What are the words that critics most often use when describing the foreign policy of the Bush Administration?
"arrogant, inept, reckless"
"unilateralist"
"dangerously simplistic"
"neo-conservative"
"aggressive"
"militaristic"
"hegemonic"
"ideological"
More than anything else critics claim that because the Bush Administration "views the world through a black and white lens", we've isolated our allies and created new enemies. They demand more nuance, more sophistication, less idealism and more realism from Bush.
And yet these are exactly some of the characteristics that have marked what is probably the administration's biggest foreign policy coup (although you won't hear much about it in the media); the decision by Libya to renounce support for terrorism and give up its WMD programs.
Just this week, the United States announced that it would resume diplomatic ties with Libya. On Wednesday, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal looked at The Libya Lesson:
The story of how Mr. Gadhafi acquired and later abandoned his nuclear capabilities is reported nearby by Judith Miller. By 2003, Libya was in possession of 4,000 advanced uranium centrifuges and sufficient quantities of highly enriched uranium to make a 10-kiloton bomb, or nearly the yield of Hiroshima's "Little Boy." This is vastly more advanced than what Iran is suspected of possessing, not to mention what was ultimately discovered about Saddam's WMD programs.
What changed Mr. Gadhafi's mind? A decade of international sanctions had an effect. A more proximate cause was Mr. Gadhafi's belief, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in Oct. 2001, that he was next. And when U.S. troops began deploying in Kuwait prior to the invasion of Iraq, Ms. Miller reports, Mr. Gadhafi phoned Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to pass this message to the White House: "Tell them I will do whatever they want."
But the decisive factor was Mr. Gadhafi's belief that his best hope of escaping the American onslaught was to abandon his nuclear dreams. "The purpose of WMD is to enhance a nation's security," Mr. Gadhafi's son Saif told Ms. Miller. "But our programs did not do that."
Had Mr. Gadhafi persevered, he may have had a functional weapon this year, or in 2008 at the latest, according to the head of the Libyan weapons program. Preventing that would have required a showdown with Libya akin to the present showdown with Tehran. Ultimately, the administration might have had no choice but to invade. It seems to us, however, that American interests are better served by deploying diplomats to the shores of Tripoli than cruise missiles and GIs.
The WSJ also published a fascinating two-part series by Judith Miller (yes, that Judith Miller) that provided new details on how Libya was persuaded to give up its WMD programs.
The first part, titled How Gadhafi Lost His Groove examined the reasons that the Libya dictator decided that he no longer wanted to be part of the WMD game:
As the Bush administration struggles to stop Iran and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, it might recall how Libya was persuaded to renounce terrorism and its own weapons of mass destruction programs, including a sophisticated nuclear program purchased almost entirely from the supplier network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's bomb.
When Libya dramatically declared on Dec. 19, 2003, that it was abandoning its rogue ways, President Bush and other senior officials praised Libya and Moammar al-Gadhafi, the surviving dean of Arab revolutionary leaders, as a model that other rogue states might follow. In fact, the still largely secret talks that helped prompt Libya's decision, and the joint American-British dismantlement of its weapons programs in the first four months of 2004, remain the administration's sole undeniable -- if largely unheralded -- intelligence and nonproliferation success. And a key figure in that effort, Stephen Kappes, is now slated to be the next deputy director of the demoralized Central Intelligence Agency.
With Hayden and Kappes on the way perhaps there is still a ray of hope for the CIA.
Col. Gadhafi's hip, 34-year-old son, Saif-al-Islam, told me in Vienna -- where he earned an M.B.A. and lives when he's not carrying out tasks for his father, or studying for a doctorate in political philosophy at the London School of Economics -- that his father changed course because he had to. "Overnight we found ourselves in a different world," said Saif, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks. "So Libya had to redesign its policies to cope with these new realities."
September 11th did change everything. At least for Libya.
But a review of confidential government records and interviews with current and former officials in London, Tripoli, Vienna and Washington suggest that other factors were involved. Prominent among them is a heretofore undisclosed intelligence coup -- the administration's decision in late 2003 to give Libyan officials a compact disc containing intercepts of a conversation about Libya's nuclear weapons program between Libya's nuclear chief and A.Q. Khan -- that reinforced Col. Gadhafi's decision to reverse course on WMD.
While analysts continue to debate his motivation, evidence suggests that a mix of intelligence, diplomacy and the use of force in Iraq helped persuade him that the weapons he had pursued since he came to power, and on which he had secretly spent $300 million ($100 million on nuclear equipment and material alone), made him more, not less, vulnerable. "The administration overstates Iraq, but its critics go too far in saying that force played no role," says Bruce W. Jentleson, a foreign-policy adviser to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign and professor at Duke University, who has written the most detailed study of why Col. Gadhafi abandoned WMD: "It was force and diplomacy, not force or diplomacy that turned Gadhafi around . . . a combination of steel and a willingness to deal."
