GROOVE VICTIM
03-21-2003, 11:54 AM
Wondering why the so called "Bush" Doctrine and the Truman Doctrine have many ties? Where did Bush's Agenda originate?
The Hawks of our Government:
You've got to hand it to Donald Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew at the Pentagon. They know all the stratagems of bureaucratic politics, and they play the game well. In their latest maneuver, reported on the front page of last Thursday's New York Times, the secretary of defense has formed his own "four- to five-man intelligence team" to sift through raw data coming out of Iraq in search of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida terrorists.
Rumsfeld has publicly continued to push this link as a prime—or at least the most easily sellable—rationale for going to war with Iraq, even after the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency have dismissed the connection as tenuous at best. But Rumsfeld contends that the spy bureaucracies may have missed something. As his top team member, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, put it to the Times, there is "a phenomenon in intelligence work that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will." Since Wolfowitz is one of Washington's most forceful advocates of a second Gulf War, we can safely predict that he will find the facts he needs to make his case.
It is an old story that bears the same lesson each time a new chapter unfolds: Intelligence analysis should be kept out of the hands of those who have a vested interest in the results.
The classic case is the "missile gap" of the late 1950s. Air Force Intelligence was estimating that Soviets would deploy 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by the early '60s. The intelligence branch of the Strategic Air Command figured the Soviets would, or might already, have 1,000 or more. The CIA, on the other hand, calculated the number at about 50. (By the time John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, photos from spy satellites revealed that the Soviets had just four ICBMs.) What drove the dispute was that the Air Force, which was embroiled in a fierce budget battle with the Army and the Navy, had a vested interest in a higher estimate. A large arsenal of Soviet ICBMs was the best argument for a large arsenal of American ICBMs, which formed a major part of the Air Force budget. The Strategic Air Command had an even bigger interest, since it controlled and operated the ICBMs.
All these opposing intelligence agencies were working from the same data base. The Strategic Air Command and the Air Force didn't have to make anything up when they predicted such a massive Soviet arsenal. They pointed to signs, clues, Soviet military documents, and statements by Nikita Khrushchev that they could say supported the conclusions they desired. In Wolfowitz's words, they had a "certain hypothesis," so they saw "certain facts" that others did not. SAC intelligence officers frequently presented a slide show to senior Eisenhower and Kennedy administration Pentagon officials—photos, taken by satellites and U-2 spy planes, of a grain elevator, a medieval tower, and another strange structure out in the middle of nowhere. The Russians might have hidden an ICBM in such places, they argued.
In 1969, President Richard Nixon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to build an anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) system to intercept incoming Soviet warheads. They had several motives, but one of them—and the easiest to sell publicly—was to protect our ICBMs from being destroyed in a Soviet first-strike. The problem was, the Soviets had no first-strike capability. A new version of the Soviet SS-9 missile, then in development, could carry three warheads apiece. If each of those warheads could be fired at a separate target—if they were MIRVs (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle)—a case could be made that they posed a first-strike threat. But the CIA concluded that the warheads were just MRVs (not independently targetable); each missile could lay down only a cluster of explosions over a single area. So, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird arm-twisted the CIA to change its analysis and describe the SS-9s as MIRVs. The pressure worked. The sales pitch for the ABM could proceed. (It turned out the SS-9s were MRVs. The Soviets would not deploy MIRVs until 1976, six years after we did.)
Vested interests can be ideological as well as institutional. In the mid-1970s, a group of well-known hawks, mainly former policy-makers and retired officers, started clamoring that the Soviets were acquiring a first-strike capability and that the CIA was gravely underestimating their prowess and might. President Gerald Ford, under growing pressure from the right, succumbed to what seemed a modest demand—to let a team of their analysts examine the same data that the CIA had been examining and come up with alternative findings. It was sold as an "exercise" in intelligence analysis, an interesting competition—Team A (the CIA) versus Team B (the critics). Yet once allowed an institutional footing, the Team B players presented their conclusions—and leaked them to friendly reporters—as the truth, which the pro-detente administration was trying to hide.
