For me, moral clarity is about what you do, not what you say. I don't consider lying--or failing to come clean on your gross mistakes--a particularly good example of it.
Don't know if you caught Pollack's interview with Josh Marshall, which took place a few weeks ago but is now up on the TPM website:
TPM Interview with Kenneth Pollack
- January 29th, 2003 -
Ken Pollack is the author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq and currently a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as a high-level government official in various capacities over the course of the 1990s, dealing with Iraq specifically and the Middle East generally.
You can get a copy here from Amazon (which I strongly recommend), read TPM's review of it in The Washington Monthly, or read Pollack's earlier article in Foreign Affairs, upon which much of the book is based.
TPM: In your book, you were pretty down on the idea of going down the inspectors route again. But having done it, how much is there an argument that even if this is a bad process, that we signed on to it? I saw your Times column but this is one of the questions I'm most curious about.
POLLACK: Yes, I think that's right. I think it was a mistake to have gone this route. But now that we've gone down it we've got to find a way to deal with it. That said, that doesn't necessarily mean we have to allow the inspections to play out forever. That would not be a logical conclusion. Just because you've signed up for it doesn't mean you've signed up for it forever. In point of fact, I think that the Blix Report has given the administration the best out that we can [have]. When I wrote the OpEd, when Martin [Indyk] and I wrote it, we were expecting that Blix would be much softer on the Iraqis and a lot of what we were saying was about how the administration ought to handle the aftermath of what we expected to be a pretty bad Blix Report. In point of fact the Blix Report was kind of stunning. It was an incredible indictment of Saddam Hussein. He said flat out: they are not cooperating. They are giving us cooperation only on process. They are not giving us any cooperation on substance. And there is no indication that any of this is going to change, which is a tremendous advantage for the administration in terms of getting out of that trap.
TPM: So in a sense the Blix Report -- with less fireworks -- is sort of the equivalent of when the inspectors go up to some building and Iraqi guards won't let them in, which is what people have been looking for, that moment when the Iraqis clearly make a breach and we can say, 'Okay, you're not cooperating. And that's it.'
POLLACK: Absolutely. That's exactly right. Blix handed the administration the smoking gun that they were unlikely to get in terms -- as you just laid it out -- of the Iraqis actually blocking an inspection or we find a Scud or something along those lines. In many ways it's even better than that in the sense that I think even [if we found] a Scud the people who oppose war would have just latched on to that and said 'See, the inspections are working.' In point of fact we're already seeing that. They did catch this Iraqi scientist with 3000 pages of documents on how to enrich uranium. That should have been a smoking gun. But instead the reaction from the rest of the world was, 'Good, this is the inspections working.'
TPM: In the president's speech last night, when he first made the turn toward talking about Iraq, he had what I thought was a very good point: that if you go back two or three years the UN is on record saying they had X and Y. The Iraqis now say they don't have it. And they have no records of having destroyed it. So by definition, they're not complying. Just on that basis.
Now I went back and looked at the transcript and the actual language - and I take it this is the UN language - is something like 'materials requisite to make' such and such amounts of anthrax, whatever. Can you clarify that particular point? If that means they have a lot of petri dishes that's meaningless. If it means they have something basically as good as having that much anthrax it means a lot more. Can you clarify that point? Because I've had a lot of readers ask me that.
POLLACK: I'm not a technical expert so I don't want to push too far. The way that I've had technical experts explain it to me is these are substances you would basically only use, would only import, if you wanted to make these different chemical substances. For example, the precursors to VX, they're very specialized chemicals. They only have certain uses. The fact that they bought so much of these specific chemicals, and the fact we know they were producing VX, it's pretty easy to put these two things together. And again these are prohibited chemicals. They're not supposed to have them without the UN being able to monitor what they're doing with these specific chemicals, because they're dual use. So even if they'd gotten permission to import them, the UN would have to be watching what they're doing.
The fact is they have imported these chemicals. We know that they've imported the chemicals. But they haven't explained what's happened to them. And so you've got people who've imported all the ingredients for VX. We know they have been making VX, that they were lying about not having VX, [that they] were [then] forced to admit that they did make VX. And they won't account for it. This is exactly right. It goes back to another piece that Martin and I wrote in the Los Angeles Times, a while back, where we were saying this is exactly what the administration should do. They need to concentrate on these gaps, on the fact that the UN has previously identified these as key gaps and the Iraqis simply refused to explain the gaps. People are constantly saying ... they use this silly courtroom analogy of innocent till proven guilty. And of course it is silly because this is not an analogous situation. This isn't a courtroom. There's no court of law here.
