Veterans for Common Sense

London (Mirror) – US intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “garbage”, UN inspectors said yesterday.

They claimed “undeniable” evidence that Saddam Hussein was double-dealing over disarmament was “circumstantial, outdated or completely wrong”.

The weapons team said they found NOTHING at an alleged nuclear research site shown in satellite pictures to the UN, and NOTHING at a Saddam palace where they were given precise co-ordinates of incriminating evidence.

Other claims relating to nuclear research and missiles were also fake. Claiming the inspectors had been fed “garbage after garbage after garbage” by President Bush’s spy chiefs, one said: “We’ve better things to do than run around the country chasing bogus evidence.”

The slapdown came as Tony Blair said he would defy any peace plea from the Pope, who he meets today.

Stepping up the “moral” case for war on Iraq, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that reports showed Saddam was planning to use chemical and bio-weapons against a range of targets.

Iraq has been ordered to destroy dozens of missiles which violate UN limits, but the US and Britain are not waiting to see whether Saddam Hussein complies.

In recent days, an Independent on Sunday investigation reveals, they have stepped up attacks on missile sites near Basra which could threaten the military build-up in Kuwait and the Gulf.

The raids are being carried out by aircraft patrolling the “no-fly” zones in northern and southern Iraq, established by the victors after the first Gulf war. They claim the patrols are being carried out in the name of the UN – especially ironic, given the passionate debate over the need for a second Security Council to authorise war on Iraq.

Some have always disputed whether the “no-fly” zones have UN authority, but now the US and Britain have widened the “rules of engagement” to the point where warplanes are effectively preparing the way for an imminent invasion.

Targets have included surface-to-air batteries as well as an anti-ship missile launcher which was considered a threat to the growing concentration of naval vessels in the Gulf. In the past two weeks there have been at least three strikes in the same area on Ababil-100 mobile missile batteries.

They are capable of rapidly firing four missiles a distance of nearly 90 miles, each with a single explosive warhead or up to 25 anti-tank “bomblets”. From Basra they could easily reach the ground forces building up in northern Kuwait, which has been declared a closed military zone.

Attacks on such battlefield weapons, rare until recently, are part of a semi-secret air campaign, conducted under cover of the no-fly patrols, which has intensified sharply since the beginning of the year. Allied aircraft have gone into action over Iraq almost every day. By the end of this month the number of missions is likely to overtake the 78 flown during the whole of 2002.

While the number of attacks and the targets are known, important information is almost always kept back, including the number and type of aircraft deployed, the weapons used and the success or otherwise of each attack: US Central Command communiques routinely say “battle damage assessment is ongoing”, and further details are never released. The Iraqis ritually say civilians have been killed; equally ritually, this is denied. What is certain, however, is that no allied aircraft has been shot down in more than a decade of patrols.

Significantly, the air attacks have been heavily concentrated in the south of Iraq, with only one having been reported north of Baghdad since the beginning of the year.

Millions of leaflets have also been dropped in the south, some warning Iraqis not to repair bomb damage, others giving the frequencies of anti-regime broadcasting stations.

The US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, proclaimed last week that there were sufficient forces in the Gulf region for war to be launched at any time. At the weekend, the Pentagon claimed that it had some 200,000 troops in the region, roughly half of them in Kuwait.

Within days there will be five US carrier battle groups in and around the Gulf, as well as the Ark Royal and its task force. The number of strike aircraft, including a third of the Royal Air Force’s strength, is climbing to about 500. They will be able to unleash devastating power against Saddam when ordered to do so, but already Iraq’s air defences have been significantly eroded by months of military action.

Mr Rumsfeld’s announcement took military chiefs by surprise, however. Delays in reaching agreement with Turkey have hampered the deployment of some significant elements in the US invasion plan. Britain’s Challenger 2 tanks and about half the 42,000 personnel in its combined force are still on the high seas.

Sharp rise in number and type of targets

Until last summer, coalition aircraft patrolling the “no-fly” zones over Iraq hit back only at missile or artillery batteries that opened fire on them, or loosed AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles at radar units “locking on” to them. But with an invasion looming, the number and type of targets attacked have increased sharply.

