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Threat Assessment: Critics Question Basis for Bush “Axis of Evil” Charge By David Ruppe President George W. Bush coined the phrase in his State of the Union address last month, saying the three countries “could” someday attempt to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction and effectively marking them targets in the U.S.-led global war on terrorism. The intelligence chief’s prepared testimony, presented annually to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, however, did not indicate the three countries have been a source of that technology for terrorists (see GSN, Feb. 7). Nor did an unclassified bi-annual report to Congress issued by the CIA last week detailing global WMD threats. They pointed instead to the Internet and former Soviet states. “There isn’t any evidentiary base for the assumption that there have been massive proliferation efforts going on,” says Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism operations. “There may be evidence linking these states to terrorists,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But there is no publicly available evidence indicating that any state has given materials, designs or expertise to these terrorist groups that would help them acquire weapons of mass destruction.” There is, of course, the possibility the United States does have such evidence but is holding it until after U.S. forces now in Afghanistan can be positioned to do something about it — to avoid alerting a regime prior to attacking. CIA Reporting CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said he could not comment on whether there is classified information indicating such proliferation. “The report we do bi-annually to Congress is as far as we can go in an unclassified forum to discuss a very sensitive issue,” he said. That report said the threat of terrorists using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear material “appears to be rising” since Sept. 11. It said, however, that such WMD information and technology is “more widely available, especially from sources like the Internet and the former Soviet Union.” It also warned of growing “secondary proliferation” from maturing state-sponsored programs, such as those in India, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, but did not say whether terrorists were receiving WMD technology. Tenet cited the Internet as a primary source of WMD technology. “Terrorist groups worldwide have ready access to information on chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons via the Internet,” he said. Tenet said his testimony reflected reported discoveries of information in Afghanistan indicating al-Qaeda attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, Jan. 17). Foreign Criticism Some foreign leaders have questioned the wisdom of Bush’s formulation, warning it could discourage cooperation by those countries and weaken moderate forces in Iran (see GSN, Jan. 31). French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine called Bush’s approach “simplistic” and “not well thought out.” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw suggested Bush's comments should be “best understood by the fact that there are midterm congressional elections coming up in November.” Less attention, however, has been paid to whether there is a factual or logical basis to the administration’s assertions that the three countries might proliferate WMD technologies to terrorists. China was an exception. “We believe that combat against terrorism should have concrete evidence,” said a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman last week. China “holds that anti-terrorism campaign should not be expanded willfully,” he said. Critics See No Evidence Nongovernmental analysts say they have seen no such evidence. With respect to North Korea, “there’s no evidence at all” that it provided aid to groups like al-Qaeda or others that have attacked the United States,” said Selig Harrison, a Korea expert at the Center for International Policy and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In fact, he said, there is “no evidence North Korea has created any terrorist acts in the Korean peninsula since 1987,” when, it was widely believed, North Korea shot down a civilian jetliner. While a connection between an Iraqi intelligence official and a key member of al-Qaeda was confirmed prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the intelligence community has not, at least yet, indicated it has found evidence of Iraqi support for the group’s terror operations (see GSN, Feb. 6). Tenet testimony said only Iraq “has also had contacts with al-Qaeda.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair has cautioned there should be no war on Iraq unless a clear connection is found between Baghdad and the Sept. 11 attacks. Tenet linked Iran to support for terrorist activities, including recent “participation in the attempt to transfer arms to the Palestinian Authority.” Tenet did not, however, describe any Iranian ties to al-Qaeda or Iranian WMD transfers to terrorists. A North Korean connection to terrorism also was not mentioned. Tenet’s statement suggested the apparent absence of intelligence showing countries have shared their WMD technology may result from difficulties in detecting such activity. “As I have mentioned in years past, we face several unique challenges in trying to detect WMD acquisition by proliferant states and nonstate actors. Their use of denial and deception tactics and their access to a tremendous amount of information in open sources about WMD production complicate our efforts,” Tenet said. “The absence of evidence doesn’t mean that