Martin S. Indyk
Posted on 08/07/2004 9:24:43 PM PDT by ncdave4life
The Iraq War did not Force Gadaffi's Hand
The Financial Times, March 9, 2004
Martin S. Indyk, Director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Martin S. Indyk |
Embarrassed by the failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, President George W. Bush is trying to find another WMD-related justification for his pre-emptive war on Iraq. Bush administration spokesmen have been quick to portray Libya's December decision to abandon WMD programmes as the direct result of the US invasion of Iraq or, as Mr. Bush himself put it in his State of the Union address: "Nine months of intense negotiations succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not." In diplomacy, noted the president, "words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America" (applause).
The implication is clear. Get rid of one dictator because of his supposed WMD programmes and others will be so afraid that they will voluntarily abandon their weapons programmes. Therefore, even if no WMDs were found in Iraq, we still made the world a safer place. The perfect comeback.
In Muammer Gadaffi's case, this proposition is questionable. In fact, Libyan representatives offered to surrender WMD programmes more than four years ago, at the outset of secret negotiations with US officials. In May 1999, their offer was officially conveyed to the US government at the peak of the "12 years of diplomacy with Iraq" that Mr. Bush now disparages. Back then, Libya was facing a deepening economic crisis produced by disastrous economic policies and mismanagement of its oil revenues. United Nations and US sanctions that prevented Libya importing oilfield technology made it impossible for Mr. Gadaffi to expand oil production. The only way out was to seek rapprochement with Washington.
Reinforcing this economic imperative was Mr. Gadaffi's own quest for respectability. Fed up with pan-Arabism, he turned to Africa, only to find little support from old allies there. Removing the sanctions and their accompanying stigma became his priority.
From the start of President Bill Clinton's administration, Mr. Gadaffi had tried to open back-channels, using various Arab interlocutors with little success. Disappointed, he turned to Britain, first settling a dispute over the shooting of a British policewoman in London and then offering to send the two Libyans accused in the Lockerbie PanAm 103 bombing for trial in a third country. For the US, accepting this offer had the advantage of bringing Libyan terrorists to justice. But it also generated pressure in the UN Security Council to lift sanctions. The task of US diplomacy then was to maintain the sanctions until Mr. Gadaffi had fulfilled all other obligations under the UN resolutions: ending support for terrorism, admitting culpability and compensating victims' families.
That was why the Clinton administration opened the secret talks on one condition—that Libya cease lobbying in the UN to lift the sanctions. It did. At the first meeting, in Geneva in May 1999, we used the promise of official dialogue to persuade Libya to co-operate in the campaign against Osama bin Laden and provide compensation for the Lockerbie families.
Libya's representatives were ready to put everything on the table, saying that Mr. Gadaffi had realised that was not the path to pursue and that Libya and the US faced a common threat from Islamic fundamentalism. In that context, they said, Libya would actively co-operate in the campaign against al-Qaeda and would end all support for Palestinian "rejectionist" groups, endorse US peace efforts in the Middle East and help in conflict resolution in Africa.
On the issue of WMD, the US at the time was concerned about Libya's clandestine production of chemical weapons. Expressing a preference for a multilateral forum, Libyan representatives offered to join the Chemical Weapons Convention and open their facilities to inspection. In a subsequent meeting in October 1999, Libya repeated its offer on chemical weapons and agreed to join the Middle East multilateral arms control talks taking place at the time. Why did we not pursue the Libyan WMD offer then? Because resolving the PanAm 103 issues was our condition for any further engagement. Moreover, as Libya's chemical weapons programme was not considered an imminent threat and its nuclear programme barely existed, getting Libya out of terrorism and securing compensation had to be top priorities. We told the Libyans that once these were achieved, UN sanctions could be lifted but US sanctions would remain until the WMD issues were resolved.
The fact that Mr. Gadaffi was willing to give up his WMD programmes and open facilities to inspection four years ago does not detract from the Bush administration's achievement in securing Libya's nuclear disarmament. However, in doing so, Mr. Bush completed a diplomatic game plan initiated by Mr. Clinton. The issue here, however, is not credit. Rather, it is whether Mr. Gadaffi gave up his WMD programmes because Mr. Hussein was toppled, as Mr. Bush now claims. As the record shows, Libyan disarmament did not require a war in Iraq.
