90/90 HINDSIGHT’: IS PRESIDENT BUSH BEING BLINDSIDED ON IRAQGATE — OR IS HE PART OF THE COVERUP?

(Washington, D.C.): On 10 October
1992, National Security Advisor to the
President Brent Scowcroft published a
carefully-crafted — and cynically
misleading — op-ed in the Washington
Post entitled “We Didn’t Coddle
Saddam.” Its bottom line: The
Iraqgate scandal is much ado about
nothing, the product of “lies”
and distortions leveled at the Bush
Administration by its partisan enemies.

The Center for Security Policy on 13
October 1992 issued a detailed,
thirteen-count rebuttal to the Scowcroft
article. In a Decision Brief
titled “Lies, Damnable Lies
and Scowcroft’s ‘Facts’ — A ‘Baker’s
Dozen’ Contribute to Iraqgate
Coverup,” ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=92-D128″>No. 92-D 128) the
Center demonstrated that the National
Security Advisor relied on minced words,
dissembling and good old fashioned
smoke-and-mirrors to deflect serious
charges of Bush Administration
wrongdoing.

What is more, as noted in the Brief,
Gen. Scowcroft’s timing was abysmal. On
the same day, the Post confirmed
what the Center had long suspected:
Agencies of the United States government
had been involved in concealing the truth
about the Bush Administration’s coddling
of Saddam.

Then last night in the course of the
third presidential debate — and in the
name of defending the “national
honor” — President Bush recklessly
parroted the Scowcroft line, minus
some of its essential qualifiers and
weasel-words. To wit:

Item #1: “The
nuclear capability has been searched by
the United Nations, and there hasn’t
been one single scintilla of evidence
that there’s any U.S. technology involved
in it.”

In fact, no one — aside perhaps from
Mr. Bush — disputes the charge that the
United States supplied sensitive
militarily relevant technology to Iraq,
albeit in smaller quantities than other
Western nations. Indeed, Gen. Scowcroft
acknowledges that “$500 million in
so-called dual-use exports” were
shipped to Iraq. While the National
Security Advisor gamely asserts that U.S.
technology “made no significant
contribution to Iraq’s military
capability,” that is a far cry from
claiming that there hasn’t been one
single scintilla of evidence that
there’s any U.S. technology involved in
[Saddam’s nuclear program].”

The truth of the matter is that there
is abundant evidence that U.S. technology
was involved in the Iraqi nuclear weapons
effort. According to David A. Kay, a
distinguished member of the Center’s
Board of Advisors who headed up no less
than three IAEA inspections in Iraq, “U.S.
manufactured equipment and nuclear
technology were found as components of
Iraq’s nuclear program.”
Among the examples Kay cites were U.S.
technology relating to the calutron
process and Lithium-6 production, as well
as electron-beam welding machines.

Item #2: “What
you’re seeing on all this Iraqgate is a
bunch of people who were wrong on the war
trying to cover their necks here and —
and try to do a little revisionism.”

Contrary to the President’s perception
that the investigation of the BNL scandal
is a politically-inspired conspiracy by
persons “who were wrong on the
war,” at least four of his most
visible critics — Vice Presidential
candidate Sen. Al Gore, New York Times
columnist William Safire, Washington
Post columnist Jim Hoagland and the
Center for Security Policy — were all
strongly supportive of Desert Shield and
Desert Storm.

Indeed there was considerably more
consistency in the positions of these
leading critics than there was in the
Bush Administration’s: Whereas the
President went from appeasing Saddam
Hussein to violently resisting him, the
aforementioned critics felt throughout
that the Iraqi despot was a menace — a
man whose megalomaniacal ambitions would
only be reinforced by U.S. acquiescence.

Item #3: “Yes,
we had grain credits for Iraq and there
isn’t any evidence that those grain
credits were diverted into weaponry. None.
None whatsoever.”

Thanks to the systematic suppression
of evidence and obstruction of justice
that has evidently occurred on the
Iraqgate scandal to date, it is not yet
possible to demonstrate conclusively either
that U.S. grain credits bought Iraqi
weapons or that they did not.
Even so, there is reason to believe that
the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale
del Lavoro (BNL) used U.S.-supplied
commodity credit loan guarantees
improperly — and probably illegally —
to provide a “slush fund” for
Saddam Hussein’s covert arms acquisition
program.

The Bottom Line

The President of the United States’
personal involvement — whether
intentional or inadvertent — in what
seems to be an unmistakable official
effort to conceal (or minimize) the truth
about Iraqgate opens a new chapter in
this scandal. His public and erroneous
intervention did nothing to defend the
national honor; if anything it has raised
new questions about his own.

The Center for Security Policy
believes that, under present
circumstances, there can no
longer be any legitimate grounds for
opposing the appointment of a genuinely
independent counsel charged with
investigating the possibility of criminal
wrongdoing in connection with the Bush
policy toward Saddam Hussein prior to the
invasion of Kuwait.