The Team B report read like one long air-raid siren: The Soviets were spending practically all their GNP on the military; they were perfecting charged-particle beams that could knock our warheads out of the sky; their express policy and practical goal was to fight and win a nuclear war. (One Team B member, former Air Force Intelligence Chief Maj. Gen. George Keegan, had briefed officials on the thousands of hidden Soviet missiles back in the '50s.)
Almost everything in the Team B report turned out to be false. Yet it provided the rallying cry for a movement against detente and arms-control accords. Its spokesmen became outspoken figures of opposition during the Jimmy Carter years (most notably, Paul Nitze and his Committee on the Present Danger) and senior officials in the Ronald Reagan administration and beyond.
Paul Wolfowitz was one of the 10 senior staff members on Team B. Another member of Rumsfeld's intelligence team, Douglas J. Feith, was counsel to Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, a longtime impresario of anti-detente forces. (Perle is still influential as chairman of the advisory Defense Policy Board.)
None of this history is meant to suggest that hawks are always wrong or doves always right. Vested interests lean in all directions. In the 1940s, senior Naval Intelligence officers argued that the Soviet Union had not really detonated an atomic bomb and persisted in their disbelief for several years after the fact. This was no doubt related to the fact that the Navy, which had no A-bombs, was in a titanic budget battle with the Air Force, which did.
Nor does this saga necessarily mean that in the present battle the CIA is right and Rumsfeld's intelligence panel wrong. But when the members of Team Rumsfeld tie together their loose strands—when they whip out the previously overlooked clues amid the mountains of data and proclaim that the new information proves what they've been saying all along—keep in mind that they are not "just trying to get another angle on this" (as one Pentagon official described the project to the Times). This is a battle and—inside the bureaucracy, if not yet in Iraq—they are in full war posture.
The Players are listed below in this thread courtesy of www.gardian.co.uk (http://www.gardian.co.uk) :
The gathering for a recent dinner at an expensive Washington hotel was officially to honour the "Keepers of the Flame" - US security officials deemed by their more conservative colleagues to have fought the good fight for bigger defence budgets and tougher policies.
It was also a celebration.
The mostly casualty-free military successes in Afghanistan have significantly boosted the power of Washington's "super-hawks" - a tight-knit group of former cold warriors who have returned from more than a decade in policy exile to grasp the levers of power once more.
"It's taken us 13 years to get here, but we've arrived," the evening's host, Frank Gaffney, the head of a hawkish Washington thinktank, declared to applause and murmurs of agreement.
The new defence establishment clustered around the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, is clearly winning the policy debate against the state department.
In the latest of a string of setbacks for Colin Powell's multilateralist approach, the secretary of state's attempts to keep negotiations going with Moscow over missile defence was abruptly brought to an end last week with the announcement that the United States would withdraw from the anti ballistic missile (ABM) treaty.
Meanwhile, the hardliners are capturing key squares on the chessboard of Washington power, at the expense of the moderates at state.
Barring a military disaster in the Afghan endgame, the Pentagon is almost certain to win its battle to pursue the war of terrorism into Iraq and suspected terrorist havens across the world.
"This is the third significant military campaign, after Desert Storm and Kosovo, in which air power has been the decisive element and where casualties have been negligible," John Pike, the chief analyst at the online security newsletter GlobalSecurity.com, said.
"To the extent that the administration now can't tell the difference between a war and a firepower display, there is a greater temptation to resort to force."
But the hawk ascendancy has had other far-reaching implications.
Significant foreign policy issues have been annexed by the Pentagon and its militant allies, including the negotiation of key international treaties and the handling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
John Bolton - the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz group's own man in the state department - was forced on Mr Powell despite the secretary of state's strenuous objections.
