Sunday, January 11, 2004

The Cable Guy: Joseph Wilson and the Plot to Test Saddam's Sincerity

By Mark Hand

Joseph Wilson was a thorn in the side of neoconservatives in Washington long before officials in the Bush administration leaked to reporters the clandestine nature of his wife’s line of work. Wilson’s own work, in 2003 and during the first Bush administration, had conflicted with the neoconservative vision of a new Middle East.

In 1989, while serving as a top official in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Wilson sent a cable to his superiors in Washington, floating the idea of conducting official low-level military exchanges with Iraq. The Pentagon took the proposal seriously because at the time the United States was not officially out to portray Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as an enemy of the United States.

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Washington had approved the sale of weapons and the provision of other forms of aid to Iraq as a means to preventing the Iranian government from gaining an upper hand in the region. But the launch of official military exchanges between the two countries, as proposed by Wilson, represented a diplomatic maneuver that would be taking the relationship one step further.

While the Reagan and Bush administrations generally leaned toward Iraq during that country’s nine-year war with Iran, some officials in Washington still sought to keep a close eye on the military capabilities of Baghdad. The scrutiny intensified at the close of the war when Saddam’s regime no longer was preoccupied with fighting Iran.

In a Sept. 16, 1988, opinion piece, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that the United States had correctly sided with Iraq during its war with Iran but now it was time to support Iran. “The geopolitical reasons are compelling enough,” Krauthammer explained. “Iran is no longer in a position to win the Gulf war or even to carry it on. Iraq has a huge battle-trained army (it has twice as many tanks as Britain and France combined) ready to be turned any which way Saddam Hussein wants — today north against the Kurds, tomorrow south against Saudi Arabia or Kuwait (which Iraq has threatened in the past), the next day against Jordan and Israel.”

Another in-house Post columnist, Jim Hoagland, criticized President Bush in an April 10, 1990, piece for going too soft on Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Iraqi leader’s threat of retaliation if Israel were to attack his country like it did in the early 1980s. While officials in capitals around the world publicly condemned Israel for the raid, some in Washington secretly applauded Israel for sending its aircraft in 1981 to destroy the Osirak reactor in Iraq from which Saddam Hussein allegedly expected to obtain plutonium for a nuclear weapon.

“Caught with his hand in the nuclear-technology cookie jar, Saddam tries to brazen it out, daring the Israelis to attack him and threatening Armageddon if they do,” Hoagland wrote. “The last Arab leader who tried this tactic was Egypt’s Gamal Abdal Nasser in June 1967. Nasser’s bluster cost Egypt an army, and the Sinai Peninsula.”

A year after the end of the Iran-Iraq war and as a war of words between Iraq and Israel was heating up, Wilson was telling Washington that moving forward with some form of a joint military arrangement with Iraq might be worth a try. This approach certainly was in conflict with the growing desire among neoconservatives in Washington to isolate Saddam Hussein.

Jump ahead to 2003. Joseph Wilson angered the architects of Washington’s Iraq policy by going public with his findings that the Bush administration had used bogus information to justify the invasion and occupation. This time, Wilson’s foes retaliated.

As the theory goes, the identity of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a deep cover CIA employee was leaked from inside the Bush administration to columnist Robert Novak in order to discredit Wilson, who had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate a document — now known to be a forgery — that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story. This proved embarrassing to the Bush administration, which had used the Niger story as one of its justifications for invading Iraq.

By revealing the identity of Plame’s employer, administration officials wanted to show that Wilson had been chosen for the temporary duty in Niger through the influence of his wife. Wilson has said that he has no doubt that those who sought to bring his wife, who was known to friends as an energy industry analyst, into the controversy intended to sound a warning to others who might take on the White House on the issue of whether intelligence about Iraq was reshaped or ignored to fit a political agenda.

The outing of Valerie Plame continues to simmer in the media, especially now that the Bush administration has appointed a special prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, to oversee the investigation into the controversy. Ironically, President Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director, said in 1999 that he has “nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.”

In the 1970s, certain groups and individuals named the names of CIA officers, agents and collaborators as a way to throw a monkey wrench into the U.S. government’s efforts to destabilize countries around the world. In 2003, officials inside the Bush White House apparently named Plame as a CIA officer as a way to boost the U.S. government’s efforts to destabilize countries around the world.

In a July 6, 2003, New York Times opinion piece, Wilson wrote that, based on his conclusions, “some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” This piece apparently set in motion a chain of events that culminated in Robert Novak writing in his July 14, 2003, column that “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

After Wilson went public with his findings, some officials in the Bush White House must have been reminded of the cable that Wilson sent to Washington from his Baghdad office on June 29, 1989. Wilson, who was the acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq at the time, said in the cable that “now is the time to test the sincerity” of recent Iraqi statements favoring a broader dialogue with Washington by approving some “low-cost” exchanges with the Pentagon urged by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.

Five months later, the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said in a cable to Washington that “we concur” with Wilson “that implementation of low-level, nonlethal military assistance would greatly facilitate developing an improved military dialogue with and access to the senior military leadership and the government of Iraq,” R. Jeffrey Smith reported in the Aug. 4, 1992, issue of the Washington Post.

The cable from the Central Command, then headed by Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, listed 10 initiatives that should be pursued with Iraq, ranging from supplying army field manuals and training Iraqi personnel in military medicine, Smith wrote.

“In January 1990, a secret cable to Schwarzkopf from the director of strategic plans and policy for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff reported that the State Department had decided that ‘the U.S. domestic political climate ... [was not] supportive of increased military relations’ with Iraq,” Smith reported. “The cable advised Schwarzkopf to get around political obstacles by beginning military training with Iraq that would not be financed by the Defense Department.”

The “domestic political climate,” of course, was a reference to the strong support on Capitol Hill for Israel, which, since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, had been sounding the alarm about Iraq’s growing threat in the region.

A Joint Chiefs of Staff position paper, written on May 29, 1990, less than three months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, continued to favor establishing “U.S. military-to-military relations with Iraq,” which, the paper noted, were currently “nearly nonexistent.” Plans by the Pentagon to conduct a military exchange with Iraq, however, were abruptly halted following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.

The Pentagon documents were released by the first Bush administration at the request of Democratic lawmakers, who in 1992 were conducting an investigation into U.S. policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf war. The Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, Sam Gejdenson, expressed astonishment in 1992 upon learning of the move to create ties with Iraq’s military, given Iraq’s perceived threat to Israel.

“Even after Saddam Hussein threatened [in April 1990] to ‘burn half of Israel’ with binary chemical weapons, attempted [in March 1990] to smuggle nuclear triggers and moved missile bases [in early 1990] closer to Israel, the Department of Defense wanted to provide him with military assistance,” Gejdenson, a congressman from Connecticut who left office in 2000, said at the time. “What could the DOD have been thinking?”

For his part, Wilson remained in his job as U.S. charge d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He was in regular touch with the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in late 1990 seeking the release of U.S. citizens that the Iraqi government was holding as “special guests” in response to the United States mobilizing for an attack on Iraq.

Wilson also participated in negotiations to convince Iraq to end its occupation of Kuwait in order to avoid a war. In December 1990, Wilson said he would be “tremendously disappointed if there is a war. If you consider that war represents the failure of diplomacy, then that means we will have failed.” He stayed in Baghdad until early January 1991 when he left the country only days before the United States began its bombardment of Iraq and its campaign to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Mark Hand is editor of Press Action.

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