The Sunday Times February 04, 2007
Sarah Baxter, Washington
A PRIZE-WINNING Iranian nuclear scientist has died in mysterious circumstances, according to Radio Farda, which is funded by the US State Department and broadcasts to Iran.
An intelligence source suggested that Ardeshire Hassanpour, 44, a nuclear physicist, had been assassinated by Mossad, the Israeli security service.
Hassanpour worked at a plant in Isfahan where uranium hexafluoride gas is produced. The gas is needed to enrich uranium in another plant at Natanz which has become the focus of concerns that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons.
According to Radio Farda, Iranian reports of Hassanpour’s death emerged on January 21 after a delay of six days, giving the cause as “gas poisoning”. The Iranian reports did not say how or where Hassanpour was poisoned but his death was said to have been announced at a conference on nuclear safety.
Rheva Bhalla of Stratfor, the US intelligence company, claimed on Friday that Hassanpour had been targeted by Mossad and that there was “very strong intelligence” to suggest that he had been assassinated by the Israelis, who have repeatedly threatened to prevent Iran acquiring the bomb.
Hassanpour won Iran’s leading military research prize in 2004 and was awarded top prize at the Kharazmi international science festival in Iran last year.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to announce next Sunday — the 28th anniversary of the Islamic revolution — that 3,000 centrifuges have been installed at Natanz, enabling Iran to move closer to industrial scale uranium enrichment.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency say that hundreds of technicians and labourers have been “working feverishly” to assemble equipment at the plant.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
With Rumsfeld Gone, Critics of War Look to Rice
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — For six years, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice worked under the cover of a very effective shield: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was the administration’s lightning rod for criticism over its handling of Iraq.
But in recent weeks, with Mr. Rumsfeld gone, Ms. Rice has faced increased, and somewhat unfamiliar, criticism. At a Senate hearing on Jan. 11, she confronted a wall of opposition from Republicans as well as Democrats. During hearings this week on Iraq, several of her predecessors were pointed in their disapproval of her job performance.
Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III took issue with Ms. Rice’s refusal to engage Syria diplomatically. Back in his day, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “We practiced diplomacy full time, and it paid off.”
This week, Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, released three letters demanding that Ms. Rice make public the administration’s requirements for actions to be taken by the Iraqi government to earn continued American support. Along with the letters, and Ms. Rice’s reply — which indicated that the Iraqis had already missed most of the benchmarks — the senators also released an irate statement.
“Secretary Rice finally provided a response” to the senators’ repeated requests, the statement said. “What Secretary Rice’s letter makes abundantly clear is that the administration does not intend to attach meaningful consequences for the Iraqis continuing to fail to meet their commitments.”
And on Jan. 20, The Economist published an editorial titled “The Falling Star of Condoleezza Rice.”
In DC, Contractors Are the "Fourth Branch of Govt."
In Washington, Contractors Take on Biggest Role Ever
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem.
They hired another contractor.
It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government’s management agency.
Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.
By SCOTT SHANE and RON NIXON
US military chiefs eye confrontation with Iran
By Philip Sherwell in Washington, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:51am GMT 04/02/2007
America's military chiefs are at loggerheads with the country's diplomats and spies over tactics for confronting Iranian agents in Iraq over their role in lethal attacks on US forces.
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The rift has spilled over into a dispute about how and when to publish alleged evidence of Iranian backing for Iraqi militias and Iran's provision of supplies and technology for roadside bombs, the biggest killer of American soldiers in Iraq, a White House adviser revealed.
It is fuelling fears among some US diplomats - shared by Britain and its European allies - that hawks within President George W Bush's administration are preparing the ground for military action against Teheran before he leaves office in 23 months.
Angered by the mounting toll of troops killed by ever-more sophisticated devices, US commanders insisted last month that the White House give them authority to target and kill Iranian operatives in Iraq as part of the new 21,500-troop "surge" strategy ordered by Mr Bush.
But the State Department, headed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the CIA had argued against openly targeting Iranian agents, most of whom claim to be diplomats based at Teheran's network of consulates, liaison offices and cultural offices in Iraq.
They contended that this approach could escalate into direct armed conflict with Iran, which is under intense international pressure to give up its nuclear programme.
The State Department and the CIA, which both objected to the way the Bush administration used pre-war intelligence on Iraq, also wanted to publicise clear evidence of Iranian interference in Iraq as a way of justifying the US stance.