* Last September, in a raid given unusual publicity, more than 100 British and US warplanes hit the main Iraqi air command and control centre in the west of the country, which would direct any Scud attacks on Israel.

* Air defence command bunkers along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of Baghdad, and the fixed communications that link them to missile and gun positions, have come in for repeated attack.

* Fibre-optic links get the most attention, since they are quickly repaired. The Iraqis are warned through leaflets that repair crews may be targeted.

* While continuing to dismantle Iraq’s air defences, coalition aircraft are increasingly attacking battlefield weapons in the far south of Iraq, the likely focus of an invasion. Fixed and mobile surface-to-air missile batteries have been targeted, as well as surface-to-surface missiles threatening US and British land and naval forces.

To what can we attribute Powell’s “losing it” with the French and the drop in his credibility?

One obvious factor was his strained attempt to connect a rosary of dots in order to establish a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The unintended consequence was to show once again that the evidence described by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “bulletproof” is in fact full of holes. But that was generally known.

What was unexpected was the way Powell played fast and loose interpreting the imagery he displayed at the Security Council. You would think he would have known better.

For his penance Powell had to sit still Friday while a Council employee gave him a lecture from the textbook for Rhetoric 101. Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix poked an embarrassing hole in the conclusion Powell drew from two satellite images of an Iraqi chemical facility.

Powell had shown that decontamination trucks seen on the first image were no longer present on the second, which was taken on December 22, the day a UN inspection team arrived. He offered this sequence as evidence that Iraq “had been tipped off to the forthcoming inspections.”

On Friday, Blix calmly pointed out that “the two satellite images of the site were taken several weeks apart,” something Powell had neglected to mention. Hence, said Blix, the removal of the trucks—whenever it actually took place— “could just as easily have been a routine activity.” Powell offered no rebuttal.

The irony is that he did not need to overreach the evidence. Proving that Iraq was in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 was a no-brainer. Blix had already done so a few days before Powell spoke on February 5.

But the White House apparently decided that if Saddam Hussein’s perfidy could be proven three times over, the result would be an automatic Ergo for war.

Predictably, this backfired—not only at the UN but also in the streets of the world’s major cities. Skepticism leapt from the placards carried by millions of marchers—particularly those of “Old Europe,” who were “not born yesterday,” as Harry Truman used to say.

Imagery intelligence is likely to play an increasingly important role in coming weeks, so it is worth giving some attention to the pressures that can make its interpretation and public release suspect. In his autobiography, Colin Powell included a highly instructive vignette from the Gulf War in 1991.

US forces were having no luck finding and destroying Iraqi Scud surface-to-surface missiles before they could be launched at Israel and elsewhere. So it was with welcome surprise that Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, learned that Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had told the press that several Scuds had been located and destroyed on their launchers.

Before Powell had time to rejoice, though, his intelligence chief warned that an imagery analyst on Schwarzkopf’s own staff had concluded that what had been destroyed were not Scuds but oil tanker trucks. Powell called Schwarzkopf at once, but Schwarzkopf badmouthed the imagery analyst and delivered himself of such a rich string of expletives that Powell decided to let the story stand—a decision he regretted the next day when CNN showed photos of the destroyed Jordanian oil tankers.

What about now? Where can Powell now turn for imagery analysis not subject to command influence or the exigencies of policy?

Nowhere. The Central Intelligence Agency’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) offered that service until 1996, when CIA Director John Deutch ceded it—lock, stock, and barrel—to the Pentagon.

One practical effect was the immediate departure, in droves, of seasoned imagery analysts who moved to other jobs at CIA. The damage could be seen all too plainly in the years that followed: in the failure to detect India’s preparations to test a nuclear weapon in 1998, for example, and in the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

In this light, Powell’s emphasis, in his UN speech, on the importance of the “years and years of experience” needed by imagery analysts had a poignant ring to those of us who witnessed the demise of NPIC—proud discoverer of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and guarantor of “trust-but-verify” strategic arms control agreements.

