Geht Iran das Öl aus?
Wolf-Dieter Roth 26.12.2006
Studie einer US-Universität legt nahe, dass Irans Griff nach dem Atom keinesfalls nur militärische Gründe haben könnte
Der sich ausweitende Konflikt zwischen den USA und dem Iran geht auch von der Annahme aus, dass das Land keine Atomkraftwerke benötige und dies nur eine Ausrede sei, um sich damit nuklear aufrüsten zu können. Nach einer Studie könnten die iranischen Ölexporte aber in den nächsten 10 Jahren komplett zusammenbrechen – und damit auch die Deviseneinnahmen, auf die das Land angewiesen ist.
Interessanterweise nicht in einer politischen Zeitschrift, sondern ganz unauffällig in den Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS (1)) ist eine politisch durchaus brisante Untersuchung.....
Geht Iran das Öl aus?
Wolf-Dieter Roth 26.12.2006
Studie einer US-Universität legt nahe, dass Irans Griff nach dem Atom keinesfalls nur militärische Gründe haben könnte
Der sich ausweitende Konflikt zwischen den USA und dem Iran geht auch von der Annahme aus, dass das Land keine Atomkraftwerke benötige und dies nur eine Ausrede sei, um sich damit nuklear aufrüsten zu können. Nach einer Studie könnten die iranischen Ölexporte aber in den nächsten 10 Jahren komplett zusammenbrechen – und damit auch die Deviseneinnahmen, auf die das Land angewiesen ist.
Interessanterweise nicht in einer politischen Zeitschrift, sondern ganz unauffällig in den Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS (1)) ist eine politisch durchaus brisante Untersuchung der Fakultät für geographische und Umwelt-Ingenieurwissenschaften der Johns Hopkins University (2), Baltimore, erschienen. In dieser geht es darum, wie sich die zukünftigen Ölexporte des Iran entwickeln könnten. Erdöl ist bisher praktisch der einzige Exportartikel des Landes, auf dem die gesamte Ökonomie aufbaut – und damit auch die politische Stabilität.
Zwar hat das Land durchaus nennenswerte Erdölvorkommen, doch wird gegenwärtig kaum etwas in deren Erschließung sowie in die Wartung und Modernisierung der vorhandenen Förderanlagen investiert. Gleichzeitig steigt mit der Industrialisierung im Land der Eigenbedarf an Erdöl und Erdgas. Wie Roger Stern in The Iranian petroleum crisis and United States national security (3) darlegt, ist einigen Analysten der Öl- und Gasindustrie bereits seit geraumer Zeit aufgefallen, dass sich hier ein Problem zusammenbraut: Wenn man den gegenwärtigen Trend fortrechnet, dürften die Erdölexporte des Iran in den nächsten Jahren jeweils um 10 bis 12% sinken, was in fünf Jahren bereits zu einer Reduzierung auf 50% bis hinunter auf 40% führen könnte, wenn wenigstens halbwegs vernünftig in die Wartung und Weiterentwicklung der Anlagen investiert wird.
In weniger als 10 Jahren keine iranischen Ölexporte mehr?
Läuft es dagegen politisch so weiter wie im Moment, könnte der Export in fünf Jahren bereits auf ein Drittel des heutigen Werts gesunken sein – um 2014, 2015 herum wären die Ölexporte schließlich auf Null, alles geförderte Öl würde im Lande selbst gebraucht. In diesem Moment wären auch die Deviseneinnahmen praktisch auf Null, wenn das Land keinen ähnlich attraktiven Exportartikel wie Erdöl finden sollte.
Die Entwicklung des Ölverbrauchs im Lande (gelb), der Ölexporte (blau) und der Förderung plus Ölimporte (grün) in Iran in den letzten 25 Jahren. Bild: Stern/PNAS
Der Iran sagt, dass er Atomkraftwerke bauen will, um den Strombedarf im Land abzudecken und Erdöl und Erdgas stattdessen zum devisenbringenden Export aufzusparen. Dabei sollen die Erdgasvorräte des Landes die zweitgrößten der Welt sein und alleine die Gasmengen, die jedes Jahr im Iran bei der Erdölförderung nutzlos abgefackelt werden, sollten ausreichen, um den Strom von vier Atommeilern des iranischen Typs Bushehr (4) zu erzeugen. So klingt es danach, dass der Wunsch nach Atomkraft nur eine faule Ausrede ist, um Atomtechnik ins Land zu holen und damit Atombomben bauen zu können.
Auch Analysen der früheren Mitarbeitern der National Iranian Oil Company ( NIOC (5)) gehen davon aus, dass die Ölexporte des Landes innerhalb der nächsten 12 bis 19 Jahre auf Null zurückgehen.
Das Problem ist, dass Öl im Land subventioniert und somit unrealistisch preiswert ist. Seit 1980 liegt infolgedessen die Zunahme des Energiebedarfs mit 6,4% über dem Zuwachs der Förderung (5,6%). Hinzu kommen speziell im Iran hohe und weiter zunehmende Verluste in Raffinerien infolge mangelnder Wartung.
Es geht hierbei wohlgemerkt nicht um die Erschöpfung der Vorräte ( "Peak Oil" (6)), sondern schlichtweg um steigenden Verbrauch bei gleichbleibender beziehungsweise leicht sinkender Förderung, was dazu führt, dass innerhalb der nächsten 10 bis 20 Jahre kein Öl zum Export mehr übrig bleibt. In dem Moment, wo dieser Punkt erreicht ist, wird die Wirtschaft des Iran instabil und das Regime gefährdet.
Nach Ansicht der Wissenschaftler ist die Weiterentwicklung der Ölförderanlagen im Iran völlig desorganisiert. So soll die NIOC 2009 eine Erweiterung der Anlage in Ahvaz bauen, hat jedoch seit der Revolution von 1978 kein einziges größeres Projekt mehr geleitet, sodass kaum anzunehmen ist, dass diese Erweiterung im geplanten Zeitrahmen über die Bühne geht. Die meisten Anlagen sind sogar noch vor der iranischen Revolution gebaut worden.
Ölförderanlagen und Raffinierien sind über 30 Jahre alt
Während in anderen ölexportierenden Ländern ausländische Investoren die Anlagen bauen, finanzieren und warten und dabei natürlich auch an den Gewinnen direkt beteiligt werden, ist dies im Iran verboten, weil es als ausländischer Besitz gewertet wird. Die stattdessen angesetzte Alternativlösung, so genannte "Buyback"-Verträge, ist wiederum für Investoren nicht attraktiv. Selbst wenn sich ein ausländischer Investor Mühe gibt, in ein Auswahlverfahren für einen solchen Vertrag aufgenommen zu werden, werden die Verfahren aufgrund antiwestlicher Vorbehalte Jahre bis Jahrzehnte verzögert.
Ein japanisches Konsortium hat beispielsweise um einen Buyback-Vertrag für das Azadegan-Feld sieben Jahre ohne Ergebnis verhandelt. Andere Investoren ziehen sich aufgrund der unsicheren politischen Situation zurück. Die Folge ist, dass ein Gaserschließungsvertrag sogar aus lauter Verzweiflung an die Revolutionären Garden vergeben wurde. Während die Investitionen schon im Zeitraum 1998 bis 2004 unzureichend waren, um die Produktionsrückgänge auszugleichen, dürften sie zukünftig gegen Null gehen.
Ein weiteres Problem ist der neben dem Ölverbrauch ebenfalls steigende Gasverbrauch im Land. Wie in Venezuela (7) bleibt dann nicht genügend Gas, um es in die Ölfelder zurück zu pumpen und damit den Druck in diesen aufrecht zu erhalten, was zu einem vorzeitigen Versiegen der Ölquellen führt. Gleichzeitig wird allerdings – ebenfalls aus Devisengründen – versucht, den Gasexport zu erhöhen.
Benzin wird importiert und zu Dumpingpreisen verkauft
Zudem wird auch noch Benzin importiert, weil es bei den bezuschussten Preisen im Land (Benzin kostet in Iran nur 8 US-Cent!) und den maroden Raffinerien unrentabel ist, eigenes Benzin herzustellen. Es gehen in den iranischen Raffinerien bereits 6% der gesamten Ölproduktion verloren und versickern im Boden, verdunsten oder verbrennen, weil es sich bei den nicht marktgerecht niedrig festgelegten Verkaufspreisen im Land schlichtweg nicht lohnt, eine Raffinerie zu reparieren, die sowieso nur Verluste bringen würde. Tatsächlich beruht der iranische Wohlfahrtsstaat auf dem gescheiterten Modell der Sowjetunion mit staatlichen Fünf-Jahres-Plänen, so Stern.
Es erscheint zwar absurd und geradezu lebensgefährlich, in einem solchen Land unter diesen Umständen auch noch in Atomtechnik zu investieren. Doch hierzu ist Russland bereit, während sich für die Gas- und Öltechnik keine Investoren mehr finden lassen. Also wird Iran versuchen, diese Gelegenheit beim Schopf zu packen, vermutet Stern. Was natürlich nicht bedeutet, dass die Nutzung der Atomenergie dann tatsächlich rein zivil bliebe, jene Bedenken sind durchaus nicht hinfällig.
Das eigentliche Problem ist jedoch das Ölkartell der OPEC in Kombination mit dem Subventionssystem im Land, das zu diesen unrentablen Verhältnissen führt. Hinzu kommt in den USA und im Nahen Osten das Fehlen eines preisstabilisierenden und sparsame Motoren fördernden Steuersystems wie in Europa. Wenn benzinsparende Techniken flächendeckend durchgesetzt würden, dann würde sich aufgrund der verringerten Nachfrage auch die Lage sowohl im Iran wie in anderen ölfördernden Ländern entspannen, so die ökonomisch begründeten Thesen von Stern. Die Einnahmeverluste durch den selbst verschuldeten Wegfall der Ölexporte dürfte das Land weit schwerer treffen als jede Sanktion, die die USA oder die UN verhängen könnten. Roger Stern hält Sanktionen, wie sie gerade beschlossen wurden, für wirkungslos. Nach seiner Ansicht könnten sie gerade den Protest der Bevölkerung gegen die ausländischen Mächte schüren und so eher zur Verfestigung des Irrwegs führen.
Links
(1) http://www.pnas.org
(2) http://www.jhu.edu
(3) http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0603903104
(4) http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/22/22029/1.html
(5) http://www.nioc.com
(6) http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/20/20727/1.html
(7) http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/23/23739/1.html
NZZ Online: 16.06.2009
«Die Iraner brauchen einen Führer»
Arnold Hottinger über die äusserst fragile Lage in Iran
Für eine Öffnung in Iran ist es noch zu früh, sagt der frühere Nahostkorrespondent der NZZ. Im Gespräch erläutert er, weshalb die Iraner einen Führer brauchen und weshalb der unterlegene Kandidat Moussavi nicht das Zeug dafür hat.
Der Wächterrat hat den Wahlsieg Ahmadinejads nur wenige Stunden nach Urnenschluss veröffentlicht. Ist das in einem Staat mit über 60 Millionen Einwohnern überhaupt möglich?
16. Juni 2009, 16:36, NZZ Online
«Die Iraner brauchen einen Führer»
Arnold Hottinger über die äusserst fragile Lage in Iran
Für eine Öffnung in Iran ist es noch zu früh, sagt der frühere Nahostkorrespondent der NZZ. Im Gespräch erläutert er, weshalb die Iraner einen Führer brauchen und weshalb der unterlegene Kandidat Moussavi nicht das Zeug dafür hat.
Der Wächterrat hat den Wahlsieg Ahmadinejads nur wenige Stunden nach Urnenschluss veröffentlicht. Ist das in einem Staat mit über 60 Millionen Einwohnern überhaupt möglich?
Die ganze Auszählung war höchst verdächtig. Man hat auch den Eindruck, es ist etwas geregelt worden. Nicht nur, dass es so schnell ging, sondern auch, dass die Resultate überall gleich sind. Ich kann mir beispielsweise nicht erklären, wie Kandidat Rezai bloss ein Prozent der Stimmen erhalten konnte. Der gleiche Kandidat kam bei früheren Wahlen immerhin auf 17 Prozent.
Warum sind bis heute keine Wahlresultate aus den Bezirken und Städten veröffentlicht worden?
Eben, die ganze Geschichte ist zweifellos überhastet gemacht worden. Und das muss einen Grund haben. Offenbar wurde ein Befehl gegeben, ein bestimmtes Resultat zu erreichen.
Was könnte denn dieser Grund gewesen sein?
Die Revolutionswächter hören auf Khamenei. Und Khamenei wollte offensichtlich Ahmadinejad noch einmal haben. Das ist keine Frage. Er hat sich schon im Vorfeld der Wahlen deutlich für Ahmadinejad geäussert. Warum er ihn nochmals wollte, ist wahrscheinlich innenpolitischer Natur. Er hat Angst vor Lockerungen des politischen Systems. Moussavi ist zwar kein eigentlicher Reformer. Aber er wäre eben doch eine Art Alternative zu Ahamdinejad gewesen. Und all diese Leute, die eine Alternative wollten, haben sich hinter Moussavi gestellt. Das genügte schon, um Khamenei Angst einzujagen. Man muss bedenken, dass die Studentenunruhen von 1999 ein schwerer Schlag gegen das Regime waren. Da hat es mal richtig gewackelt. Und zwar viel mehr, als es im Ausland wahrgenommen wurde. Das Regime hat danach beschlossen, dass es nie mehr soweit kommen dürfe. Denn jede Öffnung würde gleich weiter ausgehöhlt.
Es ist ja kein Geheimnis, dass Moussavi kein richtiger Reformer ist. Er hatte während seiner Zeit als Ministerpräsident mehrere umstrittene Gesetze verabschiedet.
Es gibt aber sehr viele Politiker des zweiten und dritten Rangs, die damals noch ungeheuer gläubige Revolutionäre waren. Doch haben sie in der Zwischenzeit ihre Haltung revidiert. Der bekannteste unter ihnen ist zweifellos Ayatollah
Muntazeri, einst Stellvertreter Khomeinis, der heute ein klarer Opponent des Systems ist und daher völlig isoliert lebt. Auch er war damals ein Mitläufer, der das tat, was Khamenei wollte. Moussavi hatte aber stets eine Linkstendenz, auch als Ministerpräsident. Er wird auch erkannt haben, dass es ein Mitspracherechts des Volks braucht.
Ali Khamenei hat die Überprüfung des Wahlresultats angeordnet. Was bedeutet die konkret?
Ich fürchte, das ist bloss ein taktisches Manöver. Denn der Wächterrat, der die Überprüfung nun durchführen muss, wird von Khamenei an der kurzen Leine geführt. Das ganze dient bloss zur Beruhigung der Leute, nach dem Motto: «Wenn ihr alle reklamiert, dann leiten wir eine Untersuchung ein.» Mit dem Resultat, dass es dann heisst, alles sei in Ordnung gewesen. Das ist aber eine persönliche Einschätzung. Ob es tatsächlich so herauskommt, weiss ich nicht.
Wird es den geistlichen Führern gelingen, die Proteste gegen das Regime einzudämmen?
Das halte ich für wahrscheinlich, weil die Revolutionswächter alles daran setzen werden, dass Ruhe einkehrt. Ihre Macht im Staate kommt einem Imperium gleich. Sie bilden eine aufsteigende Linie im politischen System. Sie sind nicht bloss eine militärisch-politische Macht, sondern bauen auch an einem wirtschaftlichen Sonderimperium. Die Front heisst Khamenei plus Revolutionswächter gegen die politischen Ayatollahs, die einsehen, dass es mit Ahmedinejad kein Weiterkommen gibt. Es wird aber eine gewaltsame Ruhe sein, die den Leuten aufgedrängt wird.
Gibt es Parallelen zur Islamischen Revolution von 1979?
Der grosse Unterschied zu 1979 besteht darin, dass es heute keinen Führer gibt. Moussavi ist ein Anlass gewesen, sich Gehör zu verschaffen. Aber er ist zweifellos nicht der begeisternde Führer, wie es damals Khomeini gewesen ist. Die Revolutionswächter und Khamenei wissen sehr genau, dass sie einen potenziellen Führer vermeiden müssen. Wo immer sich einer zeigt, der zum Führer oder zum Sprecher einer ganzen Bevölkerungsgruppe werden könnte, wird er sofort eingesperrt.
Haben die jungen Iranerinnen und Iraner nicht genug von diesem totalitären Regime?
Man hat zweifellos gesehen, dass die junge Generation genug davon hat. Jene Leute, die das nicht mehr wollen, sind diese, die sich hinter Moussavi gestellt haben. Aber ob sie damit durchkommen, ist die grosse Frage. Sie brauchen einen Chef, einen Führer, der sie begeistert und hinter den sie sich aufreihen können. Als Khomeini frisch an der Macht war, fragte ich einen persischen Archäologen: «Jetzt habt ihr doch gerade erst den Schah vertrieben, und schon schafft ihr euch mit Khomeini einen neuen Führer.» So seien die Perser halt, lautete seine Antwort kurz und knapp. Das ist in der Tradition des Landes. Aber bei Moussavi sind solche Führertendenzen nicht auszumachen. Diesen Gefahren möchte er sich kaum aussetzen.
Dann ist das erst der Beginn eines Wandels, der Zeit braucht...
Manche sagen, es gebe immer noch viele Leute, die den Wandel von 1979 erlebt haben zu Skeptikern wurden. Sie sagen, sie wollen nicht noch eine weitere Revolution. Erst wenn die junge Generation zu jener wird, die in der Mehrzahl ist und die die Revolution Geschichte ist, dann kann ein neuer Schub eintreten. Zentral dabei bleibt, wie schnell sich ein neuer Führer findet. Anders ist es, wenn Khamenei stirbt. Er ist auf Lebzeiten Irans Oberhaupt. Der Kampf um seine Nachfolge könnte dannmal eine Öffnung mit sich bringen. Doch wir müssen uns auf einen langen und sehr komplexen Prozess einstellen.
Das Gespräch mit Arnold Hottinger führte Andrea Hohendahl.
Asia Times, 29 May 2009
Asia Times: Pipelineistan goes Iran-Pak
Pepe Escobar
The earth has been shaking for a few days now all across Pipelineistan - with massive repercussions for all the big players in the New Great Game in Eurasia. United States President Barack Obama's AfPak strategists didn't even see it coming.
A silent, reptilian war had been going on for years between the US-favored Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline and its rival, the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline". This past weekend, a winner emerged. And it's none of the above: instead, it's the 2,100-kilometer, US$7.5 billion....
Asia Times, 29 May 2009
Pipelineistan goes Iran-Pak
Pepe Escobar
The earth has been shaking for a few days now all across Pipelineistan - with massive repercussions for all the big players in the New Great Game in Eurasia. United States President Barack Obama's AfPak strategists didn't even see it coming.
A silent, reptilian war had been going on for years between the US-favored Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline and its rival, the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline". This past weekend, a winner emerged. And it's none of the above: instead, it's the 2,100-kilometer, US$7.5 billion IP (the Iran-Pakistan pipeline), with no India attached. (Please see Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal, May 27, 2009, Asia Times Online.)
This whole saga started way back in 1995 - about the time California-based Unocal started floating the idea of building a pipeline crossing Afghanistan. Now, Iran and Pakistan finally signed a deal this week in Tehran, by which Iran will sell gas from its mega South Pars fields to Pakistan for the next 25 years.
According to Iranian energy officials speaking to the ISNA news agency, the final deal will be signed in less than three weeks, slightly after the first round of the Iranian presidential election. The last 250 km of a 900-km pipeline stretch in Iran between Asalouyeh and Iranshahr, near the border with Pakistan, still needs to be built. The whole IP pipeline should be operational by 2014.
The fact that Islamabad has finally decided to move on is pregnant with meaning. For the George W Bush administration IPI was simply anathema; imagine India and Pakistan buying gas from "axis of evil" Iran. The only way to go was TAPI - an extension of the childish neo-conservative belief that the Afghanistan war was winnable.
Now, IP reveals Islamabad's own interests seemed to have prevailed against Washington's (unlike the virtually US-imposed Pakistan army offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Valley). The Barack Obama administration has been mum about IP so far. But it will be very enlightening to hear what former Bush pet Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad - who's been infiltrating himself as the next CEO of Afghanistan - has to say about it. (Please see Slouching towards Balkanization, May 22, 2009, Asia Times Online.) Khalilzad's Pipelineistan dream, since the mid-1990s, has always been a trans-Afghan pipeline capable of bypassing both Iran and Russia.
IP, IP, hurrah
India, for a number of reasons (the pricing system, transit fees and above all, security) de facto shelved the IPI idea last year. Had it not been the case, IPI would become a powerful vector in terms of South Asian regional integration - doing more to stabilize India-Pakistan relations than any diplomatic coup. Nevertheless, both Iran and Pakistan still have left an open door to India.
