How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

Aside from Iraq (which is a pretty big aside), Iran is the most pressing foreign policy issue the United States currently faces, according to Nicholas Burns, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

At a March 21 conference, "Coping with Iran: Confrontation, Containment or Engagement?" Burns said, "My own view is that military conflict is not desirable, and it is absolutely unavoid— avoidable."

The audience at the RAND conference collectively drew in an anxious breath before Burns corrected himself.

While the intention of the conference was to stimulate debate regarding Iran, there turned out to be quite a bit of agreement: pre-emptive action against Iran in response to its growing nuclear program is a bad idea, panelists said. Even Danielle Pletka of American Enterprise Institute, who contended that a change of regime would be the best hope for the United States’ problems with Iran, stayed one step away from advocating pre-emption.

"If you’re looking to end [Iran’s] nuclear program, than most people agree military action is not going to provide an answer," Pletka said. "It may slow it down, but it would have a whole series of consequences."

Indeed, there should be "no doubt that Iranians will use any means necessary to strike a blow against those who assault them," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on the same day, in a televised address marking the beginning of the Persian New Year.

And yet, in a neatly laid-out chart, David Ochmanek, the Senior Defense Analyst for RAND, showed conference attendees how the U.S. is squarely on the path to confrontation with Iran. The United States’ current policies, he said, are moving things to the worst-case scenario: a hostile relationship with a nuclear-armed country.

Burns said he was confident that the latest sanctions on Iran currently being discussed by the U.N. Security Council would "tighten the vice around Iran."

The U.S. should stop pushing for sanctions, which "everyone knows will not work," said Javad Zarif, the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations. Zarif spoke at the conference via phone, since his travels within the United States are limited.

"The lack of distrust is pervasive," Zarif said. "We as Iranians should not expect the United States to start trusting Iran" and visa versa.

So even though policy experts from all points on the political spectrum agreed that military action would be a idea, the tensions between the U.S. and Iran are only increasing. Maybe, said James Dobbins, the director of RAND’s International Security and Defense Policy Center and the conference coordinator, the problem is "they’re talking to us and not each other."

New World Water

First draft, from March 16. Currently being edited:

With a host of other spending priorities to address, all too apparent what with the current Iraq spending legislation currently moving through the House, upgrading the nation’s water infrastructure may not exactly seem like an urgent priority for the federal government.

"If it flows out of taps, most people think there’s not a problem," Paul Schwartz, the National Policy Coordinator of Clean Water Action, said at a press briefing on March 16. "Most of our infrastructure is out of sight and out of mind."

But Schwartz and other environmental and consumer group representatives said that America’s water systems do not meet the health and safety standards the public expects them to meet. Just look, Schwartz said, to the disturbingly high levels of lead found in 2004 in Washington, D.C.’s drinking water, or the persisting high levels of arsenic found in rural drinking water systems.

The EPA has calculated a $22 billion annual shortfall in water infrastructure funding, noted Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch. The shortfall should be addressed March 21-23 at an EPA conference on "Paying for Sustainable Water Infrastructure" in Atlanta. The EPA will also likely emphasize plans to privatize America’s water.

The administration has said it "strongly opposes" both the Water Quality Investment Act and the Water Quality Financing Act, passed in the House with large margins of support on March 7 and March 9, respectively. The White House issued statements calling both bills "unrealistic in the current fiscal environment" and suggesting a move toward privatization.

Privatizing water infrastructure would have potentially disastrous consequences, Hauter said, such as "increasing prices, poor service and environmental problems."

She cited Atlanta as an example: When its municipal water system was handed over to the Paris-based water corporation Suez, it fell to pieces. The city faced broken hydrants, brown water and "boil-water" days, among other problems.

Privatization also consistently leads to higher rates, Hauter and Schwartz said.

"It’s a question of equity, a question of access, a question of fairness," Schwartz said. Higher rates would clearly have a larger impact on lower-income households.

"Are we going to set up a two-tier system?" he asks. "Healthy water for those who can afford it?"

The solution, Hauter and Schwatz said, lies in a federal trust fund for water infrastructure much like those that exist for highways and airports. They also would like to see a polluter-pay system in place.

But even as troubled water systems continue to make news—such as when intersex fish were found in the Potomac due to pollutants— the likelihood of increased federal funding for water systems seems unlikely in the near future.

"Even under the Bush administration and a Republican-lead congress, clean water funds were authorized," Schwartz said— but ultimately not appropriated. If you give more money to water infrastructure, where will you take it from, Schwartz asked.

"You’re looking at a declining range of options," he said. “It’s a zero-sum game."

Investigating Attorneygate

Posted this morning on The Nation's blog "The Notion":

The Nation's Washington intern, Stephanie Condon, reports on yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the dismissal of eight US attorneys by the Bush Administation:

Senators at a Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday tried to get to the bottom of whether the Bush administration inappropriately fired eight federal attorneys for political reasons.
If so, the GOP plan has backfired: at least two Republican lawmakers could be mired in scandal, and the administration, having lost eight faithful and proficient public servants, finds itself in another PR disaster.

