentally, voted for it.

Since there hadn't been any UN inspectors in Iraq from December 1998 until December 2003, there was fairly good reason to think they had at least chemical and biological weapons.

By February, however, that was less true as the inspectors could and did go anywhere.

You can see why I started this blog -- I had to spare my friends the lengthy emails.

Scholarship?

Yesterday, I updated the active scholarship section on my University webpage.

Conclusion? I've promised so many papers this semester that I may have to go easy on the blogging -- except when it's fairly directly related to one or more of these projects.

Because it is due first, I'm working on the prospectus for the paper on “The Bush Doctrine and Norms of Deliberation,” which I have to deliver in Washington at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace early next month. I've joined the Working Group of the Project on Preemptive and Preventive Military Intervention, directed by William Keller and Gordon Mitchell of the University of Pittsburgh's Ridgway Center for International Security Studies.

Does the Bush Doctrine require deliberation?

Well, I do see some deliberative elements in the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the US:

The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather. We will always proceed deliberately, weighing the consequences of our actions. To support preemptive options, we will:

build better, more integrated intelligence capabilities to provide timely, accurate information on threats, wherever they may emerge;

coordinate closely with allies to form a common assessment of the most dangerous threats;

and continue to transform our military forces to ensure our ability to conduct rapid and precise operations to achieve decisive results.

The purpose of our actions will always be to eliminate a specific threat to the United States or our allies and friends. The reasons for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the cause just.

Plus, the President certainly said he was trying to foster a debate when he started talking about Iraq in 2002. This was from September 4, 2002:

I also made it very clear that we look forward to a open dialogue with Congress and the American people about the threat, and that not only will we consult with the United States Congress -- we, being the administration -- but that my administration will fully participate in any hearings that the Congress wishes to have on this subject, on the subject about how to make America a more secure country, how to best protect the American families in our country.

At the appropriate time, this administration will go to the Congress to seek approval for -- necessary to deal with the threat. At the same time, I will work with our friends in the world. I've invited Prime Minister Blair to come to Camp David on Saturday, and he'll -- he's coming. I've looked forward to talking with him about our mutual concerns about how to make the world more secure and safe.

I will see Jean Chretien on Monday, as we -- we'll talk about how to make our borders work better, but, at the same time, I'll talk to him about this subject. I'll be on the phone to leaders of the -- China and Russia and France, and then I'll be giving the speech at the United Nations.

Saddam Hussein is a serious threat. He is a significant problem. And it's something that this country must deal with. And today the process starts about how to have an open dialogue with the elected officials and, therefore, the American people about our future and how best to deal with it.

Bush added this the next day, in Louisville at an election event with Representative Anne Northup (September 5, 2002):

One of my jobs is to think ahead and to think -- is to cause debate, and I started that yesterday, to encourage the American people to listen to and have a dialogue about Iraq. And I meant it when I said that I'm going to consult with Congress. I want there to be a discussion about the threats that face America. Tomorrow I'm calling leaders in Russia, China and France to talk about the threats that face us all. I will see Tony Blair on Saturday. I'll see Jean Chretien Monday. My point to you is, not only will I consult with Congress and talk to Congress -- my administration and I will do so -- I will also see many of the leaders of the world and remind them of the facts.

The facts are, this is a man who gassed his own people, has invaded two countries, a person who stiffed the international organization time and time again.

I look forward to the debate.

Then, Bush said the following on September 26, 2002:

We've just concluded a really good meeting with both Democrats and Republicans -- members of the United States Congress -- to discuss our national security and discuss how best to keep the peace. The security of our country is the commitment of both political parties and the responsibility of both elected branches of government.

We are engaged in a deliberate and civil and thorough discussion....I appreciate the spirit in which members of Congress are considering this vital issue. Congress will have an important debate, a meaningful debate, an historic debate. It will be conducted will all civility. It will be conducted in a manner that will make Americans proud, and Americans to understand the threats to our future.

Of course, the debate stage didn't last very long, so far as President Bush was concerned. On November 7, 2002, Bush declared political victory:

The debate about whether we're going to deal with Saddam Hussein is over. And now the question is how do we deal with him.

