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The Belmont Club

Michael Carroll reviews the role of the United Nations leading up to the Six Day War in 1967. In an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs he describes the failure of United Nations Peacekeepers to maintain a buffer between Egyptian and Israeli forces along their troubled border. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was deployed to the Middle East in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Originally intended to be a short-term "emergency" force, UNEF quickly fell into a comfortable routine patrolling along the international frontier and Gaza Strip. Despite complaints in New York about the expense of peacekeeping, it was clear that UNEF 's presence was a deterrent to further hostilities, and for most politicians and diplomats, this uneasy peace was clearly preferable to an open war in the Middle East. After ten and a half years, UNEF had become a well- recognized fixture in the Egyptian desert.

It is important to remember that the world in 1965 was practically another planet. The United Nations was a serious player in international relations. UN flagged forces, albeit mostly American, had turned back an invasion of South Korea in 1950. And the UNEF had actually helped keep the Arabs and Israelis from engaging in open war for 10 years. The United States was not nearly so dominant in 1965 as it is in 2005. The Soviet Union was still regarded as a superpower, providing the weaponry and ideology that fueled Arab nationalism. America was tied down in Vietnam with little in reserve to spare for a major commitment to the Middle East and, in the eyes of many, already in irreversible decline.

One other striking difference of that era was the confidence, perhaps even overconfidence of Arab nations in the power of their national armies. Armed with the Soviet made weaponry, numerically superior to the Israelis, the Arab street of the day had little doubt that they would drive the Jews into the sea once hostilities began. One Egyptian commander told a UN officer "I will see you for lunch at the best restaurant in Tel Aviv in a few days."

In January 1964 the Arab League officially declared its desire to achieve "the final liquidation of Israel." The problem was UNEF. For the Arab armies to triumphantly fulfill their historical mission it was necessary to get the United Nations, then a body taken seriously, out of the line of fire. (Thirty years later, neither the Serbs nor the Muslim Kosovars would show the slightest respect for the United Nations. Peacekeepers would be trussed to lamposts. UN armories would be looted.) Gamal Abdel Nasser simply decided to tell the UN to clear out.

The message to withdraw UNEF was first conveyed to the commander of UNEF, Major General Indar Jit Rikhye, on May 16, 1967. The UAR Liaison Officer, Brigadier General Ibrahim Sharkawy, called Rikhye in the afternoon to inform him that a special envoy would be arriving with an important message for the UNEF commander.

The message was a demand for UNEF to leave the buffer zone. Amazingly by today's standards, the UN held firm. "The courier, expecting immediate compliance on the part of UNEF, was sorely disappointed when General Rikhye merely noted the contents of the letter, and informed his visitors that he would pass the message on to Secretary-General U Thant. Rikhye would have to await orders from New York." This simple act of decisiveness took the Egyptians aback and forced them to take their case to New York. Unfortunately Secretary General U Thant chose this moment to begin the long journey down the slippery slope. U Thant believed that the UN could not maintain itself on the Egyptian border without the permission of the host country and recommended a gradual withdrawal. But -- and here is the time warp factor again -- Canada believed it was necessary to defy Nasser in order to preserve the buffer -- and peace in the Middle East. Although some that the question be put to the Security Council. But U Thant was adamant and Canada was outvoted. The withdrawal began.

In the meantime, Egypt's preparations were advancing apace. It blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba. Nasser characterized this act as "an affirmation of our rights and our sovereignty over the Gulf of Aqaba. This is in our territorial waters and we shall never permit a ship flying Israeli colours to pass through this Gulf." Seeing that war was in the offing, Israel sent its own diplomats around the capitals of Europe to see what their attitude would be if Israel warred against Egypt.