Mr Bolton is under secretary of state for arms control and international security. He serves as senior adviser to the president on non-proliferation and disarmament - a role which causes grim amusement in the state department as he opposes multilateral arms agreements on principle.
Inserted into the department to oversee the destruction of the ABM treaty, Mr Bolton was also instrumental in torpedoing international negotiations in Geneva earlier this month aimed at enforcing the toothless 1972 biological weapons convention.
Mr Powell does not have a counterweight to Mr Bolton in the Pentagon, and he is about to lose an important ally in the White House.
Bruce Reidel, a Clinton holdover who has echoed the state department's emphasis on the need to maintain an Arab coalition, is due to leave his job as head of the national security council Middle East desk next week.
The hawks' candidate to take over is Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American with little experience in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose empire will include the Middle East, Iran and Iraq.
Three years ago, he co-signed a letter to the then president, Bill Clinton, calling on him to throw his weight wholeheartedly into an effort to topple Saddam Hussein. The letter was also signed by Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Bolton and others.
And for the Washington hawks, Israel is a strategic ally which should not be bullied into giving ground - a view promoted by Doug Feith at the Pentagon, and Frank Gaffney, his former colleague at the Centre for Security Policy (CSP).
"The so-called Middle East 'peace process,' which began with secret Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Oslo, has materially contributed to the present, catastrophic situation," the CSP argues on its website.
"Successive concessions made in the name of advancing the 'peace process' by both Labour and Likud-led governments of Israel have not appeased demands for further concessions, only whetted Arab appetites for more."
The CSP has now established itself as an influential player in Washington, a policy powerhouse focused on establishing a radical, unilateralist and aggressive new defence doctrine.
The ballroom for the "Keepers of the Flame" gathering was packed with the high priests of the new security establishment. They included Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Feith and another Pentagon advisor, JD Crouch, sitting alongside the former CIA director, James Woolsey, a leading proponent of a new war against Saddam.
Among them was Richard Perle, known as the "prince of darkness" in the Reagan-era arms race, who has been reborn as the chairman of the defence policy board.
Mr Rumsfeld was the night's keynote speaker. He declared his happiness at being able to speak his mind "among friends" and embraced the mood by telling a cheering audience that after finishing off al-Qaida and the Taliban, "we'd best go after the rest of the terrorists".
For the time being, at least, there is little in Washington to stop Mr Rumsfeld chasing America's foes all the way to Baghdad.
America's top sabre-rattlers
Donald Rumsfeld - A veteran of the cold war chosen by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, in the face of opposition from Colin Powell, now secretary of state. His radical policies and abrasive manner initially provoked resistance from the Pentagon generals. But the war on terrorism has made him the most powerful member of the cabinet and he is expanding his influence into foreign policy fields normally managed by the secretary of state.
Paul Wolfowitz - Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, and the foremost exponent of a new war against Saddam Hussein. He is a former academic with a wide-ranging network of travellers and sympathisers, commonly referred to in Washington as the "Wolfowitz cabal".
Doug Feith - The Pentagon's policy supremo and a former director of the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), who has led the charge for a more pro-Israel Middle East policy.
Frank Gaffney - a former defence policy official and Rumsfeld acolyte who now runs the CSP - a thinktank and ideological seminary for young hawks. He advocates the scrapping of the Oslo peace process, the forceful promotion of the national missile defence system, and a settling of scores with Baghdad.
Richard Perle - Known as Ronald Reagan's "prince of darkness" for his distaste for disarmament treaties, and his hawkish attitude towards the Soviet Union. Mr Perle retains an important role in the defence policy board, a Pentagon thinktank which he chairs.
John Bolton - The hawks' man inside the state department. Despite the objections of Colin Powell, he was appointed undersecretary of state for arms control, non-proliferation and international security, even though he is a committed unilateralist who opposes global arms treaties on principle.
Zalmay Khalilzad - the top Afghan-American in the administration. Three years ago, he signed a joint letter with Donald Rumsfeld and other hawks, calling on the Clinton administration to topple Saddam.
