LIES, DAMNABLE LIES AND SCOWCROFT’S ‘FACTS’– A ‘BAKER‘S DOZEN’ CONTRIBUTE TO IRAQGATE COVERUP

(Washington, D.C.): On the eve of the
first presidential debate, National
Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft
published a wrathful defense of the Bush
Administration’s conduct toward Saddam
Hussein prior to the invasion of Kuwait.
His central contention: Critics of the
Administration’s policy toward Iraq are
“rewriting history,”
selectively citing and misrepresenting
the “facts.” Ironically, in the
course of making that claim, Scowcroft
himself conjures up distortions,
half-truths and misleading assertions
that only reinforce the appearance of an
official cover-up that is becoming more
palpable with each passing day.

In an op-ed article entitled “We
Didn’t ‘Coddle’ Saddam,” Scowcroft
lashed out at the Washington Post
(which published the piece on 10 October
1992), other leading national newspapers,
members of Congress, Governor Bill
Clinton and Sen. Al Gore and “their
teammates.” He avers that the
“facts — based on the entire record
and not selective portions of it — are
clear.” He proceeds to present these
“facts” and charges the
Administration’s critics with having
“chosen to distort them into
unfounded accusations and lies.”

The Center for Security Policy
believes that the public interest in
accurately understanding the policy
issues at stake in the
“Iraqgate” scandal are
sufficiently important to warrant a
detailed response to Gen. Scowcroft.
Accordingly, this Decision
Brief examines each of what
the general represents as
“facts” against the full
record — at least to the extent that
record has been made public by the Bush
Administration.

“Fact” #1
Scowcroft: “Most of the President’s
critics today were conspicuously absent
yesterday, when the President
successfully resisted Saddam’s violent
ambitions….”

In fact, at least four of the most
visible of “today’s” critics —
Sen. 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.

“Fact” #2
Scowcroft: “There was a broad
bipartisan consensus behind the open U.S.
policy of providing political and
economic support to Iraq during the
latter stages of its war with Iran.”

While it is generally true that the
Reagan Administration’s effort to prevent
Iran from triumphing in the war with Iraq
was broadly supported, two points need to
be borne in mind: First, that policy was
not quite so “open” as Gen.
Scowcroft’s quote suggests. Some
activities — like reflagging Kuwaiti
tankers bearing Iraqi crude oil — were
openly pursued; some (e.g., intelligence
sharing and looking-the-other-way on
Saudi and other nations’ efforts to
divert U.S. military equipment to Iraq)
were not.

Second, it is one of the Bush
Administration’s central strategic errors
that it persists in believing that U.S.
help to Saddam under wartime
circumstances somehow justified
continuing — and even expanding — that
support once the war ended. It
did not at the time and it does not now.

“Fact” #3
Scowcroft: “At the war’s end,
Congress did not challenge our policy of
trying to moderate Iraqi behavior with a
mix of limited incentives and strong
disincentives….We were right to try to
induce stability into the region without
the force of American arms and the risk
of American lives.”

The deplorable truth of the matter is
that many in Congress did go along with
the Bush Administration’s benighted
policy of appeasing Saddam after the
Iran-Iraq war. As a result, those who did
raise objections — like Reps. Stephen
Solarz (D-NY) and Larry Smith (D-FL) and
Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Al D’Amato
(R-NY) Jesse Helms (R-NC) — were either
outvoted or ignored by the
Administration.

Congressional failings in this regard
do not, however, alter the reality that only
willful self-delusion can explain the
belief that regional
“stability” would flow from
facilitating Saddam Hussein’s quest for
strategic domination. It was
predictable — and, indeed, predicted —
that the effect of the Administration’s
post-Iran-Iraq war policy toward Baghdad
would inevitably be to require “the
force of American arms and the risk of
American lives.”

“Fact” #4
Scowcroft: “Our [post-Iran-Iraq war]
policy had universal support within the
Arab world….Every European
power…[and] virtually every American
expert on the Middle East [supported
it].”