The paper is going to discuss the distortions in the debate -- both before the November elections, and after.

Treasury Department Leaks

For Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, as many bloggers have noted, became the subject of a government investigation on Monday for allegedly leaking classified information.

It looks like he was prepared for this charge, as the AP's Martin Crutsinger reports:

O'Neill said, "The truth is, I didn't take any documents at all."

Interviewed on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday, O'Neill said he had asked the Treasury Department's chief legal counsel "to have the documents that are OK for me to have" for use in the book entitled, "The Price of Loyalty."

Asked if he thought the internal Treasury probe was a get-even move by the administration, O'Neill replied, "I don't think so. If I were secretary of the treasury and these circumstances occurred, I would have asked the inspector general to look into it." But O'Neill also said he thinks the questions could have been more readily answered if top Treasury officials had talked to the agency's legal counsel.

"I'm surprised that he didn't call the chief legal counsel," O'Neill said of his successor, Treasury Secretary John Snow.

O'Neill said a cover page for the documents might have suggested they were classified material but said that the legal counsel's office "sent me a couple CDs, which I never opened." He said he gave them to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the book's author.

"I don't think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 documents," O'Neill said Tuesday, predicting the Treasury investigation would show that the Treasury employees who collected the materials for him had followed the law.

So I guess this means the administration's supporters will have to return to their old line of attack -- he's a disgruntled employee who was fired.

Of course, he was disgruntled because he thought the second round of tax cuts were wrong and motivated by politics rather than economics. That's a pretty important concern of a Treasury Secretary, eh?

Update: I just watched Ed Gillespie, Chair of the RNC, appear with Terry McAuliffe, chair of the DNC, on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. The high profile of these individuals suggests that this is a big story.

Blitzer asked Gillespie why it took almost 3 months for the government to launch an investigation of the leaked CIA agent's name, but only 1 day to open an investigation of O'Neill. He also said this seemed to be pretty important. O'Neill served in 3 Republican administrations and is a friend of the Vice President.

The RNC's Gillespie said that the Treasury Department Inspector General made the call and he is a career bureaucrat operating non-politically. Plus, the White House did not make the call on the investigation of the CIA agent leak. Gillespie more-or-less repeated the new frame, that O'Neill was a disgruntled former employee. Some Republicans are now claiming he was bad at his job.

We know, by the way, that the CIA wanted an investigation of its leak many weeks before one was actually launched. Supposedly, however, the call was made by a career bureaucrat as well.

Wanted: Ideas for Improving World Order

I oversee administration of the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. This prize is granted annually by the University of Louisville. Basically, I chair the initial screening committee that is housed within the Department of Political Science. The Grawemeyer Award's webpage hosts some useful information about the nomination and selection processes and material about past winners and their prize-winning works. Additions are made periodically.

Readers of this blog may remember that the 2004 prize was awarded last month to John Braithwaite and John Drahos of Australian National University for their book, Global Business Regulation (Cambridge, 2000).

Until Friday, January 16, 2004, the Department is accepting nominations for the 2005 competition.

The initial submission process (to open a file) is relatively simple: nominators must complete a one page form (available as a pdf file on the webpage) and submit a nomination letter. We especially encourage nominations from individual scholars and policy-makers. Self-nomination is permitted, though all nominators should note that reviewers will see these letters.

Completed files are due from nominees by February 13. We will need four copies of the nominated work, though publishers typically provide them for nominated books.

All relevant ideas published or publicly presented in any work between January 1999 and December 2003 are potentially eligible. Previously submitted nominations may be resubmitted. For general information, see my article, "Wanted: Outstanding Ideas for Improving World Order," in the December 1998 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics.

The Award's basic purpose is described on the webpage:

Submissions will be judged according to originality, feasibility and potential impact, not by the cumulative record of the nominee. They may address a wide range of global concerns including foreign policy and its formation; the conduct of international relations or world politics; global economic issues, such as world trade and investment; resolution of regional, ethnic or racial conflicts; the proliferation of destructive technologies; global cooperation on environmental protection or other important issues; international law and organization; any combination or particular aspects of these, or any other suitable idea which could at least incrementally lead to a more just and peaceful world order.

