I agree with Jonathan Tobin: the predicted delay in Iran’s achievement of a working nuclear weapon is the mildest of good news. For one thing, the year 2015 has figured in the CIA’s outside projection for over a decade. U.S. intelligence estimates have hewed to a time frame of 2009-2015 since 1999. Even the infamous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate used that as the projected period in which Iran was most likely to succeed in weaponizing a nuke.
This means that reference to the year 2015 has been a factor in every step taken by the U.S., the P5+1, and the UN over the past decade. We have made our policy on the basis of that year. It’s not a new planning factor or a signal that our basis for policy should change. We have always assumed it could take Iran until 2015 to have a working nuke. And even when it became clear that a working nuke wouldn’t emerge in 2009, the year 2015 nevertheless justified urgent concern. We will only get closer to it from here.
It also bears reiterating that Stuxnet is irrelevant to Iran’s progress toward weaponization. The assassination of nuclear scientists is on point when it comes to weaponization; the operation of Stuxnet is not. The virus can delay the accumulation of an arsenal, but its design and purpose are not geared to the weaponization process.
It’s not clear to me why Meir Dagan’s summary was made available to the media. Outgoing leaders usually celebrate the successes of their organizations as they take their leave, but the risk is high that these particular successes, as framed in the Dagan report, will be misinterpreted. Complacency about the time available to us is dangerously misguided: to date, delaying our decision deadline for effective action has only allowed Iran to achieve greater success and self-sufficiency in its nuclear pursuits.
Thank you for that Kennedy quote, which is actually quite extraordinary. I can’t recall many presidents being so candid in office about the challenges of American leadership– heck, of the job itself.
Humility in power is an attractive thing.
To the multi-lateral, global warming-lateral, anti-war-lateral, we-are-the-world-lateral pseudo intellectuals, not all genocide is created equal. That would be too “binary” for such a “suffostokated” cadre. Genocide in a country where there is no oil is far worse than genocide in an oil rich country. Furthermore, if preventing genocide also coincides with America’s strategic interests, then the inverse is true—stopping genocide is fascist.
We oversimplified binary-ians, who think all genocide is wrong, just don’t get it. We need to learn to think in a more compli-nuanced hexadecimal fashion.
” we are told Rice is a fierce advocate for human rights–yet she opposed the war to liberate Iraq”
lol has anyone seen the politcal cartoon the Onion does? this would be perfect for them.
It’s really not all that hard to reconcile.
Multilateralism is preferred. But sometimes there is no time and sometimes there is no will, as is Darfur. Then you go with what you got. Rice is not arguing that you always use one or the other. To say these statements are at odds is dishonest.
As for Iraq, the intent was never humanitarian. Even Karl Rove yesterday said Bush would never have gone to war if he did not think Saddam had weapons of mass destruction: “Absent (belief that Saddam possessed WMDs), I suspect that the administration’s course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s,” Rove said. Clearly, stopping the abuses of Saddam were a secondary consideration. Rove ought to know.
Depending on whose numbers you use, Bush is well on his way to causing as many Iraqi deaths as Saddam did. Bush’s decisions and mismanagement already have killed more Americans than the 9/11 terrorists did. Stop trying to put a noble face on an abomination.
So stopping the abuses of Saddam, because it was ONLY second on the list of reasons for neutralizing a madman, is an abomination?
If Bush put it as the PRIMARY reason for toppling Saddam, you would have supported the invasion?
“Depending on whose numbers you use, Bush is well on his way to causing as many Iraqi deaths as Saddam did.”
Yeah, either the terrorist numbers or their “enabler-ers” in the media.
Unless Obama pulls out all troops immediately, as his so-called “promise” (read lie) to the Left stated, upon his deification, err inauguration, any death after January 20, 2009, gets credited to Him.
“No blood for Obama!!”
“Obama lied Iraqis died!”
Actually, the JFK quote could have come from anyone who was just acquiring executive experience for the first time. There was no reason for Ronald Reagan to ever say those words as president, because he already knew what JFK was just learning. We may imagine that in their own ways, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton knew it too, and Jimmy Carter. I am not reassured by a president saying that making big decisions is hard. I am discouraged that people vote for candidates who don’t know that already.