Even if this were an accurate
description of the lay of the
geostrategic landscape at the time, these
factors should not have been used to
legitimate an otherwise unjustifiable
policy. There is, after all, a long
tradition of appeasement in the Middle
East, Europe and among most American
Middle East “experts.” Too
often, policy prescriptions from these
quarters are the product of chronic
shortsightedness and a systemic refusal
to resist aggression until it is
generally too late. It has been, is now and
will be in the future the height of
folly to allow American security
decisions to be guided by such advice.

The Scowcroft assertion, moreover,
ignores two important points: First, the
United States’ most valuable and reliable
ally in the region, Israel, was
strenuously opposed to the Bush
Administration’s policy of building up
Saddam politically, economically and —
whether by design or not — militarily.
Israel correctly understood that doing so
was tantamount to arming a future
adversary.

Second, a number of leading experts on
U.S. interests and security concerns in
the Middle East were steadfastly opposed
to the Bush policy. These included (to
name a few): Elie Khedourie, Bernard
Lewis, Albert Wohlstetter, Howard
Teicher, Richard Perle, Stephen Bryen,
Laurie Mylroie and Elliot Cohen. In
short, it was not the case that
virtually every “expert” agreed
with the policy; rather, the views of
those who disagreed were simply not given
comparable weight to the pro-Saddam
Arabists relied upon by the Bush
Administration.

“Fact” #5
Scowcroft: “We in no way ‘coddled’
Saddam. Our public and our private
statements critical of Iraqi policies,
including its human rights abuses and its
threats against…[its] neighbors, were
so sharp that our Arab allies…cautioned
us about our harshness.”

In addition to underscoring the
aforementioned observation about Arab
propensities to appease despotic
“strongmen,” this statement
also illuminates two points:

First, while the
Administration did occasionally employ
critical rhetoric toward Saddam, it also
went to some lengths to apologize for
having done so. For example,
when the Voice of America editorialized
in February 1990 that Saddam was among
the world’s tyrants whose days were
numbered, the State Department dressed
down VOA, required that all future
editorials be cleared with it and
unctuously expressed its regret to
Baghdad.

Second, the Administration’s
deeds spoke far louder than its words.
Saddam was a savvy enough political
operator to discount any criticisms
accompanied by favorable treatment on his
requests for financial assistance,
intelligence-sharing, technology
transfers, diplomatic support, etc. It
was against the backdrop of such
connivances that Amb. April Glaspie’s
infamous statement (i.e., that “the
United States had no opinion on the
Arab-Arab conflicts like [the] border
dispute with Kuwait”) could
reasonably have been misconstrued by the
Iraqi despot to mean that even his
invasion of his neighbor would
entail no substantial costs.

“Fact” #6
Scowcroft: “To give Saddam
incentives to moderate his behavior, the
Bush Administration…authorized $1
billion in credit guarantees — not loans
or cash — to U.S. exporters selling
grain to Iraq.”

This is a most disingenuous statement.
In fact, when the Bush Administration
decided to authorize in November 1989 a
billion dollars in credit guarantees, it
was enabling loans to Iraq that
would otherwise have been denied Baghdad.
This was due to the fact that the U.S.
taxpayer guarantee, by definition,
ensured repayment to the primarily
foreign-owned commercial lenders
operating under the Commodity Credit
Corporation (CCC) program. In short, no
serious banker or financier would argue
that taxpayer-underwritten credit
guarantees of this kind were anything
other than de facto “loans
or cash” to a non-creditworthy Iraqi
regime.

Cognizant Bush Administration
officials in the Agriculture Department
were certainly under no illusion on this
point when they objected to
then-Secretary of State James Baker’s
heavy-handed efforts to add to the
already substantial taxpayer exposure in
Iraq. Their concerns were slam-dunked,
however, when in November 1989 Baker and
a top aide (former Under Secretary of
State Robert Kimmitt) — in coordination
with Brent Scowcroft — used a
presidentially approved National Security
Directive 26 to push through the
additional $1 billion credit guarantee.
Thanks to the Bush-Baker policies,
therefore, the Treasury has been obliged
to pay out $1.4 billion to date on
defaulted Iraqi loans href=”92-D128.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
with more likely to be paid out in the
near future.