India's (momentary?) loss will be China's gain. Since 2008, with New Delhi having second thoughts, Beijing and Islamabad had set up an agreement - China would import most of this Iranian gas if India dropped out of IPI. China anyway is more than welcome business-wise to both Iran and Pakistan. Only in transit fees, Islamabad could collect as much as $500 million a year.
For Beijing, IP could not be more essential. Iranian gas will flow to the Balochistan province port of Gwadar, in the Arabian Sea (which China itself built, and where it is also building a refinery). And Gwadar is supposed to be connected to a proposed pipeline going north, mostly financed by China, along the Karakoram Highway (which by the way was largely built from the 1960s to the 1980s by Chinese engineers ... ).
Pakistan is the absolutely ideal transit corridor for China to import oil and gas from Iran and the Persian Gulf. With IP in place and with multi-billion-dollar, overlapping Tehran-Beijing gas deals, China can finally afford to import less energy via the Strait of Malacca, which Beijing considers exceedingly dangerous, and subject to Washington's sphere of influence.
With IP, not only China wins; Russia's Gazprom also wins. And by extension, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) wins. Russian deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yankovsky told the Kommersant business daily, "We are ready to join the project as soon as we receive an offer."
The reason is so blatant that Gazprom officials have not even bothered to disguise it. For Russia, IP is a gift-from-above tool in rerouting gas from Iran to South Asia, and away from competing with Russian gas. The big prize, in this case, is the Western European market, dependent almost 30% on Gazprom and the source of 80% of Gazprom's export profits.
The European Union is desperately trying to keep the Nabucco pipeline project - which bypasses Russia - afloat, so it may reduce its dependence on Gazprom. But as anyone in Brussels knows, Nabucco can only work if it is provided enough gas by either Iran or Turkmenistan. The Turkmenistan distribution system is controlled by Russia. And a deal with Iran implies no more US sanctions - still a long way away. With IP in place, Gazprom reasons, Nabucco is deprived of a key supply source.
All eyes on Balochistan
With IP firmly in place, the strategic spotlight focuses even more on Balochistan. (Please see Balochistan is the greatest prize, May 9, 2009, Asia Times Online.) First of all, there's an internal Pakistani question to be settled. An editorial in the Pakistani daily Dawn has stressed how Islamabad must be serious about hiring indigenous Balochi labor and making sure "the gains of the economic activity ... are focused on Balochistan for the benefit of its poverty-stricken people".
The port of Gwadar, in southwest Balochistan, near the Iranian border, is indeed bound to become a new Dubai - but not the way the vice president Dick Cheney and gang in Washington once dreamed of. Gas from the South Pars fields in Iran will definitely flow though it. As for gas from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan, assuming TAPI ever gets built though war-torn Afghanistan, that's much more unlikely.
This all raises the crucial question: how will Islamabad deal with ultra-strategic Balochistan - east of Iran, south of Afghanistan, and boasting three Arabian sea ports, including Gwadar, practically at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz?
The New Great Game in Eurasia rules that Pakistan is a key pivot to both North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the SCO, of which Pakistan is an observer. Balochistan de facto incorporates Pakistan as a key transit corridor to Iranian gas from the monster South Pars fields, and not to a great deal of the Caspian wealth of "gas republic" Turkmenistan. For the Pentagon, the birth of IP is mega bad news. The ideal Pentagon scenario is the US controlling Gwadar - in yet one more prime confluence of Pipelineistan and the US Empire of Bases.
With Gwadar directly linked to Iran and developed virtually as a Chinese warehouse, the Pentagon also loses the mouth-watering opportunity of a long land route across Balochistan into Helmand, Nimruz, Kandahar or, better yet, all of these three provinces in southwest Afghanistan, where soon, not by accident, there will be another US mega-base in the "desert of death". From a Pentagon/NATO perspective, after the "loss" of the Khyber Pass, that would be the ideal supply route for Western troops in the perennial, now rebranded, GWOT ("global war on terror").
Balochis surging
Islamabad has promised an all-parties conference "within days" to seriously deal with Balochistan. No one is holding their breath. Over a year ago, Balochistan was promised greater control over its immense natural resources - the undisputed, number-one Baloch grievance - and a massive aid package. Not much has happened.
Punjabis derisively refer to Balochistan's "backwardness". But the heart of the matter is systematic, hardcore pillage by Islamabad - combined with hardcore repression and serial Latin America-in-the-1970s-style "disappearances" of political activists and senior Baloch nationalists. Not to mention virtually no investment in health, education and job creation. This Third World dictatorship catalogue of disasters fuels Baloch nationalism and separatism.
Islamabad's paranoia is "foreign involvement" in the different strands of Balochistan's nationalist movements. That would be, in fact, the CIA, MI5 and the Israeli Mossad, all engaged in overlapping agendas which manipulate Balochistan for balkanization of Pakistan purposes and/or as a base for the destabilization of neighboring Iran's southeast. While the Taliban, Afghan or Pakistani, can roam free across Balochistan, Baloch nationalists are intimidated, harassed and killed.
Sanaullah Baloch, a secretary of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal, told Dawn how "several Baloch political parties tried to file charges against [former president General Pervez] Musharraf, but the country's institutions lack the will or courage to accept our plea against him." Studies show that rural poverty in Balochistan when Musharraf was in power increased 15% between 1999 and 2005.
Sanaullah Baloch roundly denounces the "civil-military elites" of Pakistan as implicated in the systematic repression going on in Balochistan; "Without their consent, no political regime can undo their policy of continued suppression."
And his analysis of why Islamabad has made a deal with the Taliban in Swat but won't do a deal with Balochis could not be more enlightening: "The establishment in Pakistan has always felt comfortable with religious groups as they do not challenge the centralized authority of the civil-military establishment. The demands of these groups are not political. They don't demand economic parity. They demand centralized religious rule which is philosophically closer to the establishment's version of totalitarianism. Islamabad's elite are stubborn against genuine Baloch demands: governing Balochistan, having ownership of resources, and control over provincial security."
So Islamabad still has all it takes to royally mess up what it has accomplished by approving IP. For the moment, Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia win. The SCO wins. Washington and NATO lose, not to mention Afghanistan (no transit fees). But will Balochistan also win? If not, all hell will break loose, from desperate Balochis sabotaging IP to "foreign interference" manipulating them into creating an even greater, regional, ball of fire.
Pepe Escobar is the author of 'Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War' (Nimble Books, 2007) and 'Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge'. His new book, just out, is 'Obama does Globalistan' (Nimble Books, 2009).
Full Text of President Ahmadinejad’s Remarks at U.N. Conference on Racism
Posted By Jeremy R. Hammond On April 21, 2009
This is a rush transcript of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks at the United Nations Durban Review Conference on racism in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 20, 2009. Transcribed from the translation given in the U.N. webcast [1] of the speech.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful… [Protestors in clown costumes escorted out by security] May he bestow upon his prophets… Praise be upon Allah, the Almighty, who is just, kind, and compassionate. May he bestow upon his prophets his blessings and his grace from Adam to Noah; Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ, and His last prophet, Mohammed. Peace be upon them all who are the harbingers of monotheism, fraternity, love … [Applause] … human dignity and justice.
Mr. Chairman. I call upon all distinguished guests to forgive these ignorant people.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be upon Allah, the Almighty, who is just, kind, and compassionate, and praise and salutations of the Almighty God to the great prophet. May he bestow upon [us] His blessings, His grace. We thank the Almighty God. Praise be upon him who is just and who is compassionate. And the salutations and regards of Allah to his prophets, from Noah to Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ, and his last prophet Mohammed. Peace be upon them all who are the harbingers of monotheism, fraternity, love, human dignity, and justice.
Mr. Chairman. Honorable Secretary General of the United Nations. Madam High Commissioner. Ladies and Gentleman. We have gathered here in...
Full Text of President Ahmadinejad’s Remarks at U.N. Conference on Racism
Posted By Jeremy R. Hammond On April 21, 2009
This is a rush transcript of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks at the United Nations Durban Review Conference on racism in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 20, 2009. Transcribed from the translation given in the U.N. webcast [1] of the speech.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful… [Protestors in clown costumes escorted out by security] May he bestow upon his prophets… Praise be upon Allah, the Almighty, who is just, kind, and compassionate. May he bestow upon his prophets his blessings and his grace from Adam to Noah; Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ, and His last prophet, Mohammed. Peace be upon them all who are the harbingers of monotheism, fraternity, love … [Applause] … human dignity and justice.
Mr. Chairman. I call upon all distinguished guests to forgive these ignorant people.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be upon Allah, the Almighty, who is just, kind, and compassionate, and praise and salutations of the Almighty God to the great prophet. May he bestow upon [us] His blessings, His grace. We thank the Almighty God. Praise be upon him who is just and who is compassionate. And the salutations and regards of Allah to his prophets, from Noah to Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ, and his last prophet Mohammed. Peace be upon them all who are the harbingers of monotheism, fraternity, love, human dignity, and justice.
Mr. Chairman. Honorable Secretary General of the United Nations. Madam High Commissioner. Ladies and Gentleman. We have gathered here in the follow up to the Durban conference against racism and racial discrimination to work out practical mechanisms for our holy and humanitarian campaigns. Over the last centuries, humanity has gone through tremendous suffering and pain. In the middle ages, thinkers and scientists were sentenced to death. It was then followed by a period of slavery and slave trade, when innocent people in millions were captivated and separated from their families and loved ones, to be taken to Europe and America under worse conditions; the dark period that also experienced occupations, lootings, and massacres of innocent people.
Many years passed by before nations rose up and fought for their liberty and freedom, and they paid a high price. They lost millions of lives to expel the occupiers and proclaim their independence. However, it did not take long that the coercive powers imposed two wars in Europe which also plagued a part of Asia and Africa. Those horrific wars claimed about 100 million lives and left behind massive devastation. Had lessons been learned from the occupations, horrors, and crimes of those wars, there would have been a ray of hope for the future. The victorious powers called themselves the conquerors of the world while ignoring or downtreading the rights of other nations by the imposition of oppressive laws and international arrangements.
Ladies and gentlemen, let us take a look at the U.N. Security Council, which is one of the legacies of World War II and World War I. What was the logic behind their granting themselves the veto rights? How can such a logic comply with humanitarian or spiritual values? Could it be in conformity with the recognized principles of justice, equality before law, love, and human dignity? [Applause] Or rather, with discrimination, injustice, violation of human rights, or humiliation of the majority of nations and countries?
That Council is the highest decision-making world body for safeguarding the international peace and security. How can we expect the realization of justice and peace when discrimination is legalized and the origin of law is dominated by coercion and force rather than by justice and the right?
Coercion and arrogance is the origin of oppression and wars. Although today many proponents of racism condemn racial discrimination in their words and in their slogans, a number of powerful countries have been authorized to decide for other nations based on their own interests and at their own discretions. And they can easily ridicule and violate all laws and humanitarian values, as they have done so.
Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings. And they sent migrants from Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine… [Delegates walk out in protest. Applause] And in fact in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe… Okay, please. Thank you. And in fact in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive, racist regime in Palestine. [Applause]
The Security Council helped stabilize this occupation regime and supported it in the past 60 years, giving them a free hand to continue their crimes. It is all the more regrettable that a number of Western governments and the United States have committed themselves to defend those racist perpetrators of genocide whilst the awakened conscience and free minded people of the world condemn aggression, brutalities and bombardments of civilians in Gaza. They have always been supportive or silent against their crimes. And before that, they have always been silent with regard to their crimes.
Distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, what are the root causes of U.S. attacks against Iraq or invasion of Afghanistan? [Shouts from audience] What are the root causes of U.S. attacks against Iraq invasion of Afghanistan? Was the motive behind the invasion of Iraq anything other than the arrogance of the then U.S. administration and the mounting pressures on the part of the owner of wealth and power to expand their sphere of influence, seeking the interests of giant arms manufacturing companies, affecting a noble culture with thousands of years of historical background, eliminating potential and practical traits of Muslim countries against the useful Zionist regime, or to control and plunder energy resources of the Iraqi people? Why, indeed almost a million people were killed and injured and a few more millions were displaced and became homeless. Why, indeed the Iraqi people have suffered enormous losses amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. And why was hundreds of billions of dollars imposed on the American people and its allies as a result of these military actions? Wasn’t the military action against Iraq planned by the Zionists and their allies in the then U.S. administration in complicity with the arms manufacturing companies and the owner of the wealth?
The invasion of Afghanistan; restore peace, security, and economic well being in this country. The United States and its allies not only have failed to contain [?] in Afghanistan, but also the illicit cultivation of narcotics multiplied in the course of their presence. The basic question is: What was the responsibility of the job of the then U.S. administration and its allies? Did it represent the world? Have they been mandated by them? Have they been authorized on behalf of the people of the world to interfere in all parts of the globe? And of course mostly in our region aren’t these measures a clear example of egocentrism, racism, discrimination, or infringement upon the dignity and independence of nations?
Ladies and gentlemen, who are responsible for the current global economic crisis? Where did the crisis start from? From Africa? From Asia? Or was it first from the United States, then spreading to Europe and to their allies? For a long time they imposed inequitable economic regulations. By their political power on the international economy they imposed a financial and a monetary system without a proper international oversight mechanism on nations and governments that played no role in the repressive trends or policies. They have not even allowed their people to oversee of monitor their financial policies. They introduce all laws and regulations in defiance to all moral values only to protect the interests of the owners of wealth and power. They further presented a definition of market economy and competition that denied many of the economic opportunities that could be available to other countries of the world. They even transferred their problems to others whilst the wave of crisis lashed back, plaguing their economies with thousands of billions of dollars in budget deficits. And today, they are injecting hundreds of billions of cash from the pockets of their own people into the failing banks companies and financial institutions making the situation more and more complicated for the economy and their people. They are simply thinking about maintaining power and wealth. They couldn’t care any less about the people of the world and even about their own people.
Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, racism is rooted in the lack of knowledge concerning the truth of human existence as the selected creature of God. It is also the product of his deviation from the true path of human life and the obligations of mankind in the world of creation. Failing to consciously worship God, not being able to think about the philosophy of life or the path to perfection that are the main ingredients of divine and humanitarian values, have restricted the horizon of human outlook, making transient and limited interests a yardstick for his actions.
That is why the cells of the Devil’s power took shape and expanded its realm of power by depriving others from enjoying equitable and just opportunities to development. The result has been the making of an unbridled racism that is posing the most serious threat against the international peace and has hindered the way for building peaceful coexistence in the entire world. Undoubtedly, racism is the symbol of ignorance which has deep roots in history. And it is indeed a sign of frustration in the development of human society. It is therefore crucially important to trace the manifestations of racism in situations or in societies where ignorance or lack of knowledge prevails in the societies. This increasing general awareness and understanding towards the philosophy of human existence is the principle struggle against such manifestations; which is the key to understanding the truth that humankind centers on the creation of the universe, and the key to a return to the spiritual and moral values, and finally the inclination to worship God the Almighty. The international community must initiate collective moves to raise awareness in the afflicted societies where the ignorance of racism still prevails so as to bring to a halt the spread of these malicious manifestations.
Dear friends, today the human community is facing a kind of racism which has tarnished the image of humanity in the beginning of the third millennium. The world Zionism personifies racism that falsely resorts to religion and abuse religious sentiments to hide their hatred and ugly faces. However, it is of great importance to bring into focus the political goals of some of the world powers and those who control huge economic resources and interests in the world. They mobilize all their resources, including their economic and political influence and world media to render support in vain to the Zionist regime, and maliciously endeavor to diminish the indignity and disgrace of this regime. This is not simply a question of ignorance, and one cannot conquer this ugly phenomenon through cultural campaigns. Efforts must be made to put an end to the abuse by Zionists and their supporters of political and international means and respect of the will and aspirations of nations. Governments must be encouraged and supported in their fights aimed at eradicating this barbaric racism [applause] and to move towards reforming … [applause] … the current international mechanisms.
There is no doubt that you are all aware of the conspiracies of some powers and Zionist circles against the goals and objectives of this conference. Unfortunately, there has been literature and statements in support of Zionism and their crimes, and it is the responsibility of honorable representatives of nations to disclose these campaigns which run counter to humanitarian values and principles. It should be recognized that boycotting such a session as an outstanding international capacity is a true indication of supporting the blatant example of racism.
In defending human rights it is primarily important to defend the rights of all nations to participate equally in all important international decision making processes without the influence of certain world powers. And secondly it is necessary to restructure the existing international organizations and their respective arrangements. Therefore this conference is a testing ground and the world public opinion today and tomorrow will judge our decisions and our actions [applause].
Mr. President. Mr President. Ladies and gentlemen. The world is going through fundamental changes, radical fundamental changes. Power relations have become so weak and fragile. The sounds of cracks in the pillars of world oppression can now be heard. Major political and economic structures are at the brink of collapse. Political and security crises are on the rise. The worsening crises in the world economy for which there can be seen no bright prospect, amply demonstrate the rising tide of far reaching global changes. I have repeatedly emphasized the need the change the wrong direction in which the world has been managed today. And I have also warned of the dire consequences of any delay in this crucial responsibility.
Now, in this [?] and valuable event, I would like to announce here to all leaders thinkers, and to all nations of the world present in this meeting and those who have a hunger for peace and economic well being, that the management, the inequitable and unjust management of the world, is now at the end of the road. This deadlock was inevitable since the logic of this imposed management was oppressive.
The logic of collective management of world affairs is based on noble aspirations which centers on human beings and the supremacy of the Almighty God. Therefore it defies any policy or plan which goes against the interest of nations. Victory of the right over the wrong and establishment of a just world system have been promised by the Almighty God and his messengers and it has been a shared goal of all human beings from different societies and generations in the course of history. Realization of such a future depends upon the knowledge of the creation and the belief in the hearts of all the faithful [applause]. The making of a global society is in fact the accomplishment of a noble held in the establishment of a common global system that will be run with the participation of all nations of the world in all major and basic decision making processes and the definite route to this sublime goal. Scientific and technical capacities as well as communication technologies have created a common and wider spread understanding of the world society and has provided the necessary ground for a common system.
Now it is incumbent upon all intellectuals, thinkers, and policy makers in the world to carry out their historical responsibility with firm belief to this definite route, I also want to lay emphasis on the fact that the western liberalism and capitalism, like communism, has reached to its end since it has failed to perceive the truth of the world and human[kind] as it is. It has imposed its own goals and directions on human beings with no regard for human and divine values, justice, freedom, love, or brotherhood; has based the living on the intensive competition securing individual and collective material interests.
Now we must learn from the past by initiating collective efforts by dealing with present challenges, and in this connection and in closing my remarks I wish to draw your kind attention to two important points. One: It is absolutely impossible to improve the existing situation in the world. However, it must be noted that it could only be achieved through the cooperation of all countries in order to get the best out of existing capacities and resources in the world. My participation in this conference is because of my conviction of these important issues, as well as to our common responsibility to defending the rights of nations vis-a-vis the sinister phenomenon of racism, and being with you, the thinkers of the world. [Applause]
Two: Mindful of the inefficacy of the current international political, economic, and security systems on the world scene, it is necessary to focus on the divine and humanitarian values and by referring to the true definition of human beings, and based upon justice and respect for the rights of all people in all parts of the world, and by acknowledging the past wrongdoings in the past dominant management of the world undertake collective measures to reform the existing structures. In this respect, it is crucially important to reform the structure of the Security Council, including the elimination of the discriminatory veto right … [applause] … and change the current world and financial monetary systems. It is evident that lack of understanding on the urgency for change is equivalent to the much heavier costs of delay.
Dear friends, be aware that to move in the direction of justice and human dignity is like the national rapid flow in the current of a river. Let us not forget the essence of love and affection, the promised bright future of human beings is a great asset that will serve our purpose in keeping us together to build a new world and to make the world a better place full of love fraternity and blessings; a world devoid of poverty and hatred, [inaudible] the increasing blessings of God Almighty and the righteous management of the perfect human being. Let us all join hands in amity in playing our share in the fulfillment such a decent new world.
I thank you Mr. President, Secretary General, and all distinguished participants for having the patience to listen to me. Thank you very much.
Tagesanzeiger Online
«Ahmadinejad hat sich in Sachen Holocaust gemässigt»
Von Daniel Foppa. Aktualisiert vor 36 Minuten
Nahost-Experte Arnold Hottinger verteidigt das Treffen zwischen Ahmadinejad und Merz. Die Kritik am iranischen Präsidenten sei übertrieben.
«Der Schweiz blieb nichts anderes übrig, als Ahmadinejad zu empfangen.»: Nahost-Experte Arnold Hottinger.
Tagesanzeiger Online
«Ahmadinejad hat sich in Sachen Holocaust gemässigt»
Von Daniel Foppa. Aktualisiert vor 36 Minuten
Nahost-Experte Arnold Hottinger verteidigt das Treffen zwischen Ahmadinejad und Merz. Die Kritik am iranischen Präsidenten sei übertrieben.
«Der Schweiz blieb nichts anderes übrig, als Ahmadinejad zu empfangen.»: Nahost-Experte Arnold Hottinger.