© Copyright 2004 The Financial Times Ltd
Note: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and should not be attributed to the staff, officers or trustees of The Brookings Institution
bump for GREAT STORY on BUSH INTEL COUPS
this otoh does not connect saddam-gadhafi dots.
Can someone dig out the Ghadafi quote from dec 2003 on this?
And why is a March article posted now? Was it not posted before?
Also NB: It would help, folks, rather than say 'spin' to indicate the factual errors, if any, that debunk it. JMHO.
Under Clinton, everything good that happened was directly traceable to Clinton--not a single bad thing was his fault.
Under Bush, everything bad that happened was directly traceable to Bush--every good thing "was going to happen anyway"
Thanks for clearing that up, lame-o!
> Was it not posted before?
Apparently not. Before posting it, I searched for the title, and I searched for Indyk, but I didn't find it.
-Dave
Is it me or does this guy look like the evil preacher in Poltergeist 2...?
excelent rebuttal.
the fact is that the Clinton administration would have trumpeted this great agreement with libya, *just like the North Korea agreement* and would have been clueless that Libya was developing nukes.
Bush's war in Iraq convinced Gadhafi we were willing to topple Governments over this issue.
When the PSI interception caught him developing nukes,
he copped a plea.
He himself said he saw what happened to Saddam and didnt want to go down the same path.
Well, then why the hell didn't it happen? Clintoon to busy crawling around the wh with his pants around his ankles and maddie trying to figure which way was up?
Thanks for the post. Typical Clinton trash-talk, however.
1) Mr. Qaddafi gave up his nuke program TEN DAYS after Saddam came up out of the spider hole.
2) On pages 207-208 of Karl Zinsmeister's book "Dawn Over Baghdad", it states: Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi telephoned Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi last year and told him, "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq and I was afraid."
These Clinton folks are pathetic. Next, they'll be claiming they were behind toppling Saddam Hussein. Absolutely pathetic.
Really?? He actually said it? Are you sure?
It's obvious that is what happened. But I was not awarre that he ever
actually admitted it.
Do you have a cite?
-Dave
Yes, he did say it.
I have a cite somewhere ... have to go digging ...
Gadafi said ... (Ben Stein mode ) anyone? anyone?
I think he's Jewish, actually.
-Dave
-------------------------
Dear Editor:
Embedded in Hertzberg's anti-Bush diatribe in the Feb 2 issue, we find the bizarre claim that Libya's nuclear ambitions were "not very scary". Hertzberg's former boss, President Carter, considered nuclear proliferation a serious threat. Now, post 9/11, it is less of a threat when a terrorist-sponsoring rogue nation tries to go nuclear? Try telling that to families of the Lockerbie bombing victims.
On the contrary, the experts who inspected Librya's nuclear program recently have been shocked at how advanced the nuclear program was; Libya acquired Pakistani technology that made them fully able to construct bombs and had already been enriching uranium. The further shock is that Libya's regime was acquiring the technology through an international black market not known to intelligence agencies. (While we fret our brows over the CIA overestimating WMD capabilities, we ignore the more serious problem of our all-too-common underestimations: Libya 2003; Iran 2003; North Korea's scamming the U.S. since 1994 with nuclear programs that broke pledges made; and Iraq's nuclear capabilities in 1991 and their bioweapons such as anthrax in 1995.)
The trigger for Gadhafi to come clean was the liberation of Iraq from Saddam's regime, in addition to intercepting illegal WMD equipment shipments to Libya. Gadhafi told Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi and said in interviews in December that: "I will do whatever the Americans want because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid".
Hertzberg's unwillingness to treat this seriously makes valid Bush's claim that we still in this country have some who share the "dangerous illusion that ... outlaw regimes are no threat to us". It seems Hertzberg downplays the magnitude of Quadafi's turnabout as a way of deny credit to the Bush administration in the war on terror and in anti-proliferation. And clearly Hertzberg doesnt want to acknowledge the end of Libya's nuclear program as a significant and positive side-benefit from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Why? To avoid saying a single positive thing about Bush in his column? It's a very petty reason for Hertzberg to take such an extreme and unwarranted position.
WOSG
You're right, it doesn't prove any connection to SH & Iraq, though I think it gives credible info about what brought about some of Libia's actions.
IMHO, it proves Mr. Indyk is blowing smoke or doesn't know what he's talking about.
