Democrats Knock Bush Security Policy

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Two prominent U.S. Democratic politicians yesterday criticized the Bush administration’s efforts at preventing the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capabilities worldwide (see GSN, Aug. 3).

Speaking here at a conference on addressing terrorism hosted by the New America Foundation, retired Gen. Wesley Clark said the administration has not sufficiently supported international arms control agreements and diplomacy and called for “talking to Iran and North Korea directly.”

Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the administration has not addressed “radical fundamentalism” and proliferation “as well as we could or should.”

He called for increased emphasis on “rebuilding and building” alliances and international organizations. Taking multilateral rather than unilateral action can bring practical benefits such as “basing rights and burden sharing,” Biden said.

Clark, who campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004, and Biden are considered potential candidates for the nomination for the 2008 race.

Echoing two major Bush administration themes, Biden also called for developing a “prevention strategy to diffuse threats to security long before they are on the verge of exploding,” and “reforming failed and antidemocratic states.”

Biden’s prevention strategy includes securing sensitive material worldwide, “fully funding” homeland security budgets, new international laws for seizing “suspect cargos,” and tougher international nonproliferation requirements.

It also includes a recommendation for legitimizing the preventive use of force. Appearing to differ though from the so-called Bush Doctrine, which advocates potential use of U.S. force to prevent suspected future WMD threats from developing, Biden called for obtaining international legitimacy for using multilateral force to prevent potential threats from developing.

States “without democratic checks” that “seek weapons of mass destruction and harbor terrorists” should be judged to “forfeit their sovereignty,” just as states systematically abusing human rights in the 1990s were argued to have done, he said.

“The U.S. should seek new international consensus that there is a duty to protect innocence and responsibility to prevent acts — terrorist acts — of destruction,” he said.

He called the administration’s approach to preventive force “dangerous and destabilizing.”

“It says to rogue states that their best insurance policy against regime change is to acquire weapons of mass destruction and do it as quickly as possible, which is one of the reasons, I believe, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal apparently increased by 400 percent in the past four years,” he said.

The approach also demands a standard of proof for intelligence “that may be impossible to meet,” he said.

Biden did not say, though, how his proposal for multilateral preventive force would overcome the difficulty of obtaining proof or eliminate concerns from states about an attack over suspected illicit behavior.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a July 25 interview with The American Interest magazine, argued that obtaining international consensus on the use of force is difficult and rare.

“The only times in which you were actually able to get a U.N. Security Council resolution on the use of force was the Korean crisis when, of course, the Russians walked out of the room, and the Gulf War in 1991, which I think was potentially, well possibly, a kind of crack in time,” she said.

Clark argued for building a “diplomatic and legal framework that will advance our interests, protect our people and keep us safe, and let us use military force as a last, last, last resort.”

That would include efforts to “rebuild our ties with Europe, to strengthen NATO,” and “to build up in a constructive way the United Nations,” as well as “talking to Iran and North Korea directly.”

“To neglect legal instruments is to neglect what the United States ultimately has stood for in over 50 years, since the Second World War: legality, legitimacy,” Clark said.

U.S. State Department officials have said they continue to support the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but have proposed mostly measures outside the treaty for strengthening nuclear nonproliferation.

They have argued that circumstances, particularly the demise of the Soviet Union and emergence of “rogue” states clandestinely pursuing banned weapons, require that focus be shifted away from building international legal norms toward formulating more ad hoc solutions to proliferation.

“Contemporary diplomatic efforts related to countering the proliferation of WMD and their means of delivery bear little resemblance to that of the past — when we engaged in what were often ponderous and lengthy negotiations that were focused primarily on the strategic offensive forces of two antagonistic superpowers,” Undersecretary of States for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph said in an Aug. 15 speech in Singapore.

“Today, diplomats are increasingly working to build a lasting basis of support for rapid coordination and action when proliferation related intelligence and law enforcement information becomes available,” he said, citing the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative to intercept shipments of WMD materials. “We are building support in the international community, both on a bilateral and multilateral basis.”

Clarke praised a number of administration foreign policy initiatives, including denying the al-Qaeda terrorist organization a safe haven in Afghanistan, breaking up suspected terror plots overseas, and Libya’s decision to abandon its illicit weapons capabilities and activities.

He said, though, terrorism worldwide has increased and in the area of nonproliferation, “precious little has been accomplished besides the denuclearization of Libya.”

“We know that there was a Pakistani source in proliferation, but he hasn’t actually been interrogated. In fact, he’s a national hero.  We had a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty five-year review conference that the administration failed to prepare for and never really weighed in on,” he said.

“North Korea and Iran are still pursuing nuclear weapons,” he added. Meanwhile, “negotiations are proceeding in fits and starts.”

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