Influential defense panel urges U.S. to oust Hussein
By Stephen J.
Hedges Washington Bureau
August 18, 2002
WASHINGTON -- A once-obscure Pentagon board is playing an influential role in
pushing the Bush administration toward an invasion of Iraq, generating support
for military action as members seek to transform a controversial idea into a central
pillar of U.S. foreign policy.
Since 1985, the Defense
Policy Board has offered advice to top Pentagon officials on a range of military
issues, usually providing a diversity of views. During the Bush administration,
though, members of the innocuous-sounding board have used their inside access
and outside voices to press a long-held belief that the U.S. should oust Saddam
Hussein.
And they have done it from their very first meeting under this administration,
held just a few days after Sept. 11.
"It was an issue, of course, all along," Richard Perle, the
Defense Policy Board's chairman, said in an interview. "The way it became
involved in the war on terrorism, I think the origin was the president's speech
on Sept. 11, when he said we will not distinguish between those who are
terrorists and those who harbor terrorists. He kind of looked around the world
and asked, `Who is harboring terrorists?' "
The answer, argues Perle--a
military analyst and an assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald
Reagan--is Hussein: "Clearly, his involvement in terrorism goes back a long
time."
But that is not so clear to detractors of the attack-Iraq
strategy. They argue that Hussein cares less about helping Muslim extremists
like Osama bin Laden than he does about acquiring chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons in a bid to become the dominant power in the Middle
East.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they add, has purged all but
four of the previous board members and replaced them with a group of unabashed
Iraq hawks, changing an advisory panel into a virtual war council.
"It's
never been anything like this," said Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton national
security aide and now a Brookings Institution senior fellow. "The Defense Policy
Board was always a very quiet sort of panel that served the secretary. It
certainly was not a lobbying organization. This has become a lobby, with a
particular point of view where the neo-conservatives of the world, the
democratic imperialist point of view, holds sway."
`Rather conservative' panel
Even some of the board's members--who include Henry Kissinger, Newt
Gingrich and Dan Quayle--acknowledge a similarity in their views.
The
board is "rather conservative," said panel member Kenneth Adelman, a former
assistant defense secretary who served in the Ford and Reagan administrations.
"We have Democrats, Republicans, and we're all kind of hard-line and therefore,
yes, we generally agree on these things."
That hard line caused
controversy recently when news reports revealed that the board had received a
briefing from an outside analyst who argued that Saudi Arabia supports terrorism
and should be a U.S. enemy. Rumsfeld quickly declared Saudi Arabia a loyal ally,
and said that the analyst's view was not U.S. policy.
"Unwanted
publicity," is how Perle summarized the episode.
The board's beliefs on
Iraq, however, track closely with the prevailing White House position, one the
administration has been pressing hard recently. Last week Bush invited leaders
of the Iraqi opposition to Washington for talks and pledges of U.S. support.
Opposition leaders met with Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and
held a video conference with Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in
Wyoming.
On Thursday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the
BBC that Hussein is "an evil man, who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc
again on his own population, his neighbors, and, if he gets weapons of mass
destruction and the means to deliver them, on all of us."
The
administration also has made new overtures to the two primary Kurdish groups in
northern Iraq who have long opposed Hussein's rule and who are now protected by
a no-fly zone.
The tough line on Iraq is intended to address a lapse that
conservatives like Perle have long bemoaned. They say a lax approach to Iraq
over the last decade has allowed Hussein to wriggle free of United Nations
weapons inspections and other concessions he agreed to after his defeat in the
Persian Gulf war.
At the same time, Iraq hawks note that Hussein
allegedly tried to kill Bush's father after he left office, has continued to
shoot at planes patrolling the no-fly zones, and has stepped up his efforts to
acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
"I wish we had gone in
months and months ago," said Adelman. "He's got billions of dollars and gobs of
labs. It's not like it's four guys in the jungle somewhere."
At least by
its charter, the Defense Policy Board was never intended to play a central role
in setting defense strategy.
The board was formed during the Reagan
presidency to "serve the public interest by providing the secretary of defense,
deputy secretary and undersecretary for policy, with independent, informed
advice and opinion concerning major matters of defense policy," according to its
charter. Its members are to be "primarily private sector individuals."