Unwilling to await the results of U Thant's discussions in Cairo, the Israeli Cabinet dispatched Abba Eban on a whirlwind tour of Paris, London, and Washington to gauge international support for Israel. Thoroughly disappointed with the reception from President Charles DeGaulle, Eban fared better in London where he at least felt he had, "crossed…into the twentieth century." Eban inferred a much higher degree of sympathy for Israel in Britain and was impressed by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's resolve to work collectively on the international stage to oppose Nasser's closure of the Straits of Tiran. In terms of a diplomatic solution, Israel was pinning its hopes on Britain and the United States to bring about a peaceful resolution. President Johnson took a strong stand against Nasser's closure of the Straits of Tiran. The limiting factor, however, was that any action to be undertaken in the Middle East needed the full support of Congress which, after having written a blank check for Vietnam, was understandably reticent. ...

As Eban flew back to Tel Aviv, Nasser was speaking to a group of Arab trade unionists, predicting that "the battle against Israel will be a general one…and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel. " Confident of the Arabs numerical and qualitative superiority over the IDF, Nasser felt he had little to fear from a war with Israel ...

UNEF deliberately slow the process of withdrawal in an effort to delay the outbreak of conflict, but events had gone too far. On June 5, 1967 the Israelis annihilated the Arab air forces on the ground and then proceeded to destroy the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria while seizing the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai, creating the map of the Middle East as we know it today. Viewed against the backdrop of 1965, the world forty years later is a strange place. Since then the Arab world found, then squandered, the oil fields beneath them. Israel would become overwhelmingly dominant in conventional force. The mantle of Arab nationalism would shift its basis from a quasi-Marxism to Islamism. The Soviet Union would collapse. America would bestride the world. But Israel itself would change, withdrawing from Gaza, destroying the very homes of its citizens who had settled there. And no longer would Arabs anchor their claim to the lost territories, their claim to Israel itself, on the strength of arms but upon the rights of the defrauded. The gallant invitation to lunch in the best restaurant in Tel Aviv would give way to a permanent hand held out to the European Union and the UN social welfare agencies.

Carroll suggests that the decline of the United Nations peacekeeping as a serious international force may have begun with UNEF's abandonment of its mission; that UNEF began a withdrawal which has never stopped. Perhaps it is fairer to say that the passage of years magnified all the tendencies present even then. It is hard to recognize in this historical portraits the Canada, America and the UN of today. But if that brings on a sense of nostalgia or loss, it should also evoke the spirit of opportunity. One thing is certain: 2045 will differ from today by as wide a margin as the present from the eve of the Six Day War.

CQ

Why Detain Terrorists? Maybe This Will Explain It

According to a Congressional study on the proliferation of WMD and the threats posed by state and non-state actors, the likelihood of an attack on a civilian population using WMD runs between 50-70% over the next ten years. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee surveyed a group of 85 security analysts from around the world to reach this gloomy prediction:

The study was commissioned by committee Chairman Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., whose nonproliferation efforts in Congress have been credited with helping the states of the former Soviet Union lessen their stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
"The bottom line is this: For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," Lugar said in a statement.

Committee aides sent out surveys asking respondents the percentage probability that a biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological attack would occur over the next five and 10 years.

"If one compounds these answers, the odds of some type of WMD attack occurring during the next decade are extremely high," the report said, using the acronym for weapons of mass destruction.


These same analysts agreed that the most likely of all scenarios would be a radiological attack by terrorists, rather than a state-on-state attack. This differs from a nuclear attack in that the weapon would not necessarily produce a fission reaction but instead spread radiological waste in a densely populated area to kill or injure as many people as possible. The probability for this kind of attack was described as "significantly higher" than any other kind of WMD attack scenario.

Given these predictions, how would people propose handling those terrorists captured in open combat or operating active networks to plan and stage attacks on the US and elsewhere? Releasing them will only allow them to return to their planning. Creating public trials for such unlawful combatants will necessarily draw the resources needed to catch their co-conspirators and fellow terrorists into civilian courts designed for criminals, not for foreign saboteurs and terrorists in time of war. This will also create massive legal headaches for the soldiers who capture the lunatics, imposing civil requirements for arrest rather than the flexibility needed to capture those who shoot and bomb them in the field.