War es falsch, den iranischen Präsidenten offiziell zu empfangen?
Der Schweiz blieb nichts anderes übrig. Ahmadinejad ist ein Staatschef.
Der US-Präsident empfängt auch nicht alle Staatschefs, die an einer Uno-Konferenz in New York teilnehmen.
New York ist ein besonderer Fall. Die USA haben Mühe mit der Uno und betrachten deren Sitz als extraterritoriales Gebiet. Genf ist jedoch Teil der Schweiz.
Hätte das Treffen besser unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit stattgefunden?
Dann wäre der Vorwurf der Intransparenz laut geworden, Die Fotos des Treffens mögen einen falschen Eindruck erwecken. Aber zwei Staatschefs schauen sich nun mal nicht grimmig in die Augen.
Wie schätzen Sie Ahmadinejad ein?
Er ist eine umstrittene Figur, aber nicht der Teufel, zu dem er gestempelt wird. Er weist auf Punkte hin, die diskutiert werden müssen – etwa die Staatsgründung Israels. Was bedeutete das für die Bevölkerung, die zuvor dort gelebt hat? Und was für eine Politik betreibt Israel heute gegenüber den Palästinensern? Ist das nationalistisch? Oder gar rassistisch?
Ahmadinejad hat den Holocaust mehrfach als «Mythos» abgetan und Revisionisten zu einer Konferenz eingeladen. Muss man einer solchen Person überhaupt zuhören?
Ahmadinejad hat sich in Sachen Holocaust gemässigt. Er hat seine Position allmählich ein wenig geändert. Das ist nicht leicht für ihn. Im Osten fehlt die Literatur und das breite Wissen zum Holocaust. Im Westen ist das vorhanden. Hier hat der Holocaust auch stattgefunden.
Es macht Ihrer Ansicht nach also einen Unterschied, ob ein westlicher Mensch den Holocaust leugnet oder jemand aus dem Osten?
Das ist so. Im Osten kommt eine besondere emotionale Dimension dazu. Dort steht die Vertreibung des palästinensischen Brudervolks durch den Staat Israel im Vordergrund. Das führt dazu, dass zunächst mal falsche und tendenziöse Behauptungen über den Holocaust verbreitet werden können.
Wie fanden Sie Ahmadinejads Genfer Rede?
Sie war vergleichsweise gemässigt. Ahmadinejad steht vor den Wahlen. Deshalb musste er im Iran sein Prestige als unerschrockener Kämpfer hochhalten. Anderseits gab er sich Mühe, so diplomatisch wie möglich zu sein. Ob er tatsächlich eine Verbesserung der Beziehungen zu den USA anstrebt, ist schwierig zu sagen.
Die Schweiz nimmt die Interessen der USA im Iran wahr. Wie stark setzt Präsident Obama noch auf diese Dienste? Er will ja direkt den Dialog mit dem Iran aufnehmen.
Die Vermittlerrolle der Schweiz war schon immer von sehr beschränktem Ausmass. Es geht darum, die wenigen noch verbliebenen Interessen der USA im Iran wahrzunehmen. Die Schweiz kann etwa im Fall der im Iran verurteilten US-Journalistin vermitteln. Darüber haben Merz und Ahmadinejad ja auch gesprochen. Wenn aber die USA beschliessen, mit dem Iran zu sprechen, dann tun sie das direkt. Oder sie ernennen einen Mediator.
Was sagen Sie zur Abberufung des israelischen Botschafters aus Bern?
Die rechtsgerichtete israelische Regierung wollte ein Zeichen setzen – und zwar in erster Linie an die Adresse der USA. Ihr ging es darum, eine gewisse Political Correctness aufrechtzuhalten: Mit einem finsteren Gesellen wie Ahmadinejad spricht man nicht, ist die Botschaft. Das ist Dogmatismus in der Politik.
Wie nachhaltig ist die Krise zwischen der Schweiz und Israel?
Das wird nicht sehr lange andauern. Die Politik und die Mehrheit der Schweizer sind grundsätzlich bereit, die israelische Sicht der Dinge zu teilen.
* Arnold Hottinger (83) war von 1961 bis 1992 Korrespondent für die NZZ und Radio DRS in Beirut, Madrid und Nikosia. Er ist ein profunder Kenner der arabischen Welt. (Tages-Anzeiger)
Erstellt: 21.04.2009, 23:21 Uhr
The New York Times
April 20, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel, Iran and Fear
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, the return of the capital from Bonn to the scene of the crime, Berlin, prompted agonizing over how to memorialize the Holocaust. Germans thirsted for a “Schlussstrich” — closure with Hitler — even as they acknowledged its impossibility.
A large Holocaust memorial was built in Berlin, but....
The New York Times
April 20, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel, Iran and Fear
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, the return of the capital from Bonn to the scene of the crime, Berlin, prompted agonizing over how to memorialize the Holocaust. Germans thirsted for a “Schlussstrich” — closure with Hitler — even as they acknowledged its impossibility.
A large Holocaust memorial was built in Berlin, but not before a leading writer, Martin Walser, had prompted outrage by railing against “the permanent presentation of our shame” and use of Auschwitz as “a moral stick.”
Closure on the Nazi mass murder is of course impossible. There is no such thing as inherited guilt, but inherited responsibility endures. Germans, through responsibility, have built one of the world’s most successful democracies, a wonder from the ashes.
In the German mirror stands Israel, another vibrant democracy birthed from the crime, albeit one, unlike Germany, that has not found peaceful coexistence. Israel, too, craves closure on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation.
As Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, has written, Israel was supposed not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” In this, 61 years after its creation, Israel has fallen short.
Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber. Existential threats — from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography — are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses — for now — to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood.
I’ve been thinking about corrosive Israeli anxiety since I read a response to my recent columns on Iran from Eran Lerman, the director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. Lerman framed his piece around his “vulnerable” 17-year-old daughter, who, he wrote, often asks him what he’s done “to make sure that she gets to be 25,” given Iran’s annihilationist rhetoric and nuclear program.
Israel, Lerman suggested, faces “simply the challenge of staying alive in a hostile environment.”
But it’s not that simple. How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?
Yes, Israel is small — all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is scarcely bigger than Maryland — and its environment hostile. This, as former President Jimmy Carter notes in a fine new book, makes it vulnerable. But as Carter also writes in “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” Israel has a “military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries.”
Not only that, Israel has a formidable nuclear arsenal; it has made peace with Egypt and Jordan; it has a cast-iron security guarantee from the United States; it has walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked the roughly 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness; its enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas, only declared victory in recent wars by preventing their own destruction.
Israel has the most dynamic and creative society in the region, one that does not convict American journalists in shameful secret trials, as Iran has just done with Roxana Saberi; it has never fought a war with Iran; and it knows — despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.
Some of this, no doubt, Lerman has told his daughter. It should reassure her. Fear is the worst of foundations.
Far from Iran, and the tired Nazi analogies misleadingly attached to it, there is another threat. As Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East scholar and author, suggested to me recently: “The biggest risk to Israel is Israel.”
A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.
As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”
That’s right. The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.
Netanyahu now wants Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have recognized Israel, to go further and recognize it as a Jewish state, even before he accepts a hypothetical Palestinian state. That’s a sign of the Israeli angst occupation has institutionalized.
Closure is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victimhood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive.
Readers are invited to comment on global.nytimes.com/opinion
The New York Times
April 13, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Realpolitik for Iran
By ROGER COHEN
VIENNA
For Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, “a combination of ignorance and arrogance” under the Bush administration squandered countless diplomatic opportunities with Iran and so allowed it to forge ahead with its nuclear program.
Referring twice to Dick Cheney as....
The New York Times
April 13, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Realpolitik for Iran
By ROGER COHEN
VIENNA
For Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, “a combination of ignorance and arrogance” under the Bush administration squandered countless diplomatic opportunities with Iran and so allowed it to forge ahead with its nuclear program.
Referring twice to Dick Cheney as “Darth Vader,” ElBaradei told me in an interview that “U.S. policy consisted of two mantras — Iran should not have the knowledge and should not spin one single centrifuge. They kept saying, wait, Iran is not North Korea, it will buckle. That was absolutely a mistake.”
Instead of building on Iran’s Afghan help in 2001, exploring an Iranian “grand bargain” offer in 2003, or backing 2005 European mediation that hinged on the U.S. agreeing to sale of a French nuclear power reactor, “We got Darth Vader and company saying Iran was in the axis of evil and we have to change this regime.”
The result, ElBaradei said, was that instead of containing the program at a few dozen centrifuges, “Iran now has close to 5,500 centrifuges, and they have 1,000 kilos of low enriched uranium, and they have the know-how.” Still, he dismissed the notion that Iran “could go to a weapon tomorrow” as “hype,” putting the time frame for that at two to five years.
Imagine if Roosevelt in 1942 had said to Stalin, sorry, Joe, we don’t like your Communist ideology so we’re not going to accept your help in crushing the Nazis. I know you’re powerful, but we don’t deal with evil.
That’s a rough equivalent on the stupidity scale of what Bush achieved by consigning Iran’s theocracy to the axis of evil and failing to probe how the country might have helped in two wars and the wider Middle East when the conciliatory Mohammad Khatami was president.
Seldom in the annals of American diplomacy has moral absolutism trumped realism to such devastating effect. Bush gifted Iran increased power without taking even a peek at how that might serve U.S. objectives.
So here we are, several thousand centrifuges on, with Iran getting what it has long craved: recognition of the regime from the Obama administration, relegation of threats and renunciation of the demand that enrichment be suspended as a condition for America’s joining other major powers in nuclear talks with Iran.
That’s salutary. American realism is now essential. It should heed ElBaradei’s view: “I don’t believe the Iranians have made a decision to go for a nuclear weapon, but they are absolutely determined to have the technology because they believe it brings you power, prestige and an insurance policy.”
I think it’s almost certainly too late to stop Iran achieving virtual nuclear power status — something like Brazil’s or Japan’s mastery of the know-how without a weapon. Iran’s advances of the past eight years cannot be undone. What can be transformed is the context Iran operates in; that in turn will determine how “virtual” Iran remains.
One context changer was Obama’s call for a nuclear-free world: it’s hard to argue for nonproliferation without tackling disarmament. “You can’t have nine countries telling the likes of Iran nuclear weapons are dangerous for you, but we need to go on refining our arsenals,” said ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 and ends his term later this year. “It’s a different world.”
He sees two years of U.S.-Iranian talks as needed, given the degree of mistrust, with “every grievance on the table.”
Here’s one normalization scenario:
Iran ceases military support for Hamas and Hezbollah; adopts a “Malaysian” approach to Israel (nonrecognition and noninterference); agrees to work for stability in Iraq and Afghanistan; accepts intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency verification of a limited nuclear program for peaceful ends only; promises to fight Qaeda terrorism; commits to improving its human rights record.
The United States commits itself to the Islamic Republic’s security and endorses its pivotal regional role; accepts Iran’s right to operate a limited enrichment facility with several hundred centrifuges for research purposes; agrees to Iran’s acquiring a new nuclear power reactor from the French; promises to back Iran’s entry into the World Trade Organization; returns seized Iranian assets; lifts all sanctions; and notes past Iranian statements that it will endorse a two-state solution acceptable to the Palestinians.
Any such deal is a game changer, transformative as Nixon to China (another repressive state with a poor human rights record). It can be derailed any time by an attack from Israel, which has made clear it won’t accept virtual nuclear power status for Iran, despite its own nonvirtual nuclear warheads.
“Israel would be utterly crazy to attack Iran,” ElBaradei said. “I worry about it. If you bomb, you will turn the region into a ball of fire and put Iran on a crash course for nuclear weapons with the support of the whole Muslim world.”
To avoid that nightmare Obama will have to get tougher with Israel than any U.S. president in recent years. It’s time.
The New York Times
April 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel Cries Wolf
By ROGER COHEN
ISTANBUL — “Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”
Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.
You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be....
The New York Times
April 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel Cries Wolf
By ROGER COHEN
ISTANBUL — “Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”
Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.
You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.
Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil:
“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”
I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there.
The issue today is Iran and, more precisely, what President Barack Obama will make of Netanyahu’s prescription that, the economy aside, Obama’s great mission is “preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” — an eventuality newly inscribed on Israeli calendars as “months” away.
I’ll return to the ever shifting nuclear doomsday in a moment, but first that Netanyahu interview.
This “messianic apocalyptic cult” in Tehran is, of course, the very same one with which Israel did business during the 1980’s, when its interest was in weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That business — including sales of weapons and technology — was an extension of Israeli policy toward Iran under the shah.
It’s also the same “messianic apocalyptic cult” that has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to “the axis of evil,” and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars.
I don’t buy the view that, as Netanyahu told Goldberg, Iran is “a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest.” Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.
Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is “a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” Huh?
On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran’s “composite leadership” has “elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world.” No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan.
Israel’s nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course.
Netanyahu also makes the grotesque claim that the terrible loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war (started by Iraq) “didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness.” It did just that, which is why Iran’s younger generation seeks reform but not upheaval; and why the country as a whole prizes stability over military adventure.
Arab states, Netanyahu suggests, “fervently hope” that America will, if necessary, use “military power” to stop Iran going nuclear. My recent conversations, including with senior Saudi officials, suggest that’s wrong and the longstanding Israeli attempt to convince Arab states that Iran, not Israel, is their true enemy will fail again.
What’s going on here? Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem’s favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war.
A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that’s a discussion for another day.
What’s critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu’s fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time. The president should read Trita Parsi’s excellent “Treacherous Alliance” as preparation.
The core strategic shift of Obama’s presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.
That’s unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu’s intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails.
The only way to stop Iran going nuclear, and encourage reform of a repressive regime, is to get to the negotiating table. There’s time. Those “months” are still a couple of years. What Iran has accumulated is low-enriched uranium. You need highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. That’s a leap.
Israeli hegemony is proving a kind of slavery. Passage to the Promised Land involves rethinking the Middle East, starting in Iran.
The New York Times
March 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran, the Jews and Germany
By ROGER COHEN
So a Jerusalem Post article says that I’m “hardly the first American to be misled by the existence of synagogues in totalitarian countries.”
The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg finds me “particularly credulous,” taken in by the Iranian hospitality and friendliness that “are the hallmarks of most Muslim societies.” (Thanks for that info, Jeffrey.)
A conservative Web site called American Thinker, which tries to prove its name is an oxymoron, believes I would have been fooled by the Nazis’ sham at the Theresienstadt camp.
The New York Times
March 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran, the Jews and Germany
By ROGER COHEN
So a Jerusalem Post article says that I’m “hardly the first American to be misled by the existence of synagogues in totalitarian countries.”
The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg finds me “particularly credulous,” taken in by the Iranian hospitality and friendliness that “are the hallmarks of most Muslim societies.” (Thanks for that info, Jeffrey.)
A conservative Web site called American Thinker, which tries to prove its name is an oxymoron, believes I would have been fooled by the Nazis’ sham at the Theresienstadt camp.
The indignation stems from my recent column on Iranian Jews, which said that the 25,000-strong community worships in relative tranquillity; that Persian Jews have fared better than Arab Jews; that hostility toward Jews in Iran has on occasion led to trumped-up charges against them; and that those enamored of the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran regard any compromise with it as a rerun of Munich 1938.
This last point found confirmation in outraged correspondence from several American Jews unable to resist some analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany. I was based in Berlin for three years; Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust inhabited me. Let’s be clear: Iran’s Islamic Republic is no Third Reich redux. Nor is it a totalitarian state.
Munich allowed Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries.
Totalitarian regimes require the complete subservience of the individual to the state and tolerate only one party to which all institutions are subordinated. Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it’s far from meeting these criteria. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable.
Most of Iran’s population is under 30; it’s an Internet-connected generation. Access to satellite television is widespread. The BBC’s new Farsi service is all the rage.
Abdullah Momeni, a student opponent of the regime, told me, “The Internet is very important to us; in fact, it is of infinite importance.” Iranians are not cut off, like Cubans or North Koreans.
The June presidential election pitting the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Mohammad Khatami (a former president who once spoke in a synagogue) will be a genuine contest as compared with the charades that pass for elections in many Arab states. No fire has burned the Majlis, or parliament, down.
If you’re thinking trains-on-time Fascist efficiency, think again. Tehran’s new telecommunications tower took 20 years to build. I was told its restaurant would open “soon.” So, it is said, will the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a project in the works for a mere 30 years. A Persian Chernobyl is more likely than some Middle Eastern nuclear Armageddon, if that’s any comfort.
For all the morality police inspecting whether women are wearing boots outside their pants (the latest no-no on the dress front) and the regime zealots of the Basiji militia, the air you breathe in Iran is not suffocating. Its streets at dusk hum with life — not a monochrome male-only form of it, or one inhabited by fear — but the vibrancy of a changing, highly educated society.
This is the Iran of subtle shades that the country’s Jews inhabit. Life is more difficult for them than for Muslims, but to suggest they inhabit a totalitarian hell is self-serving nonsense.
One Iranian exile, no lover of the Islamic Republic, wrote to me saying that my account of Iran’s Jews had brought “tears to my eyes” because “you are saying what many of us would like to hear.”
Far from the cradle of Middle Eastern Islamist zealotry, she suggested, “Iran — the supposed enemy — is the one society that has gone through its extremist fervor and is coming out the other end. It is relatively stable and socially dynamic. As my father, who continues to live there, says, ‘It is the least undemocratic country in the region outside Israel.’ ”
This notion of a “post-fervor” Iran is significant. The compromises being painfully fought out between Islam and democracy in Tehran are of seminal importance. They belie the notion of a fanatical power; they explain Jewish life.
That does not mean fanaticism does not exist or that terrible crimes have not been committed, like the Iran-backed bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires 15 years ago.
But the equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic. Hamas and Hezbollah have evolved into broad political movements widely seen as resisting an Israel over-ready to use crushing force. It is essential to think again about them, just as it is essential to toss out Iran caricatures.
I return to this subject because behind the Jewish issue in Iran lies a critical one — the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens, with a sometimes disastrous chain of results.
It’s worth recalling that hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s race-baiting anti-Arab firebrand, may find a place in a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. He should not.
Nor should racist demagoguery — wherever — prompt facile allusions to the murderous Nazi master of it.
29. Januar 2009
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
* Der Autor ist Referent in der Staatskanzlei des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen und Lehrbeauftragter am Institut für politische Wissenschaft und Soziologie der Universität Bonn. Der Beitrag gibt seine persönliche Meinung wieder.
Die neuen Stellvertreterkriege
Russland rüstet gemeinsam mit China die Gegner des Westens auf
Russlands wirtschaftliche und militärische Schwäche im Vergleich zu Amerika schafft Probleme. Eine direkte Konfrontation ist nicht ratsam, deshalb rüsten Moskau und Peking die Gegner des Westens auf. Damit wird Geld verdient und werden strategische Ziele erreicht.
Von Thomas Speckmann*
29. Januar 2009
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
* Der Autor ist Referent in der Staatskanzlei des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen und Lehrbeauftragter am Institut für politische Wissenschaft und Soziologie der Universität Bonn. Der Beitrag gibt seine persönliche Meinung wieder.
Die neuen Stellvertreterkriege
Russland rüstet gemeinsam mit China die Gegner des Westens auf
Russlands wirtschaftliche und militärische Schwäche im Vergleich zu Amerika schafft Probleme. Eine direkte Konfrontation ist nicht ratsam, deshalb rüsten Moskau und Peking die Gegner des Westens auf. Damit wird Geld verdient und werden strategische Ziele erreicht.
Von Thomas Speckmann*
Als im August 2008 für fünf Tage Krieg in Georgien tobte, da begann sogleich die Suche nach einem Begriff für diesen Typ von Waffengang. Erlebt der klassische Krieg zwischen Staaten eine Renaissance? Wird der «neue kalte Krieg» zu einem heissen? Steht die Welt vor einer Serie von kleinen lokalen Kriegen zwischen Ost und West? Moskaus Feldzug gegen Tiflis weckte derlei Vermutungen. Doch sie spiegeln nicht die Wirklichkeit. Russland ist militärisch wie ökonomisch viel zu schwach, um ein direktes Kräftemessen mit den Vereinigten Staaten zu wagen.
Schwächen im Georgien-Feldzug
Das hat nicht zuletzt der russische Einmarsch in Georgien gezeigt: Russlands Börsenindex fiel um 13 Prozent. Ausländische Investoren zogen mehr als 20 Milliarden Dollar vom russischen Finanzmarkt ab. Auch Russlands Armee offenbarte Schwächen. Nach überraschend hohen Verlusten in den ersten Kriegstagen gelang ihr der Sieg auf dem Schlachtfeld vor allem durch die erdrückende Übermacht an Mensch und Material. Moskaus vollmundige Ankündigungen einer verstärkten Aufrüstung wirken da wie Trotzreaktionen.
