If we're so right why do we need to bribe people?

America the Arm-Twister

America the arm-twister

In the conflict over a second resolution that could trigger a war, the 'Middle Six' nations on the UN Security Council face a barrage of bribes, persuasion and blatant threats

Ed Vulliamy in New York, Peter Beaumont in London, Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow and Paul Webster in Paris
Sunday March 2, 2003
The Observer

Samoud is a word with a special meaning in Arabic. In recent weeks it has come to international attention as the name of Saddam Hussein's proscribed missile system, synonymous with the white, finned tubes thick as tree trunks which Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, has ordered for destruction.

But in the Arab world it has another resonance; 'to be steadfast'. In truth, however, it means something more. Particularly in the context of the Palestinian struggle, samoud is understood as a form of existential resistance, an absolute refusal to give in even when faced with occupation by one's enemies, a quality invoked by Saddam in his struggles with the US and its allies.

This 'steadfastness' of the strong has turned negotiations for a new resolution to authorise war against Iraq into a colossal contest between America, Britain and Spain, who believe that war is inevitable, and France, Russia and Germany, who are seeking to avoid it. The prize is the very future of the UN and the shape of international relations.

All sides in what is set to be one of the most bruising encounters on the Security Council in a generation have set out their positions, as America and its allies try to secure a resolution authorising war for what they say is Iraq's non-compliance with resolution 1441. Next Friday that battle will come to a head when the council meets to hear what is likely to be the last report by Blix. Then the US and Britain will push for a vote on their new resolution to declare Iraq in material breach and authorise war.

Tony Blair made it clear this weekend that he will not back down and that he is, perhaps, more hawkish than George Bush. For his part, Bush has reaffirmed that only the total disarmament of Iraq and the removal of Saddam will lift the prospect of war, a combination so unlikely that war is virtually guaranteed.

On the anti-war side, positions appear to be hardening by an equal measure. Russia has let it be known in private - if not in public - briefings that it might exercise its veto, following similar warnings from the French.

Torn between the two sides on the Security Council are the so-called Middle Six - Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Chile, Mexico and Pakistan - whose support or otherwise is likely to characterise how the world, particularly the Islamic world, reacts to any US-led war.

The fight over the Middle Six has been characterised by threats, cajoling, US spying on their missions and blatant bribes. Seasoned diplomats have looked on in awe or felt the heat as America mounted its offensive to browbeat the nations it needs for a Security Council majority clearing the path to war.

When White House spokesman Ari Fleischer denied strong-arm tactics by the US diplomatic service, correspondents to whom he was talking on Thursday laughed and he left the briefing room.

Meanwhile, the people for whom Fleischer speaks - Bush and Vice-President **** Cheney - have been picking off countries one by one, with a mixture of courtship and threats, each tailored to match that nation's dependence on the US and the leverage of American power.

The missions of the Middle Six, on New York's Upper East Side, have been inundated by emails, phone calls and visitors from the US presence at the UN, while emissaries have been dispatched from Washington to their capitals, armed with goodies for those who toe the line - and sanctions against those who do not.

The feverish efforts flow seemlessly from the American mathematics over the nine votes required to win the necessary majority, if a veto from one of the Permanent Five is not deployed. The votes from Britain, Spain and Bulgaria are assured. Russia and China, both with veto powers, are expected to abstain or vote against. France - which also has a veto - will almost certainly vote against, along with Syria.

All six have been reminded what the price for non-compliance may be. The precedent is that of Yemen, which had the audacity to vote, along with Cuba, against the last Gulf war. A $70 million US aid package was instantly cancelled.

It is abundantly clear that this time the threats are heavier. Two senior officials from the State Department - Kim Holmes and Marc Grossman - were sent last week to Mexico, where their pleading was described as 'hostile' by diplomats, who said Mexico would face a 'very heavy price' for doing anything but supporting the Americans.

Pakistan has also been the target of a lobbying blitz. For its support during the Afghan war, it was rewarded with the writing off of $1 billion of bilateral debt and a blind eye to its nuclear bomb programme, in addition to massive aid from the US and other nations.

The stick with which US diplomats are beating Chile is a free-trading arrangement desperately needed by the South Americans. The terms have been drawn up and are waiting to pass through both legislatures, in Washington and Santiago de Chile.

If America's southern neighbours have been feeling the heat, so have the three African nations on the Middle Six. The pressure on Angola started by telephone from the White House, with Bush and Cheney making personal appeals to President Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

But it has not only been Americans who have been punching the phones. French officials have been working their own angles, though with fewer threats.

