The Nation

Let us stipulate that Saddam Hussein is a scumbag. He has run a brutal and murderous dictatorship, repressed significant numbers of his people, sought to develop weapons of mass destruction, invaded a neighbor, used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and Iranians, and defied various UN resolutions. Delivering his Big Speech at the UN on Thursday morning, President George W. Bush covered Saddam's infamy in detail (without noting, by the way, how the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s provided Saddam with assistance while he was using chemical weapons during his war against Iran). The President cited the numerous times the UN Security Council has declared Iraq in breach of resolutions ordering it to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. But Bush presented no heretofore unknown information about the threat posed by Iraq. And he offered no specific proposals on how to deal with the threat--real or hyped. He was making a case for despising Hussein (as if that was needed). But his case for war against Iraq remained vague. His message was, either you do something, or I will. That is, Bush said nothing new.

The speech was a lecture. Claiming he desired a United Nations that is "effective...and successful," Bush tried to guilt-trip the General Assembly into accepting his hardline approach. He argued the UN must do so in order to be taken seriously: "All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" Worrying about the strength and credibility of the UN is a new position for the Bush administration, which has repeatedly ignored or opposed consensus positions of the UN, such as its support for an international criminal court. (A partial list of these instances appears in the preceding column; click on the link below.)

But Bush signaled that actually he, too, held no true respect for the UN. For in the nut-graph (as a newspaper editor would call it) of his speech, Bush declared that if the UN decides his particular course of confrontation with Iraq--whatever that might entail--is not appropriate, he is willing to defy the body and move against Iraq on his own. "We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions," he said. "But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council's resolutions will be enforced--the just demands of peace and security will be met--or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will lose its power." In keeping with his with-us-or-against-us approach to foreign policy, he was telling the UN that its standing depends upon on whether it agrees with him.

There was a huge outcry in France this summer over a move by allies of French President Jacques Chirac to narrow the character and quality of that country's political competition. Stung by recent shows of electoral strength by the nationalist right and the Green and Trotskyist left, France's political establishment is preparing to rewrite election rules in order to essentially assure that only traditional major parties of the center-right and center-left can prevail in elections for the domestic and European parliaments. Objections from across the political spectrum echo a similar theme: The changes proposed by the insiders in Paris would "Americanize" that country's politics.

Casual observers in the United States might object to the notion that there is something wrong with Americanizing the politics of France or any other country. But they should understand that the complaint is grounded in our own experience in the US. For all the frenzy and hype of the cable television commentators and the vast political industry that now operates inside the Washington beltway, our country's political processes have become so leaden and disengaged that they no longer are deemed worthy of attention by the majority of voters. Almost two-thirds of America's eligible voters (64 percent in 1994, 66 percent in 1998) no longer participate in Congressional elections, and the most hotly contested presidential election in a generation (the unsettling and unsettled 2000 contest between Democratic Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush) could barely draw half the electorate to the polls.

The range of opinion expressed at the upper levels of American political discourse have been narrowing for more than a decade, as marketing men and women have taken over the levels of power in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Even a misguided war and the threat of its expansion to dramatic new levels of folly, corporate scandals of epic economic consequence and the clear corruption of executive branch decision making musters little in the way of straight talk in a Congress where the calculation of campaign contributions takes precedence at every turn over Constitutional responsibilities and the public interest.

Who's on Piffiab? It's a question anyone concerned with spying, clandestine actions, and the war on terrorism should be asking. But the Bush Administration, in a break with the past, is keeping this important information secret.

The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board--usually referred to by its acronym--is a group of prominent citizens who offer advice to the President on sensitive intelligence matters. It was established in 1956 by President Eisenhower, and past chairmen have included former Senator Warren Rudman, former House Speaker Thomas Foley, and former Defense Secretary Les Aspin. In recent years, PFIAB has conducted investigations (often through its Intelligence Oversight Board) of spy-community controversies. It examined lax security at Department of Energy nuclear weapons facilities, CIA involvement with Guatemalan military officials who committed human rights abuses, US intelligence failures in Somalia, and the CIA's cover-its-ass investigation of CIA director John Deutch, who compromised classified information. PFIAB challenged the charge--popular in rightwing circles--that China had stolen nuclear weapons secrets from the United States. ("Possible damage has been minted as probable disaster; workaday delay and bureaucratic confusion has been cast as diabolical conspiracies," a PFIAB report concluded. "Enough is enough.")

Last year--prior to September 11--President George W. Bush selected Brent Scowcroft to lead PFIAB. Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to President Bush I, possessed appropriate credentials for the post. But the choice posed problems. Scowcroft, a onetime consultant for the oil industry, a board member of Qualcomm, and a past director of Global and Power Pipelines (an Enron subsidiary involved in projects in China, Guatemala, the Philippines, Argentina and Colombia), runs his own business, the Scowcroft Group, which sells intelligence and other services to globe-trotting corporations in the telecom, aerospace, insurance, energy, financial, electronics and food industries. As head of PFIAB, Scowcroft has access to secret information that could be useful to his clients and his own business endeavors. Can the public be certain that Scowcroft's business links do not unduly influence his actions as PFIAB chairman or that he does not exploit his PFIAB position to help his clients and his own company? And his close personal relationship to the Bush family could undermine his ability to appear as an independent reviewer of intelligence activities mounted by the Bush administration. Scowcroft, though, recently proved he could take issue with the President by questioning the need to go to war against Iraq.

Will the Pentagon wire up Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle and Newt Gingrich--that is, submit them to lie detector tests? And do the same with all other members of the Defense Policy Board? It seems that someone connected with this advisory panel--a neocon-tilting group of prominent ex-government officials chaired by former Reagan Pentagon official Richard Perle--leaked word to The Washington Post of a private briefing. In that session, RAND analyst Laurent Murawiec maintained that Saudi Arabia, due to its support of Islamic terrorists, ought to be considered an adversary of the United States and that Washington should demand that Riyadh cease funding Islamic fundamentalist outlets. If the Saudis do not comply, he argued, its oil fields and overseas financial assets should be "targeted."

After news of this briefing hit the front page, administration officials rushed to put out the firestorm. This was not the message the White House wanted to send to Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, as the administration was trying to win support for a military move against Saddam Hussein. And with the White House in the process of establishing an Office of Global Communications to improve the image of the United States overseas, now was not a good time for stories reporting that senior advisers to the Pentagon--former defense secretaries James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, former CIA director R. James Woolsey, and ex-House Speaker Thomas Foley sit on this board--were discussing strikes against Arab oil wells. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell quickly explained that Murawiec's views did not reflect official US policy.

At a Q&A session with Pentagon employees, Rumsfeld criticized the leak. "I just think it's a terribly unprofessional thing to do and clearly harmful," he said. "It's harmful in this case, for example, because it creates a misimpression that someone then has to figure out a way to correct." Rumsfeld did later say the briefing was not classified, but he was adamant that the leak harmed US interests. So what is he going to do about it?