Dem russischen Militär stehen 2009 rund 35 Milliarden Dollar zur Verfügung – dem Pentagon 612 Milliarden. Ein neues Wettrüsten mit der Nato kann sich der Kreml nicht leisten. Das gilt spätestens seit der internationalen Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise. Ohnehin von gravierenden Problemen in der Infrastruktur, von einem dramatischen Rückgang der Bevölkerung und niedriger Lebenserwartung geplagt, zeigt sich Russland besonders hart von der globalen Rezession und dem Preisverfall bei Erdöl und Erdgas getroffen. Glaubte sich der Kreml zu Zeiten der Sowjetunion ein Militärbudget von bis zu einem Viertel des Bruttoinlandprodukts leisten zu können, so waren es in Putins Präsidentschaft weniger als 3 Prozent. Bis auf Tartus in Syrien sind alle Stützpunkte ausserhalb Russlands geschlossen worden. Selten war die Schere zwischen Moskaus imperialem Anspruch und der realpolitischen Wirklichkeit grösser.
Nun soll die noch 2 Millionen Mann umfassende Armee weiter schrumpfen. Allein im ersten Quartal 2009 sollen über 200 000 militärische und zivile Stellen wegfallen. Bis 2012 soll die Truppe personell fast halbiert sein. Auch das Raketenarsenal soll bis 2020 um 30 Prozent verringert werden. Eine Streitmacht von gut einer Million Mann mit mobilen, schlagkräftigen Brigaden ist das Ziel.
Droht dem Westen also in naher Zukunft neue Gefahr aus Moskau? Es mag auf den ersten Blick paradox klingen: Gerade weil Russland derzeit nicht in der Lage ist, den USA militärisch und wirtschaftlich auf Augenhöhe zu begegnen, bereitet der Kreml dem Weissen Haus zunehmend Probleme. Denn für Moskau erscheint es politisch wie ökonomisch lukrativer denn je, Washington indirekt zu treffen. Russland rüstet systematisch die Gegner der amerikanischen Verbündeten auf. Eine Renaissance der Stellvertreterkriege ist die Folge: Im Kaukasus hängen Südossetien und Abchasien am Tropf russischer Waffenlieferungen. Bereits vor Moskaus August-Feldzug beschossen südossetische Milizen georgische Dörfer mit schwerer Artillerie, die sie nur vom Kreml erhalten haben konnten.
Iran als Kunde
Ein ähnliches Bild entfaltet sich derweil im Nahen Osten. Iran wird von Russland bewaffnet. Teherans Raketen- und Atomprogramme wären ohne russische Hilfe nicht denkbar. Bereits Ende der neunziger Jahre hat Iran zahlreiche Atom- und Raketenexperten aus Russland angeworben. Wiederholt wurden russische Firmen von den USA mit Sanktionen belegt, da sie den Kernwaffensperrvertrag unterliefen. Mit dem Bau des Atomkraftwerks Bushehr am Persischen Golf, an dem Moskau in den letzten Jahren mit bis zu 2500 russischen Arbeitern und Ingenieuren massgeblich beteiligt war, gelangt Teheran in den Besitz moderner Atomtechnologie. Zusätzlich zur Fertigstellung des Kernreaktors, der im Jahr 2009 ans Netz gehen soll, bildet Russland rund 500 iranische Atomwissenschafter und Techniker aus.
Für Moskau ist das Engagement in Iran ein lukratives Geschäft: Das eine Milliarde Dollar teure Bauprojekt in Bushehr hat der russischen Atomindustrie als erster Auslandsauftrag nach dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion die Existenz gesichert. Anschlussverträge für weitere sechs Reaktoren und für Uranlieferungen in gewaltigen Mengen stehen in Aussicht. Von Aufträgen in zweistelliger Milliarden-Dollar-Höhe ist die Rede. Dabei scheint sich der Kreml vollkommen bewusst, welche Konsequenzen Irans atomare Aufrüstung hat. Bereits Präsident Jelzin gab nach der Unterzeichnung des Bushehr-Vertrages 1995 zu, dass das Abkommen sowohl Elemente friedlicher wie militärischer Nutzung enthalte.
Um die iranischen Atomanlagen vor etwaigen Luftangriffen Israels oder der USA zu schützen, haben Moskau und Teheran im Dezember 2005 die Lieferung von 29 Boden-Luft-Raketen-Systemen des Typs TOR-M1 für 1,4 Milliarden Dollar vereinbart. Damit hat Russland das sogenannte «Tschernomyrdin-Gore-Abkommen» von 1995 aufgekündigt, nach dem Moskau auf Waffenlieferungen an Teheran verzichtet und dafür mit amerikanischen Finanzhilfen für die eigene Atomwirtschaft entschädigt wird. Indes ist die Auslieferung der russischen Raketen an Iran abgeschlossen. Auch die Bedienungsmannschaften stehen bereit. Schon im Dezember 2006 hat eine Gruppe iranischer Soldaten ihren Schulungslehrgang in Russland beendet.
Derzeit wird ferner über die Lieferung von fünf russischen Flugabwehrsystemen vom Typ S-300 verhandelt. Mit einer Reichweite von 200 Kilometern, einer Flughöhe von bis zu 27 Kilometern und der Fähigkeit, gleichzeitig bis zu hundert Flugzeuge oder Raketen zu erfassen und zwölf von ihnen zu bekämpfen, würde diese Waffe das Kräfteverhältnis am Golf entscheidend zugunsten Teherans verlagern. Denn selbst für die Hightech-Luftwaffen Israels und der USA wäre die S-300 ein ernstzunehmender Gegner. Auch an diesem System sollen bereits Iraner in Russland ausgebildet worden sein. Damit hat sich Iran als Kunde für russische Waffen hinter China und Indien auf den dritten Platz vorgeschoben und beflügelt erheblich Moskaus Waffenexport.
Hizbullah und Hamas
Ende Dezember 2008 hat Russland nach Meldungen einheimischer Medien mit der Lieferung von 200 Boden-Luft-Raketen im Gesamtwert von 250 Millionen Dollar an weitere sieben Staaten begonnen. Unter ihnen befinden sich neben Venezuela, Libyen und Ägypten auch Syrien, das im August 2008 Verständnis zeigte für die russische Invasion Georgiens und die Militärbeziehungen mit Russland ausbaut – eine Stationierung russischer Raketen auf syrischem Territorium nicht ausgeschlossen. Damaskus kauft seit 2005 moderne Luft- und Panzerabwehrwaffen in Moskau und betätigt sich zugleich als Drehscheibe für iranische Waffenlieferungen russischer Produktion an den Hizbullah.
Im Libanonkrieg 2006 wurden fünfzig schwere «Merkava»-Kampfpanzer der israelischen Armee von modernen Panzerabwehrwaffen zerstört oder beschädigt. Dabei kamen 30 Soldaten um, mehr als 100 wurden verletzt. Nach einer von Israels Generalstab in Auftrag gegebenen Analyse hatte Teheran in Russland entwickelte und gebaute Panzerabwehrraketen vom Typ AT-13 Metis-M an den Hizbullah geliefert. Neuerdings soll er auch über russische schultergestützte Flugabwehrraketen des Typs SA-18 verfügen. Mitte Dezember 2008 hat überdies Libanon als Heimatland des Hizbullah bekanntgegeben, man wolle zehn moderne MiG-29-Kampfflugzeuge von Moskau beziehen.
Bereits im April 2006 hatte der Kreml auch der Hamas direkte Finanzhilfen zugesagt. Präsident Putin stilisierte Russland zur Schutzmacht der Muslime, um wieder eine führende Rolle in der Weltpolitik spielen zu können. Ist es da Zufall, dass bei den jüngsten Kämpfen auf Seiten der Hamas Waffensysteme aus dem Kalten Krieg auftauchen, die über Ägypten in den Gazastreifen geschmuggelt werden? Auf Israel werden unter anderem Flugkörper vom Typ BM-21 Grad («Hagel») mit einer Reichweite von bis zu 30 Kilometern abgefeuert – eine Rakete, die ursprünglich die Sowjetunion in den sechziger Jahren entwickelt hatte und die heute in Iran unter dem Namen «Arash» produziert und weiterentwickelt wird.
Russische Unternehmen und Wissenschafter sind auch erheblich in das ambitionierte Programm zur Entwicklung ballistischer Raketen in Iran involviert, das unter den Gesichtspunkten der militärischen Effizienz wie der politischen Symbolwirkung nur dann als sinnvoll gilt, wenn zu ihrer Bestückung ABC-Sprengköpfe zur Verfügung stehen, wobei Kernwaffen allein aus technischen Gründen eindeutig am attraktivsten sind. Während es sich bei der iranischen Mittelstreckenrakete vom Typ Shahab III («Sternschnuppe») um eine Eigenentwicklung auf Basis der nordkoreanischen Nodong-1 handelt, orientiert sich die Konstruktion des Flugkörpers mit der Projektbezeichnung Shahab IV stark an der einstigen sowjetischen Mittelstreckenrakete SS-4. Entsprechend gross ist die Beteiligung russischer Experten an dem iranischen Versuch, die Technologie dieses Flugkörpers mit einer Reichweite von etwa 2000 Kilometern wiederzuverwenden.
Munition für die Taliban
Nachdem es Ende der neunziger Jahre so geschienen hatte, als sei es den Vereinigten Staaten gelungen, durch politischen Druck sowie Sanktionen gegen Firmen die russische Unterstützung für das iranische Raketenprogramm deutlich zu verringern, berichteten amerikanische Nachrichtendienste in den vergangenen Jahren, dass erneut Russland zusammen mit China und Nordkorea zu den wichtigsten Helfern bei der Entwicklung von Flugkörpern in Iran gehöre. Wie weit die iranische Technologie inzwischen gereift ist, zeigte im August 2008 der erstmalige Test einer mehrstufigen Trägerrakete vom Typ Safir («Botschafter»), die als bedeutender Schritt zur Entwicklung von atomaren Langstreckenraketen angesehen wird. Bereits 2005 hatte Teheran, das auch ein eigenes Raumfahrtprogramm betreibt, mit Hilfe Moskaus einen kommerziellen Satelliten ins All geschossen; 2008 folgte ein iranischer Forschungssatellit an Bord einer chinesischen Rakete.
Obwohl Russland offiziell mit dem Westen in Irans Nachbarland Afghanistan kooperiert und seit November 2008 Deutschland erlaubt, seine Truppen am Hindukusch nicht nur auf dem Luftweg, sondern auch per Bahn über russisches Territorium mit Nachschub zu versorgen, mehren sich die Berichte über ein doppeltes Spiel Moskaus. Kommandanten der Taliban rühmen sich, von Russland und China gegen die Nato-Truppen munitioniert zu werden. Motive dafür dürfte es in Moskau und Peking genügend geben, allen Beteuerungen eines gemeinsamen Kampfes gegen den islamistischen Terrorismus zum Trotz.
Russische Hardliner glauben ohnehin, in Afghanistan noch eine Rechnung mit den USA aus dem Kalten Krieg offen zu haben, als nicht zuletzt amerikanische Waffenlieferungen für den afghanischen Widerstand die sowjetischen Besetzer schliesslich zum Abzug zwangen. Auch Peking verdächtigt das Weisse Haus, in Zentralasien Ziele zu verfolgen, die sich gegen China richten.
Moskau rüstet gleichfalls im südlichen Amerika die Gegner der Vereinigten Staaten auf. Venezuela ist zum grössten Kunden von russischen Waffen in Lateinamerika geworden und hat seit 2005 Rüstungsgüter im Wert von 6,7 Milliarden Dollar in Russland erworben: 24 Suchoi-MK2-Jagdbomber, 50 Helikopter der Typen Mi-26, Mi-35 und Mi-17, Panzer, Radargeräte und 100 000 Kalaschnikow-AK-103-Sturmgewehre. Waffengeschäfte im Wert von weiteren 2,5 Milliarden Dollar sind vereinbart, darunter MiG-29-Jagdflugzeuge. Auch ein Atomkraftwerk soll mit russischer Hilfe gebaut werden.
Venezuela, Nicaragua, Kuba
Zur Bekräftigung der «strategischen Partnerschaft» zwischen Russland und Venezuela landeten im September 2008 zwei strategische TU-160-Bomber der russischen Luftwaffe zu Trainingsflügen auf der venezolanischen Luftwaffenbasis Libertador rund hundert Kilometer westlich der Hauptstadt Caracas. Anfang Dezember 2008 fanden erste gemeinsame Flottenmanöver in der Karibik statt. Das zentralamerikanische Nicaragua hat sich sogar bereitgefunden, die von Georgien abtrünnigen Provinzen Abchasien und Südossetien als eigenständige Staaten anzuerkennen. Kuba ist als erneuter Stationierungsort oder Auftankplatz für russische Kampfflugzeuge im Gespräch.
Russlands unabhängiger Verbündeter in seinen neuen Stellvertreterkonflikten gegen den Westen ist China. Zwar investiert Peking sowohl absolut als auch relativ noch stärker als Moskau in die Modernisierung seiner Armee und baut vor allem sein atomares Arsenal und seine Marine aus, die nun mit ihrem Anti-Piraterie-Einsatz vor der Küste Somalias zum ersten Mal seit dem 15. Jahrhundert mit einem nennenswerten Flottenverband in Übersee operiert und damit einen historischen Strategiewechsel der Volksrepublik vollzieht. Aber wie Russland kann und will sich China derzeit nicht auf eine direkte Konfrontation mit den technisch weiterhin überlegenen USA einlassen. Daher verkauft auch Peking stattdessen Waffen an die Gegner der amerikanischen und europäischen Alliierten.
So gelang es dem Hizbullah im Sommer 2006, eine israelische Korvette vor der libanesischen Küste mit einer Anti-Schiff-Rakete schwer zu beschädigen, wobei vier israelische Seeleute ums Leben kamen. Der Marschflugkörper des iranischen Typs C-802 war eine ursprünglich chinesische Entwicklung namens Ying-Ji-802. Aus Peking soll Teheran rund 75 dieser Raketen erhalten haben, die mit einer geschätzten Treffsicherheit von bis zu 98 Prozent zu den gefährlichsten Anti-Schiff-Waffen der Welt zählen. Entlang der libanesischen Küste soll der Hizbullah allmählich rund tausend C-802-Marschflugkörper stationiert haben.
Auch das geheime Nuklearwaffenprogramm Irans unterstützt China seit Anfang der neunziger Jahre. Peking lieferte 1991 mit fast zwei Tonnen Uran den Grundstock für die iranische Atombombe. Die Anleitung zum Bau von Zentrifugen für die Anreicherung waffenfähigen Urans ergänzte der pakistanische Atomschmuggler Khan. Jüngste Prognosen gehen davon aus, dass Teheran ab Mitte 2009 einen Atomtest durchführen könnte. Pläne eines nuklearen Sprengkopfs für die iranische Shahab III wurden bereits 2004 in der Schweiz sichergestellt.
Indien, Pakistan, Afrika
Chinas militärischer Aussenhandel gerät mehr und mehr ins Visier der Vereinigten Staaten. Während Peking scharf gegen Washingtons jüngste Waffengeschäfte mit Taiwan protestiert, profiliert sich die Volksrepublik als Atom- und Raketenhändler auf dem globalen Markt. Unter den Kunden befinden sich neben Iran und Nordkorea auch die nuklearen Wettrüster Indien und Pakistan. Bereits 2003 sind in Libyen chinesische Baupläne für Kernwaffen aufgetaucht. Daher lehnte die amerikanische Regierung wiederholt die Forderung der Volksrepublik ab, Sanktionen gegen Chinas Staatsunternehmen aufzuheben, denen von Washington vorgeworfen wird, das Waffenembargo der USA gegen Iran zu unterlaufen.
In Afrika beliefert Peking ebenfalls die Gegner des Westens: Wiederholt sind Kampfflugzeuge vom Typ A5 Fantan, Lastwagen und Flugabwehrsysteme chinesischer Produktion auf Seiten der sudanesischen Regierungstruppen in Süddarfur gesichtet worden; auch Piloten werden von China ausgebildet. Weitere Waffenlieferungen gehen nach Berichten von Menschenrechtsgruppen an die regierungsnahen Janjawid-Milizen, die für schwere Menschenrechtsverstösse verantwortlich gemacht werden. Mitte November 2008 bestätigte die sudanesische Regierung zudem den Kauf von 12 MiG-29-Kampfflugzeugen in Russland. Damit verletzen Moskau und Peking nicht nur das Waffenembargo der Vereinten Nationen gegen den Sudan, sondern untergraben auch die Bemühungen des Westens im Uno-Sicherheitsrat, dem Massenmord in Darfur ein Ende zu setzen.
In dem erfolgreichen Einsatz ihrer Waffen sehen Russland und China die beste Werbung für die Qualität ihrer Systeme und hoffen auf neue Absatzmärkte in naher Zukunft. Mit ihrer weltweiten Parteinahme für die Gegner der Amerikaner und der Europäer positionieren sich Moskau und Peking als Konkurrenten um Einflusszonen. Als Vetomacht im Uno-Sicherheitsrat sperrt sich Russland nicht allein gegen weitreichende Sanktionen wegen Irans Nuklearprogramm. Moskau und Teheran haben auch eine strategische Partnerschaft geschlossen, um den USA und der EU den Zugang zum Kaspischen Meer zu versperren. Die Energieressourcen der Region wollen sich Russland und Iran alleine aufteilen. Im Kreml gilt die Islamische Republik als Schlüsselmacht, um den Einfluss der Amerikaner und der Europäer in Zentralasien und im Mittleren Osten einzudämmen.
* Der Autor ist Referent in der Staatskanzlei des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen und Lehrbeauftragter am Institut für politische Wissenschaft und Soziologie der Universität Bonn. Der Beitrag gibt seine persönliche Meinung wieder.
Vanity Fair Feb Issue 2009:
Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House
The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.
A very long article: to print it out click on that link:
Printable version
Vanity Fair:
Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House
The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.
by Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum February 2009
With assistance from Philippe Sands.
January 20, 2001 After a disputed election and bitter recount battle in Florida whose outcome is effectively decided by the Supreme Court, George W. Bush is sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. In foreign affairs he promises an approach that will depart from the perceived adventurism of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in places such as Kosovo and Somalia. (“I think the United States must be humble,” Bush said in a debate with his opponent, Al Gore.) In domestic affairs Bush pledges to cut taxes and improve education. He promises to govern as a “compassionate conservative” and to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He comes into office with a $237 billion budget surplus.
On the day of the inauguration the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, declares a moratorium on the Clinton administration’s last-minute regulations on the environment, food safety, and health. This action is followed in the coming months by disengagement from the International Criminal Court and other international efforts. Nonetheless, the early presumption is that the administration’s affairs are in steady hands, though some disquieting signs are noted.
In the Oval Office on January 20 the first President Bush and the new President Bush greet each other with the words “Mr. President.”
Illustration by Risko
Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: It was a bitterly cold day. They got back to the residence from the inauguration. The president was going over to have his first moment in the Oval Office as president of the United States. And he called for his father because he wanted his father to be there when it happened. If I recall correctly, George H. W. Bush was soaking in the tub trying to warm up, because it had been so cold on the viewing stand. Not only did the former president quickly get out of the tub, but he put his suit back on, because he was not going to enter the Oval Office without a suit. His hair was still kind of wet.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, were seen as indications that the young president, who was not used to the outside world, who didn’t travel very much, who didn’t seem to be very experienced, would be embedded into these Bush 41 guys. Their foreign-policy skills were extremely good and strongly admired. So we were not very concerned. Of course, there was this strange thing with these “neocons,” but every party has its fringes. It was not very alarming.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be “the dream team.” It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.
He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: We had a couple of meetings with the president, and there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. With the cyber-security meeting, he seemed—I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. It was as though he wanted these experts, these White House staff guys who had been around for a long time before he got there—didn’t want them buying the rumor that he wasn’t too bright. He was trying—sort of overly trying—to show that he could ask good questions, and kind of yukking it up with Cheney.
The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?
March 6, 2001 Secretary of State Colin Powell tells reporters that the United States intends to “engage with North Korea to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off.” The next day, Powell is forced by the administration to backpedal. Other early administration actions—abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty, abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change—signal that America’s way of doing business has changed. In time, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld will characterize traditional U.S. allies as “old Europe.”
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: During the Kosovo war we had developed a format which was, I think, one of the cheapest models for policy coordinating in the interests of the U.S. [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright was in the driver’s seat, and the four European foreign ministers discussed with her on a daily basis how the war develops and so on. This was U.K., France, Italy, and Germany, together with the U.S., on the phone. We continued after the war, not every day, but this was the format, to discuss problems and understand the positions. And suddenly it stopped. We had very, very few—I don’t know, two or three times. Only for a very short period when Colin came in, and then it stopped, because the new administration was not interested any longer in a multilateral coordination.
Bill Graham, Canada’s foreign minister and later defense minister: My experience with Mr. Rumsfeld was: obviously an extremely intelligent person, with a lot of experience. But compared to Colin he was cold in terms of his personal relationships. He could have a sense of humor. I remember being at the famous Munich Security Conference that takes place every year. And I think Sergei Ivanov, who was the Russian defense minister at the time, went after him about some issue, and how the Americans had altered their position.
