The Duelfer Report/ Attacks in Sinai

Update from AIJAC

The Duelfer Report/ Attacks in Sinai

October 11, 2004
Number 10/04 #02

Today's Update focuses mainly on the findings of Charles Duelfer's weapons inspection team in Iraq. As readers will probably be aware from the media, the team concluded there were no stocks before the war, but they also had a lot of other interesting things to say about the regime's intent and the abuse of oil-for-food which have not been well reported.

First, columnist David Brooks points out that the report makes it clear that Saddam was determined to have WMD, was actively working to subvert the sanctions, and would clearly have succeeded in a reasonably short period of time. He says this reality makes it clear that an unleashed Iraq with WMD was a matter of a few years, and argues that Saddam had to be deposed for this reason. For his argument, CLICK HERE

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal focuses on the revelations about Saddam's successful exploitation of UN oil for food program to bribe key political players in Russia, France and China, which meant the sanctions were never going to succeed. For this important discussion, CLICK HERE.

Finally, on those deadly terror attacks at tourist spots in Egypt's Sinai last Wednesday, which killed 30 people, included a number of Israelis, here is the always invaluable Zeev Schiff of Haaretz. He explains who [probably] did it, and the intelligence failures that allowed it to happen. For this valuable analysis, CLICK HERE.

The Report That Nails Saddam

By DAVID BROOKS

New York Times, October 9, 2004

Saddam Hussein saw his life as an unfolding epic narrative, with retreats and advances, but always the same ending. He would go down in history as the glorious Arab leader, as the Saladin of his day. One thousand years from now, schoolchildren would look back and marvel at the life of The Struggler, the great leader whose life was one of incessant strife, but who restored the greatness of the Arab nation.

They would look back and see the man who lived by his saying: "We will never lower our heads as long as we live, even if we have to destroy everybody." Charles Duelfer opened his report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with those words. For a humiliated people, Saddam would restore pride by any means.

Saddam knew the tools he would need to reshape history and establish his glory: weapons of mass destruction. These weapons had what Duelfer and his team called a "totemic" importance to him. With these weapons, Saddam had defeated the evil Persians. With these weapons he had crushed his internal opponents. With these weapons he would deter what he called the "Zionist octopus" in both Israel and America.

But in the 1990's, the world was arrayed against him to deprive him of these weapons. So Saddam, the clever one, The Struggler, undertook a tactical retreat. He would destroy the weapons while preserving his capacities to make them later. He would foil the inspectors and divide the international community. He would induce it to end the sanctions it had imposed to pen him in. Then, when the sanctions were lifted, he would reconstitute his weapons and emerge greater and mightier than before.

The world lacked what Saddam had: the long perspective. Saddam understood that what others see as a defeat or a setback can really be a glorious victory if it is seen in the context of the longer epic.

Saddam worked patiently to undermine the sanctions. He stored the corpses of babies in great piles, and then unveiled them all at once in great processions to illustrate the great humanitarian horrors of the sanctions.

Saddam personally made up a list of officials at the U.N., in France, in Russia and elsewhere who would be bribed. He sent out his oil ministers to curry favor with China, France, Turkey and Russia. He established illicit trading relations with Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and other nations to rebuild his arsenal.

It was all working. He acquired about $11 billion through illicit trading. He used the oil-for-food billions to build palaces. His oil minister was treated as a "rock star," as the report put it, at international events, so thick was the lust to trade with Iraq.

France, Russia, China and other nations lobbied to lift sanctions. Saddam was, as the Duelfer report noted, "palpably close" to ending sanctions.

With sanctions weakening and money flowing, he rebuilt his strength. He contacted W.M.D. scientists in Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria and elsewhere to enhance his technical knowledge base. He increased the funds for his nuclear scientists. He increased his military-industrial-complex's budget 40-fold between 1996 and 2002. He increased the number of technical research projects to 3,200 from 40. As Duelfer reports, "Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem."

And that is where Duelfer's story ends. Duelfer makes clear on the very first page of his report that it is a story. It is a mistake and a distortion, he writes, to pick out a single frame of the movie and isolate it from the rest of the tale.