For further information, feel free to contact my assistant:

Ms. Arlene A. Brannon
Department of Political Science
Ford Hall
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292
U.S.A.
Phone: 502-852-1009
Fax: 502-852-7923
a.brannon@louisville.edu

Weather Vanes

It's always interesting to dig back through news archives to find interesting (read: foolish) statements made by politicians. If political winds change, you can almost certainly find remarks by elected officials that sound really stupid in retrospect.

In any case, I wonder how many Republican House members said something like this when campaigning for office in 2002?

"Without a doubt, Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime posed an immediate, direct threat to the United States."

Of course, Republican Representative Anne Northup wrote those words to her constituents in May 2003! Since a columnist for the Louisville Courier Journal, David Hawpe, has quoted this statement at least three times since July, I think there's a good chance it will come up in the 2004 elections.

Northup, by the way, represents a fairly Democratic district and thus accumulates a big election war chest because she needs it to retain her job.

The Presidential candidates are not immune from this "gotcha" game either. Consider Howard Dean's old and embarrassing comments about the Iowa caucuses, for example.

Oddly enough, on perhaps rare occasions, politicians sometimes come off sounding smarter in the past than they do in the present.

In the January 4 Washington Post, E.J. Dionne cited an interesting quote from one of the Democratic candidates for President, made on October 5, 2002:

"I don't think we should pretend that protecting the security of our nation is defined by turning our back on a century of effort . . . to build an international structure of law," declared the antiwar candidate to an Iowa gathering on Oct. 5, 2002. Bush's critics had an obligation to dissent and raise doubts, he said to loud applause. "We need to understand that you have to ask those questions now, because you don't go to war as a matter of first resort; you go to war as a matter of last resort."

It turns out that these words of wisdom came from Senator John Kerry -- mere weeks before he voted for the Iraq war resolution in Congress.

If Kerry had voted differently, do you suppose he'd be a favorite in New Hampshire?

Classes Begin

It's the first day of class. I'm teaching an undergraduate course on American Foreign Policy. Anyone interested can look at the syllabus. I'm not using a lot of web links this year since I found a decent companion reader.

My second class is a master's-level seminar on International Relations Theory. Again, the syllabus is on-line. Because the students may or may not have a background in IR, I have them read an advanced textbook that covers a lot of key theories. Additionally, they read journal articles each week.

Next Monday is MLK Holiday, but in two weeks the grad seminar will be talking about realism (and neorealism). That means lots of Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer. Since my forthcoming conference paper for the International Studies Association is about the post-cold war "failure" of realist policy advice vis-a-vis US foreign policy, I may well blog on this topic in the next two weeks.

Short version: the realists expect the US to start worrying a great deal about China (and stop trading so much), are fairly unconcerned about nuclear proliferation (Ukraine, Germany, etc.), and supported deterrence/containment for Iraq (rather than war). They have expected NATO's demise since 1990 and criticize the apparent neoimperial direction of US foreign policy.

The neorealists, in particular, offer a coherent set of ideas that seems to have been dismissed by the foreign policy hierarchy in the US.

Paul O'Neill's Revenge

CBSNews.com is reporting about the new book that relied extensively on material from Paul O'Neill. The former Bush administration Treasury Secretary apparently pulls no punches when discussing the way the administration makes decisions, the insanity of the tax cuts for the wealthy, and the buildup to war against Iraq.

Obviously, I'm most interested in that last point. O'Neill says the administration started planning to attack Iraq almost from the first days in office, January 2001. The CBS story, by the way, is based on an interview with Lesley Stahl that will be broadcast later Sunday:

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he [O'Neill] tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."

O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.

Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.

"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"

A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries, and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.

In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.

So I guess that means the invasion of Iraq was not really sparked by 9/11, eh? Anyone who has read the Clinton-era documents of the Project for a New American Century already suspected that. Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby and the other alums of that institution wanted war since 1998. Some of them wanted war since 1991.