We tried the civil-court system in the 1990s, and it didn't work. That's why we need a Gitmo, regardless of wherever we put it or what we call it. We have to understand that this is a war -- and it has been since the first attack on the World Trade Center, at least. It isn't an organized crime family with Osama bin Laden as a Muslim capo di tutti capi. The only way to get those odds reduced is to capture and keep as many terrorists away from the opportunities to attack us. Once we've identified who they are, then we need to keep them locked up. And even though we haven't addressed this specifically, the most secure option is to throw away the key.

This bothers civil-rights advocates who believe that everyone deserves due process. As Michelle Malkin notes, however, under the rules of war as defined by the Geneva Convention and US regulations, they get the due process to which they're entitled. Nothing requires us to go beyond this, and given the existential nature of the threat, nothing should compel us to do so with these murderous thugs.

If life imprisonment at Gitmo seems like a harsh punishment for unlawful combatants captured during a time of war, keep in mind that we could have just lined them up against the wall and had them shot instead, after their tribunal. Keep in mind that big hole in lower Manhattan where their comrades slaughtered 3,000 Americans on 9/11. And keep in mind that unless we start taking this seriously, those probabilities mean that they will succeed in doing the same, or worse, and possibly in your community.

Personally, I think life at Gitmo is too good for them.

Power Line

A Guantanamo Vet Speaks

Last night we posted a partial transcript of Hugh Hewitt's interview with Lt. Peter Hegseth, a Minnesota native who has just returned after a year at Guantanamo Bay. Today, Lt. Hegseth sent the following letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which editorially endorsed Dick Durbin's comparison of our troops to Nazis, Communisists and Khmer Rouge killers:

As a recent veteran of Guantanamo Bay, I've been troubled by the willingness of some (namely this editorial page) to make uninformed inflammatory statements about the detention operations at GTMO. I believe that if any one of them had the opportunity to visit GTMO and witness the operation first hand, they would change their tone, if not their minds altogether.
Not only are the detainees treated humanely (top-notch medical care, hearty meals, recreational facilities, full access to religious observance, etc..) but I personally witnessed instances when detainees did not want to leave. It was not uncommon for my platoon to guard an airfield for hours in preparation for sending a detainee home, only to turn around and bring him back to the detention facility – because he refused to leave! These detainees are not stupid—they know that real torture and inhumane treatment await them at home. And while I know they’re not happy to be in GTMO, they rest assured that they will be treated well because Americans play by the rules.

I feel sheepish even having to defend this issue. While our servicemen (and innocent Iraqi citizens) are being blown-up and tortured overseas, the media obsesses over a handful of “mishandled” Korans and excessive air conditioning. (It’s also worth noting that these so-called instances of “abuse” at GTMO were all uncovered by internal Army investigations! It’s not as if the Army is torturing people and covering it up. On the contrary, the minute the Army gets wind of minor misconduct it swiftly removes and prosecutes those involved. This is an institution upholding the highest moral traditions of our country.) Would the terrorists do the same? No, I think they’d just wink at us…and then cut our heads off.

LT Peter Hegseth
Forest Lake, MN
U.S. Army National Guard, Infantry



A reader who is a lawyer in Minneapolis writes:

I thought you'd be interested to know -- I just called in to cancel my subscription [to the Minneapolis Star Tribune]. After being on hold for about 10 minutes, the service rep. who took my call asked for a reason. I told her that the editorial page writers were out of control and offensive, and she replied "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but, we have had a lot of calls cancelling subscriptions for that same reason." I feel better already.

UPDATE: Several readers have written us with similar messages. Here is the latest:
I too called to cancel my Sunday subscription to the Star Trib yesterday. Conversation was short:
Rep: May I ask why you are canceling your subscription? Me: Did you read the Durbin editorial today?
Rep: Yes I did.

Me: That's the reason.

Rep: Oh.

No more arguments from her.

James Taranto

Girls Gone Wild

Fundamentalist Muslim mythology has it that terrorist "martyrs" are greeted in heaven by 72 virgins. With Palestinian Arabs increasingly making use of female suicide bombers, we've often wondered what they get in heaven. Now we have the answer, thanks to a report in London's Sunday Telegraph from an Israeli prison:

One of the inmates, Ayat Allah Kamil, 20, from Kabatya, told me why she had wanted to become a martyr: "Because of my religion. I'm very religious. For the holy war [jihad] there's no difference between men and women shaid [martyrs]."