He is seeking to take over the Middle East portfolio when Bruce Reidel steps down later this month
The Hawks of our Government:
You've got to hand it to Donald Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew at the Pentagon. They know all the stratagems of bureaucratic politics, and they play the game well. In their latest maneuver, reported on the front page of last Thursday's New York Times, the secretary of defense has formed his own "four- to five-man intelligence team" to sift through raw data coming out of Iraq in search of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida terrorists.
Rumsfeld has publicly continued to push this link as a prime—or at least the most easily sellable—rationale for going to war with Iraq, even after the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency have dismissed the connection as tenuous at best. But Rumsfeld contends that the spy bureaucracies may have missed something. As his top team member, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, put it to the Times, there is "a phenomenon in intelligence work that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will." Since Wolfowitz is one of Washington's most forceful advocates of a second Gulf War, we can safely predict that he will find the facts he needs to make his case.
It is an old story that bears the same lesson each time a new chapter unfolds: Intelligence analysis should be kept out of the hands of those who have a vested interest in the results.
The classic case is the "missile gap" of the late 1950s. Air Force Intelligence was estimating that Soviets would deploy 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by the early '60s. The intelligence branch of the Strategic Air Command figured the Soviets would, or might already, have 1,000 or more. The CIA, on the other hand, calculated the number at about 50. (By the time John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, photos from spy satellites revealed that the Soviets had just four ICBMs.) What drove the dispute was that the Air Force, which was embroiled in a fierce budget battle with the Army and the Navy, had a vested interest in a higher estimate. A large arsenal of Soviet ICBMs was the best argument for a large arsenal of American ICBMs, which formed a major part of the Air Force budget. The Strategic Air Command had an even bigger interest, since it controlled and operated the ICBMs.
All these opposing intelligence agencies were working from the same data base. The Strategic Air Command and the Air Force didn't have to make anything up when they predicted such a massive Soviet arsenal. They pointed to signs, clues, Soviet military documents, and statements by Nikita Khrushchev that they could say supported the conclusions they desired. In Wolfowitz's words, they had a "certain hypothesis," so they saw "certain facts" that others did not. SAC intelligence officers frequently presented a slide show to senior Eisenhower and Kennedy administration Pentagon officials—photos, taken by satellites and U-2 spy planes, of a grain elevator, a medieval tower, and another strange structure out in the middle of nowhere. The Russians might have hidden an ICBM in such places, they argued.
In 1969, President Richard Nixon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to build an anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) system to intercept incoming Soviet warheads. They had several motives, but one of them—and the easiest to sell publicly—was to protect our ICBMs from being destroyed in a Soviet first-strike. The problem was, the Soviets had no first-strike capability. A new version of the Soviet SS-9 missile, then in development, could carry three warheads apiece. If each of those warheads could be fired at a separate target—if they were MIRVs (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle)—a case could be made that they posed a first-strike threat. But the CIA concluded that the warheads were just MRVs (not independently targetable); each missile could lay down only a cluster of explosions over a single area. So, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird arm-twisted the CIA to change its analysis and describe the SS-9s as MIRVs. The pressure worked. The sales pitch for the ABM could proceed. (It turned out the SS-9s were MRVs. The Soviets would not deploy MIRVs until 1976, six years after we did.)
Vested interests can be ideological as well as institutional. In the mid-1970s, a group of well-known hawks, mainly former policy-makers and retired officers, started clamoring that the Soviets were acquiring a first-strike capability and that the CIA was gravely underestimating their prowess and might. President Gerald Ford, under growing pressure from the right, succumbed to what seemed a modest demand—to let a team of their analysts examine the same data that the CIA had been examining and come up with alternative findings. It was sold as an "exercise" in intelligence analysis, an interesting competition—Team A (the CIA) versus Team B (the critics). Yet once allowed an institutional footing, the Team B players presented their conclusions—and leaked them to friendly reporters—as the truth, which the pro-detente administration was trying to hide.
