Okay, but how to convince the American people that those regimes were evil? And how to convince them that the IAEA – whose inspectors were monitoring these nations' peaceful nuclear programs to ensure they were not converted into nuke programs – is incompetent?
Well, fortunately for the neocons, there had been for many years well-organized and well-funded organizations like Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch.
“Human-rights” organizations – and their media sycophants – would be used by the neocons to demonize the existing governments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
“Anti-nuclear power” organizations – and their media sycophants - would be used by the neocons to challenge the credibility and authority of the IAEA Safeguards regime, and, thereby, challenge the “peacefulness” of IAEA Safeguarded programs.
Loose Nukes
So, scroll back in time to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact in 1989.
Hallelujah! Dancing in the streets! The prospect of Armageddon in central Europe was no more.
Hence, both the Soviet Union and the United States began to withdraw from service the tens of thousands of nukes that had been specifically developed and deployed to fight that battle.
Two years later, with the Soviet Union on the verge of economic collapse, Russian officials came to “lobby” the U.S. Congress. By then, the vast majority of Soviet nukes had been returned to Russia. Those that had not – the “strategic” nukes that were deployed atop ballistic missiles in Ukraine and Kazakhstan – were already slated to be “eliminated” under the Lisbon Protocol negotiated by Secretary of State James Baker.
The Russian delegation told Senator Sam Nunn et al. that they wanted to dismantle the tens of thousands of Soviet nukes excess to Russian needs, recover the fissile material (essentially pure U-235 uranium and Pu-239 plutonium) from those dismantled nukes, and then store it until they could eventually dispose of it as reactor fuel.
The problem was, the Russians didn't have the money to do all of that. Would Congress help?
Rarely has Congress responded so quickly to any request. The “Nunn-Lugar” Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act was attached to the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty Implementation Act of 1991, which just happened to be pending before the Senate.
Nunn-Lugar began by noting “that Soviet President Gorbachev has requested Western help in dismantling nuclear weapons and President Bush has proposed United States cooperation on the storage, transportation, dismantling, and destruction of Soviet nuclear weapons.”
Nunn-Lugar then declared “that it is in the national security interest of the United States to facilitate on a priority basis the transportation, storage, safeguarding, and destruction of nuclear and other weapons in the Soviet Union, its republics, and any successor entities, and to assist in the prevention of weapons proliferation.”
Bush Senior was immediately authorized to “reprogram” up to $400 million from funds already appropriated for that fiscal year to the Department of Defense (DoD) to implement Nunn-Lugar.
Planning for American Hegemony
Now, in 1992, Dick Cheney was secretary of defense and Paul Wolfowitz was under secretary for policy.
Periodically, the under secretary develops for the secretary a top-secret document entitled Defense Planning Guidance. The document is supposed to be “threat driven.” Once developed and approved, the secretary issues it to the military Departments and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It tells them what their “force structure” needs to be as well as the manpower, weapons, equipment, and logistical support that will be required to meet the “threat.”
So when the New York Times revealed in 1992 some contents of Wolfowitz's Defense Planning Guidance – which “envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power” – there was understandably quite a flap, here and abroad, in and out of government.
Those kinds of statements belong – if anywhere – in National Security Strategy documents, developed by the National Security Council staff under the direction of the President's national security advisor. National Security Strategy documents are supposed to inform Defense Planning Guidance, not the other way around.
But surely Cheney and the neocons shared the Bush-Baker and Nunn-Lugar view that nukes getting into the hands of terrorists was the Number One threat to our national security, right? They were anxious to implement Nunn-Lugar as soon as possible, weren't they?
Apparently not. Then or now.
In fact, Cheney and Wolfowitz may have decided to implement Nunn-Lugar maliciously.
You see, the U.S. and Russian division of responsibilities for nukes and nuclear energy were similar. The Soviet Ministry of Defense was the customer for Soviet nukes and the Ministry of Atomic Energy – MinAtom – was the supplier. MinAtom was also the entity that provided fuel for nuclear power reactors. Similarly, DoD is the customer for U.S. nukes and the Department of Energy (DoE) is the supplier. Until recently, DoE was the U.S. entity that provided fuel for nuclear power reactors.
When a U.S. nuke is determined by DoD to be obsolete or excess to requirements, it is returned to the supplier, DoE, for disposal. Similarly, the Soviet nukes determined to be in excess of the Russian Defense Ministry's needs had been returned to Russia's MinAtom for disposal.
Hence, the optimum way to have provided Nunn-Lugar assistance to Russia would have been for DoE – not DoD – to have been our Nunn-Lugar agent. Unfortunately, it was several years before Congress got around to authorizing DoE's entities to deal directly with their MinAtom counterparts.
