Posted on 03/04/2002 5:31:27 PM PST by vannrox
Sunday March 3, 2002
'Bombing Saddam is ignorance'
Robert Baer, the ex-CIA man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, says the US is not in a position to strike against Iraq because it does not understand anything about the country
Robert Baer's objections to an attack on Iraq could hardly be principled. As the CIA's point man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, he encouraged dissident groups to believe that the United States wanted the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein. Yet Baer, whose memoir of life in the CIA, See No Evil, is published in Britain tomorrow, is appalled at the idea of a US strike against Iraq today. 'If the US is to bomb Saddam and his army until there is no army, what comes after that? No one is discussing the ethnic composition of Iraq or what Iran is likely to do.'
Few in America appreciate the tribal ethnic and religious faultlines that run through the Middle East as Baer does. Iraq is particularly divided. In the south there is a Shia majority which now looks to Iran for support. Occupying the geographical and political centre of the country are the followers of the Sunni sect, which includes Saddam's tribe, and in the north are the Kurds, who are split into two warring parties, the PUK and the KDU.
'The US is in no position to rejigger this because we don't understand anything about the country. If I were the Iranians, for instance, I would try to set up a state in southern Iraq and add three million barrels a day to my account. That could begin to rival Saudi Arabia. Of course, I don't know this is going to happen, but the US government doesn't know either. The heart of the debate is about taking out all Saddam's tanks in a couple of weeks.'
Baer worked for the CIA's Directorate of Operations for 25 years, with postings in Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Tajikistan, India and Europe. His devastating portrait of the agency's decline adds much to the understanding of why America was caught off guard on 11 September, but as important is what he has to say about American sluggishness when it comes to institutional reform.
Towards the end of his time, he searched CIA computer for files on subjects that interested him, for example, the Pasdaran (the Iranian Intelligence service), the Saudi royal family and Syria.
'You know what? There was nothing there. Nothing. They didn't have anything. That's America now, you know. It can't reform.'
After a quarter of century abroad, Baer hardly recognises the States and is appalled at the level of public ignorance.
'There is no debate,' he says. 'People will not address the question of Palestine in the context of the World Trade Centre attacks. It's not in the terms of the discussion. They simply believe that Israel has the right to defend its democracy like the US does. They don't understand that Israel gives no democratic rights to the Palestinians whatsoever. They don't see that it's not a democracy.'
An affable but watchful man in his late forties, Baer is aware that the CIA is mightily displeased with his first literary effort. It can't help that the book has been on the New York Times ' bestseller list for four weeks in a row; that Warner Brothers bought an option and hope to develop the project with the team that made Traffic ; and that Baer is never off US television, often doing three national shows in an evening.
He seems to have few regrets about leaving the CIA. 'I would rather drive a taxi than serve in the CIA,' he says convincingly over lunch at the Alistair Little restaurant in West London.
'Don't ask me how it happened, but the people who work in it just don't match up to the people who got to Silicon Valley or the people who make cruise missiles or design derivatives.'
It's in the innocuous detail that Baer's book is telling. At one point he remembers taking over from a female officer in the Paris station and being handed her list of contacts and agents. When he followed them up, he found that instead of using them to gather intelligence she had been trying to recruit them to a religious sect. The serving US ambassador to France was also involved in the sect. When the two of them were observed handing out leaflets in the street, the French security service thought some kind of operation was in progress.
With good reason he is a pessimist about the CIA and US foreign policymaking. Examples of incompetence abound in See No Evil . In 1986, he was contacted in Germany by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who wanted a meeting. He went to Dortmund and listened to Syrian con tacts propose an intelligence alliance against President Assad. He wrote up a report (on a typewriter, whose ribbon he destroyed afterwards) and sent it to the US embassy in Bonn. A message came back that they weren't interested.
But that was not the last he heard of it. In the wake of 11 September, 16 years later, the FBI contacted Baer to say that associates of the Syrian contacts had been involved in al-Qaeda. That channel, closed down so peremptorily, might have led them to Mohamed Atta.