The Team B report read like one long air-raid siren: The Soviets were spending practically all their GNP on the military; they were perfecting charged-particle beams that could knock our warheads out of the sky; their express policy and practical goal was to fight and win a nuclear war. (One Team B member, former Air Force Intelligence Chief Maj. Gen. George Keegan, had briefed officials on the thousands of hidden Soviet missiles back in the '50s.)
Almost everything in the Team B report turned out to be false. Yet it provided the rallying cry for a movement against detente and arms-control accords. Its spokesmen became outspoken figures of opposition during the Jimmy Carter years (most notably, Paul Nitze and his Committee on the Present Danger) and senior officials in the Ronald Reagan administration and beyond.
Paul Wolfowitz was one of the 10 senior staff members on Team B. Another member of Rumsfeld's intelligence team, Douglas J. Feith, was counsel to Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, a longtime impresario of anti-detente forces. (Perle is still influential as chairman of the advisory Defense Policy Board.)
None of this history is meant to suggest that hawks are always wrong or doves always right. Vested interests lean in all directions. In the 1940s, senior Naval Intelligence officers argued that the Soviet Union had not really detonated an atomic bomb and persisted in their disbelief for several years after the fact. This was no doubt related to the fact that the Navy, which had no A-bombs, was in a titanic budget battle with the Air Force, which did.
Nor does this saga necessarily mean that in the present battle the CIA is right and Rumsfeld's intelligence panel wrong. But when the members of Team Rumsfeld tie together their loose strands—when they whip out the previously overlooked clues amid the mountains of data and proclaim that the new information proves what they've been saying all along—keep in mind that they are not "just trying to get another angle on this" (as one Pentagon official described the project to the Times). This is a battle and—inside the bureaucracy, if not yet in Iraq—they are in full war posture.
The Players are listed below in this thread courtesy of www.gardian.co.uk (http://www.gardian.co.uk) :
The gathering for a recent dinner at an expensive Washington hotel was officially to honour the "Keepers of the Flame" - US security officials deemed by their more conservative colleagues to have fought the good fight for bigger defence budgets and tougher policies.
It was also a celebration.
The mostly casualty-free military successes in Afghanistan have significantly boosted the power of Washington's "super-hawks" - a tight-knit group of former cold warriors who have returned from more than a decade in policy exile to grasp the levers of power once more.
"It's taken us 13 years to get here, but we've arrived," the evening's host, Frank Gaffney, the head of a hawkish Washington thinktank, declared to applause and murmurs of agreement.
The new defence establishment clustered around the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, is clearly winning the policy debate against the state department.
In the latest of a string of setbacks for Colin Powell's multilateralist approach, the secretary of state's attempts to keep negotiations going with Moscow over missile defence was abruptly brought to an end last week with the announcement that the United States would withdraw from the anti ballistic missile (ABM) treaty.
Meanwhile, the hardliners are capturing key squares on the chessboard of Washington power, at the expense of the moderates at state.
Barring a military disaster in the Afghan endgame, the Pentagon is almost certain to win its battle to pursue the war of terrorism into Iraq and suspected terrorist havens across the world.
"This is the third significant military campaign, after Desert Storm and Kosovo, in which air power has been the decisive element and where casualties have been negligible," John Pike, the chief analyst at the online security newsletter GlobalSecurity.com, said.
"To the extent that the administration now can't tell the difference between a war and a firepower display, there is a greater temptation to resort to force."
But the hawk ascendancy has had other far-reaching implications.
Significant foreign policy issues have been annexed by the Pentagon and its militant allies, including the negotiation of key international treaties and the handling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
John Bolton - the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz group's own man in the state department - was forced on Mr Powell despite the secretary of state's strenuous objections.
Mr Bolton is under secretary of state for arms control and international security. He serves as senior adviser to the president on non-proliferation and disarmament - a role which causes grim amusement in the state department as he opposes multilateral arms agreements on principle.