The reasons for the firings have continued to evade the former attorneys, as well as lawmakers. There is "no accountability in the Department of Justice," said Sen. Patrick Leahy ☼, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Instead, he said, there has been a "series of shifting explanations and excuses from the administration."

"Not since the Saturday Night Massacre have we witnessed anything of this magnitude," Leahy said, referring to the series of resignations and a dismissal during Watergate.

DOJ initially claimed the firings were performance related. Then it came out that seven of the eight attorneys had received glowing performance reviews. Now the administration claims that they did not meet certain department priorities.

The latest rationale seemed "awfully convenient" to Sen. Russ Feingold and the testifying attorneys.

"Why would I be a political liability when just a few years ago I was a political asset?" David C. Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney for the district of New Mexico, said he wondered after his dismissal. He is convinced that his forced resignation was not performance related.

Carol Lam, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, spoke of her success in meeting the administration's expectations for immigration trials. "Our immigration trial rate more than doubled from 2004 to 2005," she said.

When she inquired why she was fired, she was told by the DOJ that they "didn't think that information would be useful to me."

The unstated reason may have been that Lam, like four of her fellow prosecutors, were leading corruption investigations into Republicans at the time of their dismissal.

Prosecutors looking into instances of Democratic corruption, like Iglesias of New Mexico, were pressured by GOP lawmakers to produce indictments before the November elections. Rep. Heather Wilson ☼, who found herself in a tight re-election race, asked Iglesias on Oct 16, "What can you tell me about sealed indictments?" Sen. Pete Domenici ☼ asked him: "Are these going to be filed before November?" When told no, Domenici replied, "I'm sorry to hear that."

"I felt sick afterwards," said Iglesias. It now appears that both Wilson and Domenici violated Congressional ethics rules by pressuring a prosecutor in an ongoing legal investigation.
The plot gets even thicker inside Congress. Ed Cassidy, the chief of staff to Washington Rep. Doc Hastings ☼, called dismissed prosecutor John McKay of Seattle to inquire about an investigation into voter fraud in the 2004 gubernatorial election. McKay said he cut the call short. In February 2005, Hastings became Chairman of the House Ethics Committee. Cassidy is now a top staffer to House Majority Leader John Boehner.

Yesterday's hearings deserve to be the first of many. It's becoming more and more obvious that attorneygate reaches into the upper echelons of Congress and the administration.

Did Bush's Chief Spook Say W. Misled the Nation?

Again, I've been negligent. I covered the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 27 for my boss at The Nation. I originally wrote a straight news article, but because I had other work to do, I wasn't able to get it to him until around 6 p.m. that day. Unfortunately, this was too late, as most major news sources had already published straight news stories on their websites; I tweaked the story to make the style more appropriate for the timing and the nature of David's blog. Below is what was published today, March 1. Below that is the original story (written Feb. 27) and David's comments.

Stephanie Condon reports:

When the top three intelligence officials in the Bush administration testified before the Senate armed services committee on Tueday, their negative assessments of the situation in Iraq received the standard amount of media coverage. But what didn't draw much attention was that George W. Bush's top intelligence aide essentially said that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had recently misled the public about the ground reality in Iraq.

Citing a recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, Vice Adm. John McConnell, the newly appointed Director of National Intelligence, said, "Current sectarian and political trends are moving in a negative direction." He added that "sectarian violence has become self-sustaining" and reported that the U.S. intelligence community has concluded "the sectarian situation will continue to deteriorate."Noting that suppressing sectarian violence and creating political unity is necessary for progress in Iraq, McConnell said, "Iraqi political leaders have a close to impossible task."

Those words struck a chord with Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, who came back to them later in the hearing."If theirs is close to impossible," the senator asked, "then how would you characterize our task?" At first McConnell didn't know how to respond. After a fair bit of hesitation, he said, "Our task is similar in that it is very, very difficult."

Bayh continued to press McConnell, forcing McConnell to acknowledge that the situation in Iraq has been deteriorating for some time. "So if someone indicated four months ago we were 'absolutely winning' in Iraq, that is a mistaken assessment?" Bayh asked.

"I wouldn't agree that we were winning," McConnell replied, explaining that it became clear in 2006 that conditions were worsening. Bayh then noted that comment was made by the president and vice president four months earlier. McConnell response? A very long pause. Then Bayh's time for questions expired.

###

What I originally wrote the day of the event:

The scenario is worsening in Iraq, the Iraqi government is too entrenched in sectarian division to do anything about it and there is no way out for the United States anytime soon, three intelligence directors told Senators Tuesday during an Armed Services Committee hearing on worldwide threats to the United States.

"Current sectarian and political trends are moving in a negative direction," said Vice Admiral John M. McConnell, the newly appointed director of National Intelligence, with regard to Iraq.

Sectarian violence has become self-sustaining," he said, citing the most recent National Intelligence Estimate released on Iraq. "We assess the sectarian situation will continue to deteriorate."