It will be welcome news to the
taxpayer that the Administration intends,
as Scowcroft put it, to “recover
[the outstanding] debt from Iraq’s frozen
assets;” it has not, however, to
date acted to do so. Moreover, it is not
at all clear that the allocation of Iraqi
frozen assets to numerous claimants in
the West will be sufficient to cover the
total U.S. taxpayer exposure.

To add insult to injury, Gen.
Scowcroft cheekily takes credit for the
fact that “only half of those funds
[$500 million] were ever released.”
Recent disclosures strongly suggest that
Scowcroft’s National Security Council —
along with the State Department —
assiduously argued for the release of the
second “tranche” in the months
leading up to the invasion of Kuwait.

“Fact” #7
Scowcroft: “The Banca Nazionale del
Lavoro, which has been accused of illegal
transactions with Iraq, was not involved
in any of the credit guarantees approved
by the Bush Administration….No
investigation…has established
that Iraq misused credit guarantees to
purchase weapons or diverted commodities
to a third country.” (Emphasis
added.)

Gen. Scowcroft is mincing words here.
Although BNL loans guaranteed by CCC were
technically approved during the Reagan
Administration’s second term, the Bush
Administration could have interrupted the
flow of BNL-issued loans at any time. The
only reason that BNL was not
among the foreign banks subscribing to
the aforementioned billion dollar CCC
program approved by President Bush in
November 1989 was that the FBI had
already raided — and shut down — the
Atlanta branch three months before.

Furthermore, while
“established” is a legal term
of art subject to differing
interpretations, several
investigations (notably that by
the House Banking, Agriculture,
Government Operations and Judiciary
Committees and the Senate Agriculture
Committee) have found
evidence that U.S. credit guarantees were
indeed misused to purchase weapons
technology and for other unauthorized
purposes (e.g., kickbacks,
bribes and miscellaneous so-called
“after-sales services.”) Their
inability to “establish” the
facts is as much a result of the inherent
limitations within which individual
congressional committees — entities with
finite jurisdictions and constrained
investigative powers — must operate. It
is also one of the reasons why these
Committees sought to have a special
prosecutor appointed.

“Fact” #8
Scowcroft: “Perhaps the most
egregious falsehood…forced on the
public is that the Bush Administration
sold high technology to Saddam to enhance
his nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons program…[Our] export controls
toward Iraq were tougher than those of
any other industrial country. We followed
a strict policy of denying weapons to
Iraq. Whenever we learned of an attempt
to evade U.S. law, we stepped in and
clamped down….”

The fact of the matter is that, under
the Bush Administration, the U.S. —
along with most of its allies — took a
forward-leaning stance toward Iraq’s
technology acquisition efforts.
While the U.S. refrained from selling
finished weapon systems to Baghdad,
licenses for militarily relevant
components and critical manufacturing
processes were routinely approved.

Even Gen. Scowcroft admits that “about
$500 million in so-called dual-use
exports” were shipped to Iraq.
(In fact, the record shows that roughly $1.5
billion in export licenses for
dual-use technology were approved during
this period.) A number of these
technology transfers were bought by, paid
for and delivered to Saddam’s
military-industrial complex — including
its nuclear, chemical and biological
warfare elements. Others wound up there
after passing through various cut-outs.

To make matters worse, during the
period between the end of the Iran-Iraq
war and the invasion of Kuwait, Washington
cooperated in a German-led effort to
dismantle the existing export control
regime. As a result, in
important respects, the relative
“toughness” of the U.S. policy
concerning strategically sensitive
technology transfers has been severely
compromised. For example, it is no longer
necessary to license a wide array of
militarily relevant dual-use
technologies; tracking them — and, more
importantly, preventing them from getting
into dangerous hands — is becoming
totally problematic.