it’s not true, but it’s very difficult to sustain the argument without any evidence at all,” said Carnegie’s Cirincione. “It’s very difficult to construct your policy without any evidence this is happening.” Questions Over Probability The administration’s underlying reasoning for the “axis of evil” designation appears to be that a common antipathy toward the United States could lead the three countries to share more than conventional weapons with terrorists. Bush in his State of the Union address did not provide the explanation, saying only that they “could” share the technology. Citing Iran, Iraq and North Korea, he said, “states like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these countries pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred” (see GSN, Jan. 30). Tenet, though, did provide an explanation: mutual hatred. “Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible — even though [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences,” Tenet said. Would They Risk It? Tony Blinken, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former staffer at the National Security Council during most of the Clinton administration, said the administration’s reasoning may be more involved. “After Sept. 11, with the knowledge al-Qaeda was more dangerous than we thought and was spread around the world, there was a concern Iraq might think it could have its cake and eat it too,” he said. Iraq, he said, might feel it can get away with it. “We’ve spent the last, I don’t know how many months, trying to determine who’s behind the anthrax attacks in the United States, and we still don’t know,” he said. With respect to Iran, “there is speculation, and if you believe some people, real evidence Iran had a hand directly [or] indirectly in several terrorist acts we’ve never been able to pin on it, including the Khobar Towers destruction in Saudi Arabia,” Blinken said. Critics, on the other hand, argue the countries have been developing weapons of mass destruction mainly for deterrence, and the risk of proliferating their weapons or technology would greatly outweigh the benefit. “It is very unlikely that any country, including Iraq, would actually provide a weapon of mass destruction to a group they don’t control,” said Cirincione. “It’s against their own self-interests. And if they needed any proof of the validity of that, all they have to do is look at what happened to the Taliban.” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington and expert on secret foreign nuclear weapons programs, however, envisions a scenario in which Iraq might someday transfer such technology to terrorists for use against the United States. “If the Iraqi regime was about ready to go down the tubes, would it reach out and use terrorists as a delivery vehicle? Probably of a biological agent,” he said. “So I think you can’t ignore that.” Otherwise, “separate from a doomsday scenario for a regime, I don’t see any motivation for any of the regimes to do that.” Tenet in his spoken question-and-answer session, however, seemed to suggest evidence about a WMD connection and consideration of what might be in the three countries’ interests are not considered relevant to determining whether they should be targets of the terror campaign. “Nobody dismisses anything. Everybody's on the table, and these networks of terrorism should no longer be thought about purely in terms of the state's interests, what [states] say publicly, what their obvious interests are and how they see the benefit in hurting the United States,” he said. A Simplistic Strategy The administration’s axis of evil phrasing has prompted domestic and international concern the administration is attempting to lay the intellectual groundwork for a U.S. military attack on Iraq, less possibly for the other two (see GSN, Jan. 31). Former CIA official Cannistraro believes administration hardliners may see the Sept. 11 attacks and massive public support for anti-terrorism “as an opportunity to change the strategic equation in the world. And get rid of people who aren’t necessarily current threats to the United States, maybe threats to other countries.” Analysts alternatively suspect the label may be diplomatic posturing, designed to scare the countries into positive action with the implied threat of force. For instance, “the administration appears to be gearing up to press North Korea for broadening and accelerated nuclear inspections,” as provided for in the bilateral 1994 Agreed Framework, said Harrison. “Part of it is posturing to scare them and to scare Saddam. I think to that degree it has worked,” said Cannistraro. The “axis of evil,” they said, lacks subtlety to be effective. In scaring Hussein they are also scaring Russia, whose cooperation is needed for maintaining strong sanctions against Iraq, Cannistraro said. The axis of evil designation also is problematic for lacking clear distinction between the troublesome regimes in those countries and the rest of the population, said Cannistraro, which could embolden the hardliners in Iran competing for power with moderates. “Now they’re able to say to the moderates and the [President Mohammad] Khatami people, see, this is what your policy gets you. Americans are the great Satan,” he said. The designation seems so contrary to U.S. interests, Cannistraro said, that conspiracy-minded people in the Middle East and South Asia think it is actually intended to keep the Iranian hardliners in power. “It was not a well thought out phrase, certainly a not a well thought out position. And if it was thought out, it reflects on the quality of thought within the administration, I’m sorry to say,” he said.
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