And Rumsfeld’s answer was “Well, that was the old Rumsfeld, and I am now the new Rumsfeld.” And of course it brought a great laugh. But he was terribly determined to have his way; there was no question about that.
One of his shticks—if I can call it that—at the nato meetings was always about caveats. He would pronounce the word “caveat” the way you and I might speak of some sort of sexual deviation. You know, people who had “caveats” were really evil, bad people.
Some caveats are not about an unwillingness to fight; some are about fundamental constraints on what you can do as a country. But Mr. Rumsfeld was not about listening and being cooperative. Mr. Rumsfeld was about getting the way of the United States, and don’t get in my way or my juggernaut will run over you.
May 16, 2001 A task force assembled and led by Vice President Dick Cheney unveils a blueprint for the administration’s energy program. The report, “National Energy Policy,” which had been in the works since shortly after the inauguration, calls for increased drilling for oil and more nuclear power. The energy task force becomes an immediate focus of controversy—and lawsuits—because its records and the list of advisers, mainly representatives of the oil and gas industries, are never divulged by the White House. The administration’s environmental policy is heavily politicized from the outset.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: Christine Todd Whitman, the E.P.A. administrator, was one of several people in the Cabinet, along with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who strongly supported a proactive position on climate change. And she was, I think, in Europe telling European governments that the U.S. position was to regulate carbon dioxide. And when she got back home, she had an interaction with the president in which she was very brusquely told that that was off the table. The turning point, essentially, was that Cheney grabbed hold of this issue and took down the whole notion of regulating CO2.
George W. Bush: “He always gets asked, Have you changed?,” says Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to President Bush, “and he instinctively recoils at that kind of question.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
May 24, 2001 Vermont senator Jim Jeffords, a Republican, changes party, and control of the Senate shifts to the Democrats, making Tom Daschle the Senate majority leader and testing the administration’s public face of bipartisanship.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: I went to a communications meeting the day after Jeffords switched. I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality-game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement, and staggering ignorance.
Someone made the suggestion that perhaps the president should call the new majority leader. And it’s like, Well, I’m not sure that’s really necessary. Margaret Tutwiler [assistant to the president and special adviser for communications] was there, and I remember her sitting at the head of the table, her eyes just sort of wide, and she sort of lost it. She’s like, Are you fricking kidding me? She goes, The president of the United States calls the new majority leader. The president of the United States calls the new minority leader, right? The president does these things because, you know, these things have to be done.
And, you know, people around the table—Karl [Rove], Karen [Hughes]—all these people were like, Oh, well, do we have to? It was like an absolutely serious debate.
Noelia Rodriguez, press secretary to Laura Bush: In the first weeks after he took office, I was in those daily communications meetings, and the conversation I remember one morning turned to, you know, Tom Daschle was going to be coming to the White House—should we allow him to come in the door of the West Wing entrance, while the camera’s on, or should he come in on the side, so that cameras won’t see him? And I’m thinking, You know, the president should go out there and greet him just like he would if he was coming to his own house—which, by the way, it is. But they ended up having him come in on the side.
Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to George W. Bush: My view is that civility was a heartfelt, well-intended objective that went right off the rails the day of the recount. The recount poisoned the well from the beginning. A good number of people in this country didn’t believe Bush was a legitimate president. And you can’t change the tone under those circumstances. There was a genuine effort, and I think there was some early success with Ted Kennedy and the education stuff. But it was acrimonious from the beginning.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: There is a toxic nature to Washington that thrives on food fights and thrives on controversy and thrives on people not getting along. But I don’t think that’s the biggest part of the problem. It’s like the old argument of: somebody’s thrown in jail, and then they blame it on their environment. You’ve got to bear some accountability, even in a bad environment, for having a strength of will and a capacity to bring diverse opinion and not be bubbled in. We too easily say, Blame it on the Washington culture. Well, Washington is made up of people. It’s not like there’s this, like—you know, it’s not like some Star Trek episode where some room made me do it.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: After the recount, the disputed election, a lot of people said you needed to start to trim your sails: What are you going to cut back on as a way to show outreach to the other party? The president rejected that line of thinking, making the case that mandates are created by presidents with ideas, and he was going to follow through on the ideas that he ran on.
May 26, 2001 With big bipartisan majorities, Congress passes Bush’s $1.35 trillion package of tax cuts, the centerpiece of the administration’s economic program. The tax cuts are skewed heavily toward the affluent. Those making $1 million a year receive an average tax cut of $53,000. Those making $20,000 a year receive an average tax cut of $375. A second round of tax cuts will be enacted in 2003. By 2004 the budget deficit will exceed $400 billion.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: When Bush announced his “compassionate conservatism” [during the 2000 campaign], Elizabeth Dole’s communications director mocked him. He goes, Oh, that’s a great thing if you want to be president of the Red Cross, right? And that man was Ari Fleischer. Those are the people that ended up populating the White House. When the president’s tax package first came through Congress and first came through the Senate Finance Committee, his promise to have a tax cut for charitable giving for people who don’t itemize their tax deductions wasn’t even in the plan. [Senator] Charles Grassley looked at this and went, Oh, gosh, there must have been some oversight. And he was the one who inserted it into the tax plan. And the White House is the one that pulled it out.
June 16, 2001 During a five-day foreign tour Bush meets with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia. After the meeting, in Slovenia, Bush declares, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” By all accounts, including his own, Bush puts great stock in the primacy of personal relationships.
Noelia Rodriguez: I wish that more people could have seen the president the way I experienced him. Even if you don’t agree with him or respect his opinions or his decisions—strip that away, if you’re able to—he is a caring human being.
I brought my mom to the White House, to get a tour the day before Thanksgiving. The president came in and greeted her—it was a total surprise. And on the spot he invited us to go to Camp David for Thanksgiving. Of course, we went, and it was Disneyland for adults. We went to chapel services before dinner. I remember we got there early. A few minutes later the president walks in with Mrs. Bush and the family, and you could see him looking around, and he sees my mom in the distance, and he literally shouts at her from across the chapel, “Grace, come sit over here with me.” And at dinner, again, he sees her, and he says, “Grace, you’re going to sit over here next to me.” And he tilted the chair against the table so that nobody would take her place.
Ed Gillespie, campaign strategist and later counselor to the president: Picking up the phone, calling people who are visiting an ailing father in the hospital, personal notes to people whose child just had surgery. Things big and small. It’s hard to describe it all, but they are the kinds of things that do inspire great loyalty—and that’s not why he does it, by the way.
August 6, 2001 While vacationing at his ranch, in Crawford, Texas, Bush is given a Presidential Daily Briefing memorandum whose headline warns that the al-Qaeda terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden, is “determined to strike in U.S.” After being briefed on the document by a C.I.A. analyst, Bush responds, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: We went into a period in June where the tempo of intelligence about an impending large-scale attack went up a lot, to the kind of cycle that we’d only seen once or twice before. And we told Condi that. She didn’t do anything. She said, Well, make sure you’re coordinating with the agencies, which, of course, I was doing. By August, I was saying to Condi and to the agencies that the intelligence isn’t coming in at such a rapid rate anymore as it was in the June-July time frame. But that doesn’t mean the attack isn’t going to happen. It just means that they may be in place.
On September 4, we had a principals meeting. The most telling thing for me about the attitude of these people was on the decision that had been pending for a long time to resume Predator [remote-controlled drone] flights over Afghanistan, and to now do what we couldn’t have done in the Clinton administration because the technology wasn’t ready: put a weapon on the Predator and use it as not only a hunter but a killer.
We had seen bin Laden when we had it in the Clinton administration, as just a hunter. We had seen him. So we thought, Man, if we could get this with a hunter-killer, we could see him again and kill him. So finally we have a principals meeting and the C.I.A. says it’s not our job to fly the Predator armed. And D.O.D. says it’s not our job to fly an unarmed aircraft.
Dick Cheney: “We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41,” says Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister. “So we were not very concerned.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
I just couldn’t believe it. This is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of C.I.A. sitting there, both passing the football because neither one of them wanted to go kill bin Laden.
August 9, 2001 Bush issues a directive that permits federal funding for research on stem cells from human embryos—but only on the 60 stem-cell lines already in existence. That evening, he gives the first nationally televised speech of his presidency, explaining his decision. Five years later, Bush will use his veto power for the first time to kill legislation that would permit broader federal funding for stem-cell research. In the late summer of 2001, stem-cell research is the most contentious political question facing the nation.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: I had done a poll that finished the morning of 9/11. I was going to go to Washington that day to present the findings to Karl [Rove]. The amazing thing about that is: not a single question was asked about foreign policy, terrorism, national security. In the poll I’d been sitting on, Bush’s approval I think was 51 or 52 percent. Twenty-four hours later his approvals are 90 percent.
September 11, 2001 Terrorists crash two commercial airliners into New York’s World Trade Center, bringing both buildings down with a loss of some 3,000 lives. A third aircraft crashes into the Pentagon, killing 184. A fourth aircraft, its likely destination the U.S. Capitol, is brought down by the passengers in a field in Pennsylvania. It is known quickly that the perpetrators are members of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, based in Afghanistan, but the search for a connection to Saddam Hussein and Iraq begins immediately.
Sandra Kay Daniels, second-grade teacher at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, in Sarasota, Florida, whose classroom the president was visiting when he received news of the attacks: When he came into the classroom, our principal introduced him to the children, and he shook a couple of the kids’ hands and introduced himself, tried to kind of lighten the room up a little, because the kids were in awe. They were like little soldiers, quiet and just struck by the sight of the president. And he said, Let’s get started with reading. I’m here to celebrate you—maybe not those exact words, but that was the feeling in the room.
The story was “My Pet Goat” from our reading series. And we started our lesson. And all I remember is someone walking over to him, and I knew that was totally out of character, because this was a live broadcast and nobody was supposed to move. I mean, everybody was in their position. And when I saw this man, who I now know is Andy Card, walk over to him and whisper in his ear, I could see and I felt his whole demeanor change. It’s like he left the room mentally. He wasn’t there anymore mentally.
When it was time for the kids to read with him, he didn’t pick his book up. His book was sitting on the easel, and he didn’t pick it up. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what was wrong. And I’m thinking all the time, O.K., President Bush, pick up your book, that type of thing, you know. The cameras are rolling. My kids are here. And he left us mentally. I knew I had to continue with the lesson, and I did. I’m a teacher. I’ve got eyes all around the room. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head. I see everything that goes on. And I’m thinking, O.K., he’ll join us in a minute. And he did.
Mary Matalin, assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president: My enduring memory is how calm people at the White House were, and focused on getting their job done. Right from the get-go, people were mature. That’s not the right word, but there wasn’t hand-wringing and hair on fire and Keystone Cops or anything like that. It was how you hope that any government would function. “Professional” doesn’t even scratch the surface. They were all so fully functioning and integrated in everything that they did. Everybody was confident in the other guy’s ability.
Richard Clarke: That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.
And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: The real change in the president, in my opinion, didn’t actually happen until that Friday, when he traveled to New York. The situation on Tuesday was so—you really didn’t have time to reflect. In New York, the range of emotions that he went through—standing on the rubble, the bullhorn moment, but just as important, when he sat there in that room in private and met with those people who were still trying to learn the whereabouts of their loved ones, and hugging them, and where he got the badge.
He always gets asked, Have you changed?, and he instinctively recoils at that kind of question. But when something like this happens on your watch, there’s no way it can’t change you. It can’t not change your worldview—and it obviously changed his in a way that has been controversial for a lot of people.
September 18, 2001 Envelopes containing anthrax spores are mailed to media outlets in New York and Florida. This first attack is followed by a second, aimed at government offices in Washington. All together 5 people die and 22 are infected. The administration’s initial reaction, which turns out to be wrong, is to suggest that al-Qaeda is responsible. (It knows “how to deploy and use these kind of substances, so you start to piece it all together,” Cheney explains.)
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency: Very shortly after 9/11 I was leading a briefing in the Roosevelt room about smallpox. The president was there, the vice president. Condi was there. The president didn’t ask a lot of questions. Don’t get me wrong—he did ask some questions. But the majority of the questions came from either Condi or the vice president. As the president was leaving the room, he turned to everybody and said, God help us all. We should all say very strong prayers tonight for guidance. It really stuck in my head. You’re the president of the United States basically saying, I’m going to pray tonight, and I hope all of you pray, too, because this is much bigger than all of us.
September 27, 2001 At O’Hare International Airport, Bush advises Americans on what they can do to respond to the trauma of September 11: “Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Matthew Dowd: He was given a great, great window of opportunity where everybody wanted to be called to some shared sense of purpose and sacrifice and all that, and Bush never did it. And not for lack of people suggesting various things from bonds to, you know, some sort of national service. Bush decided to say that the best thing is: Everybody go about their life, and I’ll handle it.
There’s this West Texas thing in him, which is the—you know: Bad people are comin’ to town. Everybody go back to their house. I’ll take the burden on. Which, you know, may work in a Western town, but doesn’t work for a country that wants to be part of that conversation.
Mary Matalin: There was so much to do that was more important than—I mean, looking back, the national-unity thing is important, but it was way more important to re-structure the intelligence communities, way more important to harden targets. Know what I mean? It was all hands on deck. We were working on other shit. Everyone’s pulverized and beat, and there’s 24 hours in a day, so woulda, coulda, shoulda, but, you know, there was no office to do “feel-good” stuff.
Matthew Dowd: Karl wasn’t receptive to ideas that would’ve called the country to certain things and brought them to a common purpose and a sense of shared sacrifice. Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good.
Scott McClellan, deputy White House press secretary and later press secretary: I remember Karl Rove was out there talking at some events about how we’d use 9/11, run on 9/11 in the midterms, and that it was important to do so.
October 7, 2001 American and British forces begin an aerial campaign against Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda has its base, followed weeks later by a ground invasion. The Taliban government falls and al-Qaeda is routed from some of its strongholds. One person captured is John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. His handling proves to be a harbinger. The Defense Department’s general counsel, Jim Haynes, authorizes military intelligence to “take the gloves off.”
Jesselyn Radack, ethics adviser at the Department of Justice: I was called with the specific question of whether or not the F.B.I. on the ground could interrogate [Lindh] without counsel. And I had been told unambiguously that Lindh’s parents had retained counsel for him. I gave that advice on a Friday, and the same attorney at Justice who inquired called back on Monday and said essentially, Oops, they did it anyway. They interrogated him anyway. What should we do now? My office was there to help correct mistakes. And I said, Well, this is an unethical interrogation, so you should seal it off and use it only for intelligence-gathering purposes or national security, but not for criminal prosecution.
A few weeks later, Attorney General Ashcroft held one of his dramatic press conferences, in which he announced a complaint being filed against Lindh. He was asked if Lindh had been permitted counsel. And he said, in effect, To our knowledge, the subject has not requested counsel. That was just completely false. About two weeks after that he held another press conference, because this was the first high-profile terrorism prosecution after 9/11. And in that press conference he was asked again about Lindh’s rights, and he said that Lindh’s rights had been carefully, scrupulously guarded, which, again, was contrary to the facts, and contrary to the picture that was circulating around the world of Lindh blindfolded, gagged, naked, bound to a board.
October 26, 2001 Bush signs the USA Patriot Act, which among other things gives the government far-reaching powers to conduct surveillance. In addition, Bush will issue a secret executive order authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps on American citizens and others living in the United States, bypassing the procedures mandated by Congress.
Jesselyn Radack, ethics adviser at the Department of Justice: When Ashcroft initially came on board as attorney general, he was a somewhat beleaguered person. He had just lost an election to a dead man [Mel Carnahan, his opponent in the Missouri senatorial race, who had been killed in a plane crash]. We were told that he liked to conduct things more in a top-down corporate manner, rather than with Janet Reno’s glasnost openness. The real shift came after 9/11. It wasn’t that we were sent a memo saying all the laws were out the window, but that was definitely the tone that pervaded the department.
November 1, 2001 A presidential executive order exempts presidents, vice presidents, and their designees from provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act and permits unclassified archived materials to be kept sealed in perpetuity, rather than being released after 12 years, as the law allows.
Robert Dallek, presidential biographer: I’ve testified twice before the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, protesting this executive order. Now, there are two constraints that operate in relation to all executive materials. One is that if you’re going to violate someone’s privacy you are constrained from releasing the material. A much bigger issue is one of national security, and that’s what causes years to go by before many, many documents are released. So those are the two constraints.
But broadening this—and not only in relation to the president, but in relation to the vice president—reflects, I think, the Cheney proposition that the Watergate crisis put too many limitations on executive power.
And so we now have the issue of what sort of documentary record we’re going to find. I mean, this is a separate issue, I guess, but will they have sanitized the records?
November 13, 2001 Bush issues an order declaring that accused terrorists will be tried by secret military commissions that dispense with traditional rights and protections.
John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council, and later to the secretary of state: A small group of administration lawyers drafted the president’s military order establishing the military commissions, but without the knowledge of the rest of the government, including the national-security adviser, me, the secretary of state, or even the C.I.A. director. And even though many of the substantive problems with the military commissions as created by the original order have been resolved by Congress in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hamdan case, we have been suffering from this original process failure ever since.
December 2001 Osama bin Laden and many of his followers have taken refuge in the mountains of Tora Bora, on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, where an attempt to dislodge and capture them proves unavailing. A decision by Washington has the effect of allowing bin Laden to escape into the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Illustration by Risko
Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Gary Berntsen, C.I.A. intelligence commander at Tora Bora: We knew he was there—he had fallen into the mountains with about a thousand of his followers. That’s why we threw a BLU-82 [the bomb known as a “daisy cutter”] at him. At one point we knew where he was; we allowed food and water to go in to him. And then we came in with a 15,000-pound device. Bin Laden was outside the lethal effects of that blast. I understand he was injured.
I got a message out and made my request for inclusion of what I believed was needed—800 Rangers. The army of the Eastern Alliance on the north side had blocking positions there, so al-Qaeda couldn’t get back out into Afghanistan. But I was always concerned about the Pakistani side. I explained clearly that this was our opportunity to, so to speak, kill the baby in the crib. I was very concerned about them breaking out [south] into Pakistan, because I knew, if they did that, containing this thing would be a significant problem.
Unfortunately, the decision was made at the White House to use the Pakistani frontier force. What the White House didn’t understand is that the frontier force had cooperated with the Taliban. So they used individuals who were very, very sympathetic to the Taliban to set up purported blocking positions.
December 17, 2001 Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, where Dick Cheney had been C.E.O., is awarded a 10-year omnibus contract to provide the Pentagon with support services for everything from fighting oil-well fires to building military bases to serving meals. As defense secretary under George H. W. Bush, Cheney had pushed strenuously to outsource a variety of military functions to private contractors—part of a broader effort to transfer government functions of all kinds to the private sector.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: Cheney brings this accumulation of power and ability to influence the bureaucracy to a fine art. He surpasses Kissinger even. This is all the more ironic because Cheney was the antithesis of this when he was chief of staff of the White House under Gerald Ford and when he was secretary of defense. He was very deferential. He was not trying to insinuate himself.
But he turns everything on its head and he becomes the power. And he does it through his network. This is a guy who’s an absolute genius at bureaucracy and an absolute genius at not displaying his genius at bureaucracy. He’s always quiet.
So are most of his minions, not all of them. [David] Addington [the vice president’s counsel] is brilliant, and Addington is a strange beast, and Addington is sort of the Ayman al-Zawahiri for Cheney, the brains trust. [Chief of Staff Lewis] Libby was the doer. Libby was a real bureaucrat’s dream.
January 8, 2002 Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act, which, among other things, mandates that, in return for continued access to federal funding, states must institute standardized tests to ensure that students meet educational goals. The bill, co- authored by Senator Edward Kennedy, passed with a large bipartisan majority.
Margaret Spellings, Bush’s domestic-policy adviser and later secretary of education: George Bush ran for office as a different kind of Republican and called for some things like annual measurement, accountability, closing the achievement gap—things that other Republicans hadn’t talked about. I mean, the standard Republican stock fare was Abolish the Department of Education. So he had had some equities on an issue that few Republicans previous to him had really talked about, especially on behalf of poor kids.
I’ve learned a lot from [Ted Kennedy], and I think he’s the consummate legislator. He is a person of his word. I remember the very first time that the so-called Big Four—it was Kennedy, Jeffords, John Boehner, and George Miller—met in the Oval Office to talk about how we were going to proceed. It was in the first week of the administration. At the end of the meeting—after we had agreed that we really needed to get something done, we had to close the achievement gap, I’m really serious, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, all of those sorts of things—the president, in closing the meeting, as the press was about to come in, said something like: You know, they’re going to ask us about vouchers. They’re going to—the press is going to try to find division immediately. And I am not going to talk about vouchers today. I’m going to say we talked about how we’re going to close the achievement gap.