But you can actually turn that around and say 'Look, if this were Columbo or Perry Mason they would have an incredibly damning case to make. Imagine Saddam Hussein on the witness stand. And you put it to him exactly the way the president did last night. 'Saddam Hussein, you have admitted that you manufactured VX. We also have receipts that show that you purchased the following chemicals which have very limited uses, one of which is making VX. Where are those chemicals?'
The UN resolutions required that [he] account for those chemicals and for twelve years Saddam has just been looking us in the eye and saying 'I don't know what you're talking about. I refuse to answer the question.' Imagine what that would look like if this were Law and Order and if this were Jack McCoy asking that question again and again. And after each presentation of the evidence and question to Saddam, 'What have you done with those materials.' And the Iraqi response is 'We're not answering that question.' That's a pretty damning indictment.
TPM: Now here's my other question - or one of my other questions [laughter]. One of the things that stood out to me about your book was that we have this catch-all phrase 'weapons of mass destruction', but in strategic terms and - just putting it more crudely -- in body-count terms, there's really a substantial difference between nuclear weapons on the one hand and most every chemical weapon and all but a very few - maybe smallpox would put it into a different category - biological weapons. Everything in the president's speech yesterday where they had really compelling facts on their side was all about chemical and biological. The stuff about nuclear struck me as much more hypothetical and even in some cases hyperbolic - in the sense of time frames and stuff like that. Is what I've said basically accurate? In terms of what we know now? Not what intentions are, but the best we know about what they have now, what their capabilities are now?
POLLACK: In some ways. To some extent it's that the gaps are biggest and the information that we do have about things the Iraqis are cheating on is greatest on the chemical and biological front. It's easiest to make the arguments there. We do have a lot of evidence, or a lot of information, about both the missile and the nuclear programs. The problem is that it's much harder to operationalize. It's been much harder to use in terms of what the UN has found, what they've been able to do with the Iraqis. As a result, the administration seems to be - and this is probably the smart thing to do - they're using the chemical and biological issues as surrogates. They are the places where the evidence is strongest, where we are most able to trip the Iraqis up, to expose their cheating.
The problem is that we haven't got the goods to quite the same extent on the missile and nuclear programs. We've got enough to indicate that they are cheating as much on those programs as they are on the chemical and biological. It's just that it's harder to make that kind of a case, to really demonstrate that the Iraqis are cheating with the nuclear and the missile fronts.
TPM: Now my understanding is that back in the early 1990s the one area where we had some confidence that we had dismantled a lot of their operation was on the nuclear front. And from reading and talking to various people I have at least been given the impression that a nuclear program - whether it's based on uranium or plutonium - is just intrinsically more difficult to conceal and therefore more readily inspectable. Is that your perception or is that not really the case?
POLLACK: Yes and no. I will say flat out [that] I was under the same impression: that we had a very good grip on their nuclear program and there really wasn't much of a nuclear program well into the 1990s. I was constantly being assured that by the IAEA and by the intelligence community. And then all of a sudden we had a slew of defectors come out in the mid- and late 1990s and what they told us was that everything that we had thought was wrong. You know Khidhir Hamza is the only one who's gone public. So he's the only one I can really talk about. But in 1994 we really thought the IAEA had eradicated their nuclear program. And the IAEA really thought that they'd eradicated their nuclear program. And they were telling us they'd eradicated their nuclear program. And Khidhir Hamza comes out and says 'No, the nuclear program in 1994 was bigger than it had ever been before.'
In point of fact the Iraqis had found all kinds of ways to hide what they were doing. It introduced inefficiencies in what they were doing. For example, they talk about these short track cascades. Normally the cascade is enormous. The way we do it it's three football fields long. That's the most efficient way to do it. The Iraqis figured out ways to do short cascades, which didn't require as much energy, which weren't as big and therefore were much more easily concealed. They were more inefficient. They didn't produce the enriched uranium nearly as well. But nevertheless they were able to do it.
TPM: So when you look at this you have no great confidence that they may not be as well along on the nuclear front as we know from very solid evidence that they are on chemical and biological stuff?
