Thought I’d give a heads-up about a “forthcoming _Arms Control Today_ article”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_07-08/Interdiction_Misrepresented.asp from Wade Boese.

[Obviously, I am responsible for all snarky comments.]

Shockingly, Wade finds, the Bush administration has been playing a bit fast and loose with the facts surrounding the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and the October 2003 interdiction of the BBC China — the ship that was delivering centrifuge parts to Libya.

Various administration officials have touted that interdiction as a successful PSI operation. “As recently as 26 May,”:http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/46917.htm SecState Rice asserted that

bq. It was a very important success of the Proliferation Security Initiative that we interdicted a cargo that was headed to Libya from North Korea…

In addition to the fact that the shipment did not originate in North Korea, Rice’s statement appears to be false for another reason.

A “31 May ACA press statement”:http://www.armscontrol.org/pressroom/2005/20050531_PSI.asp summarizes the issue:

Although the administration asserts that the initiative has been a huge success, it says that the sensitive nature of PSI prevents discussion of its specific accomplishments, except for the much publicized October 2003 interdiction of the BBC China transporting nuclear contraband to Libya.

Yet, some foreign government and former U.S. officials dispute this assertion, arguing that the BBC China interdiction was not a PSI operation. These claims will be detailed further in a forthcoming article in the monthly journal _Arms Control Today_…

Interestingly,when Rice praised the PSI “in a speech that same day”:http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/46951.htm, she characterized the initiative a bit differently than she had just 4 days earlier. This time, she said the “PSI provided the framework for action in the 2003 interdiction of the ship BBC China.”

Obviously, her speech was written before the ACA statement was issued. One wonders what prompted the change.

It’s also worth noting a salient fact that Rice _et al_ omit when they talk about the BBC China — the officials who boarded the ship “missed some centrifuge components”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_07-08/IAEAandLibya.asp which later ended up in Libya.

But apart from that…

*Update:*

I neglected to give Michael Roston credit for “addressing this issue”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=154 a while ago. My bad.

Steve Aftergood brought these two links (“one”:http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/index.tkl and “two”:http://www.opencrs.com/) to my attention.

I thought I’d add this (little-known, I think) one from the “State Department.”:http://fpc.state.gov//c4763.htm I don’t think it’s searchable, but for finding recent foreign policy-related reports, it’s wicked good.

Pavel Podvig “asked”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=590#c000354 a while back about “some numbers I used”:http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/2005_05/Ukraine.asp regarding the Ukrainian Kh-55 cruise missiles that ended up in Iran and China.

I wrote:

… the [missile] smugglers forged documents naming Russia as the missiles’ destination. This is potentially significant because Ukraine agreed in 1999 to send a portion of its Kh-55 missiles to Russia, eventually transferring 582. (See ACT, June 2001.)

Ukraine destroyed an additional 483 missiles†apparently the balance†as of May 2001, the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) reported.

Pavel asked “where did the 582 number (of missiles transferred to Russia) come from?” He “puts”:http://russianforces.org/eng/blog/archive/000407.shtml the number at 581.

Three data points of interest:

* This “ACT story”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2001_06/briefsjun01.asp?print#ukraine (written by a predecessor) places the number at 582.

* An 18 May 2001 ITAR-TASS news agency report also uses 582.

* “This statement”:http://www.ukraine-eu.mfa.gov.ua/cgi-bin/valnews_miss.sh?lpos1200211070.shtml from Ukraine’s FM uses 581. But it also states that Ukraine dismantled 487 under the US CTR program – “according to DTRA,”:http://www.dtra.mil/press_resources/fact_sheets/display.cfm?fs=sbe the actual number is 483.

Tom Friedman “writes”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/11/opinion/edfried.php: “Readers of this column know that I rarely write about nuclear proliferation.”

It shows.

People who know about proliferation would not write that “the solution [to proliferation] is so ridiculously obvious there isn’t much to say.”

[One could, however, anticipate such piffle from someone who “said”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2093620/entry/2093641/ the Iraq debacle was a justified response to terrorism because the US needed to “go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something.”]

It’s great when a pundit evidently believes that we can dispense with careful study of states’ motives for going nuclear and rely on his back-of-the-envelope pseudo-analysis.

Tommy F has concluded that US can do nothing about Iran and North Korea because the policies need to be all-stick and Washington’s already whacked Tehran and Pyongyang as much as it can.