Regarding the justification for regime-changing Saddam, the 22 counts against him listed by Congress in its authorization of force in October 2002 included a number of humanitarian considerations. Moreover, when Bush spoke about his policy, both before and during the operation, he always couched his justification in terms of what Saddam, whose government had ties to Islamic terrorists, could, if left in power, be able to do. If you check through Bush’s public statements, you will find that he always related the problem of Saddam’s potential to the sponsorship of terrorism. He also never left the impression that we knew for sure what Saddam had already, WMD-wise, or that regime-changing Saddam was predicated on Saddam ALREADY having an arsenal of any particular size or character. He always spoke in terms of WMD programs, potential, and how these quantities might serve a terrible purpose of terrorism.
US intelligence always thought that Saddam had more WMD programs than fully developed, mass-produced weapons on-hand. That’s how Bush was advised, and those are the terms in which he spoke. Since I didn’t hear what Karl Rove said yesterday, or what the nature of the prior discussion was, I can’t speak to that.
But it is erroneous logic-chopping to imply that the only thing driving the regime-change of Saddam was a simplistic yes-no belief on his “possession” of WMDs, as the public understands that expression. If Rove actually implied that, there is nothing in the record to support him. What we found after the invasion was pretty much what we thought Saddam had: former-Soviet chemical rounds, some indigenously-developed rockets and missiles, and materials and documentation for programs, including nuclear, chemical, and biological. It was Saddam’s potential, and his resistance to 12 years of sanctions (cited by Congress for multiple issues) that drove the judgment that his will and intentions would not change, and therefore HE must be.
still debating iraq? lol good to know the GOP is still at the bottom and not rallying anytime soon
Great human rights record for Bush and Zionist Neocons! See Responsibility for 5 Million Refugees.
…if Ms. Rice and President-elect Obama had both had their way, the surge would never have happened, all American combat troops would have been withdrawn from Iraq by March of this year, and Iraq would have slid into a civil war and experienced mass death and perhaps genocide.”
I hate to be a naysayer, because I agree with the spirit of this sentiment, but there’s something wrong with its logic, It bothered me during the campaign too, when McCain and his backers made it. The problem is that this logic ignores what would have happened had the Iraq war never been waged. That, I believe, is the true position of S. Rice and Obama. Early withdrawal was merely a fallback.
Ergo, had Obama and Rice gotten their way, genocide would not have ensued. Rather, Saddam would still be in power.
And with Saddam in power, evil as he was, there was no real danger of genocide in Iraq. The Kurds had achieved a semi-autonimous state, the Kuwaitis were back in business, and the war crimes of the Iran-Iraq conflict were old history by then. Yes, he flouted the UN. So does Lebanon. So does everyone.
To quibble about the surge is to miss the larger point, which is that Obama and S. Rice opposed war in the first place. The blame for a genocide that might have followed had the surge not been tried, should not be placed on their shoulders, since they argued not only against the surge but against the invasion itself.
You can assert that Saddam’s abuses were hideous, but were they more hideous than the Mullahs’ in Iran or Kim Jong Ill’s in North Korea? Doubtful. So we’re back at square one: when is foreign military intervention justified against nations that systematically violate the human rights of their OWN citizens? The UN and international law is ill-equipped to wrangle this tough question (witness Darfur and Rwanda) precisely because they are fashioned around a 19th-century idea of inviolable national sovereignty.
Until we reformulate that out-moded idea (as al Qaeda, Hizbollah, Hamas et al are rapidly forcing us to do), we will lack the tools to do more than point fingers of blame when it comes to derailing genocidal regimes.
Dyer,
Your dispassionate argumentation is a much needed counter-point to the idiotic spew of the Martillos of the world.
“when is foreign military intervention justified against nations that systematically violate the human rights of their OWN citizens? The UN and international law is ill-equipped to wrangle this tough question (witness Darfur and Rwanda) precisely because they are fashioned around a 19th-century idea of inviolable national sovereignty.
Until we reformulate that out-moded idea (as al Qaeda, Hizbollah, Hamas et al are rapidly forcing us to do), we will lack the tools to do more than point fingers of blame when it comes to derailing genocidal regimes.”