POLLACK: I'd put it slightly differently, Josh. I don't think they're as far along. Obviously, on the chemical front they've got everything they need. There is not a single chemical weapon they would want to procure beyond what they've got. On the biological front there are still some things out there. We don't think that they have smallpox. We don't think that they have plague. There are a few other agents out there which they'd like to be getting. So I don't think it's quite the case that they're as far along. It's just that I believe that they're working just as hard on the nuclear and ballistic missile side as they are on the chemical and biological side. It's just been my experience that every time the IAEA says 'We've got this thing under control. We know exactly what they have' we find out later that they absolutely didn't. Again, one of the things that has been most important to me is talking to the inspectors., the inspectors who were responsible for this program during the 1990s. Every one of which I've spoken to believes that the Iraqis somewhere have a clandestine centrifuge program. And that's very meaningful to me because the experts, the guys who are in there doing it themselves, they also believe that the Iraqis are still pursuing this. It's just that we can't find what they've got. On the chemical and biological side it's not that we can find what they've got. It's just that we've got some evidence on the discrepancies. We do have this document that the inspectors briefly held in their hands which showed that the Iraqis had expended far fewer chemical munitions during the Iran-Iraq war than they had claimed to us, a disparity of over 6500 weapons. And so you can look at that and say, where are those 6500 weapons? And that's exactly what Hans Blix did on Monday.
TPM: A lot of people who are on the fence on this whole issue probably think the evidence is there, but they want the administration to show it. Why the reticence about putting out a lot of what we have? To make this more than a matter of taking our word for it?
POLLACK: Again, this is one of the problems of going the inspections route, of putting all of our eggs with the UN in this basket. We were inevitably going to find ourselves in the position of having to produce evidence which we were unlikely to have. And, again, the perverse thing about it is that we're not supposed to be the ones producing the evidence. It's the Iraqis who are supposed to be producing the evidence. So it's just bad all around. Now the administration is saying that they think they have the evidence. And if it's true then that's fantastic. Then they've hit the jackpot right there. If they can actually produce the evidence then all of this becomes easy. What Martin Indyk and I put in the piece that we did in the Los Angeles Times was basically making the argument that they are unlikely to have the evidence and instead what they need to do is to make the case differently.
And basically there are two broad approaches to that.
One: Make the point that everyone has basically agreed that the Iraqis need to come clean. And they're not coming clean. And that is something that you can demonstrate. And Blix really made that effort much easier with his report. And the second thing is to basically go to the Security Council members and in private say to them, 'Look, you know the Iraqis have it, we know that the Iraqis have it.' In some cases we can show them more information that we wouldn't necessarily show to the public. You can show governments things that you wouldn't necessarily want to make public, assuming you can trust the government. And there what you could do is to construct an argument and build the legitimacy of your case based on the number of countries who were willing to come forward and say 'Yes, we agree with the Bush administration. We agree with the United States that the Iraqis have not fully disarmed.' And our own feeling was that if you could get enough countries coming forward and saying that, that would be proof.
I think most Americans - I think most people in the world - are just looking for someone other than George Bush to be able to say that. And I think that if you had two or three dozen countries coming forward and saying 'We too are convinced of this. We too are convinced that Iraq has the stuff,' then that coalition, that group of people would in and of itself legitimize the effort. But, again, if the administration can actually produce the smoking gun, that's by far better, given where we are.
TPM: But your sense and I guess Martin's sense too, from having been on the inside, is that it may not be that easy to do?
POLLACK: Right. Absolutely. This was always the problem we had with the Iraqis. We knew they had this stuff, but we didn't know where they were hiding it. And therefore the likelihood that you were going to get something like Adlai Stevenson going to the UN and showing photographs of missiles was highly unlikely. And the Iraqis knew that. They know what our intelligence capabilities are and they were never going to put a missile out there where we could take a photograph of it. That was always the inherent problem.
TPM: When you and I talked months ago, one of the big issues was the back and forth between the civilians and the people in uniform at the Pentagon, about how you were going to do this, in operational terms, and also which countries you would need on board. Where is that part of this debate right now?