Update: Time has an interview with O'Neill too.

"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," he told TIME. "There were allegations and assertions by people.

But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions. To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence."

Though O'Neill is careful to compliment the cia for always citing the caveats in its findings, he describes a White House poised to overinterpret intelligence. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country," he tells Suskind. "And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"

Of course, an administration official says O'Neill wouldn't have been in a position to see the evidence -- in whatever form it might have existed.

This made me laugh.

In the book, O'Neill suggests a very dark understanding of what happens to those who don't show it. "These people are nasty and they have a long memory," he tells Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out even in the face of inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate loyalty to something he prizes: the truth. "Loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that's the opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and telling someone what you really think and feel—your best estimation of the truth instead of what they want to hear." That goal is worth the price of retribution, O'Neill says. Plus, as he told Suskind, "I'm an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me."

Another update: Atrios includes a quote from Fox reporter Chris Wallace noting that O'Neill was, in fact, on the National Security Council. Thus, he would have had access to all sorts of Iraq stuff.

A Better Case?

Matthew Yglesias, a blogger who writes for The American Prospect, yesterday posted an interesting blog entry titled, "A Better Case." Briefly, Yglesias says that sanctions were causing horrible suffering for innocent Iraqis, US troops were tied up in Saudi Arabia, Iraq was consuming tremendous amounts of US diplomatic capital, and that Iraq would eventually pose a threat to its neighbors (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) if the sanctions regime ended.

While this is a somewhat provocative defense of war, I think it falls well short of an actual justification for attack.

Why?

First, a lot of attention was directed at the sanctions problem over the past decade. Many people favored "smart sanctions" that would minimize the harm to innocents and maximize the containment value (deny military equipment, etc.). Essentially, US policy towards the Soviet Union and its satellites was governed by "smart sanctions" through much of the 1970s detente era. Granted, the Soviet economy was sufficiently large and powerful to build weapons indigenously, but Saddam Hussein's Iraq would have needed trade. It would have been relatively easy to allow food, medicine and even consumer goods, even as weapons and arms-related good were banned.

Second, while 5000 American troops were tied up in Saudi Arabia, about 120,000 are now in Iraq -- and will be there for many years under current Pentagon planning. The war is also diverting important resources from the war on terror -- as I keep mentioning.

The US expended diplomatic capital on Iraq because it considered Iraq one of the worst rogue states in the world, long before 9/11. Even after Iraq was relatively easily defeated, had its weapons programs dismantled, and suffered more than a decade of sanctions, some people still viewed it as part of an "axis of evil." This was threat inflation, pure and simple, and was distracting because the US made it so.

Finally, there is very little reason to believe Iraq would have been a major regional threat. Many international relations theorists viewed Iraq's past "aggression" as mostly defensive. As John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt pointed out in their Foreign Policy article from January/February 2003, Iraq may have had reasonable (and defensive) reasons for attacking both Kuwait and Iran. Kuwait was exceeding OPEC oil quotas and wasn't negotiating a solution to that or to debts related to the long Iran-Iraq war. Iran had been stirring up dissent within Iraq, attempted to kill Saddam, and had even gained territorial concessions.There is also pretty good evidence that deterrence failed in Kuwait because US Ambassador April Glaspie said the following at a July 25, 1990 meeting with Saddam Hussein:

We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

As Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, "The U.S. State Department then reinforced this message by declaring that Washington had 'no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.'”

I'm not trying to defend Iraq's past behavior, and Saddam was certainly a very bad man, but that does not mean the US should default to war to attack and topple bad regimes headed by horrible tyrants. President Bush himself opposed war in Rwanda, even when asked during the 2000 campaign if it would have been worth saving 600,000 lives.

Since 9/11, the US has focused tremendous attention on the problems of transnational terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The war in Iraq did very little to address either of those problems, ticked off key American allies, diverted resources, angered millions of Muslims (thus, potentially increasing the pool of terrorists), and undercut the rule of international law (necessary for fighting terror and criminalizing proliferation of WMD).