Excellent starting point for a whole new, much more meaningful conversation. The danger is that, in empowering some sort of INTER-national body with the responsibility of stopping genocide, people could lose the rights that, within the context of many, albeit not all, nation-states, protect them against a draft. I can’t imagine living in a world where my sons could be called up at anytime by a dubious body like the UN, to do its bidding and serves its interests, as it defines them.
Kat,
I’m not talking about empowering an international body to stop genocide. That’s putting the cart way ahead of the horse. I think we need to do some serious theory-building tailored to the peculiar 21st-century circumstances we face. And then we need to do some international law-drafting. Then and only then can we talk about enforcement.
It’s a messy business, and no one really wants to pry open the Geneva Convention or the Declaration of Human Rights for major retooling. But the necessity of doing so becomes obvious to thoughtful people living in functioning democracies. Israel and the U.S. are already feeling their way through this minefield. The sooner the rest of the world joins the effort, the better for everyone.
Brilliant. But then I expect no less from Commentary.
Seems like the girls are with us tonight. Optimistic ’til the end. God Bless ladies.
Rice is the only top figure in Obama’s national security team who did not support the war in Iraq? Assuming all of the other national security appointees, like so many of our leaders, supported the war and then turned against it when the going got tough, then I would say that, with the exception of Rice, they form a perfect transition between President’s Bush and Obama. They are like President Bush in determining that going into Iraq was the least bad option we had at the time, and they are like President-elect Obama in changing their views freely whenever it is politically expedient to do so.
Diane,
What do YOU think would have happened had we not invaded Iraq? Remember, as a result of the invasion, we learned Iraq (Saddam) was bribing UN officials right up to the highest level. He was bribing a lot of high-powered officials and businessmen with political influence in countries like Germany, France, Russia, and China (you know, countries that were opposed to the invasion – I wonder why).
With this type of a “team” behind him, it would only have been a few more years before any UN sanctions were lifted, and Saddam was free to do whatever he pleased, which undeniably involved the development of nukes and other WMD. Libya would never have given up its nuclear program (which no one even seemed to realize they had). We would never have found out about the widespread influence of Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan, who was running his own nuclear eBay sales force. Lebanon would not be on its way to self-governance (even though they still have Hezbollah to contend with, they are breaking away from Assad and Syria). God only knows what would have happened if both Iraq and Iran developed nukes.
0bama has never tried to work this side of it out, either. In many cases, the results of inaction (which may not become visible for decades, such as with Carter’s failure to handle Iran properly) are worse than the results of taking action (where you can see the horrible results immediately, and if you are not strong you bail out before the job is done – you know, like S. Rice and 0bama, and most Democrats, wanted to do in Iraq).
It will take about 20 years to see if the Iraq invasion was worth it. If Iraq continues the way it is going now, and helps pave the way for other Arab nations to become at least somewhat democratic, it will turn out to be one of the best investments mankind has made in its future. And the best thing for 0bama to do would be to get out of the way. He can not help this situation, all he can do is hurt it with his policies. If he screws up Iraq like Carter did with Iran, then yes, Iraq would have been a mistake, but it would 0bama’s mistake, not Bush’s.
Perhaps the most sickening thing about liberals is their fetishization of their exquisite moral sensitivity to horrors such as the Rwandan genocide, coupled with their complete refusal to recognize and accept the consequences of actually taking action to address moral wrongs. For example, what if sending in US troops to Rwanda had resulted in the death of thousands of Rwandans, Congolese or other Africans? Would it still have been worth it, or would Rice, Obama, et al. back away from that action like a stinking pile of slimy feces, as they have done in the case of the Iraq war? The important thing is how exquisitely sensitive Rice was to the carnage in Rwanda. That apparently absolves her of any responsibility for the inaction of the Clinton administration.
These people truly are sickening and it is disturbing that they are in control of the U.S. government.
Intervention in tyrannical regimes (more precisely, the overthrow of such regimes) should be incorporated into American foreign policy as follows: we use it against our enemies as a weapon of war in accord with strategic necessities. In other words, we mobilize as allies the people oppressed by the regimes that will us harm. That’s the core principle, and the formulation of more specific policies involves calibrating strategic priorities and capacities. Saddam’s regime was especially evil, even if he had a few competitors, but he was also an especially noxious enemy, and one who was leading us to divert more resources than were justified. Overthrowing Saddam would have been far more “economical” strategically if we had, as quickly as possible, used our proximity to Iran to to agitate systematically for the overthrow of the mullah’s regime–not only retaliating for suspected intervention on their part in Iraq but providing aid to any all resistance organization except for overtly terroristic or fundamentalist ones and highlighting and trumpeting to the world each and every human rights abuse. I don’t understand why this wasn’t done–there is a good chance the Iranian regime would be long gone by now. In the end, we have to hope that the one domino will be enough.
