Good Riddance: Clinton, Not Congress, Should Be Blamed for Chaos Afflicting U.S. Non-Proliferation Policy, Bureaucracy

(Washington, D.C.): Today’s New York Times assails House Speaker
Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
and House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman
(R-NY) for
interring a congressionally-mandated commission concerning the federal government’s
management of non-proliferation issues — a commission that was supposed to have completed its
work three months ago. This criticism entirely misses the point: The
infelicitously named
Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the
Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was a classic example of rearranging
the Titanic’s deck chairs when the problem is with the Captain — President Clinton —
and
the perilous non-proliferation course he has set.

‘No Accident, Comrade’?

Perhaps it is coincidence that this diatribe against key congressional leaders comes on the eve
of
two important — and very much relevant — events on Wednesday, 15 July: 1) The
expected
House override of the President’s veto of the bill that would impose economic sanctions
on
Russian entities involved in the transfer of ballistic missile technology to Iran and 2) the unveiling
of the long-awaited report of another congressionally-mandated, blue-ribbon commission
concerning the threat posed by Iranian and others’ ballistic missiles.

While the missile threat commission, chaired by the estimable former Secretary of
Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, was also plagued by Administration-imposed and other delays
(including
chronic uncooperativeness on the part of the intelligence community href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾), it has something to show
for its labors. And what it is expected to show, like the Russia-Iran sanctions override, will be the
Administration’s ineptitude, wishful-thinking and misfeance (if not malfeasance)
concerning the
burgeoning problem of proliferating WMD and their delivery systems.

Why Euthanasia Was in Order

The proliferation commission was doomed when President Clinton wasted all but four months
of
this commission’s eighteen-month life-span by failing to designate the commissioners he was
charged with appointing. It is ironic that Speaker Gingrich made his one appointment,
Ambassador Henry Cooper, back in May of 1997. It took the Administration a further seven
months to get around to filling out its four billets.

Once that was done, the problem with the composition of the commission became clear:
It is
hard to see how a genuinely bipartisan outcome could be assured when there were six
Democratic appointees (the President’s four and one each for the Senate and House
minority
leaders) and two Republican ones (Speaker Gingrich’s choice and
one by Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott [R-MS] — Sen. Arlen Specter [R-PA], author of
the enabling legislation).

Then there is the matter of some of the appointees themselves. The commission’s chairman,
Dr.
John Deutch, was to some extent implicated in the Administration’s hapless proliferation
policy-making machinery — first in his capacity as Under Secretary and then Deputy Secretary of
Defense and finally as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In addition, Amb. Robert Gallucci — who did as much to neuter U.S.
non-proliferation policy as
anyone in the course of the Clinton team’s appeasement of North Korea — remained on the panel
even after he returned to government service in a key Clinton policy-making position,
namely the
special envoy responsible for addressing (read, obscuring) evidence that Russian missile
technology is hemorrhaging to the Iranians.

Finally, there were substantive concerns: The Deutch commission seemed to be straying into
areas it was not mandated to examine, notably with respect to the domestic management of WMD
crises and the use of economic sanctions as a tool in the fight against proliferation. With the
mayhem that passes for a federal non-proliferation bureaucracy, one would have thought the
commission had enough to do without delving into sensitive areas it was not authorized to
explore.

The Bottom Line

Speaker Gingrich and Chairman Gilman are to be commended for bringing to an
early end
an endeavor that was poorly conceived, abysmally executed and unlikely to produce what is
really needed — a sea-change in the Clinton Administration policy of paying
lip-service but
little more to the real, and growing, problem of the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. Unless and until such a redirection is undertaken by the President and his
Cabinet,
redrawing the wiring diagrams and organizational charts is unlikely to justify the expense or
energy entailed. On the other hand, once there is a change at the top, a balanced, responsible
and
independent commission may be in order to facilitate the long-overdue streamlining of U.S.
non-proliferation policy-making.

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1. Interestingly, the coup de grâce to the
proliferation commission was actually provided by the
CIA’s lawyers who insisted on shutting the panel down in the absence of the enactment of
legislation renewing its mandate. Had the Administration wished to do otherwise, knowledgeable
congressional staff tell the Center that the Agency’s lawyers could have found a basis for keeping
the Deutch commission in business.