But that is exactly what has happened. I have never in my life seen a government report so distorted by partisan passions. The fact that Saddam had no W.M.D. in 2001 has been amply reported, but it's been isolated from the more important and complicated fact of Saddam's nature and intent.

But we know where things were headed. Sanctions would have been lifted. Saddam, rich, triumphant and unbalanced, would have reconstituted his W.M.D. Perhaps he would have joined a nuclear arms race with Iran. Perhaps he would have left it all to his pathological heir Qusay.

We can argue about what would have been the best way to depose Saddam, but this report makes it crystal clear that this insatiable tyrant needed to be deposed. He was the menace, and, as the world dithered, he was winning his struggle. He was on the verge of greatness. We would all now be living in his nightmare.

Iraq Amnesia

The real "coalition of the bribed" was at the U.N.

Wall Street Journal, Friday, October 8, 2004

Judging from the current Iraq debate, you might think Saddam Hussein didn't use poison gas on the Kurds and the Iranians in the 1980s. Or that 500,000 American troops hadn't been sent to the Gulf in 1990-91 to reverse his invasion of Kuwait. Or that Saddam hadn't tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in 1993, or long harbored one of the bombers who attacked the World Trade Center that year.

It might also be easy to forget that Saddam never came clean about his weapons of mass destruction, resulting in Bill Clinton's Desert Fox bombing of 1998 and the ejection of U.N. inspectors. Or that he necessitated a huge U.S. troop presence in the region, which Osama bin Laden cited in his 1998 fatwa as one of his primary grievances against America.

It's clear why John Kerry doesn't want to talk about these things, having decided for now that Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Count us a bit mystified, however, that the incumbent hasn't done a better job putting his Iraq policy in this context. Fortunately for President Bush, Congressional Oil for Food hearings and Charles Duelfer's final weapons inspections report for the CIA have come along this week to remind us all that the "containment" of Saddam was neither as blissful as certain partisans remember it, nor even sustainable.

"By 2000-2001, Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of sanctions and undermine their international support," Mr. Duelfer writes. "Iraq was within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime."

We realize that some of our media friends think the salient news here is the old news: that Saddam did not possess large stockpiles of WMDs when Coalition forces invaded in March 2003. But Mr. Duelfer explicitly rejects the facile conclusion that therefore sanctions were working. Among his other findings, based in part on interviews with Saddam himself and other senior regime figures:

• Saddam believed weapons of mass destruction were essential to the preservation of his power, especially during the Iran-Iraq and 1991 Gulf wars.

• He engaged in strategic deception intended to suggest that he retained WMD.

• He fully intended to resume real WMD production after the expected lifting of U.N. sanctions, and he maintained weapons programs that put him in "material breach" of U.N. resolutions including 1441.

• And he instituted an epic bribery scheme aimed primarily at three of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, with the intent of having them help lift those sanctions.

"Saddam personally approved and removed all names of voucher recipients," under the Oil for Food program, Mr. Duelfer writes. Alleged beneficiaries of such bribes include individuals in China, as well as some with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Jacques Chirac.

As Congressmen Chris Shays's House International Relations Committee heard in testimony on Tuesday, France, Russia and China did in fact work hard to help Saddam skirt and escape sanctions. One Iraqi intelligence report uncovered by Mr. Duelfer says that a French politician assured Saddam in a letter that France would use its U.N. veto against any U.S. effort to attack Iraq--as indeed France later threatened to do.

Evidence also continues to mount that U.N. Oil for Food Program director Benon Sevan was among those on Saddam's payroll. (He denies it.) And contrary to earlier claims that Secretary-General Kofi Annan's son Kojo severed connections with the Swiss-based firm Cotecna prior to it winning its Oil for Food inspections contract, we now know that Kojo was kept on the company payroll for another year. We eagerly await the promised interim report from the U.N.'s Paul Volcker-led Oil for Food review panel, and hope in the interests of an informed electorate that it can be delivered soon.

But there are already plenty of facts on the table to support one conclusion. To wit: Even if one accepts the desirability of some kind of "global test" before America acts militarily, U.N. Security Council approval can't be it. There was never any chance that this "coalition of the bribed" was going to explicitly endorse regime change, or the presumed alternative of another 12 years of economic sanctions. "Politically," writes Mr. Duelfer, "the Iraqis were losing their stigma" by 2001.