It used to be said during the Cold War that the American national game was poker, where you could be dealt a new hand, and that of the Soviets was chess, where the same “hand” persisted until a winner or loser was established. I see it is still true of the political left.
Those who want to go back to the beginning and get a new hand must return to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. After the first Gulf War, Saddam’s “box” was by no means stable and Osama declared war on us because our forces were in Saudi Arabia to enforce the “no-fly” zone. If you choose to leave Saddam on the borders of Saudi Arabia, or perhaps over them, and there was never a response, I will accept your hypothetical. You are entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. Once Bush pere’ responded, the die was cast.
Had World War I ended differently, the 20th century might have ben very different. Adults deal with the world as they find it.
Yes, the actual situation with Iraq post-9/11 is almost never discussed: we could stay bogged down in Saudi Arabia, policing the rapidly deteriorating sanctions regime while our presence there is causus belli of the terrorists who had just attacked us–so, leaving would have looked like a retreat, while the status quo was untenable. Removing Saddam cut the gordion knot. Even if Bush couldn’t quite present it in that way, intelligent, responsible and loyal opinion makers should have been able to figure it out for themselves. One of the most destructive aspects of the leftist prominence in public discourse is the virulent utopianism which never, but never, looks at the world in terms of actual alternatives, sometimes bad and worse–the left always measures what the “powerful” do in terms of an abstract, international-legalistic standpoint that can never be satisfied and, in fact, has no legitimacy. The real source of all our problems, though, is that conservatives still care what leftists think. When we get a new batch of conservatives who can smile for the cameras while never ceasing to twist the screws on the Left and exposing them ruthlessly at every point, things will start to turn around. Reagan could do it; Gingrich couldn’t; Bush couldn’t even see the need.
Peter Whener,
stop comparing that empty suit obama to JFK. JFK was an accomplished and well spoken man–before and after he became President.
There is one more point to add to Nick’s comment: Saddam had a host of useful idiots who were blaming the US and sanctions for the deaths of Iraqi children. I saw them on German TV. No doubt similar propaganda was commonplace in the Muslim world. Anyone who thinks this was not a recruitment tool for Islamic terrorists is a complete fool. Even today, I am sure most Germans remember the “bad” sanctions. Yet from the media coverage I have seen, I suspect that very few are even aware of the oil for food scandal, to say nothing of the bribe recipients who really did take bread from the mouths of starving children.
to #8:
Of course we should debate the Iraq war. Closing your eyes and wishing an event never happened is what children do. Republicans are the adults in this country.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Peter:
If you’d like a keen understanding of Rice’s reign as Assist. Sec for African Affairs, check out Ryan Lizza’s article in the New Republic (24.7.2000), p.22 on her management of the atrocities attending Charles Taylor’s rule in Liberia leading to the Lome agreement of 1999. Was in moral insensitivity or merely incompetence? You be the judge.
It never ceases to amaze me when former Clinton administration officials tell us how sickened and horrified they are about the Rwandan genocide that occured during their time in government. Especially when we know that THEY, the Clinton administration, did not lift a finger to help those poor, innocent souls who were so brutally murdered. At the time, I was outraged this genocide was happening and the world stood by and watched. And to this day I can not believe that Bill Clinton made it out of Rwanda alive when he visited there after his time in office and told the people of Rwanda “how sorry” he was that he and the world did not do more to protect them from the horrors they experienced. Now we are going to have basically the same people who watched this horror occur from the sidelines in charge again. This is truly scary.
Dianne Said “Ergo, had Obama and Rice gotten their way, genocide would not have ensued. Rather, Saddam would still be in power.
And with Saddam in power, evil as he was, there was no real danger of genocide in Iraq. The Kurds had achieved a semi-autonimous state, the Kuwaitis were back in business, and the war crimes of the Iran-Iraq conflict were old history by then. Yes, he flouted the UN. So does Lebanon. So does everyone.