POLLACK: It seems like it's mostly being resolved. First, on the pure military plan, it looks like the Pentagon - that is, the uniform services - have won out and that it is going to be the big military operation. And that seems to be part of what's going on is that it's going to take us a number of weeks more until we've got the forces in place to actually mount the big military operation. [That's] rather than Secretary Rumsfeld's initial desire for this rolling start that was mostly reliant on airpower. The big thing there is this issue of when the United States actually starts military operations. I can imagine scenarios where for political reasons President Bush decides he wants to move sooner. And if he moves sooner we may not have all of those troops in place. And we may have to start with something like the rolling start. On the other hand, the longer that the current diplomacy goes on the more likely it is that we're going to have the troops in place ready to go.
Basing is still out there as an issue. Look, we've got Kuwait. We've got Bahrain. We've got Qatar. We've got Oman. Those are the absolute necessities. And we've got those. We've also, it looks like, got Saudi permission to use their airspace and to use Prince Sultan airbase which - again - those are the minimums and it's good that we've got them.
The issues that are remaining out there are Turkey and in particular putting ground troops in Turkey and if we can do anything more with the Saudis and particularly whether the Saudis will allow us to put ground troops in Saudi Arabia. It looks unlikely. I think that unless we both got a new UN resolution and the administration were willing to do something on the peace process I think it'd be hard for the Saudis to come around on that issue. If we got the second resolution, maybe. But I think the Saudis would still want to see progress on the peace process before they actually gave in to a US military presence on the ground in the Kingdom.
TPM: So overall it sounds like no one is happy about it. But despite their unhappiness we have the bare minimums that we need.
POLLACK: Exactly. What we've got is good enough. It could be much better. But it's good enough. On Turkey, the Turks have made it clear they'll allow us to use their airbases. The question is ground troops and how many ground troops. My guess is that actually there we will get to bring in maybe a division's worth of troops. And in that case that will be better than good enough. A division of ground troops really is exactly what we'd want up in Turkey.
TPM: And this is to get in there in the north and make sure that things don't spin out of control when everything is happening?
POLLACK: There is the ostensible reason of wanting to threaten Baghdad from the north and wanting to pin down Iraq's forces in the north. And those are good reasons. And they're certainly true. But they're not the most important reason. The most important reason is that we can be on the ground to prevent the Kurds and the Turks from coming to blows.
TPM: My last question is this: People who aren't familiar with the region and also don't talk to people in the region always see this seeming disjuncture between what one sees and hears from various Saudi officials on TV, for instance, and what they actually seem to be saying behind closed doors. And from your column in the Times one of the main issues we're confronting now is that these leaders aren't crazy about how we got to this point, but that they'll be really pissed if we bring it to this level and then don't do anything.
POLLACK: Yeah, I mean, beyond pissed. This is one of the problems I have. As you well know, Josh, I've always felt that we had to go to war against Iraq sooner rather than later. But I didn't necessarily think it had to be this year. And there were always a whole bunch of things that I wanted to do to make sure that we were ready to go when we did go. But the problem that I face now is that I think we are so deep into this - we are so far down this road - that it is now or never. I think that if we don't go to war this time around I don't think we will ever go to war with Saddam Hussein until he's acquired nuclear weapons. And then he picks the time and place of going to war. And this is exactly what I'm hearing: There are a whole variety of different issues out there. There's the military issues. There's the domestic political issues. There's the international political issue in terms of we've spun up the entire world for this thing. Don't think we're going to do this again in the future. We've spun up the whole country. And don't think we're going to do this again. We're moving all of these divisions out there. We don't have replacements for these divisions. If they come back home it's going to be a while before they can go back out there.
But I think the biggest issue right now is the Gulf Arab states who are feeling extremely exposed and extremely unhappy. And it's exactly as you put it: they're not wild about how we got to this point. They wish we would have done things differently. But now we've built up these forces. We've publicly committed ourselves to doing it. We have forced them to publicly take positions and they're taking a great deal of heat from their own people and from other countries in the region. The last thing they want is to go through this again. And I'll put it even more strongly: They've seen the United States commit itself to a major effort against Iraq - to toppling the Iraqi regime - and seen us pull our punches and back away from it too many times. And what they're saying is, 'Look, we really thought at the end of the Clinton administration that you guys weren't going to go after Iraq. And then 9/11 happened and President Bush indicated he was serious and we took him at his word . If you guys don't go this time we don't think you will ever go. We think you'll do the same thing to us next time. You'll build up again and at the last minute you'll find a way to back out. And once again you will leave us out on a limb. And we're not going through that again.'