According to the Koran, male martyrs are welcomed to Paradise by 72 beautiful virgins. Ayat, as with many of the women she is incarcerated with, believes that a woman martyr "will be the chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair."

That is to say, the highest aspiration for a fundamentalist Palestinian girl is murder, suicide and prostitution. Has there ever been a more depraved culture?

Instapundit

TOM MAGUIRE FINDS THIS BURIED TREASURE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES:


Senators Laud Treatment of Detainees in Guantánamo

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: June 28, 2005
WASHINGTON, June 27 - Senators from both sides of the aisle competed on Monday to extol the humane treatment of detainees whom they said they saw on a weekend trip to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. All said they opposed closing the center.

"I feel very good" about the detainees' treatment, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said.

That feeling was also expressed by another Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

On Monday, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, said he learned while visiting Guantánamo that some detainees "even have air-conditioning and semiprivate showers."

Another Republican, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, said soldiers and sailors at the camp "get more abuse from the detainees than they give to the detainees." . . .

One senator, Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, has come under criticism and apologized repeatedly for comparing reported abuses at the camps to treatment in Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps.


Buried, that is, on page A15. I wonder why? Maybe because good conditions at Guantanamo are old news?

National Review
MARK STEYN

A Weird Stockholm Syndrome

A few years back in London, I caught a delightfully bad lounge act who, in contrast with the overwrought tremulous chanteuses one finds in the Oak Room and such these days, specialized in a blithely bouncy cheerfulness when it came to even the most lugubrious lyric. He sang the theme from M*A*S*H — you remember, the TV show about the Korean War that was really about the Vietnam War and ran longer than the Hundred Years War. Johnny Mandel’s theme music was wistful and ambiguous on the sitcom, and accompanied by landing choppers. But in that little boîte in Knightsbridge, our singer was entirely unperturbed by the dark lessons of war. He shrugged off Mike Altman’s lyric with a careless finger-snappy breeziness:


Suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes,
And I can take or leave it if I please . . .
Yeah, baby.

Since 9/11, confronted by the smug indestructible conventional wisdom of the multiculti counter-tribalists in America and Europe, I’ve often found that loopily swingin’ “Suicide is painless” swimming up from the recesses of my memory. “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder,” wrote Arnold Toynbee in his now mostly forgotten work on the subject. But surely it’s never been embraced quite so insouciantly as by our present-day elites. Guantanamo is denounced around the world as the gulag to end all gulags because of shocking torture revelations such as this:

“A female interrogator took an unusual approach to wear down a detainee, reading a Harry Potter book aloud for hours. He turned his back and put his hands over his ears.”

Good grief, what next? Will they force detainees to sit through PBS pledge-drive weeks, watching the same Peter, Paul & Mary reunion specials over and over, punctuated only by local announcers touting the complimentary Bill Moyers mug you receive for a $200 “level of membership”?

If J. K. Rowling is the Torquemada de nos jours, nothing should surprise us. Nonetheless, even in my jaded state, I was taken aback by the remarks of Andrew Jaspan, editor of the Melbourne Age, one of Australia’s biggest newspapers. You’ll recall that Douglas Wood, an Aussie taken hostage in Iraq, was recently rescued, and immediately apologized to John Howard and President Bush for a video statement he’d made during his capture calling for the withdrawal of coalition forces. No apology necessary: Obviously such demands are made under duress, and it’s only the media’s insistence on treating them as a serious contribution to foreign-policy analysis that gives them any currency whatsoever. He then went on to describe his captors as “a**holes,” or, if you prefer, “assh***s.”

The Age’s editor didn’t care for this brusque mean-spirited judgmentalism. As Mr. Jaspan told Australia’s ABC network, “I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood’s use of the a**hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought-through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly skeptical of his motives and everything else. The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive.”