What is more, in a number of cases, the
Bush Administration resisted calls from
the Congress, from outside experts and
even from some of its own officials to
halt the transfer for sensitive
technologies to Iraq. One of the
most dramatic cases involved
sophisticated furnaces manufactured by
Consarc, Inc. which were bound for the
Iraqi nuclear and ballistic missile
programs. Far from aggressively
“stepping in and clamping
down,” the Administration deferred
acting on the exporter’s own warning
that these furnaces could be used for
dangerous purposes until they were
literally on the dock ready to leave the
country.

“Fact” #9
Scowcroft: “During Desert Storm,
coalition forces did not encounter any
U.S.-supplied weapons on the
battlefield….U.S. technology made no
significant contribution to Iraq’s
military capability.”

The accuracy of these
statements has more to do with the timing
of the war with Iraq than with the value
of American technical assistance to
Baghdad. As a result of
decisions taken by the Bush
Administration in 1989 and 1990,
U.S.-supplied technology was being
integrated into the Iraqi military
machine as Kuwait was invaded. Its
purpose: to manufacture key components
that would go into ballistic missile
systems, navigation and sensor systems,
nuclear, chemical and possibly biological
weapons.

Thankfully, American forces do not
seem to have been exposed to the worst of
the fruits of these ill-advised
technology flows. Had the war not
occurred when it did, however — had the
destruction it entailed and the
subsequent dismantling of key Iraqi
capabilities pursuant to the U.N.
cease-fire resolutions not occurred — American
troops would almost certainly have faced
an Iraqi army equipped with weapons
manufactured or improved by U.S.
technology.

The Bush policy of accommodating
Saddam Hussein’s arms build-up also had
one other, even more insidious effect. It
acted as a multiplier insofar as
the American “Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval”
served to legitimize and facilitate U.S.
allies’ efforts to secure lucrative
contracts from the Iraqi military.
Partly as a consequence of Washington’s
approach, the United States’s armed
forces in the Gulf war did have
to contend with a dangerous array of
German, Italian, French, Belgian and
British equipment and installations.

“Fact” #10
Scowcroft: “Saddam built the world’s
fourth largest army with more than $100
billion of his own oil revenues and with
loans from his neighbors. He fielded
troops with weapons mostly from the
former Soviet Union, China and Western
Europe. No one can fairly conclude that
the United States created Iraq’s military
machine.”

The first statement is tautological
since Gen. Scowcroft (incorrectly) claims
that the United States made no loans to
Saddam’s regime and (mistakenly) contends
that none of the proceeds of U.S. credit
guarantees were used by Iraq to build
weapons. As has been discussed above,
American taxpayer dollars do appear to
have contributed to building up Saddam
Hussein’s military might. While it is
true that the preponderance of Iraq’s
arsenal came from other sources, the
United States contributed appreciably to
one of its most dangerous — if still
largely incipient — qualities: the
ability to manufacture advanced weapon
systems and components indigenously.

“Fact” #11
Scowcroft: “We have no reason to
conceal any of this from Congress. The
charge of a coverup is outrageous and
irresponsible.”

If all there were to the
Iraqgate saga was a tragic story of a
misguided policy gone awry, there
would still be ample “reason”
for a coverup in the midst of a closely
contested presidential election campaign.
This is particularly true insofar as
competent execution of foreign policy is
claimed by President Bush as his ultimate
justification for reelection. What is
more, to the extent that the talisman of
that competence — his leadership in the
Gulf war — might be tarnished by
evidence of previous appeasement of a
“Hitler”-esque figure, it is
obvious why the White House would want to
suppress that evidence.

If, however, there is also
reason to believe that in pursuit of such
an appeasement policy, the Bush
Administration engaged in activities that
were not only wrong-headed but unethical,
irresponsible and possibly criminal, then
the perceived need for a coverup could
have been even more compelling.
While Gen. Scowcroft takes credit for
having provided tens of thousands of
documents and having “not denied
Congress access to a single
document,” the truth is that much of
this data has been extracted with great
difficulty from the executive branch.
Some of it remains classified —
seemingly for reasons having more to do
with political embarrassment than
national security; some of it was
admittedly altered in a criminal manner.