Enter Clinton
But then, just as the Nunn-Lugar funds began to flow, the Bush-Quayle administration was turned out of office. So now, with Clinton in power and the neocons gone from the Pentagon, we could proceed to apply correctly and expeditiously the Nunn-Lugar solution to “loose nukes”; still widely acknowledged to be the Number One Threat to our national security – right?
Wrong!
For one thing, the neocons weren't all gone from the Pentagon. Richard Perle – a neo-crazy if ever there was one – had been a member of the influential Defense Policy Board all during the Bush-Quayle administration and remained there through both Clinton-Gore administrations. He was soon joined by Wolfowitz and various other card-carrying neocons.
For another, the Republicans soon took control of both Senate and House and many Republicans were not happy with the prospect of helping the only other nuke superpower optimize – and perhaps modernize – its nuke arsenal.
As a result, of the billions of “Nunn-Lugar” dollars that have been appropriated over the years, the vast majority of it was spent by DoD – most of that going to DoD contractors – with only a small fraction ever being spent in Russia by MinAtom.
The Nuke Disarmament Activists
In any event, for the anti-nuclear entourage that Clinton brought to power, our national security was not as important as world peace. For Greenpeace, the thousands of nukes – yea, even the hundreds of nuclear power plants – in our hands were more of a threat to world peace than a few “loose” nukes in the hands of terrorists.
So, Clinton made it quite clear that he intended to pursue “a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control” as required by Article VI of the NPT.
Whereas Cheney's neocons had essentially declined to implement Nunn-Lugar as intended, Clinton's Greenpeace entourage actually hijacked Nunn-Lugar, transforming it from a nuke proliferation prevention program into a nuke disarmament program.
Although not required to do so, Clinton unilaterally subjected our “excess” cold-war nuke materials and nuke facilities to the full NPT-IAEA Safeguards regime.
Clinton expected all other nations having nukes to follow our example.
Russia did – somewhat reluctantly – once Clinton and the Republican Congress made it clear that the promised Nunn-Lugar assistance was contingent upon it.
At the 40th I
AEA General Conference in 1997, Director General Hans Blix announced the U.S.-IAEA-Russia Trilateral Agreement. We and the Russians each committed to dispose of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, “transparently” and permanently, under the watchful eyes of the IAEA.
But, the Russians intended to make mixed-oxide (MOX) reactor fuel out of their excess weapons-grade plutonium. Once that was gone, they intended to continue making MOX from plutonium recovered from the “spent-fuel” of ordinary nuclear power reactors.
Hence, the Trilateral Agreement essentially committed us to fund the “recycling” of spent fuel. Greenpeace had long argued that the plutonium recovered from power plant spent-fuel could be used to make nukes. That's scientific nonsense, of course, but their argument had been translated into law by President Jimmy Carter.
The “no-recycling” activists so objected to the Trilateral Agreement that Clinton never asked Congress for the funds needed to implement it.
As if that weren't enough, taking a page from the neocon's 1992 grand strategy, Clinton had begun pushing the boundaries of NATO eastward, toward the walls of the Kremlin.
Also, at the urging of human-rights activists and the neocons, Clinton bashed the Russians for their efforts to suppress Islamic terrorist activities in Chechnya.
Clinton further angered the Russians by attempting to achieve regime change in Kosovo-Bosnia from 20,000 feet, imperiling Russia's Slavic brethren, the Serbs, on the ground.
As a result, when Clinton and his human rights entourage and his antinuclear entourage left office, the Russian loose nuke threat was at least as bad as when he entered.
Return of the Neocons
Worse, on Clinton's “watch,” there had been added the Pakistani “loose” nuke threat. Pakistan had surprised everyone in 1998 by testing a half-dozen or so fairly sophisticated nukes just days after India – defying Clinton – had tested several of their own.
The prospect that the next India-Pakistani conflict would involve nukes was bad enough, but Bush II inherited a far worse problem. Nuke-armed Pakistan openly supported the ruling Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, and the Taliban openly provided refuge to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Moreover, Bush II inherited in Iraq a Gulf War mess made far worse by Clinton, the human rights activists, and the neocons.
In 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, the IAEA had discovered the remains of a well-funded – but nevertheless unsuccessful – Iraqi program to enrich uranium to be used to produce nukes.
Iraq had agreed, as a condition of the Gulf War ceasefire, to accept UN Security Council sanctions and to allow the IAEA to preside over the complete destruction of all Iraqi nuclear programs, peaceful or otherwise. Furthermore, the IAEA was to continue monitoring Iraq in perpetuity to ensure that Iraq made no attempt to resurrect those programs.