And, you know, we got to work.
January 11, 2002 A new detention-and-interrogation center at Guantánamo Bay receives the first of an eventual 550 “unlawful combatants” from the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror. Guantánamo is chosen because it is not officially U.S. soil and thus provides a rationale for denying detainees protections under American and international law, creating a “legal black hole.”
Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: After 9/11 the administration faced two sharply conflicting imperatives. The first was fear of another attack. This permeated the administration. Everyone felt it. And it led to the doctrine of pre-emption, which has many guises, but basically means that you can’t wait for the usual amounts of information before acting on a threat because it may be too late. They were really scared. They were afraid of what they didn’t know. They were very afraid they didn’t have the tools to meet the threat. And they had this extraordinary sense of responsibility—that they would be responsible for the next attack. They really thought of it as having blood on their hands, and that they’d be forgiven once but not twice.
On the other hand, there was a countervailing imperative, and that was the law, because there had grown up since the 70s—for a lot of good reasons—some extraordinary restrictions on presidential power and presidential war power, many of them embodied in criminal laws, many of them vague or uncertain, never having been applied before, certainly none of them ever applied in this new context. And there was enormous legal uncertainty about how far we could go.
John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council, and later to the secretary of state: The Department of Justice often was the decisive voice on detainee matters, but the Justice Department really never lived up to its name. It was not the Department of Justice—it was often the Department of Litigation Risk, and they saw everything through the perspective of whether a decision might result in some kind of liability, whether someone might get sued or prosecuted. But that’s not the only role of the lawyer. The role of the lawyer is also to exercise good judgment and to look at long-term consequences, and ultimately to do what’s the ethically and morally correct thing.
January 29, 2002 In his State of the Union message, Bush invokes the specter of an “axis of evil”—Iraq, Iran, North Korea—and vows that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Afghanistan remains unstable, but resources and attention are shifting elsewhere.
Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate intelligence committee: In February of ‘02, I had a visit at Central Command, in Tampa, and the purpose was to get a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan. At the end of the briefing, the commanding officer, Tommy Franks, asked me to go into his office for a private meeting, and he told me that we were no longer fighting a war in Afghanistan and, among other things, that some of the key personnel, particularly some special-operations units and some equipment, specifically the Predator unmanned drone, were being withdrawn in order to get ready for a war in Iraq.
That was my first indication that war in Iraq was as serious a possibility as it was, and that it was in competition with Afghanistan for matériel. We didn’t have the resources to do both successfully and simultaneously.
February 7, 2002 Bush issues an executive order denying any protections of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees. The order comes after an intense behind-the-scenes battle pitting the State Department against the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the Office of the Vice President.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: Based on what the secretary and [State Department legal adviser] Will Taft were telling me, I think they both were convinced that they had managed to get the president’s attention with regard to what they thought was the governing document, the Geneva Conventions. I really think it came as a surprise when the February memo was put out. And that memo, of course, was constructed by Addington, and I’m told it was blessed by one or two people in O.L.C. [Office of Legal Counsel]. And then it was given to Cheney, and Cheney gave it to the president. The president signed it.
Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: To conclude that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply—it doesn’t follow from that, or at least it shouldn’t, that detainees don’t get certain rights and certain protections. There are all sorts of very, very good policy reasons why they should have been given a rigorous legal regime whereby we could legitimatize their detention. For years there was just a giant hole, a legal hole of minimal protections, minimal law.
February 14, 2002 The Bush administration proposes a Clear Skies Initiative, which relaxes air-quality and emissions standards. This is followed by a Healthy Forests Initiative, which opens up national forests to increased logging. Climate change becomes a forbidden subject.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: At the beginning of the Bush administration, Ari Patrinos, a very senior science official who had run the Department of Energy’s climate-change research program for many years, and a half-dozen high-ranking federal science officials were brought together and told to explain the science and help develop policy options for a proactive climate-change policy for the administration. They moved into an office downtown, and they worked very hard and were briefing at the Cabinet level, in the White House. Cheney was there, Colin Powell was there, Commerce Secretary [Don] Evans was there. They were making the case on climate change.
And one day they were told: Take it down, pack it up, go back to your offices—we don’t need you anymore.
May 6, 2002 The effort to create an International Criminal Court, to which the United States and more than a hundred other nations have signed on, encounters a setback when Bush withdraws American participation by “unsigning” the I.C.C. treaty.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court: When I started at the I.C.C., in 2003, the Bush administration appeared hostile towards the court, as though we were radioactive. But what started with hostility over time became less so. All of a sudden the court was seen to be useful. On Darfur, for example, the administration could have vetoed the Security Council vote referring Darfur to my office. They didn’t. That was a big change. But I’ve kept a respectful distance. They don’t give me intelligence. They cannot control me. When I received the U.N. Commission report on Darfur, inside the boxes there was a sealed envelope which appeared to contain classified U.S. information. We returned it to the U.S. Embassy, without opening it.
Ironically, the hostility has helped in my dealings with countries that might otherwise perceive me to be in the pocket of the Americans. It has been one positive factor in the Arab and African worlds. The U.S. distance from the court seems to have had the very opposite effect of that intended—of strengthening it.
June 1, 2002 In a graduation speech at West Point, Bush advances a new strategic doctrine of pre-emption, stating that the United States reserves the right to use force to deal with threats before they “fully materialize.” Preparations for war with Iraq are not yet publicly acknowledged, but earlier in the spring, as Condoleezza Rice discusses diplomatic initiatives involving Iraq with several senators, Bush pokes his head into the room and says, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
Donald Rumsfeld: “He’s sort of like a snake on a hot summer day sleeping on the road in the sun,” a Canadian general once observed. “If an eyelid flickers, you say it’s very animated.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
July 23, 2002 Senior British defense, diplomatic, and intelligence officials meet in London to discuss the American position on war with Iraq. An account of the meeting, known as the Downing Street Memo, is drawn up by one of the participants, but remains secret for several years. In the meeting, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, gives an assessment of his recent talks in Washington: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: I asked George [Tenet, the C.I.A. director], What did the national intelligence estimate [N.I.E.] that we had done on Iraq tell us about what would be the conditions during the period of combat, what would be the conditions post-combat, and what was the basis of our information on the weapons of mass destruction? Tenet said, We’ve never done an N.I.E.
Paul Pillar, national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the C.I.A.: The makers of the war had no appetite for and did not request any such assessments [about the aftermath of war]. Anybody who wanted an intelligence-community assessment on any of this stuff would’ve come through me, and I got no requests at all.
As to why this was the case, I would give two general answers. Number one was just extreme hubris and self-confidence. If you truly believe in the power of free economics and free politics, and their attractiveness to all populations of the world, and their ability to sweep away all manner of ills, then you tend not to worry about these things so much.
The other major reason is that, given the difficulty of mustering public support for something as extreme as an offensive war, any serious discussion inside the government about the messy consequences, the things that could go wrong, would complicate even further the job of selling the war.
August 1, 2002 A secret memorandum prepared by Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo sets out the limits on coercive interrogation by U.S. government officials of those captured in the war on terror, finding that there are essentially none. The memo abandons international constraints and raises the threshold of what constitutes “torture.”
September 8, 2002 In a television interview, Condoleezza Rice builds the case against Saddam Hussein by invoking the nuclear threat. “We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon.… We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” This assertion is echoed by Vice President Cheney, even though Iraq’s nuclear capability is widely questioned by numerous experts.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations and later the British special representative in Iraq: When I arrived in New York, in July 1998, it was quite clear to me that all the members of the Security Council, including the United States, knew well that there was no current work being done on any kind of nuclear-weapons capability in Iraq.
It was, therefore, extraordinary to me that later on in this saga there should have been any kind of hint that Iraq had a current capability. Of course, there were worries that Iraq might try, if the opportunity presented itself, to reconstitute that capability. And therefore we kept a very close eye, as governments do in their various ways, on Iraq trying to get hold of nuclear base materials, such as uranium or uranium yellowcake, or trying to get the machinery that was necessary to develop nuclear-weapons-grade material.
We were watching this the whole time. There was never any proof, never any hard intelligence, that they had succeeded in doing that. And the American system was entirely aware of this.
September 15, 2002 In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the assistant to the president for economic policy, Lawrence Lindsey, estimates the cost of a war with Iraq to be in the neighborhood of $100 billion to $200 billion. Mitch Daniels, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, quickly revises the figure downward to $50 billion to $60 billion, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld calls Lindsey’s estimate “baloney.” Lindsey is fired in December. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill is dismissed the same day. Years later, an analysis by Nobel-laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes will estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be $3 trillion.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: What happened was the president made the point to the staff that, if America ever goes to war, we go to war because it’s the right thing to do regardless of the cost. That is a moral issue, and so we should not be talking to anybody about how much it may or may not cost; the whole issue is, do you or don’t you go? And if you go, you pay whatever the cost is to win. The day the president dismissed Larry and Secretary O’Neill, I remember he said to me that he noticed that morning that everybody in the Situation Room was sitting up a bit straighter.
October 10–11, 2002 By an overwhelming vote, and at a politically delicate moment, Congress passes the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, which gives the president a free hand to take military action. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, invited to the White House before the vote, has as yet found no evidence that Iraq has an active program to produce biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.
Bob Graham: Unlike the first George Bush, who had purposefully put off the vote on the Persian Gulf War until after the elections of 1990—we voted in January of 1991—here they put the vote in October of 2002, three weeks before a congressional election. I think there were people who were up for election who didn’t want, within a few days of meeting the voters, to be at such stark opposition with the president.
Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq: The most remarkable thing was the talk that we had with the vice president before we were taken to Mr. Bush. To our surprise, we had no idea we would be taken to Mr. Cheney first, but we were, and we sat down, and I thought it was more a sort of a courtesy call before we went on to President Bush.
Much of it was a fairly neutral discussion, but at one point he suddenly said that you must realize that we will not hesitate to discredit you in favor of disarmament. It was a little cryptic. That was how I remembered it, and I think that’s also how Mohamed [El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who was present], remembered it. I was a little perplexed, because it was a total threat, after all, to talk about the discrediting of us. Later, when I reflected on it, I think what he wanted to say was that if you guys don’t come to the right conclusion, then we will take care of the disarmament.
November 4, 2002 Defying precedent, the Republicans make decisive gains in the midterm elections; the White House interprets the results as an across-the-board green light. In an interview with Esquire released in December, John J. Dilulio Jr., the former head of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, complains that the “compassionate conservative” agenda is dead and that politics alone drives the White House.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: I happened to be in the stairwell of the West Wing when the president was walking down, and he goes, Hey! He goes, Dilulio piece. He goes, Is this true? Is this … I mean, is this stuff … is this, is he right? What the hell’s goin’ on?
And whoever was with him at the time—it was probably Andy Card, Andy and Karl—they were like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, it’s fine. We’ll get back to it. That afternoon we get a call from Josh Bolten, who was at the time the head of domestic policy, saying, O.K., we need to have a “compassion” meeting.
I’ll never forget the discussion—we’re sitting around the table, and someone says, I know what we should do. We should tackle chronic homelessness. I hear there are like 15,000 homeless people in America.
What can you say to that?
November 25, 2002 The Department of Homeland Security comes into being. The new department, an amalgam of nearly two dozen existing agencies, soon emerges as perhaps the most dysfunctional and unwieldy of all the federal departments. By presidential directive D.H.S. issues a daily color-coded advisory of “threat conditions.” Its secretary, Tom Ridge, later acknowledges that the alerts were sometimes heightened under pressure from the administration.
Michael Brown, director of fema, which becomes part of the Department of Homeland Security: Bush’s strength was—he would say to everybody in the room, Tell me what the problem is and I’ll make a decision. The detrimental aspect of that is the president would make a decision and in his mind it was over with. There was no changing course. The blinders are on. You had to work incredibly hard to get back in front of that line of sight to say, We need to take a different tack here.
Condoleezza Rice: “You thought you had the dream team of foreign-policy experts,” says Charles Duelfer, the former weapons inspector in Iraq, “but they weren’t a team at all.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
I’m asked at one point for my input, and I basically say we should not have a Department of Homeland Security, because it’s going to be disruptive to create it in the midst of all of these things going on. [Later,] I remember being in the car alone with Bush, where I’m talking to him about the department and how it’s not working and how we really need to make some changes. And while I thought he may have been listening, I quickly came to the conclusion that he wasn’t, because his answer to it was: Well, we’re bringing in a new leader, a new secretary or deputy secretary, and he’ll be able to fix all these things.
He had made the decision, and we’re going forward. And if things aren’t working, we don’t need to revisit the original decision. We’ll just put somebody else in there.
David Kuo: Every time you had a conversation with him, he would make it clear the subject was important. Bush would say, I care about this. Let’s get this done. But it was like a ship whose wheel is not attached to the rudder.
December 2, 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signs off on a memo from the Defense Department’s legal counsel, Jim Haynes, permitting the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, including stress positions, isolation, and sleep deprivation. Rumsfeld writes on the memo, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” The memo is eventually rescinded, after strenuous objections from the general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, among others, but policies and practices continue to be influenced by the philosophy outlined in the earlier Bybee-Yoo “torture memo.”
Alberto Mora, navy general counsel: When I saw the [Haynes] memorandum, I thought this was all a mistake. My assumption going into my first meeting with Haynes was that once these mistakes were pointed out the authorization would be instantaneously reversed. So I had a meeting with Jim, in which I indicated that I felt the document authorized abusive treatment that included torture. Jim’s instantaneous response was that, no, it didn’t. I asked him to think carefully about this, and I took him through the analysis that this could be torture, that it would necessarily have legal repercussions, including to the military-commission process, and could also engender liability for all individuals associated with this process.
I spent about an hour with him, and my sense was that he’d be picking up the phone and calling the secretary to have those authorizations rescinded. The next day I flew to Miami for Christmas vacation, thinking the problem was solved. I then got a phone call saying that the reports of abuse were continuing. That’s when I realized that this was not a simple mistake but that, in fact, people had adopted this course of action consciously.
As soon as I got back, I requested a second meeting with Haynes, in which I took him through some of the same reasoning but in much greater detail. I also discussed much more heavily the potential liability of individuals involved in authorizing these kinds of techniques. I pointed out Secretary Rumsfeld’s handwritten notation at the bottom of the authorization page. I said, This may be a joke, but it would not be regarded as a joke potentially by a prosecuting attorney or a plaintiff’s attorney, and I said that this would lead to very painful cross-examination of Secretary Rumsfeld on the stand. The implication or allegation by opposing counsel would be that this constituted a wink and a nod to the interrogators. I closed by saying, Protect your client—thinking that was the most powerful message one attorney could deliver to another.
John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council and later to the secretary of state: One of the great tragedies for this administration has been the damage caused by its detainee policies—the decision to set up Guantánamo without the involvement of the international community, the issuance of the president’s executive order creating military commissions, aspects of the C.I.A. interrogation program, the conduct of certain renditions [sending detainees to other countries for interrogation], and the decision about the inapplicability of the Geneva Conventions. The most serious error is not any of these decisions individually or even collectively, but the administration’s inability to change course as the magnitude of the problems caused by these decisions became apparent.
January 28, 2003 Bush delivers his State of the Union message and continues to make the case for war with Iraq. The speech includes the assertion, later shown to be based on a crude forgery, that Saddam Hussein has “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The administration had been warned that the information was unreliable.
Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq: I think [Tony] Blair, whom I admire for many things and respect for many things, but when he went out and he talked about the Iraqis’ being able to use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, now that went much too far.
There was another example, and that was the famous case of the alleged contract between Iraq and Niger for the import of yellowcake, uranium oxide. I was very curious about that, because I could not see why Iraq should at this stage, in 2002, want to import yellowcake. That’s a long, long way from the enriched nuclear materials they can use in a bomb. I didn’t suspect that there was a forgery behind it.
January 31, 2003 Bush meets at the White House with Tony Blair. A secret account of the meeting, written by Sir David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign-policy adviser and later ambassador to Washington, will become public three years later. The administration’s public stance is that it hopes to avoid war with Iraq. In the meeting, however, Bush and Blair agree on a start date for the war, irrespective of the outcome of U.N. inspections: March 10. Bush proposes that a pretext for war might be provided if an aircraft were painted with U.N. colors and sent in low over Iraq, in the hope that it would draw fire. According to the memo, Bush also “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups” in Iraq once Saddam was removed from power.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon belatedly turns attention to planning for the aftermath of war.
Jay Garner, retired army general and first overseer of the U.S. administration and reconstruction of Iraq: When I went to see Rumsfeld at the end of January, I said, O.K., I’ll do this for the next few months for you. I said, you know, Let me tell you something, Mr. Secretary. George Marshall started in 1942 working on a 1945 problem. You’re starting in February working on what’s probably a March or April problem. And he said, I know, but we have to do the best with the time that we have. So that kind of frames everything.
February 5, 2003 Colin Powell appears before the United Nations Security Council to present evidence that Iraq is actively seeking to make or acquire weapons of mass destruction. In the ensuing months, it will emerge that, although Powell was unaware of the fact, many of his claims are unfounded.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: I spoke over and over and over with Colin Powell. He always looked, I don’t know, not at me, but I could see the pain in his eyes. These are very powerful questions, he used to say. I understood. It meant: I have serious problems inside the administration.
Hans Blix: In March 2003, when the invasion took place, we could not have stood up and said, There is nothing, because to prove the negative is really not possible. What you can do is to say that we have performed 700 inspections in some 500 different sites, and we have found nothing, and we are ready to continue.
If we had been allowed to continue a couple of months, we would have been able to go to all of the some hundred sites suggested to us, and since there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, that’s what we would have reported. And then I think that, at that stage, certainly the intelligence ought to have drawn the conclusion that their evidence was poor.
I now feel sorry for Colin Powell. He was given the material by the C.I.A., and we read in the newspapers how he threw out a lot of it. But he retained some. And then he came to the Security Council, and, of course, in a way, this was to tell the world that, Look, this is what we’ve found. We have the means to do it. The inspectors are very good boys and nice, and we listen to them, but they haven’t seen this, and this is what there is.
February 25, 2003 General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, tells a congressional hearing that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” will be required to mount a successful occupation of Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly rebukes Shinseki, stating that the general’s estimate is “wildly off the mark.” Shinseki is forced to retire early.
Jay Garner: When Shinseki said, Hey, it’s going to take 300,000 or 400,000 soldiers, they crucified him. They called me up the day after that, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They called me the next day and they said, Did you see what Shinseki said? And I said yes. And they said, Well, that can’t be possible. And I said, Well, let me give you the only piece of empirical data I have. In 1991, I owned 5 percent of the real estate in Iraq, and I had 22,000 trigger pullers. And on any day I never had enough. So you can take 5 percent—you can take 22,000 and multiply that by 20. Hey, here’s probably the ballpark, and I didn’t have Baghdad. And they said, Thank you very much. So I got up and left.
March 19, 2003 The Iraq war begins. Two weeks of “shock and awe” bombardment herald the invasion by ground forces. U.S. and British troops make up 90 percent of the “international coalition,” which includes modest support from other countries. The defeat of Iraqi forces is a foregone conclusion, but within days of the occupation Baghdad is beset by looting that coalition forces do nothing to stop. Rumsfeld dismisses the breakdown of civil order with the explanation “Stuff happens.” Kenneth Adelman, a Rumsfeld-appointed member of a Pentagon advisory board, and initially a supporter of the war, later confronts the defense secretary.
Illustration by Risko
Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Kenneth Adelman, a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board: So he says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted.
Start out with, you know, when you stood up there and said things—“Stuff happens.” I said, That’s your entry in Bartlett’s. The only thing people will remember about you is “Stuff happens.” I mean, how could you say that? “This is what free people do.” This is not what free people do. This is what barbarians do. And I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces. Plus, destroying, what, 30 percent of the infrastructure.
I said, You have 140,000 troops there, and they didn’t do jack shit. I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?
So he takes out his yellow pad of paper and he writes down—he says, I’m going to tell you. I’ll get back to you and tell you. And I said, I’d like to know who gave the order, and write down the second question on your yellow pad there. Tell me why 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq disobeyed the order. Write that down, too.
And so that was not a successful conversation.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations and later the British special representative in Iraq: The administration of Iraq never recovered. It was a vacuum in security that became irremediable, at least until the surge of 2007. And to that extent, four years were not only wasted but allowed to take on the most terrible cost because of that lack of planning, lack of resources put in on the ground. And I see that lack of planning as residing in the responsibility of the Pentagon, which had taken charge, the office of the secretary of defense, with the authority of the vice president and the president, obviously, standing over that department of government.
May 1, 2003 Aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, under a banner reading, mission accomplished, Bush proclaims that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Meanwhile, decisions have been made that will inadvertently prolong major combat operations, chief among them the disbanding of the Iraqi Army. The responsibility for this decision, which is promulgated by the new U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, remains unclear.