…The blame for a genocide that might have followed had the surge not been tried, should not be placed on their shoulders, since they argued not only against the surge but against the invasion itself.”
—
You choose to forget that Saddam’s payment of exorbitant amounts of blood money to Palestinian Terror Bombers in Israel in 2001-March 2003 very nearly brought that government to its knees and may well have forced unilateral Israeli action against Iraq. Such action clearly would have had the potential to drag our multilateral posteriors to their rescue; either diplomatically or militarily or both.
Had Obama and Rice been making U.S. policy in 2001-3, the flash point of greater Middle East conflict desired by the Jihadis may well have been achieved through their naïveté’ and failure to create a theater of conflict against radical Islam in the terrorist’s neighborhood.
From here we can conjecture that inaction on their part could have caused a far greater loss of life and destabilization of the area. At minimum, the Jihadis would have been free to direct there world-wide terror effort unhindered by the loss of thousands of volunteers in Iraq each year.
The attacks in Mumbai show us it is not Bush’s America they hate, it is any non-Muslim state in which people attempt to achieve greater self determination than under a Caliphate.
I think most of us also realize that if pressured to the point of extinction, Israel will go nuclear. Woe unto the multilateralist who underestimates that nation’s will to live, or forces them into untenable peace accords that cede defendable borders for a false pause in the multipronged assault on Israel’s existence.
Obama and Rice have shown at best an antipathy toward Israel and in some utterances a complete intolerance. So, not only would Obama and Rice have brought about peril through there lack of experience in 2001-3, but we may have the unfortunate opportunity to observe their painful ascent of a very steep learning curve in the coming months.
Of course, their first major test need not be in the Middle East at all. Consider the potential for an economic downturn in China–already ongoing as a result of the global recession–to force a scrambling government to whip-up nationalistic fervor in favor of restoring the mythical Greater China with an invasion of Taiwan? Nationalism is a mechanism the regime in Beijing has previously employed to deal with domestic instability in the mid to late 1990s. Make no mistake; by some estimates China already has 100 Million unemployed; roughly two thirds of the entire U.S. workforce. How much more can their infrastructure handle?
More importantly, how forceful do you see Obama responding in the Taiwan Straights? Who else would join us in defending Taiwan?
If you want to see hypocrisy, just watch the critics of Bush’s coalition of the willing scotch-tapping together an identical lash-up. Assuming they have the skill. Will Rice have the acumen to bring about a UN resolution authorizing intervention, or will the U.S. resort to Clinton Administration unilateralism as in the intervention in the Balkans?
Of that’s right, it’s the good intentions, hope and hope for change that count, not the outcome.
“Liberty Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 9:23 AM
It never ceases to amaze me when former Clinton administration officials tell us how sickened and horrified they are about the Rwandan genocide that occured during their time in government.”
—
You are so right.
Not only did Clinton fail to act, but we actually had the USS Tripoli Amphibious Group with a Marine Expeditionary Unit (~ 2,500 member Spec Ops Capable Marine Air Ground Task Force) in position with men and equipment that could have reinforced the UN Peace Keepers. I was there in the late summer and fall of 1994 bobbing off the coast of Kenya waiting for the word to execute that never came. We wound up sending in four or five CH-53 helicopters after the blood bath to aid in the recovery, with the majority of the Marines staying on board ship.
We subsequently wound-up putting Marines ashore to provide security for the US Liaison Officer withdrawl (final U.S. retreat) from Somalia.
Good intentions, rather than outcome….a hallmark of nuanced diplomacy.
26 ru kidding: so you admit that iraq is a mistake that qwe need to learn from. good for you. here’s a good lesson we learned: interventionism is stupid
I may be wrong, abut I am under the impression that it was Ms. Rice who either formulated or at least parroted President Clinton and refused to call Darfur genocide for fear tha that would force the U.S. to act. A position I note assiduoulsy adopted or stqrted by Kofi Annan.
So… we’re going to advocate a campaign against human rights violations, with U.S. force, but this same woman did not want to use US force to liberate a nation that was the victim of human rights violations. What exactly can we expect from this woman other than the typical flip flopping of the illuminati left?