TF asserts:

bq. the real problem is that those parties with the leverage to make a diplomatic difference refuse to use it. (We have already largely isolated Iran and North Korea. There is nothing much more America can threaten, short of using force.)

Proliferation Expert has not, apparently, considered a key element of IR: discerning which combinations of incentives and disincentives shape other states’ behavior.

Of course, T-Fried doesn’t need to bother because the _Times_ will pay him to write this nonsense:

bq. North Korea’s nuclear program could be stopped tomorrow by the country that provides roughly half of North Korea’s energy and one-third of its food supplies – and that is China.
All China has to say to Kim Jong Il is: “You will shut down your nuclear weapons program and put all your reactors under international inspection, or we will turn off your lights, cut off your heat and put your whole country on a diet. Have we made ourselves clear?” … if China played hardball that way with North Korea, the proliferation threat from Pyongyang would be over.”

And

bq. If the European Union said to the Iranians: “You will shut down your nuclear weapons program and put all your reactors and related facilities under international inspection or you will face a total economic boycott from Europe. Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”…that is the kind of explicit threat that would get Tehran’s attention.

One could list lots of reasons why Friedman is wrong (the Agreed Framework was largely successful, North Korea survived a serious famine, Iran has signaled a willingness to compromise with the EU3, Iran’s facilities are ALREADY under IAEA safeguards, etc.).

Perhaps, however, the most infuriating life-form on planet Friedman is the assumption that neither the Chinese nor the EU3 will compromise their own (presumed) selfish interests:

At the end of the day, the Chinese would rather live with a nuclear North Korea than risk a collapsed nonnuclear North Korea, and the Europeans would rather live with a nuclear Iran – that Europe can make all kinds of money off of – rather than risk losing Iran’s business to prevent it from going nuclear.

[snip]

Are the Europeans and Chinese behaving cynically? Of course, these are the very countries constantly complaining about U.S. “hegemony,” and calling for a “multipolar world.” Yet the only thing they are really interested in being a pole for is to oppose the U.S. – not to actually do something hard themselves to stabilize the global system.

So the situation is hopeless because the EU and Chinese are too cynical to threaten the Iranian and North Korean economies. How sophisticated.

Just more evidence that those who supported the Iraq fiasco really need to STFU, stop lecturing the rest of us about foreign policy, sit in a corner, and think about what they did.

Some relevant points on Syria and Libya’s suspected WMD programs that I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

*Libya*

I “posted”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=467 a while back about Bolton’s accusations that Libya was in violation of the BWC. This name-calling strategy was proven pretty much bankrupt when Libya was found to lack such a program.

It _is_ true, as an astute reader pointed out in response to “this post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=562, that the “Robb-Silberman report”:http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html#chapter2 mentions some possible loose ends concerning Tripoli’s BW efforts.

But after “looking into”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_05/WMDreport.asp the report’s Libya conclusions, the evidence for a BW program still seems pretty weak.

I wrote:

The commission did not offer any evidence that Libya had a biological weapons program. Indeed, the report concedes that Libya may not have had such a program, but it also asserts that Tripoli’s declarations “have failed to shed light on Tripoli’s plans and intentions for its biological program.”

Commission spokesperson Carl Kropf told Arms Control Today April 27 that there is a “discrepancy” between the information Libya has provided concerning its biological weapons efforts and previous U.S. intelligence judgments. “Specific information on this point remains classified,” he added.

It’s obviously impossible to say for sure, but the “discrepancy” appears to stem from the IC’s inability to confirm or deny “additional evidence” obtained in the late 1990s that Libya was revitalizing its BW program.

As an aside, I’d be interested in knowing who let U.S. Deputy PermRep to the UN James Cunningham “say”:http://www.un.int/usa/03_133.htm in September 2003 that “Tripoli is actively developing biological and chemical weapons.” Cunningham said this as the UNSC met to announce the end of UN sanctions on Libya. The public CIA 721 reports from that time said that “Evidence suggested that Libya also sought dual-use capabilities that could be used to develop and produce BW agents.”

*Syria*

“A few weeks ago,”:http://apps49.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/comm/events/20050425.pdf former NSC official Flynt Leverett was asked about Bolton’s preoccupation with Syria’s nuclear program. Leverett expressed confidence in “U.S. Government representations about Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities and its Scud missile force.” But was less confident about U.S. intel regarding possible Syrian BW and nuclear weapons programs:

I do not believe the case is there on nuclear, and I don’t think there’s any evidence there of significance indicating offensive B[iological]W[eapons] capability… I guess it’s theoretically possible the Syrians have it, but I don’t know that we really have the evidence to indicate that they have it.