No steel, no deal.
And not without our allies. Our real allies anyway.
Although the Camp David talks focused mainly on the impending Iraq war, Mr. Bush reportedly accepted Mr. Blair's proposal that they explore Col. Gadhafi's avowed interest in discussing WMD in exchange for lifting sanctions. In October 2002, Mr. Blair wrote a letter to Col. Gadhafi proposing such a dialogue; a few weeks later, Col. Gadhafi replied affirmatively: "I will instruct my people to be in touch with your people," a diplomat quoted his letter as saying. Col. Gadhafi, who Saif says avidly surfs the Net for news, had by now become even more anxious about press reports of Iraqi-Libyan nuclear cooperation. Stories sourced to senior Israeli officials accused Iraq of having sent nuclear physicists to Libya to work on a joint weapons program.
Gadhafi sounds like he'd be right at home in Hollywood.
"Hey Tony baby, have your people talk to my people. Maybe we can have lunch at the Tower Bar sometime."
He's got a "hip son" and he "avidly surfs the net for news" too. This isn't exactly your standard image dictator here.
The diplomatic lull soon ended, however. Libyans close to the Gadhafi family told me that after Saddam Hussein's sons were killed in a shootout with U.S. soldiers in Mosul in July 2003, Safiya, Col. Gadhafi's wife, angrily demanded that he do more to ensure that Saif and her other sons would not share a similar fate.
It's comforting to know that even though you may be the dictator of your country, you're not immune to getting nagged by your wife.
"Now you listen and you listen good Moammer. My babies are not going to get riddled with bullets and dragged out into the street. Do you understand that? So you get on that fancy phone and you call up whoever you need to call and make sure that doesn't happen. Am I making myself clear? Moammer? Are you even listening to me?"
"Yes, dear."
The second part was called, Gadhafi's Leap of Faith and looked at what the US learned from dismantling Libya's WMD programs:
Several things surprised him: first, the relatively small number of Libyans involved in the WMD programs. "Though the Libyans I dealt with were knowledgeable, dedicated and innovative," he said, "there was almost no bench." "The same six people -- most of them American-educated -- did almost everything," said Harry L. Heintzelman IV, senior adviser on noncompliance. A second lesson was how relatively easy it was to hide elements of a WMD program, even in an open desert, "if there is a national dedication to do so," Mr. Mahley wrote in a "Lessons Learned" paper for an arms-control newsletter.
Team members were also struck by the extent to which sanctions had complicated Libya's hunt for unconventional weapons, especially biological. Though U.S. intelligence officials still debate whether Libya has disclosed all aspects of its early effort to make or acquire germ weapons -- in particular, how much help, if any, was provided by Wouter Basson, head of South Africa's illicit germ-warfare program under apartheid -- sanctions apparently helped dissuade Col. Gadhafi from building an indigenous program. "The program, if you can call it that, just kind of fizzled out," said a member of the British-led biological team that first toured suspect Libyan sites and interviewed some 25 scientists during a two-week trip in the late spring of 2004.
This does not mean of course that the deal with Libya was perfect. Far from it. Gadhafi is still in power and the Libyan people are still suffering under his regime. In fact, on Thursday another piece by a Libyan human rights activist appeared in the WSJ criticizing the diplomatic recognition:
The State Department's decision undermines U.S. credibility. Realists say the administration is sending a positive message to the Arab world that it will reward good behavior in the war on terror. What despots hear, though, is that lip-service will obviate the need to reform or respect human rights. Re-establishing relations with Col. Gadhafi is not a victory and it may very well be a defeat unless Washington begins full-court pressure to force political change in Libya.
One hopes that closer contact with the US and a turn away from being a rogue state will, in the long run, improve the situation in Libya and lead to freedom for the Libyan people. What this episode demonstrates conclusively is that the Bush administration is willing to take different approaches with different countries when dealing with threats from terrorism and WMD.
Libya's continuing political repression and human rights abuses have prompted officials to cite Reagan's motto for dealing with the Soviet Union during its own tumultuous transformation: Trust, but Verify. "And this is exactly how we approached the case of Libya," said Mr. Bolton, now U.S. ambassador to the U.N., in a July 2004 speech. But not even the very conservative Mr. Bolton defends the halfhearted effort to assure Col. Gadhafi that he was right to renounce WMD. Calling Libya's about-face "an important nonproliferation success" because it "proves that a country can renounce WMD and keep its regime in power," Mr. Bolton told me recently that preventing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons "requires long-term strategic thinking and concentration."
And a healthy dose or two of nuance.
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