Jay Garner, retired army general and first overseer of the U.S. administration and reconstruction of Iraq: My plan was to not disband the Iraqi Army but to keep the majority of it and use them. And the reason for that is we needed them, because, number one, there were never enough people there for security. I mean, I’ll give you an example. My first day in Baghdad, I went to see Scott Wallace, who was the corps commander, the V Corps commander, and I said, Scott, I need a lot of help here on security. And he said, Let me show you my map. I walked over to the map. And he had 256 sites that day he was guarding that he had never planned on. He just didn’t have the force structure to do it.
So we said, O.K., we’ll bring the army back. Our plan was to bring back about 250,000 of them. And I briefed Rumsfeld. He agreed. Wolfowitz agreed. Condoleezza Rice agreed. George [Tenet] agreed. Briefed the president on it. He agreed. Everybody agreed.
So when that decision [to disband] was made, I was stunned.
Charles Duelfer, U.N. and U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq: One Iraqi colonel told me, You know, our planning before the war was that we assumed that you guys couldn’t take casualties, and that was obviously wrong. I looked at him and said, What makes you think that was wrong? He goes, Well, if you didn’t want to take casualties, you would have never made that decision about the army.
May 27, 2003 Bush signs legislation authorizing the President’s Emergency Plan for aids Relief (pepfar). He visits Africa, a main focus of the legislation, soon thereafter. pepfar commits some $15 billion for aids prevention and treatment over a period of five years. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof concludes, “Mr. Bush has done much more for Africa than Bill Clinton ever did.”
Michael Merson, M.D., international aids researcher, who has evaluated the relief program: Look, pepfar is the largest commitment ever made by any nation for a global health activity that’s dedicated to a single disease. I mean, that’s just not disputable. It has a prevention component, a treatment component, and a care component, but treatment is the centerpiece. The last number I’ve seen is that this initiative has led to treatment of more than 1.7 million people, most of them in Africa. Now, that’s not all the people who need treatment, but it’s a huge amount. pepfar at least tripled our aid flow to Africa—I’m talking about total aid flow.
August 19, 2003 A month after Bush indicates little concern about an insurgency in Iraq with the remark “Bring ‘em on,” a car bomb in Baghdad destroys the headquarters of the United Nations mission, killing the U.N. chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello. President Bush receives the news of the bombing while playing golf, and by his own account decides at that moment to give up the game in solidarity with troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan (although two months later he plays a round at Andrews Air Force Base). The U.N.-headquarters bombing is seen as the start of the full-blown insurgency.
Jay Garner: I think a lot of the problem the president had is: people around him were doing what he said, and nobody was doing the analytical questioning of the things we were doing where you could do all the puts and takes and say, O.K., Mr. President, here’s all the pros to do this and here’s all the cons to do this, and here’s the likely outcome. Now, let’s make a decision.
I don’t think that ever happened. I never saw anything like that. And I think the Defense Department was enamored with what they felt they’d accomplished in Afghanistan with a very small force of basically special-ops guys and the air force. And they looked at it as a high-tech thing. Nation building is a low-tech thing. Get a whole bunch of you. Roll up your sleeves. Get a bunch of shovels, and then everybody goes out and busts their ass every day. We just didn’t have enough soldiers to do that.
January 23, 2004 David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, resigns his position, affirming his belief that no W.M.D. stockpiles will be found in Iraq; the following week he discusses his conclusions at the White House. Nine months later his successor, Charles Duelfer, will conclude officially that Iraq not only did not possess W.M.D. but did not have an active program in place to develop them. The structural supports of Powell’s U.N. presentation begin to crumble.
Karl Rove: “Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good,” says Matthew Dowd, a onetime Bush-campaign strategist. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: Well, [Powell] got a telephone call each time a pillar fell. It was either John [McLaughlin, deputy C.I.A. director], calling Rich [Armitage], and Rich telling him, or it was George [Tenet] or John calling the secretary. And I remember this vividly because he would walk through my door, and his face would grow more morose each time, and he’d say, Another pillar just fell. I said, Which one this time? And, of course, the last one was the mobile biological labs.
Finally, when that call came, the secretary came through the door and said, The last pillar has just collapsed. The mobile biological labs don’t exist. Turned around and went back into his office.
David Kay, chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq: As we turned to the trailers, it was probably—I guess the single biggest shock I had during the entire inspection process, because I’d been powerfully moved by Powell’s statement to the Council. Well, when we started tearing it apart, we discovered it was not based on several sources. It was based on one source, and it was an individual [code-named Curveball] held by German intelligence. They had denied the U.S. the right to directly interview him. And they only passed summaries—and really not very good ones—of their interrogations with him. The Germans had refused to pass us his name even.
As you delved into his character and his claims, none of them bore any truth. The case just fell apart.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: I was astonished that the Americans used Curveball, really astonished. This was our stuff. But they presented it not in the way we knew it. They presented it as a fact, and not as the way an intelligence assessment is—could be, but could also be a big lie. We don’t know.
April 13, 2004 At a press conference Bush is asked by John Dickerson of Time to name the biggest mistake he has made since 9/11. Bush is unable to come up with an answer. He replies, “I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it.”
David Kay: He has a tremendous sense of calm and certitude about the positions he takes, and is unusually doubt-free about them. Most people, when they make monumental decisions, understand that they’re doing it under conditions of great uncertainty, and are not fully at the time really able to understand what the consequences might be—and that frightens them, or at least they have concern, disquietude about it. This president has none of that, as far as I can tell.
April 28, 2004 A televised report on 60 Minutes II reveals widespread abuse and humiliation of detainees by U.S. military personnel and private contractors at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, dating back to October 2003 and known to the Defense Department since January.
Kenneth Adelman, a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board: I said to Rumsfeld, Well, the way you handled Abu Ghraib I thought was abysmal. He says, What do you mean? I say, It broke in January of—what was that, ‘04? Yeah, ‘04. And you didn’t do jack shit till it was revealed in the spring. He says, That’s totally unfair. I didn’t have the information. I said, What information did you have? You had the information that we had done these—and there were photos. You knew about the photos, didn’t you? He says, I didn’t see the photos. I couldn’t get those photos. A lot of stuff happens around here. I don’t follow every story. I say, Excuse me, but I thought in one of the testimonies you said you told the president about Abu Ghraib in January. And if it was big enough to tell the president, wasn’t it big enough to do something about? He says, Well, I couldn’t get the photos. I say, You’re secretary of defense. Somebody in the building who works for you has photos, and for five months you can’t get photos—hello?
Lawrence Wilkerson: The twin pressures were from Rumsfeld, and they were: Produce intelligence, and the gloves are off. That’s the communication that went down to the field.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: When Abu Ghraib happened, I was like, We’ve got to fire Rumsfeld. Like if we’re the “accountability president,” we haven’t really done this. We don’t veto any bills. We don’t fire anybody. I was like, Well, this is a disaster, and we’re going to hold some National Guard colonel responsible? This guy’s got to get fired.
For an M.B.A. president, he got the M.B.A. 101 stuff down, which is, you know, you don’t have to do everything. Let other people do it. But M.B.A. 201 is: Hold people accountable.
Bill Graham, Canada’s foreign minister and later defense minister: We were there in Washington for a G-8 meeting, and Colin suddenly phoned us all up and said, We’re going to the White House this morning. Now, this is curious, because normally the heads of government don’t give a damn about foreign ministers. We all popped in a bus and went over and were cordially received by Colin and President Bush. The president sat down to explain that, you know, this terrible news had come out about Abu Ghraib and how disgusting it was. The thrust of his presentation was that this was a terrible aberration; it was un-American conduct. This was not American.
Joschka Fischer was one of the people that said, Mr. President, if the atmosphere at the top is such that it encourages or allows people to believe that they can behave this way, this is going to be a consequence. The president’s reaction was: This is un-American. Americans don’t do this. People will realize Americans don’t do this.
The problem for the United States, and indeed for the free world, is that because of this—Guantánamo, and the “torture memos” from the White House, which we were unaware of at that time—people around the world don’t believe that anymore. They say, No, Americans are capable of doing such things and have done them, all the while hypocritically criticizing the human-rights records of others.
Alberto Mora, navy general counsel: I will tell you this: I will tell you that General Anthony Taguba, who investigated Abu Ghraib, feels now that the proximate cause of Abu Ghraib were the O.L.C. memoranda that authorized abusive treatment. And I will also tell you that there are general-rank officers who’ve had senior responsibility within the Joint Staff or counterterrorism operations who believe that the number-one and number-two leading causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have been, number one, Abu Ghraib, number two, Guantánamo, because of the effectiveness of these symbols in helping recruit jihadists into the field and combat against American soldiers.
July 22, 2004 The bipartisan 9/11 commission—whose creation was fiercely opposed by the administration—issues its report. It provides a detailed reconstruction of events leading up to the attacks, and of the attacks themselves; an earlier staff report found “no credible evidence” of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The final report also determines that many warning signs of an impending attack were ignored.
Lawrence Wilkerson: John [Bellinger] and I had to work on the 9/11-commission testimony of Condi. Condi was not gonna do it, not gonna do it, not gonna do it, and then all of a sudden she realized she better do it. That was an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the president had been actually concerned about al-Qaeda. We cherry-picked things to make it look as if the vice president and others, Secretary Rumsfeld and all, had been.
They didn’t give a shit about al-Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.
Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission: Intelligence reform was our big recommendation. The principal conclusion we reached was that the 15 or 16 agencies of the intelligence community did not share information and that there had to be some mechanism put in place to force the sharing of information. In the intelligence business, you don’t get, or you usually don’t get, information saying that the terrorists are going to strike at nine in the morning in the World Trade towers in New York City on September 11. You get bits and pieces of information that have to be put together.
We knew, for example—when I say we, I mean the F.B.I. in Minneapolis knew—that those guys in flight-training school were more interested in flying the airplane than they were in taking off and landing. They knew that. Who didn’t know it? The director of the F.B.I. didn’t know it. The director of the C.I.A. did know it. His response was that it was none of his business. Technically correct, because his business is foreign intelligence.
That’s one of many, many examples.
November 2, 2004 Election Day. Bush defeats Kerry by a margin of three million popular votes and 35 electoral votes. In a press conference two days later Bush says, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I now intend to spend it. It is my style.”
Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to George W. Bush: The interesting thing about both Bush campaigns is that they strategically defied conventional wisdom and turned it on its head. In 1999, on the old “right track, wrong track” question, which we ask on every poll—the reason we ask it is because it determines whether or not it’s a change environment or a status-quo environment—in 1999, the “right track” was 65 percent or 70 percent, which under conventional wisdom would indicate that it was a great environment for the Democrats and for Al Gore. The strategic challenge we had was—we were in the position of trying to argue everything’s great, so it’s time for a change, right?
Flash forward to 2004. It’s just the opposite. This time, the “wrong track” is like 65 or 70 percent. We’re in a very difficult war, uncertain economy, and so now we’re in the strategic position of saying, you know, everything’s all screwed up. Stay the course. We’re all f’d up. Stay the course.
November 15, 2004 Colin Powell announces his resignation as secretary of state. He is succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, who will in time have limited success charting a new direction on issues such as Iran and North Korea.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: I’m not sure even to this day that he’s willing to admit to himself that he was rolled to the extent that he was. And he’s got plenty of defense to marshal because, as I told [former defense secretary] Bill Perry one time when Bill asked me to defend my boss—I said, Well, let me tell you, you wouldn’t have wanted to have seen the first Bush administration without Colin Powell. I wrote Powell a memo about six months before we were leaving, and I said, This is your legacy, Mr. Secretary: damage control. He didn’t like it much. In fact, he kind of handed it back to me and told me I could put it in the burn basket.
But I knew he understood what I was saying. You saved the China relationship. You saved the transatlantic relationship and each component thereof—France, Germany. I mean, he held Joschka Fischer’s hand under the table on occasions when Joschka would say something like, You know, your president called my boss a fucking asshole. His task became essentially cleaning the dogshit off the carpet in the Oval Office. And he did that rather well. But it became all-consuming.
I think the clearest indication I got that Rich [Armitage] and he both had finally awakened to the dimensions of the problem was when Rich began—I mean, I’ll be very candid—began to use language to describe the vice president’s office with me as the Gestapo, as the Nazis, and would sometimes late in the evening, when we were having a drink—would sometimes go off rather aggressively on particular characters in the vice president’s office.
Charles Duelfer, U.N. and U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq: You thought you had the dream team of foreign-policy experts, but they weren’t a team at all. Some of the wags over at the Department of Defense would call John Bolton’s office over at State the “American Interests Section.” Very funny, but it showed you how badly divided this administration had become.
Lawrence Wilkerson: The imbalance is huge. The Pentagon now gets three quarters of a trillion dollars every year and State gets $35 billion. Rumsfeld remarked one time, I lose more money than you get. He has two and a half million men. State is not even a combat brigade, you know?
Bill Graham, Canada’s foreign minister and later defense minister: We came out of our meeting, and our nato ambassador said, “Oh, Mr. Rumsfeld was really quite cordial and animated today.” And [one of our generals], his remark was something like: Oh, he’s sort of like, it’s like a snake on a hot summer day sleeping on the road in the sun. If an eyelid flickers, you say it’s very animated.
December 26, 2004 An undersea earthquake off the western coast of Sumatra—the second-largest earthquake ever recorded—unleashes a wave of tsunamis throughout the Indian Ocean, killing more than 200,000 people. Bush orders the U.S. Navy to spearhead emergency relief efforts, which are widely praised. Distracted elsewhere, the administration’s Asian initiatives are otherwise few. There is one clear beneficiary.
Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former ambassador to the United Nations: The Chinese never said so, because they are the best geopolitical strategists in the world, but it was immediately obvious that with 9/11 the U.S.-China relationship improved. The Chinese were smart. They didn’t put any real obstacles in the way of action in Afghanistan, and even if they strongly opposed the war in Iraq, they did so in a way that minimized the difficulties for the U.S. I saw that firsthand, in the period after the invasion was over, when the U.S. needed a Security Council resolution to get the oil sales flowing again. They got the resolution, and I remember asking a U.S. diplomat which country had been most helpful in getting the resolution passed. China, he replied. That 2003 resolution was a double win for the Chinese leaders: they obtained valuable political goodwill from the Bush administration, which translated into gains on the Taiwan issues, and they helped to ensure that American troops would remain bogged down in Iraq for a long time.
The Chinese have been brilliant in playing the Bush years. Asia is one part of the world where many will see George Bush in a positive light, although not necessarily for the reasons he may have wished.
February 2, 2005 In his State of the Union address, Bush starts spending his political capital with a plan to take the Social Security system in the direction of privatization by allowing individuals to divert payments to their own retirement accounts. The partial-privatization scheme is widely opposed—the public sees reliable benefits at risk—and in the end the proposal goes nowhere. Meanwhile, despite significant turnout by Evangelicals in the election, faith-based initiatives make little headway on the president’s agenda.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: After the 2004 election they cut the White House faith-based staff by 30 percent, 40 percent, because it became clear that it had served its purpose.
There’s this idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of religious conservatives. But what people miss is that religious conservatives and the Republican Party have always had a very uneasy relationship. The reality in the White House is—if you look at the most senior staff—you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders. Now, at the end of the day, that’s easy to understand, because most of the people who are religious-right leaders are not easy to like. It’s that old Gandhi thing, right? I might actually be a Christian myself, except for the action of Christians.
And so in the political-affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at everyone from Rich Cizik, who is one of the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals, to James Dobson, to basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.
June 7, 2005 Documents emerge indicating that the decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, in 2001, was influenced by the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group with ties to Exxon. One State Department letter to the coalition states: “Potus [president of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you.” Several days later, Philip Cooney, a former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist and the chief of staff of the president’s Council on Environmental Quality, resigns after it is revealed that he had edited government reports to downplay the threat of climate change. Cooney takes a job at Exxon.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: In the fall of 2002, I was doing something I’d been doing for years, which was developing and editing the [Climate Change Science Program’s] annual report to Congress. And it had been drafted with input from dozens of federal scientists and reviewed and vetted and revised and vetted some more.
And then it had to go for a White House clearance. It came back to us over the fax machine with Phil Cooney’s hand markup on it. I flipped through it and saw right away what he was doing. You don’t need to do a huge amount of re-writing to make something say something different; you just need to change a word, change a phrase, cross out a sentence, add some adjectives. And what he was doing was, he was passing a screen over the report to introduce uncertainty language into statements about global warming. The political motivation of it was obvious.
June 24, 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is elected president of Iran, a country whose regional sway has been enhanced by the implosion of neighboring Iraq under U.S. occupation. Iran steps up its efforts to enrich uranium, and Bush states more than once that he will not rule out the use of force if Iran seeks to develop nuclear weapons.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: The big problem was that the administration was in a permanent state of denial—that they are doing the job for Tehran. That’s another irony, a very tragic one. Because if you look to the basic parameters of Iran’s capability or strategic strength, this is not a superpower—they’re far from a superpower. They never could have achieved such a level of dominance and influence if they would have had to rely only on their own resources and skills. America pushed Iran in that way.
I was invited to a conference in Saudi Arabia on Iraq, and a Saudi said to me, Look, Mr. Fischer, when President Bush wants to visit Baghdad, it’s a state secret, and he has to enter the country in the middle of the night and through the back door. When President Ahmadinejad wants to visit Baghdad, it’s announced two weeks beforehand or three weeks. He arrives in the brightest sunshine and travels in an open car through a cheering crowd to downtown Baghdad. Now, tell me, Mr. Fischer, who is running the country?
Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq: In my experience of negotiations, about the worst you can do is to humiliate the other side. And I think that this is one error that has been with the U.S.—they reject any talk with Ahmadinejad because he is someone who is regarded as a rogue and playing to the galleries and so forth.
Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission: I was in the Congress when we began talking to members of the Supreme Soviet under the old Soviet Union. I’d get up and give a speech. My Soviet counterpart would get up and give a speech. Then we’d toast each other with vodka and say that we were for peace in the world and prosperity for our grandchildren, and then we’d go home. And we did that year after year after year. After doing it 10 or 15 years, we put aside the speeches and we began to talk with one another. That was the beginning of the thaw.
It might not take 40 years with the Iranians, but it’s going to take a long time. You’re going to have to have patience. You have to put on the table not just our agenda but their agenda as well. But the conversation is critical, and I don’t know how you deal with differences without talking to people. If you know a way to solve problems without talking to people, let me know, because I haven’t found out about it yet.
August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded, strikes the Gulf Coast. The storm surge breaches the levees in New Orleans; the city is flooded and eventually evacuated amid a complete breakdown of civil order. Bush flies over the city on his way back from a fund-raiser out West. Days later, visiting the destruction as relief efforts falter, the president praises the fema director, Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”
Bush vows to rebuild New Orleans, and Brown, whose performance is widely criticized, is effectively fired; the president’s approval rating sinks to 39 percent. Three years after Katrina the population of New Orleans will have dropped by one-third. The city’s defenses against storms and floods will remain a vulnerable patchwork.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter. I knew when Katrina—I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We’re done.
Michael Brown, director of fema, which becomes part of the Department of Homeland Security: There were two things that went wrong with Katrina. One is personal on my part. I failed after having briefed the president about how bad things were in New Orleans and telling him that I needed the Cabinet to stand up and pay attention. When that didn’t happen, I should’ve leveled with the American public instead of sticking to those typical political talking points about—how we’re working as a team and we’re doing everything we can. I should’ve said this thing is just not working. Probably would’ve been fired anyway, but at least it would’ve caused the federal government to stand up and get off their butts.
The second thing that happened was this. [Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff inserted himself into the response, and suddenly I had this massive bureaucracy on top of me. I should have basically told Chertoff to kiss off, that I would continue to deal directly with the president. But he’s the new kid on the block and the White House deferred to him, and it gave me no choice but to work through him, which then scoped things down and caused it to just completely implode on itself.
Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission: When you have a disaster strike, you have to have someone in charge. They didn’t have anybody in charge in New York during 9/11. They didn’t have anybody in charge in Katrina. And you get a mess.
Politically it’s a very difficult thing. You’ve got the counties, the cities, and the federal government and all the rest to work it out. Nobody wants to give up authority prior to the fact. The governor of Louisiana wants to be in charge. The governor of Mississippi wants to be in charge. The mayor of New Orleans wants to be in charge. You’ve got 50 other cities that want to be in charge. I have come to the view in these massive disasters—like Katrina or New York on 9/11—that the federal government has to be in charge because they’re the only one that has the resources to deal with the problem.
But presidents don’t like to stomp on governors and override them. When these kinds of problems are not resolved, people die.
December 6, 2005 nasa scientist James Hansen gives a lecture on climate change at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in San Francisco. nasa reacts by ordering his future public statements to be vetted in advance. Earlier in the year Rick Piltz had resigned from the Climate Change Science Program over other instances of political interference.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: To me, the central climate-science scandal of the Bush administration was the suppression of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts report. In the 1997–2000 time frame, the White House had directed the Global Change Research Program to develop a scientifically based assessment of the implications of climate change for the United States. It was a vulnerability assessment: If these projected warming models are correct, what’s going to happen? And over a period of several years a team made up of eminent scientists and other experts produced a major report. To this day, it remains the most comprehensive effort to understand the implications of global warming for the United States.