The nuclear stuff, people occasionally will try to say that Syria’s, you know, somehow pursuing covertly a nuclear weapons program. After the disclosure of the A.Q. Khan network, there has been a lot of speculation that Syria was somehow a customer of that network. I haven’t seen any real evidence of that, and I will just note that as recently as late last year, Mohamed ElBaradei was saying that there is no†you know, Syria cooperates with the IAEA inspection process, and that there is no evidence of any kind of illicit or covert Syrian nuclear activity.

Of course, these are blue-state, non-Fox News facts, so why pay them any heed?

North Korea’s FM responded to the 13 May “bilateral meeting”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=603 between US and DPRK officials with a “positive statement”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2005/200505/news05/23.htm:

bq. The DPRK will continue to closely follow the U.S. attitude and its stand will be officially conveyed to the U.S. side through the contact channel in New York when an appropriate time comes.

Well, postive for the North Koreans, who also complained that some US officials issued …

bq. …an endless string of balderdash at a time when the DPRK is seriously studying the U.S. stance, which it had learned through the contact in New York, in connection with what the Bush administration has said. This only creates confusion in guessing the U.S. stand.

Pyongyang objects to a pair of statements by Rice and Hadley regarding a Security council “referral”:http://www.forbes.com/business/feeds/afx/2005/05/16/afx2031943.html and other “punitive measures”:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0505/15/le.01.html should North Korea test a nuclear weapon.

Seoul’s neighbor to the North is livin’ large in a glass house when it comes to endless strings of balderdash, but the complaint is reminder that people like _our_ Dear Leader should take Ari Fleischer’s advice to “watch what they say” while trying to get the talks back on track.

Jack Pritchard — who knows something about dealing with North Koreans — recently commented on President Bush’s tendency to say “whatever pops into his head”::http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/04/20050428-9.htm at a “Center for American Progress event”:http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/050519%20NORTH%20KOREA.PDF:

…there is a concern I have had that this administration has a schizophrenic approach to North Korea. I was thinking, you know, you got to be very careful. That’s a medical term. So you
know, I’m very judicious here.

I went and I consulted with a very eminent medical person and he said, “No, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think they have a schizophrenic approach. I think it’s more basic than that.

I think the president of the United States has a very little known disease called Kim Jong Il-itis. It’s a rare form of Tourette Syndrome in which in an uncontrollable and unexplained manner he will just explode and talk about Kim Jong Il; perhaps as his chief negotiator is, oh, say Tokyo, Beijing, talking up the advantages of a policy.”

I jest a little bit, but not by much.

It should be noted that last week’s secret US- North Korea discussions didn’t come entirely out of nowhere. In fact, North Korea has recently been suggesting such talks.

While Pyongyang obviously backed away from its demands that SecState Rice apologize to them for her “tyranny” remarks, the secret talks also seem to have been North Korea’s way of both giving and getting face-saving paths back to the six-party talks.

The meeting last Friday was probably in response to statements like this 8 May gem from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry:

There were only press reports that the U.S. is ready to recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks.

If there be any request from our side, we only expressed our intention to directly meet the U.S. side to confirm whether those reports are true before making a final determination.

This does not mean any intention to hold the DPRK- U.S. talks for discussing the issues between them. What we mean is a simple working procedure for confirming the U.S. stance in the true sense of the word.

Additionally, Selig Harrison reported last month that, according to First Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, the United States must indicate that it will respect North Korea’s sovereignty. Kang added that “we want to hear it directly in open or secret discussions with the United States.”

According to Harrison, Kang also said:

We need a springboard to be at the six-party talks … some signal that the United States treats us with respect. We have to convince our Army and our people that we are acting in a way consistent with the dignity of a sovereign state that is respected as a strong military state. It’s not a difficult thing to be at the six-party talks, but we can’t do so if we are going there under pressure.

It’s not directly related, but we should also note that the North Koreans “have also hinted”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_05/NK_Talks.asp that they’ll discuss their HEU program:

[A] congressional source, as well as a witness to at least one such discussion, told Arms Control Today that these officials have suggested to unofficial interlocutors within the past several months that Pyongyang is willing to discuss U.S. concerns about the program in private bilateral talks.

Hopefully, another round of six-party talks will happen soon. But the Bush people know that if their policy is failing, they can always resort to lying and blaming the Clinton administration.