The above is not an especially thorough critique of the Yglesias case. For more on Iraq specifically, I would recommend reading the writings of David Cortright, George Lopez, Eric Herring, and Marc Lynch. All these scholars worked on Iraq sanctions and threats for many years before the US went to war in March 2003. None liked the sanctions regime and all saw legitimate alternative policies that were not pursued.

The alternative policy to the WMD/al Qaeda justification for war was not simply a "better case" for attack.

Secretary Powell: No evidence of link between Iraq and al Qaeda

This New York Times story by Christopher Marquis goes even further than President Bush did back in September, when he pointed out the lack of evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. Now, administration officials admit they have no evidence even linking Iraq to al Qaeda. :

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The story also acknowledges that the Bush administration has withdrawn 400 weapons inspectors from Iraq who were looking for chemical and biological arms.

Repeat this chorus: no WMD, no link to 9/11 and no link to al Qaeda. And all these are now facts acknowledged by top Bush administration officials.

Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy, but he was a bad guy when the US found common ground with him in the 1980s. And he was a bad guy locked in a box of sanctions and deterrence.

The war in Iraq was horribly misguided policy, diverting resources from the real war on terror. This is all redundant coming from me, of course, but I'm going to keep saying it until Americans hold the political leaders accountable.

Bush et al must go.

Oops: From Dean's Outspoken Past

As I learned by reading Pandagon last night, today's New York Times has a story to follow by Jodi Wilgoren and Rachel Swarns, headlined "Tape Shows Dean Maligning Iowa Caucuses." This seems like bad news for Dean, primarily because he insults the Iowa political process -- even as he's gone around praising its democratic qualities. Many people might not care about these old statements (and some would agree with him), but the people who attend caucuses are likely to be the most offended. And since this is on TV (with images), there is perhaps greater potential for impact:

Four years ago, Howard Dean denounced the Iowa caucuses as "dominated by special interests," saying on a Canadian television show that they "don't represent the centrist tendencies of the American people, they represent the extremes."

Videotapes of the show were broadcast on the NBC Nightly News on Thursday, less than two weeks before the Jan. 19 caucuses, the first contest of the Democratic nominating race. The tapes show Dr. Dean arguing that the lengthy caucus process in which neighbors gather to debate their preferences is inconvenient for ordinary people.

"Say I'm a guy who's got to work for a living, and I've got kids," he said on the show on Jan. 15, 2000. "On a Saturday, is it easy for me to go cast a ballot and spend 15 minutes doing it, or do I have to sit in a caucus for eight hours?"

A moment later, he added, "I can't stand there and listen to everyone else's opinion for eight hours about how to fix the world."`

The story also quotes Dean saying in 2000 that Bush was a moderate who might win re-election. Lots of people might have thought the former in 2000 and have now reconsidered their view. That's not a big deal. And Dean certainly isn't in favor of Bush's re-election now. Indeed, the Democrats need to reach out to people who thought Bush was a moderate and viewed him as electable.

Perhaps more troubling for the candidate, Dean is also quoted saying that Hamas might become the post-Arafat Palestinian leadership. He said this would be bad, of course, because Hamas is a terrorist organization. But, Dean added that it might also have good effects, forcing Hamas to act more responsibly and negotiate.

Dean has already had to deal with Israel issues on his campaign, and I've blogged a little about the controversial views of some of his advisors. Again, I don't think this part of the story matters that much in Iowa or New Hampshire. The opinions are not totally unreasonable and can be explained as part of a bigger context.

Finally, the story includes the accusation that Dean is bringing in thousands of out-of-state volunteers and some of these people will allegedly attempt to participate (illegally) in the Iowa caucuses. This is little more than political mud-slinging and could actually end up hurting whatever opponents are levying the charges.

The winner? In my mind, it is Clark, who has just passed Kerry in New Hampshire tracking polls and is behind Dean only 24-20% in a national poll. Mark A.R. Kleiman has been tracking the Clark campaign, and its recent surge, pretty closely.

Oh, and since I'm writing about the election, Liberal Oasis has an ad that didn't make MoveOn's final cut...actually, it's a satire of the other ads. Thanks to Dave Johnson for the link.