The independence enjoyed by NPIC to resist command influence and departmental bias was as important an asset as the long years of experience of its veteran analysts. Are there imagery analysts who are still free to “tell it like it is,” experts with some assurance that their careers will not suffer if the evidence leads them to unwelcome conclusions? (Someone should look into what happened to that imagery analyst on Schwarzkopf’s staff who made the correct call on the Scud-like oil tankers in 1991.)

Whether the non sequitur for which Powell was gently chided by Dr. Blix was a result of inexperience, a desire to please, or both, Powell and other senior policymakers need to look with jaundiced eye on the imagery intelligence coming out of the Pentagon.

And so do we all.

___________________

Ray McGovern worked as an all-source analyst at CIA for 27 years. He is now co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, DC.

Powell “Bounce” Fades

Gallup News Service

Princeton, New Jersey – The latest Gallup Poll finds that overall public support for military action against Iraq has faded slightly from the recent high point registered shortly after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, but remains in solid majority territory at 59{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}.

However, Americans continue to want international cooperation for such action. Support for war without a new U.N. vote authorizing it is only 30{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}, down 9 points from a poll conducted Feb. 7-9.

The poll also shows that Americans opposed to a war with Iraq are more intense in their beliefs than are those who favor military action. This results in a situation in which the number of Americans who feel intensely that war should be avoided is roughly equal to the number who are intensely in favor of war.

CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports the U.N. has been taking a precise inventory of Iraq’s al-Samoud 2 missile arsenal, determining how many there are and where they are.

Discovering that the al-Samoud 2 has been flying too far in tests has been one of the inspectors’ major successes. But the missile has only been exceeding its 93-mile limit by about 15 miles and that, the Iraqis say, is because it isn’t yet loaded down with its guidance system. The al-Samoud 2 is not the 800-mile-plus range missile that Secretary of State Colin Powell insists Iraq is developing.

In fact, the U.S. claim that Iraq is developing missiles that could hit its neighbors – or U.S. troops in the region, or even Israel – is just one of the claims coming from Washington that inspectors here are finding increasingly unbelievable. The inspectors have become so frustrated trying to chase down unspecific or ambiguous U.S. leads that they’ve begun to express that anger privately in no uncertain terms.

U.N. sources have told CBS News that American tips have lead to one dead end after another.

Example: satellite photographs purporting to show new research buildings at Iraqi nuclear sites. When the U.N. went into the new buildings they found “nothing.”

Example: Saddam’s presidential palaces, where the inspectors went with specific coordinates supplied by the U.S. on where to look for incriminating evidence. Again, they found “nothing.”

Example: Interviews with scientists about the aluminum tubes the U.S. says Iraq has imported for enriching uranium, but which the Iraqis say are for making rockets. Given the size and specification of the tubes, the U.N. calls the “Iraqi alibi air tight.”

The inspectors do acknowledge, however, that they would not be here at all if not for the threat of U.S. military action.

So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they’ve been getting as “garbage after garbage after garbage.” In fact, Phillips says the source used another cruder word.

The inspectors find themselves caught between the Iraqis, who are masters at the weapons-hiding shell game, and the United States, whose intelligence they’ve found to be circumstantial, outdated or just plain wrong.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Britain are planning to present a new resolution to the U.N. Security Council on Monday in a bid for support to use force to disarm Iraq.

Finishing touches were being put on the resolution on Thursday. Adoption is by no means assured. A majority of the 15 council members are opposed to war at least until U.N. weapons inspectors report in mid-March.

Secretary Powell said a headcount was “academic” because the resolution demanding Iraqi disarmament had not been put forward.

Powell, who flies to Japan on Friday for the start of a five-day Asia trip, juggled resolution diplomacy with stressful negotiations with Turkey, a potential key ally in any war.

Turkey is balking at U.S. terms for an economic aid package. Powell, who interceded on Wednesday with Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, said he had told the Turkish leader “our position was firm with respect to the kind of assistance we could provide.”