"The military's highest echelons really do not want the release of details of what Iran is up to as they don't want the Iranians to know what's working and what's not," the administration adviser said.
"The military and the State Department and CIA are coming at this from very different approaches. State and the CIA believe we should respect the supposed diplomatic immunity of these Iranians. But the military has had enough and they say 'to hell with their fake diplomatic immunity'."
The splits within the administration come as reports emerge of new variants of "explosively formed projectiles" allegedly made with Iranian help.
The Pentagon said the first soldier was killed by one of the devices on Jan 22, but it is refusing to give further details of their use because it wants to limit the information available to its enemies.
The US has also suggested that Iranian operatives may have been involved in the abduction and killing of five soldiers in Kerbala, a potentially explosive accusation. But Stephen Hadley, Mr Bush's national security adviser, acknowledged on Friday that the intelligence briefing on Iranian interference in Iraq - publication of which has been delayed twice - was still being refined.
The build-up of anti-Iran rhetoric and despatch of two US aircraft carriers to the region has echoes for some of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, prompting suspicions about the intentions of the remaining hawks within the administration, led by the vice-president, Dick Cheney.
The defence secretary, Robert Gates, sought to play down these concerns on Friday, saying that the US was not planning for a war with Iran but was determined to stop Iranians supplying bombs for attacks on American troops in Iraq.
Dan Goure, a Pentagon consultant, said that targeting Iranian operatives in Iraq was crucial to Mr Bush's "surge" strategy. "You cannot try to deal with the militia if you're not dealing with the Iranians backing them," he said. "The message now is that the gloves are off. This is Bush's last chance in Iraq and he isn't going to hold back."
The US has also increased flights of unmanned spy planes over the border corridor between Iraq and Iran, to track movements across the frontier to back up its claims about Teheran's behaviour.
The drones were being flown into Iran from bases in Iraq to maintain a 24-hour check on a corridor running along "much" of the Iranian side of the border, an American intelligence officer told this newspaper.
The US is intent on not launching any attacks that could inadvertently hit Iranian soil. But once suspects were a few miles from the border inside Iraq, they would be "whacked", the officer said.
John Pike, director of the military think-tank GlobalSecurity.org, said there were 600 or 700 drones operating in Iraq and "the air is thick with them".
The Iranian military had upgraded gun and missile posts a few miles into its territory and was trying to bring down the drones, the intelligence officer said. The US is also believed to be flying drones above Iranian territory in search of intelligence about its nuclear facilities. The drones can use radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather information that is not accessible by satellites.
Teheran claims it developed its secret atomic programme for civilian energy purposes, but Western governments believe it is pursuing a nuclear bomb.
•Mr Bush has asked Congress for an additional $245 billion (£125 billion) for Iraq and Afghanistan for the next two fiscal years. If approved, the overall cost of the "war on terror" since the Sept 11 2001 attacks will rise to nearly $750 billion (£381 billion) - more in real terms than was spent on the Vietnam war.
Iraq Plan's Authors Doubt It Will Work
Doubts Run Deep on Reforms Crucial to Bush's Iraq Strategy
Even Plan's Authors Say Political, Economic Changes May Fail
Even Plan's Authors Say Political, Economic Changes May Fail
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 4, 2007; A16
The success of the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy depends on a series of rapid and dramatic political and economic reforms that even the plan's authors have little confidence will work.
In the current go-for-broke atmosphere, administration officials say they are aware that failure to achieve the reforms would result in a repeat of last year's unsuccessful Baghdad offensive, when efforts to consolidate military gains with lasting stability on the ground did not work. This time, they acknowledge, there will be no second chance.
Among many deep uncertainties are whether Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is up to the task and committed to spearheading what the administration foresees as a fundamental realignment of Iraqi politics; whether Maliki's Shiite-dominated government and its sluggish financial bureaucracy will part with $10 billion for rapid job creation and reconstruction, at least some of it directed to sectarian opponents; and whether the U.S. military and State Department can calibrate their own stepped-up reconstruction assistance to push for action without once again taking over.
A pessimistic new National Intelligence Estimate released Friday described the Iraqi government as "hard-pressed" to achieve sectarian reconciliation, even in the unlikely event that violence diminishes. Without directly mentioning Maliki, it noted that "the absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunni or Shia with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects."