The sanctions-were-working crowd also ignores that Saddam never would have readmitted weapons inspectors without the kind of U.S. troop mobilization that isn't feasible with any frequency. For President Bush to have backed off in 2003 without unambiguous disarmament would have meant the end once and for all of any real threat of force behind "containment."

Senator John McCain summed it up well at the Republican Convention: "Those who criticize that decision [to go to war in Iraq] would have us believe that the choice was between a status quo that was well enough left alone and war. But there was no status quo to be left alone." Supporters of his Iraq policy are hoping that Mr. Bush finds a similar voice tonight.

Terror in Sinai / A tempting and easy target

By Ze'ev Schiff

Ha'aretz, Oct. 10

If the assessment that preparations for the Sinai attacks went on for months proves correct, Israel obviously didn't know about the slowly-developing danger.

The danger of terror attacks in places where Israelis congregate on a periodic or regular basis exists in every country that has a large Muslim population. Since Israeli intelligence failed to penetrate International Islamic Jihad and the various Al-Qaida outgrowths, the danger has increased further. This is one of the lessons emerging from the Sinai terror attack, which killed over 30 people, including many Israelis.

The series of attacks on Thursday in Sinai is a replica of the terror attack in Mombasa, Kenya, in November 2002. Then, Al-Qaida, making use of Muslim locals, chose an easy target - the Paradise Hotel, frequented by many Israelis, and an Arkia plane with over 250 Israel-bound passengers that took off from Kenya's international airport. The two shoulder-launched missiles missed the plane. The explosives-packed car driven into the hotel killed 11 people, including three Israelis.

Like Kenya, the Sinai beaches are a popular Israeli tourist destination. The tens of thousands of Israelis who traveled to Sinai over the Sukkot holiday, and who go to the same tourist spots there each holiday and at every opportunity, presented a tempting and easy target for terrorists.

Several other countries contain smaller terror targets. In Turkey, planes laden with Israelis regularly land and take off, and various resort areas draw hundreds of Israelis on a regular basis. We should not conclude that Turkey ought to be removed from the Israeli tourist map, but the public must understand that the danger exists in the high concentration of hundreds of Israelis who become an easy target. A similar problem exists in certain places in Thailand. Sometimes the target is Jewish, as in Morocco or Tunisia.

Israel does not know enough from its sources about International Islamic Jihad. In the division of labor among intelligence services, the task primarily falls to the Mossad. Foreign intelligence services also have trouble infiltrating Islamic Jihad, and not only its operational levels. But the problem is even graver in Israel, since the country constitutes a clear target for the Al-Qaida organizations. If the assessment that preparations for the Sinai attacks went on for months proves correct, Israel obviously didn't know about the slowly-developing danger. Many steps taken by people intending to harm Israelis went unseen.

Along with the shortcomings of Israeli intelligence, the Sinai terror attacks disclosed a severe failure of Egyptian intelligence. Under the Al-Qaida modus operandi, a project manager is appointed to oversee all preparations and the stage-by-stage progress. These actions were not uncovered by Egyptian intelligence, even though the activity was carried out in Egyptian territory and endangered important Egyptian interests.

The belief is that such a major terror attack could not have been carried out without the help of Sinai Bedouin or Palestinians familiar with weapons-smuggling routes. It is highly possible that a group of Bedouin and Palestinians was recruited at great cost. Intelligence experts rule out the possibility that Hamas assisted Al-Qaida in its preparations. Hamas is currently negotiating with the Egyptians ahead of Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Hamas is trying to garner Egyptian support, not harm Egyptian interests or demean Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak with terror attacks on Egyptian soil.

Egyptian intelligence also failed to trace the origins of the explosives used in the attack. It's clear that these were not explosives manufactured from fertilizer, but large amounts of standard explosives. One possibility is that the explosives were smuggled in small amounts from Saudi Arabia or Sudan and Yemen. The Egyptians now face not only the problem of blocking smuggling from Sinai into the Gaza Strip, but also terror attacks in Sinai itself. It is clear now that the Egyptians did not keep vigilant watch over the smuggling routes into Sinai.

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