As to why it's posted now, guess you'd have to ask quin. If you'll check this thread there's a link to the original post at FR. There's a lot more more info posted to that thread than just this article, links to press releases & such. Quin's post was the first time I ever heard of this. All I'm doing is passing along what I think is good info.
THIS LINKED ARTICLE IS A DIRECT REBUTTAL TO THE INYCK ARTICLE and has the sourced quote (It was first published in the Daily Telegraph):
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.20016/pub_detail.asp
"Unfortunately for members of the "soft power" school of thought, it hardly seems a coincidence that Gaddafi's intelligence chief, Moussa Kussa, opened the dialogue on WMDs in March 2003, immediately before the invasion of Iraq. Gaddafi's own testimony at the time reveals the extent to which America's sudden willingness to assert its power in the Middle East weighed heavily on him. "When Bush is finished with Iraq, we'll have a clear idea of where he's going," he told the French daily Le Figaro on the eve of the war. "It won't take long to find out if Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Libya will be targets as well."8 Likewise, in September 2003, a spokesman for Silvio Berlusconi told the Daily Telegraph that Gaddafi had confided to the Italian prime minister: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."[9]
"Soft power" advocates also overlook the fact that negotiations with Gaddafi had been dragging on for years--a steady process of wooing and cajoling the dictator with offers of international acceptance and lucrative oil contracts, but with no conceivable end in sight. What ultimately shuttered the Libyans' secret WMD programs were not these blandishments but a more tangible reality: namely, they got caught.
In August 2003, the U.S. and British intelligence communities scored a remarkable coup, blowing open the vast nuclear black market operated by Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. As revealed this past month, the CIA infiltrated a factory in Malaysia that was manufacturing centrifuges for uranium enrichment, which were then shipped to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. There, they were repackaged as "used machinery" and loaded onto the BBC China, a German ship bound for Tripoli. As the BBC China passed through the Suez Canal, Washington ordered the vessel seized, thus securing ironclad proof of Libya's clandestine nuclear program.
According to U.S. officials, the shipments of machine parts suggest that the Libyans had hoped to acquire at least ten thousand centrifuges, which could have produced enough uranium for ten nuclear bombs a year. "Their goal was far-reaching," said a top European nuclear expert. "They had ordered this very large amount."[10]
Despite Gaddafi's years of high-flying oratory about "engagement" with the West and his strenuous denials about unconventional weapons--a mere nine months before the interdiction of the centrifuges, he insisted that nuclear weapons "are no use to us, and we don't have enough money to manufacture weapons of mass destruction"--it was only after the seizure of the BBC China that the behavior of his regime actually changed.[11] "The seizure showed them how much we know about the program," said one U.S. official. "Even though the Libyans said, 'You can come and look,' months went by and they didn't grant access. When the interdiction took place, they said, 'You can come in.'" [12]
The seizure of the centrifuges and the unraveling of Khan's nuclear network effectively left Gaddafi with little room to maneuver. In addition, Gaddafi has become "increasingly isolated at home," as "corruption, mismanagement, and unemployment have eroded support for the regime."[13]
See the linked article in #35, which is a bit stronger on how the Iraq war helped Libya 'see the light', ... they 'felt the heat'.
#35 also proves that Indyck is blowing smoke. Libya was pretending they only had chemical WMD programs but was LYING TO THE US AND OTHERS THE WHOLE TIME. And Insyck calls that 'successful diplomacy', getting lied to???
The amount of real ignorance of what was going on in the mideast (didnt know about Pakistan, India, Libya, Iran, *nor * North Korea's nuclear ambitions, until we got surprised ... that was the Clinton WMD proliferation legacy)
Thank you. That explains why we heard nothing more of this story. It's just another failed ploy on the part of a failed administration to exculpate themselves from failed policies. There'll be more.
More cites of Gaddafi crying uncle .. and BTW, that guy has more spellings to his name ....
http://yaledailynews.com/articlefunctions/Printerfriendly.asp?AID=24537
http://slate.msn.com/id/2093015/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/columns/krauthammercharles/
"Yeah, sure. After 18 years of American sanctions, Moammar Gaddafi randomly picks Dec. 19, 2003, as the day for his surrender. By amazing coincidence, Gaddafi's first message to Britain -- principal U.S. war ally and conduit to White House war councils -- occurs just days before the invasion of Iraq. And his final capitulation to U.S.-British terms occurs just five days after Saddam Hussein is fished out of a rathole. "
By Charles Krauthammer
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