McConnell said resolution in Iraq will necessarily be political, but he was not optimistic about the prospects for political resolution any time soon.

The Shias, in my view are not confident in their position in the majority," McConnell said.

Morever, he said,"the Sunnis are not willing to admit they are no longer in charge. The Kurds are participating… and biding their time."

"Iraqi political leaders have a close to impossible task," he said.

Senator Evan Bayh later pressed McConnell, "If theirs is close to impossible, then how would you characterize our task?"

In a response that seemed to reveal just how oblique the United States’ mission in Iraq is, McConnell asked, after some hesitance, “With regard to Iraq?"

"Our task is similarly very difficult,” the director then said.

McConnell said, however, that as it states in the NIE, there would be a “significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict” if coalition forces were removed quickly.

Sen. Bayh pressed the panelists on the language of the NIE: Why discount a “rapid withdrawal” from Iraq without considering other, more measured withdrawal plans?

The NIE was “unquestionably and uncategorically not to consider policy,” said Dr. Thomas Fingar, deputy director of National Intelligence for Analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

Instead, Fingar said, the hypothetical was posed in the NIE to address the hypothesis that the coalition presence was aggravating violence. To remove the forces within the time frame addressed in the NIE—12 to 18 months— “would by very definition be ‘rapid,’” he said.

Still, the President’s “surge” plan has not started off to the greatest success, the panelists acknowledged under the committee’s questioning.

"I do not see evidence that Iraqi forces are measuring up in any amount to what the President laid out,” said Sen. John Warner.

He cited the president’s Jan. 10 speech, which said 21,500 additional American troops would be sent to Iraq to aid the Iraqis in securing their own country—not to take the lead in doing so.

But, according to a Feb. 23 New York Times article, only 300 Iraqi forces joined the 2500 American forces in the first few days of the new Baghdad security plan.

"The Iraqis have moved two of three brigades into Baghdad” that it promised, said Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

However, the forces are only manned at 43 to 82 percent of the levels promised.

McConnell said Iraqi forces were “in the process of taking the lead."

"It’s a work in progress,” he said.

###

David's comments:
stephanie,
you are a concise and clear writer--that's good. the piece you sent last night would have made a fine posting yesterday, almost as a straight but short account of the hearing. but if you lok at the newspaper stories out today, it's not mch different (that's a compliment, in a way). if you had gotten this to me right after the event, it would make sense to psot it. but if it's later--after the main news of the hearing has already hit--then it would need to have soemthing lse. a focus on a telling (or amusing or disturbing) exchange, fact, or moment that did not get much attention. but you are showing talent and good instincts.

What Would Iran Do?

I've been negligent in my posting. Here is an article I wrote, originally posted on www.DavidCorn.com on Feb. 22, 2007:

Stephanie Condon wrote the following posting, while I was waiting for a verdict in the Libby trial....

Today's UN announcement that Iran has failed to meet the Security Council's deadline for suspending its uranium enrichment activities will likely fuel talk of an US-Iran military confrontation. But if it should come to that, there's no assurance that the United States would benefit from the clash. In a paper posted yesterday by the British American Security Information Council, retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner warns that Iran's capacity to retaliate against a US military attack would be not one of shock-and-awe but, nevertheless, of significant consequence.

In the paper--titled General, you have the advantage of time: Iran's response to the U.S. military option--Gardiner speculates that Iran's retaliation would be subtle and indirect--and perhaps set off explosive results throughout the entire region. Tehran could easily create more havoc for the United States in Iraq, Gardiner asserts, by boosting whatever assistance it provides Shia militia groups and by threatening the flow of oil in the region. It would also be able to summon up regional support, Gardiner says. With the right rhetoric, Iran could associate Israel with any U.S. military action, prompting Hamas and Hezbollah to step up attacks there. The results across the region would be unpredictable.

Writing as if he were an Iranian strategist submitting a memo to Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Gardiner notes,

Time is on Iran's side. Even after a U.S. strike, some of our options will even improve if they unfold slowly. That's particularly true of using oil leverage. Low signature but significant cuts in oil flow raise the prices, benefit us, and force the U.S. to pay. Low signature, drawn-out responses reduce the likelihood of additional U.S. attacks. A slow and low-signature response is important beyond preventing U.S. retaliation. Iran has another important interest: preventing chaos. The strategy I have outlined offers the best chance for first, deterring a U.S. attack, and second, if deterrence fails, inflicting long, drawn out and ultimately unacceptable pain on them while minimizing the chances of a second attack on the Islamic Republic, and leaving the government in the best position to harness the national will and international outrage against the aggressors while controlling the popular reaction. It will show that while we have retaliatory capability, we are reasonable and moderate in the face of unprovoked and outrageous attacks by the imperialist forces. It could play a central role in changing the international balance of power away from the Americans. In the end, Iran's influence in the region will be strengthened by a U.S. attack.

Despite appearances to the contrary, the administration insists that it does not desire a military clash with Iran. Perhaps they've already figured out what Gardiner has.