“Fact” #12
Scowcroft: “There is no
justification for the charges of illegal
conduct or wrongdoing by senior
Administration officials. Career
prosecutors — not political appointees
— in the Department of Justice have gone
over every allegation in detail and found
them baseless.”

Unfortunately for Gen. Scowcroft, this
whitewash appeared on the same day that
the Washington Post reported on
its front page that:

“CIA officials alleged in
secret testimony before the
Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence this week that a
senior Justice Department
official had pressured them to
release what they considered a
misleading report about a
politically sensitive bank
scandal.”

This explosive revelation is only one of
a cascade of recent disclosures about
back-stabbing and recriminations among
the Justice Department, CIA and FBI.
Where this bloodletting will end cannot
be predicted at this point. What is
clear, however, is that in the
aftermath of these disclosures “the
charges of illegal conduct or wrongdoing
by senior Administration officials”
are — if anything — more compelling
today than ever.

“Fact”
#13 Scowcroft: “The
demand for an independent counsel when
there is no basis for one is sheer
McCarthyism — an attempt to transform a
legitimate policy debate into a criminal
conspiracy. The Justice Department’s
refusal to be stampeded into allowing the
law to be used for partisan purposes was
precisely the response that anyone who
respects the law should have
expected.”

In light of the true facts of
the Iraqgate scandal, it is clear that what
is at issue is not simply a legitimate
debate over a failed policy. There
are ample grounds for pursuing criminal
investigations against a number of
individuals in the senior ranks of the
Bush Administration — not for partisan
purposes but because the law appears to
have been broken, justice appears to have
been obstructed, Congress appears to have
been lied to, etc.

What is more, in light of the active
role being played by a number of top Bush
Administration officials — most
recently by Brent Scowcroft — in
concealing these facts, the case
for an independent counsel is today an
open-and-shut one. While past
abuses of this mechanism (most notably
those still being perpetrated by Judge
Walsh) are cause for serious concern and
criticism, the Justice Department’s
transparent inability (or unwillingness)
to perform its assigned function leaves
no alternative if mis- and malfeasance in
the conduct of the Bush policy toward
Iraq is to be rooted out.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy finds
immensely ironic the coincidence of this
formal misstatement of numerous
critical facts by the National Security
Advisor to the President with the
implosion of the Justice Department’s
carefully constructed cover story —
namely, that the BNL Atlanta branch
manager, Christopher Drogoul, acted
alone. At this writing, the Department of
Justice and the Central Intelligence
Agency are being investigated by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Senate Intelligence Committee for
allegedly having knowingly issued false
or incomplete statements to the federal
judge in the Drogoul case among other
abuses.

The Center believes that, pending the
conclusion of these and other
investigations into the burgeoning
Iraqgate scandal, the following
individuals, at a minimum, must now join
Assistant to the Attorney General Robert
Mueller in recusing themselves from any
actions that might involve them in — or
permit them to interfere with — these
on-going inquiries:

former Secretary of State and current
Chief of Staff James Baker

Acting Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger

National Security Advisor to the
President Brent Scowcroft

CIA Director Robert Gates

Attorney General William Barr

FBI Director William Sessions

Secretary of Agriculture Edward
Madigan

White House General Counsel Boyden
Gray

Deputy Attorney General George J.
Terwilliger

former Under Secretary of State Robert
Kimmitt (currently Ambassador to Germany)

Special Assistant to the President
Dennis Ross

Special Assistant to the President
Richard Haas

National Security Council General
Counsel Nicholas Rostow

CIA Acting General Counsel David
Holmes

Elizabeth Rindskopf, Office of the
CIA’s General Counsel

Chief of the Department of Justice’s
Fraud Section Larry Urgenson

Acting U.S. Attorney Gerrilyn Brill

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gale McKenzie

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s
Decision Brief
entitled “The CCC Fiasco Continues:
Libyans, Iraqis, Europeans Made Whole by
U.S. Taxpayers for Saddam’s
Default,” (No.
92-D 89, 7 August 1992).