French diplomats claimed - perhaps optimistically - yesterday that the pro-inspection lobby among the 15 council members weighed in favour of giving the inspectors more time. Apart from China and Russia, France believes it has the support of Angola, Cameroon and Guinea in addition to the declared opponents of US policy, Germany and Syria.

For all the threats and cajoling, the issue which will weigh most heavily on this week's negotiations in the run-up to Blix's report will be Iraq's commencement of its destruction of its al-Samoud missiles yesterday. It is around this issue that the arguments will be most heated. France has already said that Iraq's decision to comply with a UN order to destroy missiles is proof that inspections are working, a view shared by the Russians.

In Washington and London, however, Iraq's decision to obey Blix's deadline to begin destruction - a deadline built up on both sides of the Atlantic as a 'key test' of cooperation - is discounted as yet 'another trick' by Saddam that both Bush and Blair had foreseen.

'The truth is that Iraq is still not complying,' said one Whitehall source. 'Resolution 1441 demands full, complete and immediate disclosure and disarmament, and that has not happened. The missiles are a distraction from this.'

To this end, Britain's ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, last week made an oral representation to members of the Security Council in closed session on Iraqi concealment of chemical and nerve agents, based on British intelligence. This week he will circulate a letter formally disclosing the same intelligence.

Washington and London will also make much of Blix's comments last week that Iraq's belated and patchy cooperation, mandated under resolution 1441, had 'been very limited so far'. It is this that the war party will seize on as the material breach that - new resolution or not - effectively authorises war under the existing resolution.

Which leaves the question of a Russian or a French veto. While in Washington and London officials have pooh-poohed the idea that Russia might really veto any resolution, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov apparently does not share the US view. Speaking to reporters in Beijing on Friday, he insisted that 'Russia has the right to veto' and 'will use it if it is necessary in the interests of international stability'.

In the end, however, even those most hostile to the US and Britain's search for a new resolution are deeply pessimistic that war can be avoided. What America wants, America will get, they believe. And there is the United States' most powerful threat of all: that it will damage not only national interests, but render the United Nations an irrelevance when confronted by the reality of US power.

Buying Support

Buying support
The first gulf war 'paid for itself.' This time it's a very different story.

By Alan W. Bock
Senior editorial writer

A striking but little-noted contrast between the gulf war of 1991 and the war to which we are building up - some stubborn part of me wants to believe it isn't inevitable - is in the costs of the war and who is expected to bear them. The contrast is worth exploring.

As many noted at the time, the United States not only persuaded other countries - chiefly Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany and Kuwait - to pay for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but might have made a small profit of $2 billion or $3 billion.

Andrew Bacevich, who now teaches international relations at Boston University, was in the military in Germany shortly after the war. He told me on the phone recently that repairs to any equipment that had been in the gulf were charged to a special account, even if the wear and tear had really occurred in Germany months later.

The war went so swimmingly from a financial point of view that pundits for a time discussed it as a model for the post-communist world: The United States uses its military to put out brush fires and defuse problems and the rest of the world pays the bills and is grateful for the stability.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

U.S. taxpayers paid full freight for most of the Clinton administration's desultory excursions into nation-building with bombs, in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and beyond. Now that Bush II wants another war with Iraq, not only is no other country offering to pay the bills, we have to bribe other countries to join up.

This sole superpower business is getting to be expensive.

Nobody knows the direct cost of waging the war itself. It wasn't included in the budget Bush presented to Congress - one that already included the biggest increases in domestic nondiscre- tionary spending in decades and the biggest deficits yet.

Former Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey, in one of those moments of relative honesty that the political class calls gaffes, last September offhandedly estimated the cost at about $200 billion. That was an estimate rather than a considered calculation, and it would be prudent to treat it as a lowball estimate. The first gulf war cost about $60 billion. The equipment is more expensive now, and the objective more ambitious. It is unlikely to be over in 100 hours.

What about subsequent occupation/transition costs? Tough to figure. Nobody knows how long the United States plans to stay. Economists cited in a recent International Herald Tribune article estimate the seven-year cost of failing to rebuild Bosnia at about $15 billion - and that's not including the costs of NATO soldiers, humanitarian aid and resettlement of a million refugees. Iraq is bigger and probably more intractable.

Then there are the costs of getting others to go along.

Just a few weeks ago Israel was asking for $8 billion in commercial loan guarantees over and above the just less than $3 billion a year in aid it gets virtually automatically - the ongoing bonus for going to Camp David with Jimmy Carter (Egypt gets about the same). Israel also has asked for $4 billion in additional military assistance.