Several senior officials involved in formulating the political and economic aspects of the administration's strategy, along with a number of informed outsiders, agreed to discuss its assumptions and risks on the condition that they not be identified by name. Other sources refused to be even anonymously quoted, describing the administration as standing on the brink of an intricate combination of maneuvers whose outcome is far from assured.
The foundation of the strategy is not new -- U.S. policy since the March 2003 invasion has been to use American military might, money and know-how to foster a peaceful Iraq with a unified government and a solid economy. The strategy incorporates major elements of last year's "clear, hold and build" plan, whose "hold and build" parts never got off the ground.
Several sources expressed concern that the administration, by publicly rejecting a "containment" option -- withdrawing U.S. troops to Iraqi borders to avoid sectarian fighting while preventing outside arms and personnel from entering the country -- has not left itself a fall-back plan in the event of failure.
Shift in Political ClimateThe strategy's political component centers on replacing deepening Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish divides with a new delineation between "extremists" and "moderates." Moderates are defined as those of all religious and political persuasions who eschew violence in favor of safety and employment.
With the help of outside Iraq experts, the administration has compiled lists of active and still-untapped moderates around the country. "They wondered could I give them some [names] from the provinces or anywhere" from which to construct a new political base, recalled one think-tank expert called to the State Department in December. According to the intelligence estimate, however, Iraq's reservoir of such people, especially trained technocrats and entrepreneurs, has been drained as they have fled the country in droves.
As American and Iraqi combat forces focus on cooling the cauldron of violence in Baghdad, U.S. military commanders and State Department teams plan to funnel "bridge money" toward moderate designees in outer provinces and in the capital to create jobs, start businesses and revitalize moribund factories. Iraqi money would come in behind to make it all permanent.
Iraqis with physical and economic security, the thinking goes, will give their political support to the government that produces both. Closing the circle, the Iraqi government will see non-sectarian moderates as the central support for a new political coalition.
As they put the plan together, officials held heated internal debates over whether Maliki was the right man to head such an effort. Some argued in favor of engineering a new Iraqi government under Maliki's Shiite coalition partner, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Hakim's political stalking horse, Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi.
They closely examined the makeup of Iraq's 275-seat parliament, where a no-confidence vote requires only a simple majority. Maliki's Dawa party is part of the Hakim-led United Iraqi Alliance, the largest Shiite group, with 130 seats. Making a strong case for SCIRI, some argued that the Iraqis themselves were so fed up with Maliki that a different governing coalition is possible with realigned Sunni and Kurdish elements. This view found proponents in the White House and Pentagon, and it extended into parts of the normally more cautious State Department.
Maliki, whose Dawa party holds 12 seats in the parliament, was seen as unwilling to separate voluntarily from his existing power base -- dominated by the violent and unruly Baghdad-based Jaish al-Mahdi militia, also known as the Mahdi Army, of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. With a new coalition, the Alliance would not need Sadr's 30 seats.
SCIRI's own militia, the Badr Organization, is seen as more cohesive, "an actual organization with command and control" that might be integrated into the Iraqi military, said one State Department official. The administration has charged that both the Sadr and Badr militias receive assistance from Iran. But officials regularly note that Badr forces have not attacked the U.S. military and that SCIRI has voiced equal opposition to Iranian and U.S. domination.
Other officials find that view naive, noting that evidence of Iran's involvement in Iraqi violence was found in a SCIRI compound during a raid last month.
Several officials said they believe that Hakim's backers in the Bush administration have been seduced by his forceful demeanor and Abdul Mahdi's fluent English. And while many emphasized the importance of a single, visible Iraqi leader, others have said it is a mistake to personalize the policy in one Shiite actor.
After extensive discussions last month with Maliki, Hakim and Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the most senior Sunni in the Iraqi government, policymakers decided to place their bets on Maliki. "We judge that Maliki does not wish to fail in his role," National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar told Congress in a tepid endorsement recently. "He has some, but not all, of the obvious requirements for success."
In any case, replacing Maliki was determined to be "too hard," in the words of one analyst. A two-thirds parliamentary majority is required to install a new prime minister, and any attempt to remove Maliki by parliamentary maneuver, it was agreed, should remain a Plan B that Iraqis themselves would undertake if he failed to produce results.