And heaven forbid we’re insensitive about “insurgents.” True, a blindfolded Mr. Wood had to listen to his captors murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how crude and boorish would one have to be to hold that against one’s hosts? The liberation of Douglas Wood is surely a first: He didn’t get Stockholm Syndrome, but everyone back home did. What’s with this guy, anyway? They fed him every day and if they’d ever got around to sawing his head off they’d have got out the nice sharp scimitar, not the old rusty thing they used for Nick Berg. Like, why’s he so totally insensitive? Is he a Bush supporter or something?

The other fellow in this story who hasn’t got Stockholm Syndrome is, in fact, from Stockholm. Mr. Wood’s fellow hostage, Ulf Hjertstrom, has decided to operate on that even more “insensitive” and “coarse” principle — don’t get mad, get even. “I have now put some people to work to find these bastards,” he told Australian TV. “I invested about $50,000 so far, and we will get them one by one.”

“The sooner the better,” agreed Wood.

“These scum should be put out of business,” added Mr. Hjertstrom, evidently some Sylvester Stockholm-type Nordic Rambo insufficiently grateful for his couple of months on the Halal diet.

I’d be happy to chip in to his get-the-bastards fund. It’ll do more good than most tsunami donations. The head-hackers have murdered dopey peaceniks and female aid workers and, of course, hundreds of Iraqi Muslims — and Ted Kennedy says, “Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing: the hearts and minds of the people.” Detonating the hearts, minds, and organs over a shopping market seems an odd way of doing it.

Karl Rove is right and the point is unarguable: Those whom we erroneously call “liberal” have no stomach for the defense of liberalism — not if it involves reading Harry Potter to terrorists or calling them “a**holes,” a term properly reserved for disparaging Bush and Cheney, but only if the guys before you did all the best Hitler cracks first. The Islamists can’t win, but we can certainly lose — all by ourselves, and, as the Europeans are discovering in this first stage of their demographic death-spiral, civilizational suicide is never painless.

'1984' coming close to reality under Bush
by Ed Tant
http://smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22045
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Those were the slogans of Oceania, the fictional country gripped in the iron glove of "Big Brother" dictatorship in George Orwell's chilling novel of tyranny, "1984."

Today, those same sentiments could be the mottos and mantras for the Bush administration and its cacophonous choir of braying, bleating Bush backers.

Three years ago today, on July 23, 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with his war cabinet and heard the news that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's capabilities to wage war with weapons of mass destruction were being exaggerated and hyped by a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of aggression.

The Downing Street memo that came out of the meeting also said war was seen as the only option by a Bush regime determined to invade Iraq by speciously implying the country was somehow involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and that the timing of the invasion of Iraq was designed to give Bush's Republicans a "war party" advantage in U.S. midterm elections.

In spite of the Downing Street documents' blockbuster assertion the Bush crew lied and flim-flammed its way into an unnecessary war that has so far taken the lives of nearly 1,800 troops, the memos received only scant and perfunctory attention in a mainstream American "news" media seemingly more occupied with constant coverage of the latest "trial of the month" celebrity circus or emoting ad infinitum about the plight of the latest missing white girl.

News media, both print and electronic, should be watchdogs against corporate and government corruption, not lapdogs for corporate and governmental collusion.

Instead, many in the often compliant and complacent U.S. media have gone along to get along with a Bush administration that longtime Washington journalist Helen Thomas so rightly calls the worst presidency in American history.

It took the jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and the sleazy scandals swirling around Bush's political pal Karl Rove to shake the vaunted Washington press corps into finally firing some aggressive questions in the direction of Bush and his media mouthpiece, Scott McClellan.

In the typically Orwellian "Newspeak" of the Bush regime, McClellan told reporters the death-dealing U.S. invasion of Iraq was "about protecting the American people" after the White House admitted in January there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, in spite of administration claims to the contrary used to justify Bush's war.

When Judith Miller was sent to jail last month, Joe Wilson, the former ambassador and husband of the CIA operative "outed" by someone in the Bush White House after Wilson wrote an article critical of the administration, said a "culture of unaccountability infects the Bush White House from top to bottom."

He added that "the conspiracy to cover up the web of lies that underpinned the invasion of Iraq is more important to the White House than coming clean on a serious breach of national security.