What the United States gets for this is unclear. An agreement from Israel not to enter the war and aggravate Arab countries if Iraq launches only a few missiles? The aid is not contingent on progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Then there's Turkey, recently rebuffed (correctly in my view) by France, Belgium and Germany after a request for NATO help if Iraq counter-attacked Turkey after a U.S. attack on Iraq. But don't weep for Turkey. It's getting AWACS and Patriot missiles anyway. And it's exacting a high and rising price for any agreement to allow U.S. forces to use bases in Turkish territory.

A couple of weeks ago the United States was offering about $14 billion in direct aid and loan guarantees, up from a previous estimated price of $10 billion. Now the offer is around $26 billion ($6 billion grants, $20 billion loan guarantees) and Turkey says it's still too small. Turkey wants more like $32 billion, claiming it suffered costs in the last gulf war that were never compensated, expects to incur risks and costs this time, and needs a carrot to offer the Turkish people who, according to polls, overwhelmingly oppose a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Turkey also wants to occupy some of the oil fields in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq - and probably a guarantee from the United States to squelch any possible upstart Kurdish rebellion.

Russia had an $8 billion oil deal, providing support services, equipment and the like, with Iraq. It is likely it is being coy just now in hopes of getting the best deal - not only a guarantee that U.S. taxpayers will cover that $8 billion in expected revenue if war makes the deal go sour, but a decent cut of the Iraqi oil spoils after the war.

France was cut out of the oil spoils after the first gulf war, and many thought it was holding out to get a guarantee of the spoils this time. But it might just be acting on principle or on irreducible hostility to war, so maybe it won't be in at the kill.

Qatar, which has welcomed U.S. troops and equipment, is getting something, but nobody seems to know what or how much. Oman and Yemen have to be getting something. Djibouti, where U.S. intelligence operatives are tracking al-Qaida and building infrastructure, will be getting money and aid, but again nobody knows how much.

In 1991 the world paid the United States to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Now the United States has to bribe people to be allies. What does that tell us about the wisdom and prudence of the current cause?

Copyright 2003 The Orange County Register

Just like Nixon..

America Plans "Dirty Tricks" Campaign To Win UN Vote

Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war

Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members

Read the Memo

Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy in New York and Peter Beaumont
Sunday March 2, 2003
The Observer

The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.

Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.

The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency - the US body which intercepts communications around the world - and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.

The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations 'particularly directed at... UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of course)' to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.

The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York - the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.

The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is 'mounting a surge' aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also 'policies', 'negotiating positions', 'alliances' and 'dependencies' - the 'whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises'.

Dated 31 January 2003, the memo was circulated four days after the UN's chief weapons inspector Hans Blix produced his interim report on Iraqi compliance with UN resolution 1441.

It was sent by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the 'Regional Targets' section of the NSA, which spies on countries that are viewed as strategically important for United States interests.

Koza specifies that the information will be used for the US's 'QRC' - Quick Response Capability - 'against' the key delegations.

Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also 'pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations'.

Koza also addresses himself to the foreign agency, saying: 'We'd appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar more indirect access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines [ie, intelligence sources].' Koza makes clear it is an informal request at this juncture, but adds: 'I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels.'

Disclosure of the US operation comes in the week that Blix will make what many expect to be his final report to the Security Council.

It also comes amid increasingly threatening noises from the US towards undecided countries on the Security Council who have been warned of the unpleasant economic consequences of standing up to the US.

Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush administration officials over whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign with some warning of the serious consequences of discovery.

The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their efforts to win over the undecided delegations.

The language and content of the memo were judged to be authentic by three former intelligence operatives shown it by The Observer. We were also able to establish that Frank Koza does work for the NSA and could confirm his senior post in the Regional Targets section of the organisation.

The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza's office. However, when The Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told 'You have reached the wrong number'.

On protesting that the assistant had just said this was Koza's extension, the assistant repeated that it was an erroneous extension, and hung up.

While many diplomats at the UN assume they are being bugged, the memo reveals for the first time the scope and scale of US communications intercepts targeted against the New York-based missions.

The disclosure comes at a time when diplomats from the countries have been complaining about the outright 'hostility' of US tactics in recent days to persuade then to fall in line, including threats to economic and aid packages.

The operation appears to have been spotted by rival organisations in Europe. 'The Americans are being very purposeful about this,' said a source at a European intelligence agency when asked about the US surveillance efforts.