But, in 1998, at the urging of the neocons, Clinton sand-bagged the IAEA – which had certified Iraq to be nuke free – by bombing Saddam's palaces in and around Baghdad. The neocons claimed they had “intelligence” that Saddam was conducting a nuke development program beneath his palaces – the only places the IAEA had not requested to look at.
So, Bush II inherited a situation in Iraq wherein the IAEA continued to verify Iraq's compliance with its IAEA Safeguards agreement, but where Clinton and the anti-nuclear activists had badly undercut the value of an IAEA “seal of approval.”
Finally, Bush II inherited Clinton's Agreed Framework, wherein North Korea – which had already produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a half-dozen nukes, but had not yet chemically recovered it – had agreed to “freeze” all its nuclear programs, subject to IAEA locks, seals, and continuous environmental monitoring.
Enter the Axis of Evil
It soon became apparent – at least to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea – that Bush II intended to impose “regime change” on them, and that the rationale would be that each “evil” regime had an illicit nuke development program that the IAEA had been unable – and never would be able – to uncover.
The neocons had begun making these charges about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea during the Clinton-Gore administrations.
In particular, they had been charging that the conventional nuclear power reactor the Russians were building at Bushehr in Iran could easily be operated – even though subject to IAEA Safeguards – so as to produce weapons-grade plutonium for use in a nuke.
In order to make these ridiculous charges stick, the competence of the IAEA had to be attacked, and the authority of the IAEA itself destroyed.
That authority suffered a severe blow when Clinton totally ignored the IAEA report made weeks earlier, on October 7, 1998, to the UN Security Council that:
The verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its programme objective of producing nuclear weapons or that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely acquired such material.
Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.
The value of an IAEA “clean bill of health” took another severe blow in March 2003 when Bush II launched his preemptive invasion against Iraq.
Only days before the Bush invasion, IAEA Director General ElBaradei had reported to the UN Security Council that he had “to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.”
ElBaradei went on to refute the three specific charges that Bush and other high administration officials had made. To wit:
There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.
There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.
There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminum tubes in question.
The Clinton preemptive attack on Baghdad was seven years ago and the Bush preemptive invasion of Iraq over two years ago. Result? The IAEA has been totally vindicated.
But now ElBaradei and the IAEA are under fire again by the neocons over Iran. Not content to accuse the IAEA of incompetence, they had accused ElBaradei of being in cahoots with Saddam Hussein. They are now accusing ElBaradei of being in cahoots with the Iranian mullahs.
The neocons are claiming – as they have claimed for the last decade - that Iran has a secret nuke development program that the IAEA hasn't found and is incapable of finding. And now, in keeping with the attempt to discredit the IAEA, it has come to light (as reported in the December 13, 2004, issue of the Washington Post) that the U.S. has been tapping ElBaradei's phone in hopes of finding reason – like not dealing effectively with the Iranians – to block his third term at the IAEA's helm. The irony of it all is – as Ray McGovern has pointed out in a March 2005 column (based on a Washington Post report by Dafna Linzer) – that, “in 1976 – with Gerald Ford President, Dick Cheney his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz responsible for non-proliferation at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Henry Kissinger national security advisor,” the Ford administration agreed to let Iran pursue a nuclear energy program to meet its future energy needs.
Meanwhile, the Iranians have taken the route chosen by the Iraqis two years ago and have thrown themselves on the mercy of the court of world opinion. That might work for Iran. The British were on Bush's side in Iraq. They're on Iran's side this time.
The Iranians opened up completely to the IAEA. ElBaradei has recently reported to the IAEA Board of Governors that as a result of a two-yearlong exhaustive and intrusive inspection he has found no indication that the Iranians
have or ever had a nuke program.
Enter Congress
Just as it isn't fair to blame Bush II for everything the neocons have done - especially during the Clinton-Gore administrations – it isn't fair to let Congress off the hook, either. Neither Bush II nor Clinton would ever have been able to change – or even threaten to change – the governments of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran if they had not been aided and abetted by Congress.
And Congress would never have aided and abetted the neocons if they had not been influenced by the “human rights” activists, the “anti-nuclear” activists, and the disarmament crowd.
In passing the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 for Clinton – which was renewed in 2001 for Bush II – Congress found (among other things) that:
The efforts of the Government of Iran to acquire weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them and its support of acts of international terrorism endanger the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and those countries with which the United States shares common strategic and foreign policy objectives.
In signing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 President Clinton said:
This Act makes clear that it is the sense of the Congress that the United States should support those elements of the Iraqi opposition that advocate a very different future for Iraq than the bitter reality of internal repression and external aggression that the current regime in Baghdad now offers.
In passing the Resolution Authorizing the Use of U.S. Armed Forces Against Iraq of 2002, Congress found (among other things) that:
Iraq persists in violating resolutions of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait;
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