Over lunch we circled the problem of Iraq. He mentioned that it is easily within Saddam's power to forestall the long-announced air attacks from US bases in Diego Garcia. He could, says Baer, 'simply move his tanks into Syria and proclaim that he was going to liberate the Palestinians', thus pitching Israel into a war with an Arab state.
If there is a fault in Baer's analysis of the Iraqi problem, it is that while he acknowledges Saddam's willingness to use force against civilians he does not believe that the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction is anything but defensive.
Baer says we should look at it through Saddam's regional mentality and that his chief concern is, as it always has been, Iran.
·See No Evil, by Robert Baer, Crown Publications £12.99.
I think that they are going to suddenly start glowing, when their surface temperature approaches that of the Sun!
I also get tired of those who say "they don't have a delivery system". They don't need long-range missiles to deliver nuclear weapons. They simply need a typical freighter ship or large truck. Tel Aviv is on the coast as is New York, Seattle, LA and San Francisco. You can hope there is some magic detection system that can detect these devices buried deep in a giant cargo ship or oil tanker but that is hugely unlikely. I'd bet a few million gallons of crud oil makes a pretty good radiation absorber especially below the water line… If these detectors are so sensitive then the Russians would know were all our nuclear submarines are, they would be easy to track. They don't, it isn't.
It has always been known that nuclear weapons were at some point going to be in the hands of petty dictators and suicidal tyrants. The question was always when. Why is it so hard to believe that that time has finally arrived? There is nothing more in this world that would make these people more full of themselves and "bold" than having these weapons. Look at what they have done, at what there doing and what their end goal is.
I think a lot people want us to attack Iraq, not so much because Iraq is a threat to us, but because it's a threat to Israel. If that's what they’re really worried about I wish they would state it forthrightly, not pretend they’re only concerned about American security.
Could Saddam get a nuclear weapon into the United States on a truck from Canada or on a ship from anywhere? I'm sure he could, if he had a nuclear weapon. But as commentator Jude Wanniski has repeated noted, the International Atomic Energy Agency sends its inspectors into Iraq on a regular basis, most recently this past January, and once again they certified that they saw "no signs of nukes or nuclear weapons development."
This doesn’t of course mean Saddam couldn’t get nuclear weapons in the future. But if our policy now is to bomb any country that poses a potential threat, we better begin preparing for an attack on China, which does have both thermonuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Furthermore, a couple of years ago a Chinese general threatened to use them against Los Angeles if we stepped out of line over Taiwan.
One might argue that China is a stable country and would never go off half-cocked, something that couldn’t be said for a dictator like Saddam. That might be true. But unlike Osama bin Laden, Saddam is neither a religious fanatic nor a madman. He sought assurances of our forbearance before attacking Kuwait and April Glaspie foolishly gave it to him. And during the first Gulf War he wasn’t so reckless as to fire chemical or biological weapons at Israel (we had warned him what would happen if he did).
Having said all that, I’m not opposed to our going to war with Iraq, if we do it for the right reasons (our own security) and in the right way, meaning we debate all the reasons fully and openly, conclude that nothing else will work, and then follow that up with a declaration of war from congress, as Congress’s original authorization allowing Bush to go after terrorists made no mention of Iraq.
That is not a nice thing to say about Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, all of whom advocated using nuclear weapons to kill entire populations, should the appropriate occasion arise. Oops, I take it back, it is a nice thing to say about Bill Clinton!
That is fine, so long as we notice that you consider that every President since WWII is morally inferior to Osama bin Laden, I guess that you have a right under the First Amendment to say that, just as I have the right to state my opinion that you are a traitor, and are giving aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war. I guess that the moderators have found your stuff to be acceptable, and I wish you a happy Easter. I also wish that you might be spending it in the company of your friend Arafat. Of course, maybe you ARE Arafat, and this suggestion is superfluous. Whatever!
"My country, may she always be in the right, but my country right or wrong". Blind allegiance to any enemy of the state of your birth that comes along, so long as it is your country's enemy is certainly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. I also think that it is less likely to get me prosecuted for treason. After your friends set off a nuclear weapon in this country in the next few months, I will be glad that JimRob has sufficient information to locate you, for the appropriate level of 'questioning' by the CIA and our Mossad allies. Have fun!!
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