In
recent years boards have taken to meeting for two-day sessions, about four times
a year. The government covers travel and administrative costs for members--about
$225,000 last year, according to the Pentagon. The sessions are held in a
Pentagon conference room, usually one adjacent to the defense secretary's
office.
Since Sept. 11, the board under Perle has met five times.
Rumsfeld's office declined to discuss the board's role specifically, but in a
press briefing last week, the defense secretary said that he relies on its
advice "a lot."
"We have former secretaries of defense and state,
national security advisers," Rumsfeld said. "We have people who are very
thoughtful and knowledgeable--former speakers of the House of Representatives, a
couple of them. We have academics, people who think about these things
full-time. And I have always benefited from a competition of ideas."
The
board's roster is drawn from the heart of the conservative defense
establishment: Five board members served under President Richard Nixon, six in
the Reagan administration and four under Bush's father. Many are affiliated with
conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage
Foundation. Stanford University's Hoover Institution has seven fellows on the
defense board.
Elder statesmen on panel
Aside from Perle and
Adelman, the board includes James Woolsey, who was CIA chief under President
Bill Clinton, and Richard Allen, Reagan's national security advisor. Elder
statesmen include James Schlesinger, a former defense and energy secretary;
former House Speaker Thomas Foley, a Democrat; and Harold Brown, defense
secretary under President Jimmy Carter.
The policy board's sessions are
closed and confidential; its members have security clearances and review
classified material. But many also are veterans at pressing their causes both
inside and outside of government, in ways that would be impossible for those who
currently hold office.
Perle has written opinion pieces on Iraq for The
New York Times and London Daily Telegraph. Just a few days after the Sept. 11
attacks, Gingrich told an American Enterprise Institute briefing that, "We have
to talk about replacement, not about punishment" of Hussein. Adelman hosts a Web
site where he posts his own thoughts on Iraq and includes others who favor
action.
Last week Kissinger wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post
that suggested action against Iraq was a plausible objective. Another board
member, Johns Hopkins University professor Eliot Cohen, wrote in The Wall Street
Journal this year: "Overthrow Saddam Hussein and the U.S. not only rids itself
and the world of a menace and a monster. It may bring about a regime that will
serve as a moderate influence on the region and increase the world's oil
supply."
Perle, Adelman and Woolsey have for years used their media
access to express the dangers of Hussein. All three support a theory posited by
Laurie Mylroie, a well-known terrorism expert and author, who argues that
Hussein was behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and has been a
vital ally to terrorists like bin Laden.
Woolsey even made a personal
trip to London last fall--misreported, Perle said, as a Defense Policy Board
mission--to examine possible links between Al Qaeda and Hussein.
Because
their beliefs on Iraq have been so public for so long, Rumsfeld's appointment of
Perle and company has been viewed as a sign that he favors a hard line against
Iraq. By putting these Iraq hawks on the board, experts say that Rumsfeld has
given them an official megaphone through which to broadcast their beliefs. "It's
one thing to be Richard Perle, a former assistant defense secretary during the
Cold War," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. "No one remembers
that anymore. It's another thing again for him to be the chair of the Defense
Policy Board. I think it has been an extraordinarily effective means for
building a political consensus for their views."
But Perle and other
members say the board's influence over administration policy has been
exaggerated. As a member of the board for two decades, Perle said this version
functions only slightly differently than past panels.
`Freewheeling discussions'
"I hadn't realized that when you call something a policy
board, people think it hands down rulings," he said. "It's not that at all.
There are quite freewheeling discussions, people interacting, and when the
board's done they come to conclusions. But it doesn't have findings, and the
views expressed when the secretary is present are expressed by
individuals."
And as the next chapter in the war on terrorism, there is
no doubt in Perle's mind that a military operation to remove Saddam Hussein is
the proper choice.
"It was clear to a number of us," Perle said, "because Saddam has harbored terrorists,
tried to assassinate a former president, had all kinds of links to terrorist organizations,
and was writing checks to terrorists in the West Bank, had all these terrorist
links. We needed a new strategy."