TPM: So to characterize where you are on this: If we could rewind to where we were a year ago it sounds like you very much wouldn't want to be where we are right now. But now that we are here - with the options we have and with everything as it is right now - we really don't have much choice but to move ahead.
POLLACK: Right. I think that if you could have turned back time we could have handled this a lot better than we actually did. But we are where we are. And I do want to give the administration some credit. They actually have addressed a number of issues out there. There are some things that I actually think they've handled quite well. Jordan was one. I had a great deal of concerns about what was going to happen with Jordan. And I don't think the administration has absolutely solved the problem. But they've taken some very important steps to make sure that the Jordanians are shielded from the brunt of this war. That's really important.
TPM: Does that mean the economic brunt of it?
POLLACK: Yeah. They've made a number of arrangements with countries to make up for the Iraqi oil. And that's huge. That's something that we in the Clinton administration could never make happen. And so I give them credit there. But I think there are a whole bunch of other things which this administration has not handled particularly well. There are a number of other issues out there which have not been addressed fully. And, yeah, if given my preference I would prefer not to be in the position we're in. But I can't turn back time. And we're in the position we're in. And at this point in time, as messy as it may be, I think that it is now or never. And now is a much better option than never.
TPM: As long as we're on this subject, what are the other areas - as far putting this all together - that the administration has handled well.
POLLACK: I think the military plan, as I said, I think they've gotten to the right place on that. It was a fitful process. But I think they have gotten it to the right place. I think they've also done a pretty good job in terms of the 'day after'. I think you probably saw the piece by David Sanger and Eric Schmidt in the New York Times a couple weeks ago. That does really reflect, as best I can tell, where the administration is. And that's a pretty good approach to handling the 'day after'. They've given up their early ideas that we would just install a new dictator, or that we would install one of the Iraqi oppositionists, or that we just walk away from the problem the way we did in Afghanistan. They recognize this is going to be a big issue and that we have to be committed.
They're still arguing over whether the reconstruction should have a US head or a UN head. But even there I think they're leaning in the direction of the UN. And I think that that's the right answer. So I think they've addressed the 'day after' properly. I think there's still an issue out there of whether they will actually follow through on the 'day after'. But just in terms of the planning and doing everything necessary I think they're well on the road. So that's another one where I tend to give them some credit. I think that they've handled that one pretty well.
The Congress is another one. When I first wrote the book it was a time when you had administration figures coming out and saying 'We don't need anything from Congress. We've got all the authority that we need.' And [yet] they went to the Congress. And they got the war resolution, which I think was very important. To some extent the UN as well. You've heard me say any number of times that I wish they hadn't pursued this route with the UN. But, again, when I wrote the book they were in the mode of 'We don't need the UN. We've got all the authority we need to go ahead and do this.' And instead they recognized that that was a mistake. And they have gone to the UN. Unfortunately the route they took may have cost them as much support as it built them. Nevertheless, I appreciate the fact that they at least made the effort.
Just to cap it off, there are at least two big areas that we haven't talked about where I don't think that the administration is as far along as I would like to see them. Those are a Middle East peace process and the war on terrorism. On the Middle East peace process I think they've singularly failed. They haven't even put out their road map. I think this is a big issue. And I think that if we have problems in the Middle East as a result of the war they will largely be because the administration refused to really engage on getting negotiations resumed between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And I think they've missed some real opportunities there. I hope that the war goes smoothly enough that this doesn't come back to bite us. I'm afraid that it will though.
And then the other issue is the war on terrorism. I think the administration is fighting as hard as they can. I don't have too many complaints about how they're doing it. It's just that I think that there is the risk that when we go to war with Iraq it will reduce some of the pressure on al Qaida. The administration will be focusing on Iraq. It will be making its biggest efforts there. These are very important things. There are countries out there - many counties in the world like Saudi Arabia - that are going to say to us 'Whatever your top priority is, we'll make that our top priority too. But you only get one priority.' And if that priority is Iraq we're not going to get the same level of cooperation from them on terrorism than we would if terrorism were our highest priority. So my preference would have been that we'd be further along on the war on terrorism, that al Qaida would be weaker when we go into Iraq than they are today.
Now I think the president's right. I think that we've won some important victories against al Qaida. And I think to a certain extent they are scattered. They are on their heels. They're trying to knit themselves back together. But they're not out. They might be down. But they're not out. |
