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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (24259)	2/15/2004 5:51:53 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

Part II: The Wrong Culprit From the February 16, 2004 issue: In stopping proliferation, the problem has been political will, not faulty intel. by Henry Sokolski 02/16/2004, Volume 009, Issue 22 URL:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00... Page 2 of 2 < Back More often, though, U.S. officials have taken a more cowardly course, downplaying initial proliferation reports, especially when they involved nations Washington wanted to engage. Thus, U.S. officials were skeptical of the early intelligence that highlighted Israel's nuclear program in the 1960s, Iraq's and South Africa's nuclear weapons activities in the late 1970s, Pakistan's nuclear weapons efforts in the 1980s, and Iran's and North Korea's in the 1990s. Early evidence of China's, Russia's, and, more recently, Pakistan's illicit strategic assistance to these nations was similarly viewed with reservation. This caution did little to encourage intelligence analysts tracking these proliferators. Thankfully, though, after 9/11, this reluctance receded: For the first time, a president publicly emphasized the desirability of acting against proliferators whenever and wherever practical. This helped put fighting proliferation back on the policy map, but it also had a downside: The increased interest in reporting proliferation developments focused attention on what little tactical information we had. In the case of Iraq--a nation with a clear intent and history of acquiring and using strategic weapons capabilities and a persistent and annoying habit of openly defying U.N. inspections and dismantlement resolutions--policymakers and intelligence analysts leaned forward, emphasizing specifics that turned out to be wrong. Many of Saddam's strategic weapons capabilities, it now appears, were either dismantled in the early 1990s or bombed during Clinton's second term. This gaffe is hardly good news, but it's not nearly as bad as Washington pundits are making it out to be. As they see it, the lesson to be learned (and, if we are not careful, to be driven home by the newly announced investigations) is that the United States must be more cautious in acting against proliferation, lest it repeat the Iraqi error. And what error was this? Attacking Saddam on the basis of insufficient proliferation intelligence. Yet, surely, this was not our key mistake. Instead, it was waiting as long as we did to act against Saddam's strategic weapons ambitions and his hostility to us, the U.N., and his own population. We had abundant strategic intelligence on this, and had it for two decades or more, but we chose to ignore it. Instead, we actually supported Saddam financially and militarily and sent him the dual-use goods he needed to pursue his strategic weapons programs. Had we taken a different course when the first intelligence reports emerged about his nuclear ambitions 25 years ago (and his subsequent military buildup), we might have been able to avoid not just one, but both wars we waged against him. The problem wasn't a lack of intelligence on Saddam's strategic weapons programs. It was a lack of will to use the sound strategic warnings we had. Certainly, before investigations get underway and recommendations start flying to centralize our intelligence agencies further and spend ever more money on more layers of management and new sources of intelligence, we would do well to focus on our uneven use of accurate early warnings. In the end, knowledge of proliferation specifics is the least of our problems. Henry Sokolski is the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and editor with Patrick Clawson of "Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions" (Army War College, 2004).

To: calgal who wrote (24259)	2/15/2004 5:52:04 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

Hating FOX Brent Bozell (archive) February 6, 2004 \| Print \| Send The dominance of Fox News in the cable news ratings -- and what liberals see as its annoying tendency to cover topics and angles that they believe should be buried for the good of liberalism -- has led to a great amount of Fox-hating in the anything-but-"mainstream" press. These liberal elites love to pretend that the patch of dirt where they stand is the hallowed ground of objectivity, when in reality, their idea of "mainstream" is floating out on a liberal sea, on a fanciful boat where everyone thinks Howard Dean is best classified as a political moderate, as were McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis. As, one is meant to believe, are they. From their vantage point, which is nowhere within boom-microphone distance of the center, Fox News Channel must look like Right-Wing Kooksville. Unique in standing to the right of the ossified liberal media establishment, Fox is now regularly disparaged as the only ideological news media outlet in the United States. The rest of them are all, to use Dan Rather's self-description, "common-sense moderates." Anyone with his feet grounded in reality realizes that in fact Fox is fairer and closer to the American center than any of the liberal outlets. Pick an issue -- global warming, taxes, homosexuality -- and Fox demonstrates the temerity to allow both sides to debate, whereas other networks still pretend that only one reasonable, quotable side exists. No wonder their audience numbers are sliding as Fox continues to climb. The latest sad anti-Fox outburst came when the National Press Foundation decided to honor respected Fox news hound Brit Hume with its "Broadcaster of the Year" award, Geneva Overholser, a former ombudsman of the Washington Post and a whining liberal windbag if there ever was one, resigned in protest since she felt Hume and Fox practice "ideologically committed journalism." How controversial was the Hume selection? Consider the previous winners of this award: "moderate" Dan Rather, fired New York Times editor Howell Raines, loopy leftist Ted Turner, tiresome PBS propagandist Ken Burns, and NPR bias legend Nina Totenberg, who tried to destroy conservative hero Clarence Thomas with phony-baloney sexual allegations and wished AIDS on conservative hero Jesse Helms in a TV appearance. No one, including Overholser, resigned over any of them. But wait, there's even more phoniness in this take-my-ball-and-go-home protest. In the Nov. 28, 1992, edition of Editor & Publisher magazine, Overholser complained that there wasn't enough ideologically committed journalism out there. "All too often, a story free of any taint of personal opinion is a story with all the juice sucked out. A big piece of why so much news copy today is boring as hell is this objectivity god," she complained. "Keeping opinion out of the story too often means being a fancy stenographer." I saw this riotous act up close on a C-SPAN set a few years ago, as Ms. Overholser sat across the table from me and announced with a straight face and a calm voice that the Washington Post was committed to "presenting the news in a straightforward manner," while the Washington Times was only committed to "representing the conservative viewpoint." Fox News is routinely disparaged by the Left as a hard-swinging right-wing channel because of its top attractions. Populist maverick Bill O'Reilly is not reliably conservative but is regularly rebellious about liberal pieties. Then there's Sean Hannity, who is so packed with persuasive power that liberals never seem to notice he has a liberal co-host sitting across from him every night. Neither is a news reporter, thus rendering the liberal complain moot. But that won't stop the whining. Lost in the rage at the prime-time lineup is the performance of Brit Hume, who brought all the heft of his years of fairness covering Washington and politics at ABC to Fox's table. "Fair and balanced" are not silly marketing words to describe Hume. He earned an "A" from the Media Research Center for even-handed coverage of the Iraq war. But we're not alone. The radical left has trouble complaining about Hume, too. A report by the anti-Iraq-liberation media critics at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting put Hume in the middle in its guest selection: It "had fewer U.S. officials than CBS (70 percent) and more U.S. anti-war guests (3 percent) than PBS or CBS." FAIR's definition of "anti-war" may be ridiculously narrow (in their odd attempt to making liberal networks look conservative), but even FAIR credited Hume's show for giving air time to save-Saddam lobbyists like Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Fortney Stark. So credit should be granted to the National Press Foundation for having the courage to resist the Fox-haters and honor Hume's easily recognized professionalism. And shame should be awarded to Geneva Overholser, who, by her actions, is telling the world she doesn't have an honest bone in her liberal-activist body. Brent Bozell is President of Media Research Center, a Townhall.com member group. ©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.