Inserted into the department to oversee the destruction of the ABM treaty, Mr Bolton was also instrumental in torpedoing international negotiations in Geneva earlier this month aimed at enforcing the toothless 1972 biological weapons convention.
Mr Powell does not have a counterweight to Mr Bolton in the Pentagon, and he is about to lose an important ally in the White House.
Bruce Reidel, a Clinton holdover who has echoed the state department's emphasis on the need to maintain an Arab coalition, is due to leave his job as head of the national security council Middle East desk next week.
The hawks' candidate to take over is Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American with little experience in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose empire will include the Middle East, Iran and Iraq.
Three years ago, he co-signed a letter to the then president, Bill Clinton, calling on him to throw his weight wholeheartedly into an effort to topple Saddam Hussein. The letter was also signed by Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Bolton and others.
And for the Washington hawks, Israel is a strategic ally which should not be bullied into giving ground - a view promoted by Doug Feith at the Pentagon, and Frank Gaffney, his former colleague at the Centre for Security Policy (CSP).
"The so-called Middle East 'peace process,' which began with secret Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Oslo, has materially contributed to the present, catastrophic situation," the CSP argues on its website.
"Successive concessions made in the name of advancing the 'peace process' by both Labour and Likud-led governments of Israel have not appeased demands for further concessions, only whetted Arab appetites for more."
The CSP has now established itself as an influential player in Washington, a policy powerhouse focused on establishing a radical, unilateralist and aggressive new defence doctrine.
The ballroom for the "Keepers of the Flame" gathering was packed with the high priests of the new security establishment. They included Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Feith and another Pentagon advisor, JD Crouch, sitting alongside the former CIA director, James Woolsey, a leading proponent of a new war against Saddam.
Among them was Richard Perle, known as the "prince of darkness" in the Reagan-era arms race, who has been reborn as the chairman of the defence policy board.
Mr Rumsfeld was the night's keynote speaker. He declared his happiness at being able to speak his mind "among friends" and embraced the mood by telling a cheering audience that after finishing off al-Qaida and the Taliban, "we'd best go after the rest of the terrorists".
For the time being, at least, there is little in Washington to stop Mr Rumsfeld chasing America's foes all the way to Baghdad.
America's top sabre-rattlers
Donald Rumsfeld - A veteran of the cold war chosen by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, in the face of opposition from Colin Powell, now secretary of state. His radical policies and abrasive manner initially provoked resistance from the Pentagon generals. But the war on terrorism has made him the most powerful member of the cabinet and he is expanding his influence into foreign policy fields normally managed by the secretary of state.
Paul Wolfowitz - Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, and the foremost exponent of a new war against Saddam Hussein. He is a former academic with a wide-ranging network of travellers and sympathisers, commonly referred to in Washington as the "Wolfowitz cabal".
Doug Feith - The Pentagon's policy supremo and a former director of the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), who has led the charge for a more pro-Israel Middle East policy.
Frank Gaffney - a former defence policy official and Rumsfeld acolyte who now runs the CSP - a thinktank and ideological seminary for young hawks. He advocates the scrapping of the Oslo peace process, the forceful promotion of the national missile defence system, and a settling of scores with Baghdad.
Richard Perle - Known as Ronald Reagan's "prince of darkness" for his distaste for disarmament treaties, and his hawkish attitude towards the Soviet Union. Mr Perle retains an important role in the defence policy board, a Pentagon thinktank which he chairs.
John Bolton - The hawks' man inside the state department. Despite the objections of Colin Powell, he was appointed undersecretary of state for arms control, non-proliferation and international security, even though he is a committed unilateralist who opposes global arms treaties on principle.
Zalmay Khalilzad - the top Afghan-American in the administration. Three years ago, he signed a joint letter with Donald Rumsfeld and other hawks, calling on the Clinton administration to topple Saddam.
He is seeking to take over the Middle East portfolio when Bruce Reidel steps down later this month