Update: I just read Daily Kos, who reports that Senator Tom Harkin's endorsement of Dean has changed today's TV news coverage. MSNBC apparently went from stories focusing on Dean's old statements to this latest political victory.

Some good news in the war on terror

Let me quickly update two stories I've been following in the so-called "war on terror."

First, some good news. As I've blogged before, US airliners are potentially under real threat of shoulder fired missiles. Several news reports, in fact, suggest that some of the recent intelligence (and "chatter") relates to this possibility, which is behind the elevated (orange) threat level in the US.

As the Chicago Tribune reported yesterday, airlines are about to test an anti-missile system. The system will cost about $1 million per plane, and with 6,800 planes potentially at risk, that means a cost of nearly $7 billion. This is consistent with what I wrote 3 months ago.

The story says that Homeland Security will begin funding tests very soon, it will use the data to make a decision, and defense systems could be deployed in two years.

Now, some more good news -- unless you think it would be good news if Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday's Washington Post had a really long story by Barton Gellman detailing Iraq's lack of WMD.

There's lots of good stuff in the article. Much of the piece just brings together material we've all read before over the past six months -- but with added detail. For example, Gellman explains exactly why the original reports about finding mobile biological weapons facilities were so wrong. Iraq used a chemical process for inflating hydrogen weather balloons. And Iraq did have a military rationale for wanting to know the weather (wind conditions and temperature), as it improved missile targeting. But the trailers were actually for inflating weather balloons.

As I've noted before, one apparently important reason the US believed Iraq had WMD is that Saddam Hussein's scientists were lying to him to save their jobs (and lives). They deceived their boss, but that also had the effect of deceiving the rest of the world. But, in reality, they had almost no means of producing sophisticated biological weapons, and their nuclear program has been virtually inactive since the IAEA dismantled it years ago.

Hans Blix speculates that Iraq might have been using a defense strategy that my wife and I have actually promoted among our friends. When we go to house-warming parties for new homeowners, we typically take a "beware of dog" sign (when they have a pet). It's much cheaper than an electronic home security system and may work just as well as a deterrent. Blix says that Iraq may have been putting up a "beware of dog" sign without actually possessing a dog.

The Wrong Medium?

I just finished reading a very interesting article on "Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics," by Michael C. Williams in the latest International Studies Quarterly.

While international relations (IR) scholars are increasingly studying texts, discourses, and public arguments, Williams notes that television images are centrally important in shaping public understandings about world politics. He focuses on security questions, but the point is more broadly applicable.

Communications professor Cori Dauber basically makes this same point, but in IR, very few scholars study images carefully. Ironically, because of their emphasis on the role communication can play in "securitizing" various issues (like environment, migration or global poverty), scholars associated with the "Copenhagen School" of IR theorizing are in many ways on the discipline's cutting edge. Yet, as Williams notes, even theorists aligned with the Copenhagen School overlook the importance of TV:

"the increasing impact of televisual communication in security relations provides a fundamental challenge for understanding the processes and institutions involved in securitization."

I've often blogged about the words political leaders and policy elites utter in public contexts. And words remain important. However, I agree with Williams (and Dauber, and Ron Deibert of Toronto -- someone in IR who has studied non-print media) that images are also critical.

What do we see? Why? How do those images shape what we "know"?

I think bloggers too need to take TV images more seriously. Sure, many have noted the way Bush was positioned in front of Mount Rushmore and "served" a centerpiece turkey to troops in Iraq. They also note the fact that the media is denied access to caskets returning home to the US and that no one has seen images of President Bush at a military funeral because he hasn't attended one.

But much more could be done. In many ways, the MoveOn commercials I noted yesterday affirm the importance real-world political actors place on images.

Thus, in my second blog-related New year's resolution, I will try to comment at least periodically on the images I see on TV news programs. What images are American seeing about the news? By checking out international news sources, I will also try to comment on the images Americans are not seeing.


Update: A faithful reader sent me a good example of an image that Americans didn't see from Iraq. Well, at