"The real victims of this cover-up, which might have turned criminal, are the Congress, the Constitution and, most tragically, the Americans and Iraqis who have paid the ultimate price for Bush's folly."

"Folly" is a charitable word for the chicanery, mendacity and pure old-fashioned evil emanating from the Bush White House.

If a Democratic president had pulled half the stunts the Bush-Cheney junta have gotten away with since being installed in 2001, crybaby conservative Republicans would be heard howling from Capitol Hill to Foggy Bottom.

Instead, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on July 15, "There are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern."

Welcome to the world of Big Brother Bush. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Ex-CIA official: Bush administration misused Iraq intelligence
Friday, February 10, 2006 Posted: 1628 GMT (0028 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast ... index.html
(CNN) -- The Bush administration disregarded the expertise of the intelligence community, politicized the intelligence process and used unrepresentative data in making the case for war, a former CIA senior analyst alleged.

In an article published on Friday in the journal Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, called the relationship between U.S. intelligence and policymaking "broken."

"In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made," Pillar wrote.

Although the Clinton administration and other countries' governments also believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction, they supported sanctions and weapons inspections as means to contain the threat, he said.

The Bush administration's decision to go to war indicates other motivations, Pillar wrote, namely a power shake-up in the Middle East and a hastened "spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region."

The Bush administration "used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," Pillar wrote. "It went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

Though Pillar himself was responsible for coordinating intelligence assessments on Iraq, "the first request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war," he wrote.

Pillar: Intelligence was right
Pillar said much of the intelligence on Iraq proved to have been correct.

Prior to the March 2003 invasion, the intelligence community concluded that the road to democracy in Iraq would be "long, difficult and turbulent" and forecast power struggles between Shiites and Sunnis, Pillar said.

Intelligence experts also predicted that an occupying force would be attacked "unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity" immediately after the fall of Hussein, he wrote.

As to whether Iraq pursued nuclear weapons, intelligence reports had concluded Iraq was years away from developing them and was unlikely to use such weapons against the United States unless cornered, Pillar said.

The biggest discrepancy between public statements by the Bush administration and judgments by the intelligence community centered on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, he said.

"The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the 'alliance' the administration said existed."

Rather, "the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the 'war on terror' and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood," Pillar wrote.

White House at odds with intelligence
Pillar cited an August 2002 speech by Vice President Dick Cheney that said "intelligence is an uncertain business" and that intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq was to developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"His conclusion -- at odds with that of the intelligence community -- was that 'many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.'"

After such remarks, the intelligence community was left "to register varying degrees of private protest," he said.

Pillar also cited President Bush's claim, made in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq was purchasing uranium ore from an African country.

"U.S. intelligence analysts had questioned the credibility of the report making this claim, had kept it out of their own unclassified products, and had advised the White House not to use it publicly," Pillar said.

"But the administration put the claim into the speech anyway, referring to it as information from British sources in order to make the point without explicitly vouching for the intelligence."

Reorganization criticized
Pillar described a "poisonous atmosphere" in which intelligence officers, including himself, were accused by administration officials of trying to sabotage the president's policies.

"This poisonous atmosphere reinforced the disinclination within the intelligence community to challenge the consensus view about Iraqi WMD programs; any such challenge would have served merely to reaffirm the presumptions of the accusers."

Pillar also criticized the December 2004 reorganization of the intelligence community that made intelligence leaders serve at the pleasure of the president, saying they need more independence.

Congress and the American people must get serious about "fixing intelligence," he said. "At stake are the soundness of U.S. foreign policymaking and the right of Americans to know the basis for decisions taken in the name of their security."

Pillar, now on the faculty of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program, called for experienced intelligence officers to lead nonpartisan oversight of U.S. intelligence efforts as well as inquiries at the request of members of Congress.

He also called for public discussion on how to improve the relationship between intelligence officials and policymakers, but said there is no clear fix.

"The current ill will may not be reparable, and the perception of the intelligence community on the part of some policymakers -- that Langley is enemy territory -- is unlikely to change," Pillar wrote, referring to CIA headquarters.

So, the intelligence did have it right and Bush had it wrong! What a surprise!