For example, Tim Russert “asked Andy Card”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7698687/ a couple of weeks ago, “Could it be said that President Bush was so focused on Iraq that another far greater threat emerged and that six nuclear bombs were developed by North Korea on his watch?”

Card then lied through his teeth:

Or on President Clinton’s watch. Some of those weapons may well have been produced as the North Koreans were violating the agreement that they had with President Clinton. And that’s what a North Korean delegate said to an American diplomat, and they said it with great pride.

This is total bullshit. Russert was clearly referring to weapons that may have been produced from the spent nuclear fuel that had been monitored by the IAEA until the Bush administration screwed the pooch in fall 2002. When Card mentioned that North Korea was “violating” the Agreed Framework, he was talking about North Korea’s HEU program. But Pyongyang has no uranium-based weapons that we know of.

The Washington _Times_, “shockingly”:http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050502-094119-9101r.htm , referred to critiques of the Bush North Korea policy as “political cheap shots.”

Speaks for itself.

I’ll get my .02 in.

The point of the discussion RE: the Niger fiasco is that Bolton was cherry-picking intelligence. He ignored INR’s conclusions on this matter because he wanted to believe something different.

The “circus tent known as NRO”:http://www.nationalreview.com/editorial/editors1200505110914.asp dutifully defends this practice:

bq. Bolton in many ways was a model consumer of intelligence as undersecretary of State for arms control. He read everything, but never accepted anything without asking probing questions. Intelligence is not received from on high. It is almost always subject to interpretation, and if Bolton brought (appropriately) hawkish assumptions to his reading of the data, some of the analysts with whom he clashed brought different assumptions.

Remember that Bolton’s supporters can’t have it both ways: Bolton cannot be BOTH an astute intelligence consumer AND someone who was misled by the IC. The problem is that Bolton wrongly thought that he had better judgment than his own intel analysts.

For example, Daveed correctly notes that the CIA was still talking up the Niger claim a couple days before the fact sheet went out. However, he falsely claims that INR cleared the fact sheet. According to the Senate report, INR said:

bq. “as you know, INR assesses this reporting as dubious. Policymakers are entitled to leave out the word ‘reported,’ but the INR/SPM would not sign off on such a move.”

Now, it is true that the CIA was inconsistent in its assessment of the Niger data. However, the Senate Intel Committee’s report makes it perfectly clear that information existed which cast doubt on the Niger reporting.

For example, the CIA “widely distributed in routine channels” a March 2002 report detailing what Amb. Joe Wilson found (nothing of consequence) when he visited Niger earlier that year. The CIA also had reports from two other sources who had said pretty much the same thing.

(As an aside, it needs to be acknowledged that the much-maligned Wilson was right .)

A couple of other salient points:

* Regardless of the state of the intelligence in December 2002, the administration had intelligence by March 2003 which disproved its earlier contentions regarding Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program. If it had waited for the inspectors to finish their job, Washington would have had even stronger proof that Iraq had no program to speak of.

* Bolton didn’t learn his lesson, as his later battles with the IC (esp. over Syria) make clear.

You’d think the needless deaths of a lot of innocent people would lead hawks to be more humble. But then, you’d think a lot of things…

ACA Executive Director Daryl Kimball and ACA Research Director Wade Boese “respond”:http://www.armscontrol.org/pressroom/2005/20050510_ArmsControl_Gurus.asp to State Department spokesman Richard Boucher’s “dismissal”:http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2005/45505.htm of an “ACA report”:http://www.armscontrol.org/pdf/USNW_2005_Drell-Goodby.pdf by Sidney Drell and James Goodby regarding U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces.

Asked about Drell and Goodby’s conclusion that the US can further reduce its nuclear weapons stockpile, Boucher replied:

bq. I know the arms control gurus can debate these numbers all day long. But the fact is the U.S. is meeting its obligations under the treaty. Going down to one-quarter of where we were in the Cold War is pretty impressive and it does certainly show we’re all headed in the right direction, and if we’re going to meet our obligations in that way we think others should meet their obligations, too.

Wade and Daryl offer devastating answers to the administration’s “contention”:http://www.armscontrol.org/events/20050203_rademaker_text.asp that the United States is meeting its Article VI obligations.

FYI the briefing got somewhat more entertaining:

QUESTION: Can I stick with arms control treaties for a second?

MR. BOUCHER: Yeah. Arms control treaties for 500. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: On CT … on the CTBT, has …

MR. BOUCHER: That’s arms control treaties for 1,000, I’m afraid. (Laughter.)