And the administration killed that study. They directed federal agencies not to make any reference to the existence of it in any further reports. Through a series of deletions it was completely excised from all program reports from 2002 onward. It was left up on a Web site. There was a lawsuit filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is an ExxonMobil-funded “denialist” group, demanding that the report be deleted from the Web. Myron Ebell of the institute said, Our goal is to make that report vanish.
December 16, 2005 The New York Times reveals the existence of a massive warrantless-surveillance program conducted on American soil. Bush contends that the September 2001 war-on-terror authorization by Congress—“to use all necessary and appropriate force” against relevant “nations, organizations, and persons”—effectively gives the president unlimited power to act. Other kinds of snooping occur inside the administration.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn’t use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we’d broken the Japanese code. He thought he’d broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.
December 30, 2005 Bush signs into law the Detainee Treatment Act. The legislation was passed by Congress in order to prohibit the inhumane treatment of prisoners, but Bush appends a “signing statement” laying out his own interpretation and indicating that he is not otherwise bound by the law in any meaningful way. This is one of more than 800 instances in which Bush deploys signing statements to finesse congressional intent.
Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: Every president in war time and in crisis—Lincoln, Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, just to name three—exercised extraordinarily broad powers. They pushed the law and stretched the law and bent the law, and many people think they broke the law. And we’ve largely forgiven them for doing so because we think that they acted prudently in crisis. So Lincoln—he did all sorts of things after Fort Sumter. He spent unappropriated moneys. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
Now, there’s a way of looking at the Cheney-Addington position on executive power which is not unlike some of the most extreme assertions of Lincoln and Roosevelt. But there are important differences. One is that both Lincoln and Roosevelt coupled this sense of a powerful executive in times of crisis with a powerful sense of a need to legitimate and justify the power through education, through legislation, through getting Congress on board, through paying attention to what one might call the “soft” values of constitutionalism. That was an attitude that Addington and I suppose Cheney just did not have.
The second difference, and what made their assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.
June 29, 2006 The Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld rules that detainees at Guantánamo have rights under the Geneva Conventions, including fundamental rights of due process. Two months later, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who had been held at Guantánamo for nearly five years, will be released from custody and flown back to Germany.
John le Carré, novelist and former intelligence officer whose novel A Most Wanted Man was inspired by the Kurnaz case: Murat Kurnaz, a German-born-and-educated Turkish resident of Bremen, in northern Germany, by trade a shipbuilder, was released from Guantánamo on 24 August 2006 after four years and eight months without charge or trial. He was 24 years old. In December 2001, at the age of 19, he had been arrested in Pakistan, sold by the Pakistanis to the Americans for $3,000, and tortured for five weeks and nearly killed at an interrogation center in Kandahar before being flown in chains to Cuba. His family was first informed of his situation in January 2002. Despite repeated brutal treatment and repeated interrogation at Guantánamo, no evidence was found to link him with terrorist activities, a fact acknowledged by both U.S. and German intelligence. Yet it took years of intense lobbying by lawyers, family, and NGOs to secure his release.
Two weeks after Murat’s release, I was in Hamburg to take part in a television discussion on the anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on America. A woman journalist attached to the program had been assigned the task of looking after Murat while the program’s producers prepared a documentary about him. Would I like to meet him? I would, and spent two days listening to him in a hotel suite in Bremen. Despite a disgraceful campaign of innuendo orchestrated by the complicit German authorities, I shared the view of practically everyone who had met him that Murat was remarkably truthful and was a reliable witness to his own tragedy.
September 21, 2006 The Environmental Protection Agency declines to tighten regulations on annual emissions of soot.
November 7, 2006 The Republicans suffer a stinging defeat in the midterm elections; Democrats take control of both the House and Senate. The following day, Rumsfeld resigns as defense secretary. He is replaced by Robert Gates.
November 26, 2007 Secretary of State Rice convenes a Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. The Bush administration had from the outset paid scant attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and attempts by Rice to revive the peace process come to little.
Anthony Cordesman, national-security analyst and former official at the Defense and State Departments: In reality, a great deal of what Secretary Rice did seems to have been based as much on a search for visibility as any expectation of real progress. The fact was that you did not have to contend with Chairman Arafat, but you did have to contend with a deeply divided Israel, which was far less willing to accept or make compromises over peace. And with the Palestinian movement, which was moving toward civil war. The United States can only make serious progress when both the Israelis and Palestinians are ready to move toward peace. Setting artificial deadlines and creating yet another set of unrealistic expectations did not lay the groundwork for sustained real progress. It instead created new sources of frustration and again made people throughout the Arab and Muslim world see the United States as hypocritical and ineffective.
December 6, 2006 The independent Iraq Study Group, chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, issues a report setting out 79 recommendations for the future conduct of the Iraq war. The report is brushed aside by the president. Lawrence Eagleburger, one of the group’s members, says of Bush after the report is delivered, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”
Alan K. Simpson, former senator from Wyoming and a member of the Iraq Study Group: It was an early-morning session, seven a.m., I think, breakfast, the day we trotted it out. And Jim and Lee said, Mr. President, we will—and Dick was there, Cheney was there—just go around the room, if you would, and all of us share with you a quick thought? And the president said fine. I thought at first the president seemed a little—I don’t know, just maybe impatient, like, What now?
He went around the room. Everybody stated their case. It just took a couple minutes. I know what I said. I said, Mr. President, we’re not here to present this to vex or embarrass you in any way. That’s not the purpose of this. We’re in a tough, tough situation, and we think these recommendations can help the country out. We’ve agreed on every word here, and I hope you’ll give it your full attention. He said, Oh, I will. And I turned to Dick, and I said, Dick, old friend, I hope you’ll gnaw on this, too. This is very important that you hear this and review it. And he said, I will, I will, and thanks.
Then the president gave an address not too far after that. And we were called by [National-Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley on a conference call. He said, Thank you for the work. The president’s going to mention your report, and it’ll be—there will be parts of it that he will embrace, in fact, and if he doesn’t happen to speak on certain issues, you know that they’ll be in full consideration in the weeks to come, or something like that. And we all listened with a wry smile.
We figured that maybe 5 of the 79 recommendations would ever be considered, and I think we were pretty right.
Lee Hamilton: Cheney was there, never said a word, not a—of course, the recommendations from his point of view were awful, but he never criticized. Bush was very gracious, said we’ve worked hard and did this great service for the country—and he ignored it so far as I can see. He fundamentally didn’t agree with it. President Bush has always sought, still seeks today, a victory, military victory. And we did not recommend that. The gist of what we had to say was a responsible exit. He didn’t like that.
December 7, 2006 The Justice Department fires seven United States attorneys without explanation. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales calls the controversy an “overblown personnel matter,” but the legal battle over the firings plays out to this day as it becomes clear that the attorneys were fired for having insufficient partisan zeal. Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, and Karl Rove are cited for contempt of Congress when they refuse a summons by the House Judiciary Committee to discuss the firings.
David Iglesias, former U.S. attorney in New Mexico and one of the fired prosecutors: When I got the phone call, on Pearl Harbor Day, it came completely out of the blue. Mike Battle, the head of the executive office of U.S. attorneys, said very directly, Look, you know, we want to go a different way, and we’d like you to submit your resignation by the end of next month. I said, What’s going on? Mike said, I don’t know, I don’t want to know. All I know is that this came from on high.
I knew that U.S. attorneys were only asked to resign essentially for misconduct, and I knew I hadn’t committed any misconduct. I knew my office was doing well by the Justice Department’s internal metrics. Logically that only left one possibility, which was politics.
I started thinking back to, well, Who within the party have I angered? The first thing that came to mind were two very inappropriate phone calls that I got in October 2006. One was from Congresswoman Heather Wilson. She called me directly on my cell phone and was snooping around, asking about sealed indictments. I was very vague in my answer and basically gave her reasons why U.S. attorneys can seal something. She seemed very unsatisfied.
Approximately two weeks later, I got a second phone call. This one was from Pete Domenici, who had been my sponsoring senator, and he called me at home. He started asking about the political-corruption cases [against Democrats] and matters he’d been reading about in the local media. He just came out and asked me point-blank, Are these going to get filed prior to November?, and I was absolutely stunned by that question. I tried to be responsive without violating any regulations or rules myself, and I told him I didn’t think so. At which point he said, I’m very sorry to hear that, and then he hung up the phone. I had a very sick sense in my stomach.
December 20, 2006 In a news conference Bush states that the year ahead will “require difficult choices and additional sacrifices.” Noting that it is important to maintain economic growth, he adds, “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”
January 10, 2007 Bush announces a surge in American troop strength in Iraq, from 130,000 to more than 150,000. The aim is to suppress the level of violence and overt sectarian strife and thus to provide a breathing spell in which the Iraqi government can make progress toward a set of stated political benchmarks. By fall the level of violence has indeed subsided—observers disagree on why—though many of the political benchmarks remain unmet.
Anthony Cordesman, national-security analyst and former official at the Defense and State Departments: We can all argue over the semantics of the word “surge,” and it is fair to say that some goals were not met. We didn’t come close to providing additional civilian-aid workers that were called for in the original plan. And often it took much longer to achieve the effects than people had planned. But the fact was that this was a broad political, military, and economic strategy, which was executed on many different levels. And credit has to go to General Petraeus, General Odierno, and Ambassador Crocker for taking what often were ideas, very loosely defined, and policies which were very broadly stated, and transforming them into a remarkably effective real-world effort.
It’s important to note that we made even more mistakes in Afghanistan than we did in Iraq. We were far slower to react, but in both cases we were unprepared for stability operations; we had totally unrealistic goals for nation building; at a political level we were in a state of denial about the seriousness of popular anger and resistance, about the rise of the insurgency, about the need for host-country support and forces; and we had a singularly unfortunate combination of a secretary of defense and a vice president who tried to win through ideology rather than realism and a secretary of state who essentially stood aside from many of the issues involved. And in fairness, rather than blame subordinates, you had a president who basically took until late 2006 to understand how much trouble he was in in Iraq and seems to have taken till late 2008 to understand how much trouble he was in in Afghanistan.
June 28, 2007 Bush’s immigration plan, a bipartisan effort that represents the most ambitious attempt to overhaul U.S. immigration policy in a generation, goes down to defeat in the Senate. The most controversial element is a provision that would permit an estimated 12 million illegal aliens already in the United States to take steps to legalize their status, with citizenship an eventual possibility. The provision enrages many in Bush’s own party, who call it amnesty and see it as a security threat.
Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to George W. Bush: My suspicion would be that that is a real regret [of the president’s]. It’s an issue we talked about early on in the 2000 campaign, and he was told by advisers that it was the third rail, or maybe the fourth rail—Social Security’s the third rail. But it’s also an issue that attracted people like me to him. Centrist types, independent types in Texas were attracted to him because he was a Republican who was talking about a limited yet appropriate role for government on issues like education and immigration. Immigration was one of his most heartfelt issues.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: The repercussions of that decision by our party are going to be felt for decades. As I sit here in Austin, I see the demographic changes that are happening in our state—in less than 20 years, Hispanics are going to be a majority of the population. And we are on the wrong side of that issue. It’s that simple.
January 1, 2008 As the new year begins, the United States is faced with an accelerating economic crisis. The price of oil will soon top $100 a barrel for the first time in history, driven by rising demand in the developed world and in India and China—and by the prospect of continuing Middle Eastern uncertainties. Although the fact will not be established for another year, when the National Bureau of Economic Research issues its December 2008 report, the U.S. economy has entered a recession.
The catalyzing event is the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market. During the past 12 months there have been nearly 1.3 million foreclosure filings. The losses flow upward. In March, J. P. Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provide massive emergency loans to prevent a default by Bear Stearns, one of the nation’s largest financial institutions; Bear Stearns is ultimately absorbed by J. P. Morgan. A cascade of economic woe ensues.
Some regulators had been warning for years about the threat posed by bad mortgages and the housing market, but steps to tighten the rules were successfully opposed by lenders.
Robert Shiller, Yale economist who warned of a housing bubble: The Bush strategists were aware of the public enthusiasm for housing, and they dealt with it brilliantly in the 2004 election by making the theme of the campaign the ownership society. Part of the ownership society seemed to be that the government would encourage home ownership and, therefore, boost the market. And so Bush was playing along with the bubble in some subtle sense. I don’t mean to accuse him of any—I think it probably sounded right to him, and the political strategists knew what was a good winning combination.
I don’t think that he was in any mode to entertain the possibility that this was a bubble. Why should he do that? Attention wasn’t even focused on this. If you go back to 2004, most people were just—they thought that we had discovered a law of nature: that housing, because of the fixity of land and the growing economy and the greater prosperity, that it’s inevitable that this would be a great investment. It was taken for granted.
John C. Dugan, comptroller of the currency A lot of mortgages got made to people who could not afford them and on terms that would get progressively worse over time, and that created the seeds of an even bigger problem. As the whole market became even more dependent on house-price appreciation, when house prices flattened and then started to decline the whole situation began to unravel. The question you have to ask yourself: Why did credit become so easy? Why would lenders make mortgages that became increasingly less likely to be repaid?
Part of the answer is that there was a huge chunk of the mortgage market that was not regulated to any significant extent. The overwhelming proportion of subprime loans were being done in entities that were not banks and not regulated as banks—I’m talking here about mortgage brokers and non-bank mortgage lenders that could originate these mortgages and then sell them to Wall Street firms that could package them into new kinds of mortgage securities, which arguably could take into account the lower credit risks and still be salable to investors worldwide.
Unfortunately, the theory was not in accord with the reality. Although they thought they had accurately gauged that risk, they too were in fact depending—when you get to the bottom of it—on house prices continuing to go up and up and up. And they did not.
Henry Paulson, secretary of the Treasury: I easily could imagine and expected there to be financial turmoil. But the extent of it, O.K., I was naïve in terms of—I knew a lot about regulation but not nearly as much as I needed to know, and I knew very little about regulatory powers and authorities. I just had not gone into it in that kind of detail. This’ll be the longest we’ve gone in recent history without there being turmoil, and given all the innovation in the private pools of capital and the over-the-counter derivatives and the excesses around the world, we figured that when there was turmoil, and these things were tested for the first time by stress, it would be more significant than anything else.
I said at the time, I have a concern that every rally we’re going to have in the financial markets will be a false rally until we break the back of the price correction in real estate. And these things are never over until you have a couple of institutions go that surprise everyone. Bear Stearns can hardly be a shock.
But having said that, it’s one thing to see it intellectually and it’s another to see where we are.
June 12, 2008 The Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush strikes down a provision in the Military Commissions Act, ruling that the denial of the right to petition for habeas corpus is unconstitutional.
July 9, 2008 The annual summit of the G-8 nations, held in Japan, concludes with a tepid pledge to cut greenhouse gases by 50 percent by the year 2050. It is the last G-8 summit that Bush attends. He bids farewell to the other heads of state with the words “Good-bye from the world’s greatest polluter.”
July 30, 2008 As the subprime-mortgage crisis continues to ripple through the economy, Bush signs emergency legislation to rescue the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A Wall Street bailout will follow in October. The budget deficit for the year is expected to exceed $1 trillion.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: [The housing bubble] was not on my radar screen. Now, after everything broke with Fannie and Freddie, I guess the White House released some document that, if I remember it, said the president 17 times cited Fannie and Freddie problems going back to the initial budget that we submitted in 2001. So the wonks were onto it, but in the post-9/11 world and then the Iraq-war world, all the visible focus, all the news, was on other issues. I think it just got drowned out and it didn’t get met with any sense of urgency from people in both parties.
August 8, 2008 Russia invades the Republic of Georgia. Bush says in a Rose Garden appearance that the United States “stands with” Georgia. Bush makes his comments during a brief stop in Washington between a trip to Beijing for the Olympics and a vacation at his ranch in Crawford. Since taking office Bush has spent more than 450 days at the Crawford ranch and more than 450 days at Camp David. During the last six months of his presidency, Bush is largely absent from public view, even as the economic crisis continues to build.
September 1, 2008 Republicans meet in St. Paul to nominate John McCain as their presidential candidate; with an approval rating in the polls hovering below 30 percent, Bush becomes the first sitting president since Lyndon Johnson not to appear at his own party’s nominating convention. (He had been scheduled to attend, but his appearance was canceled when a hurricane once again threatened the Gulf Coast.) The president travels to Gettysburg for a tour of the battlefield, accompanied by his wife, Laura, and a number of former aides—Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Harriet Miers. Among the guides are Gabor Boritt, a Lincoln scholar, and his son Jake Boritt, a filmmaker.
Jake Boritt, filmmaker and Gettysburg tour guide: We’re standing in front of the Virginia monument, which is more or less where Robert E. Lee ordered Pickett’s Charge from. When Lee invaded the North, his hope was that he could get far enough in, win a great battle, demoralize the Northern will to fight, and then there would be pressure on Lincoln to stop the war. Everybody in the North was terrified. Lincoln was not. He was looking at it as an opportunity, because finally Lee was going to be off his home turf in Virginia. Lincoln was actually excited at the possibility that the Confederate Army was invading Pennsylvania. And Bush said, Well, did the president say, “Bring it on”?
We do this one thing where you line people up shoulder to shoulder to show how the Confederates moved across a mile-long field to attack the Union line. So we lined them up—it was roughly 20 people, all mostly important White House people, and you’re pretending you’re shooting at ‘em with cannon shells as you pretend to take them out.
October 3, 2008 After much wrangling, and with a sense of urgency and dismay, Congress passes the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which authorizes the secretary of the Treasury to spend $700 billion to shore up U.S. financial institutions and otherwise address the fallout from the subprime-mortgage crisis.
Eric Cantor, G.O.P. congressman from Virginia and Republican chief deputy whip: It was almost as if panic had struck the capital. When the news came out about how dire the situation was, not only for the U.S. capital markets but for the global financial scene, [there was real worry that] all the sort of nightmare scenarios that one learned in school could actually be occurring. I was a little bit concerned, though, about the haste with which the administration was moving, given the enormity of the package that they were proposing to bring to the Hill in a matter of days. The amount of money was so gargantuan—more than what Social Security spends in a year. It was really unheard of. In hindsight I can see now that the panic was such that they felt they needed to do whatever was possible to make sure that we did not have a repeat of the Great Depression. I felt like the weight of the world and the weight of the national economy and the well-being of every family across this country was resting on our shoulders. The level of anxiety and panic found on the face of Secretary Paulson, [Federal Reserve Board] Chairman [Ben] Bernanke—you could see in person that it was severe. I do not think that anyone foresaw the level of seriousness of the problem we were faced with.
November 4, 2008 Barack Obama is elected president in an electoral-college landslide. The Republicans lose at least seven seats in the Senate and a score in the House, dashing Karl Rove’s hopes of a permanent Republican majority. As the administration prepares to leave office, it promulgates a raft of “midnight” orders to weaken environmental, health-care, and product-safety regulations. The unemployment rate is nearly 7 percent and rising. Income inequality is at the highest level since the 1920s. As of a week before the election, the stock market had lost a third of its value over a period of six months.
Illustration by Risko
Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Ed Gillespie, campaign strategist and later counselor to the president: Politics goes in cycles, and my old boss, [Mississippi governor] Haley Barbour, who was a mentor to me, has a saying that in politics nothing’s ever as good or as bad as it seems.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: At the end of the day I think the divisiveness of this presidency will fundamentally come down to one issue: Iraq. And Iraq only because, in my opinion, there weren’t weapons of mass destruction. I think the public’s tolerance for the difficulties we face would’ve been far different had it felt like the original threat had been proved true. That’s the fulcrum. Fundamentally, when the president gets to an approval rating of 27 percent, it’s this issue.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: As my boss [Colin Powell] once said, Bush had a lot of .45-caliber instincts, cowboy instincts. Cheney knew exactly how to polish him and rub him. He knew exactly when to give him a memo or when to do this or when to do that and exactly the word choice to use to get him really excited.
Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: One of our difficulties now is getting the rest of the world to accept our assessment of the seriousness of an issue, because they say, You screwed it up so badly with Iraq, why would we believe that you’re any better today? And it’s a damn hard question to answer.
Meanwhile, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have relocated, have strengthened, have become a more nimble and a much more international organization. The threat is greater today than it was on September the 11th.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: It’s kind of like the Tower of Babel. At a certain point in time, God smites hubris. You knew that right around the time people started saying there’s going to be a permanent Republican majority—that God kinda goes, No, I really don’t think so.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: You know, the headline in his presidency will be missed opportunity. That is the headline, ultimately. It’s missed opportunity, missed opportunity.
Cullen Murphy is Vanity Fair’s editor-at-large.
Todd S. Purdum is Vanity Fair’s national editor.
Philippe Sands is an international lawyer at the firm Matrix Chambers and a professor at University College London.