So far, Maliki has said the right things about cracking down on the sectarian violence -- including by Sadr's militia -- that is tearing Baghdad apart. But there are worrisome signs. A parliamentary session late last month in which Maliki introduced the new plan was adjourned after it erupted in sectarian squabbling in which the prime minister gave as good as he got.
Many experts believe that the administration's effort to build a new political center, supported by "moderate" Sunni allies in the region that fear Shiite Iranian expansion, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, is hopelessly outdated. "Our struggle may be between moderates and extremists," Brookings Institution scholar Martin Indyk said last month. "Their struggle is between Sunnis and Shias."
New Economic InitiativesOn the economic front, where the United States has already invested more than $38 billion, the administration has asked for $538 million to keep current programs running and has proposed an additional $1.2 billion for new initiatives that it says will receive long-term Iraqi funding.
A combination of violent attacks on previous projects, sectarian favors, inefficient and overly cautious officials, and a complex bureaucracy -- much of it installed by the United States under the post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority -- has left the Iraqi government with a significant capital surplus in each of the past several years.
Getting approval for reconstruction expenditures in the past, observed one U.S. official, has been like "pushing wet spaghetti." The surplus, which is kept in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now totals $12.5 billion. Maliki has publicly agreed to spend $10 billion of it on reconstruction and jobs.
The State Department has sent new "tiger teams" to six Iraqi ministries to help clear away the wreckage of the past and speed financing for approved projects, and it plans to double to 20 the number of U.S.-staffed provisional reconstruction teams in Baghdad and around the country.
In addition to Foreign Service officers, experts including small-business advisers and camel veterinarians are being recruited from the U.S. Agriculture Department and elsewhere to staff the teams, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, David Satterfield, told Congress last week.
Former Foreign Service officer Timothy M. Carney, who worked in Iraq in 2003, has been appointed to coordinate the U.S. and Iraqi bureaucracies, to get the Iraqi government's money moving and to make sure that Iraqi funding priorities coincide with the administration's.
But some officials worry that the expanded U.S. presence will repeat the mistakes of the past -- when the United States oversaw virtually every part of the Iraqi government -- and undermine the goal of turning the country over to the Iraqis themselves.
"It's the same old problem as in 2003," cautioned one official. "The same impatience that if they can't do it we'll step in and do it. There is a bit of that creeping into this dialogue."
Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.
Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up: FRANK RICH - Cover-Up Crumbles
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
By FRANK RICHPublished: February 4, 2007
Thanks to the commotion caused by the White House leak case, damning evidence has slowly dribbled out.
IN the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation’s armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago. The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.
The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.
Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago. When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring.
---
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war.
No Way Out: MAUREEN DOWD - Iraq: " We can try or we can leave, but either way, it seems, we’re cooked"
REPOSTED
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
No Way Out
By MAUREEN DOWDPublished: February 3, 2007
We’re in a cycle of violence in Iraq that is so complex and awful that withdrawing American troops will make it worse and keeping American troops there may also make it worse.
Everything you've heard and read is true. And I am deeply sorry about that." Who said it?
(a) George Bush, about the chilling new intelligence report on Iraq.
(b) Joe Biden, about his self-imploding prolixity.
(c) Condi Rice, on her ability to understand Peyton Manning's vulnerabilities better than Nuri Kamal al-Malaki's.
(d) Silvio Berlusconi, on his wife's Junoesque lightning bolt after his public flirting.
(e) Jacques Chirac, after giving a Gallic shrug at the prospect of Iran getting un or deux nuclear weapons.
(f) Hillary Clinton, on enabling the president to invade Iraq.
(g) Barack Obama, for the ultimate sin of not being black enough or white enough.
(h) Mary Cheney, on her decision to work on her terrifying dad's homophobic campaign because the thought of John Kerry was "terrifying."
(i) Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, about his affair with his campaign manager's wife.
The answer is Gavin Newsom.
It's rare to get a simple apology when a complex obfuscation will do.
Even after releasing parts of an intelligence report so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled "Iraq: We're Cooked," Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge.
In the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, civil war was a worst-case scenario. In the 2007 one, Iraq has zoomed past civil war to hell: "The Intelligence Community judges that the term 'civil war' does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence."
As John McLaughlin, the former acting director of central intelligence, told The Times's Mark Mazzetti: "Civil war is checkers. This is chess." ....
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