Did Libby/Cheney Hate the CIA or Joe Wilson More?

Did Scooter Libby get himself indicted because he hated Joe Wilson so much? I don't think so. It's more likely that Libby hated the CIA that much, and that he saw Joe Wilson as the CIA's representative or front man in a battle between the CIA and the White House. I first heard this idea from Mort Zuckerman on the McLaughlin Group, and then found it in an op-ed by David Ignatius in the Washington Post.

Although Joe Wilson was an ambassador to an African country, he was not one of the top tier of career Foreign Service officers. He was more or less equivalent to a midlevel general in the military, most of whom are never heard from again after they retire. He seems to have some political connections, but again, not of the highest level. He did not have the personal clout to threaten the White House. He wrote an op-ed attacking the White House's WMD justification for the Iraq War, but a lot of other people -- academics, think tank staffers, other retired government officials -- wrote articles attacking various aspects of the Iraq War, presumably without attracting the vicious attacks from Libby, Rove and Cheney that Wilson did.

Therefore, it makes sense to me that the White House saw the CIA as undercutting the White House rationale for the war and thus as a major bureaucratic enemy in Washington. When the White House staff found out that Wilson was married to a CIA agent, they assumed the worst: that he had been put up to his attack on the White House by the CIA. Thus, as a representative of the CIA he came under the kind of attack usually reserved for major Washington players, which he personally was not.

IAEA Nobel a Slap at Bush

The Nobel committee's decision of award the Nobel Peace Prize to the IAEA and ElBaradei, as reported by CNN and many others, is a slap at Bush for his decision to settle everything by war rather than diplomacy. Before the Iraq war, Bush ignored and ridiculed the IAEA along with the other UN inspection efforts in Iraq led by Hans Blix, the former head of the IAEA. The UN was right about weapons of mass destruction, and Bush was wrong. Then Secretary of State Powell ruined his reputation by arguing Bush's case in the UN. Most of Powell's arguments were wrong. I think he was just mistaken or misled by the CIA, but clearly he intended to support Bush's case, although the case had no basis in fact.

So, hooray for the Nobel Committee and for the IAEA! Truth will out. The UN is on the side of the angels. The Bush administration and all its evangelical supporters are on the other side. It's pretty clear when you see where this administration stands on torture at Guantanamo and in Iraq. This administration and its supporters stand for evil, illustrated currently by their opposition to Sen. McCain's bill. Clearly the 9/11 terrorists were more evil, but apparently Bush decided that you have to fight evil with evil. I don't think that was the way to go.

North Korea Nuclear Agreement Redux

The much touted nuclear agreement with North Korea is very similar to the one that the Clinton Administration reached about ten years ago. The issue that caused the US to break off the earlier agreement, uranium enrichment, is not mentioned explicitly in the new agreement, but according to the US is captured because the new agreement refers to all North Korean nuclear activities.

What appears to have happened is that sometime after the Clinton agreement and the tantrum by the Bush administration, Pakistan's A.Q. Khan dropped by North Korea and offered to sell them uranium enrichment technology, because he wanted a little (or a lot of) extra money. The North Koreans thought this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and jumped at it. It turned out to be somewhat of a once in a lifetime opportunity, because once the US learned what Khan was up to, they got Pakistan to rein him in, although they closed the barn door after the horse had escaped.

When the Bush administration learned that North Korea had gotten access to enrichment technology they threw a hissy fit, which is not very helpful in diplomacy. They managed to:
-- cancel the agreement, which provided some restraint on North Korea's activities,
--provoke North Korea to withdraw from the NPT, and
--get the IAEA inspectors thrown out.
All of which left us less secure and more in the dark about what the DPRK was doing.

Now we have a proposal, in principle, to get us more or less back where we were several years ago. At least this administration has more or less come to its senses. The DPRK probably never will, but it's better to have one of the parties at the table to be sane. Probably a lot of the progress on the US side been made possible by getting John Bolton out of the State Department, where he managed to sabotage any similar attempt by Colin Powell. Also, I tend to believe the reports that the Chinese threatened to embarrass Bush and blame the US publicly for the failure of the negotiations if we didn't sign on.

Another Encounter with Richard Perle

I began working on Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) issues while I was in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), about the same time I began working on Soviet high technology issues. There was no non-proliferation regime for controlling delivery systems of weapons of mass destruction, and Reagan decided to follow up on Carter's first steps towards developing one.

One of the first things we needed was a list of items to be controlled by a missile control regime, and one of the State Department experts on controlling high technology was Bill Root, who was the director of the office in the Economic Bureau that handled COCOM issues, the Coordinating Committee that allowed Western countries to coordinate their exports of high technology items to the Soviet Union. Root's assistant, the deputy director, was Vic Comras. Richard Perle took a strong interest in COCOM issues from his Pentagon roost. He and his staff frequently fought with Root and his staff on COCOM issues, just as he and his staff fought with me and my associates (I was too junior to have a staff) on MTCR issues.

One day I was going over a draft list of controlled items for the MTCR with Bill Root. I think that I had left INR and had been reassigned to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), where I continued to work on MTCR issues. (ACDA was then headed by the Ken Adelman, now an outspoken neo-con. It has since been abolished as a separate agency and folded into the State Department.)

Root was explaining how to make the most effective use of technical specifications, so that manufacturers could understand them, and so that the list actually did what we wanted it to do. While we were talking, he got a phone call from Richard Perle. He suggested that we break for lunch and continue after lunch. When I came back to his office after lunch, his staff told me that he had retired from the State Department. I guess he had had it with Perle. Unfortunately, I continued to cross swords with Perle, his minions and successors for years. I believe that one reason the MTCR is so weak is because Perle wanted it so strong. The Western countries would not accept a regime that was as restrictive as Perle wanted, but because of Perle's pressure within the government, it was impossible for the US Government to reach a reasonable compromise with the Europeans and the Japanese.