However, Powell said, “there may be some other creative things we can do.”

As for the expected U.N. resolution, the Bush administration sees little value in extending inspections and much to worry about in Iraq’s connection to al Qaeda and other terror groups.

One U.S. official said the projected day for presenting the resolution was Monday but that it could slip a day or two.

Powell said, “We won’t put a resolution down unless we intend to fight for the resolution, unless we believe we can make the case that it is appropriate.”

In Baghdad, meanwhile, Iraq allowed another flight by an American U-2 surveillance plane Thursday as President Saddam Hussein’s government sought to convince the world that it is cooperating with the weapons inspectors.

In New York, a U.N. spokesman said Iraq also had submitted a list of people involved in the destruction of banned weapons — a key demand by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.

It was the second flight this week by a U-2 in support of the U.N. inspection program. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said the plane spent six hours and 20 minutes over Iraq’s territory, searching for evidence of banned weapons.

In regard to the possible basing of U.S. troops in Turkey, Gul said in Ankara that a statement would be made on Friday. He did not elaborate.

Powell did not elaborate on the refinements under consideration, but another U.S. official said one approach might be to seek a $1 billion congressional appropriation that would then permit Turkey to obtain loans at preferential U.S.-government rates for many times that amount.

Ships carrying equipment for a U.S. infantry division are already at sea. The United States wants to base tens of thousands of soldiers in Turkey to open a possible northern front against Iraq.

The dispute with Turkey is one of many problems the Bush administration has as it tries to line up support for an attack on Iraq if Saddam doesn’t disarm quickly.

Implying the United States might deploy troops elsewhere if terms could not be reached with Turkey, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said “we have to deal with realities, and we will.”

Meanwhile, President Bush sought to keep the pressure on the Security Council, telling a suburban Atlanta audience, “Denial and endless delay in the face of growing danger is not an option.”

The president has said the council risks irrelevance if it does not face up to Iraq’s defiance of more than 10 years of disarmament resolutions.

Mr. Bush also has said if the council does not approve a second resolution he is prepared to go to war with a “coalition of the willing” — nations like Britain that agree with him that Iraq’s arsenals of biological and chemical weapons pose a threat.

Mr. Bush planned to host Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, an ally, at his Texas ranch Friday and Saturday. Another potential ally, Prime Minister Simeon Saxcoburggotski of Bulgaria, is due next Tuesday at the White House.

US Lobbyist Helped Draft Eastern Europeans’ Iraq Statement

(Agence France Presse) – A former Pentagon official helped draft a controversial statement by 10 Central and Eastern European nations this month that supports the United States in its stand-off with Iraq, according to a press report published in Paris.

In an interview, Bruce Jackson, a former US Defense Department official who heads a Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, said that he was among those who helped initiate the statement supporting the US stance, the daily International Herald Tribune reported.

The joint statement by Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia drew a scathing rebuke from France’s President Jacques Chirac at a European Union summit meeting in Brussels Monday.

According to the report, it was the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, Jackson’s organization, that helped distribute the text to news agencies.

“The American influence in all this is vastly exaggerated,” said Jackson, who, according to the paper, has played down his role in drafting the statement during a dinner organized at the Slovak embassy in Washington which he said he attended.

The statement “was a product of the Slovaks and really the Latvians”, he said.

But, according to the IHT, Kestutis Jankauskas, deputy chief of mission at the Lithunian embassy in Washington, said Jackson played a “considerable role” and helped “initiate the text.”

Richard Mucins, counselor at the Latvian embassy in Washington, said, according to the paper, that Jackson suggested the following passage, one of the most compelling sections in the statement: “Our countries understand the dangers posed by tyranny and the special responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values”.

The statement which was published by what is known as the Vilnius 10 on February 5 is considered as a way to help seven out of the 10 countries, which are not yet members of NATO, to join the Atlantic alliance, says the paper.

It’s time to take a close look at the Defense Department’s plan for managing the press during the impending invasion of Iraq. Called “embedding,” it will position chosen reporters and photographers inside military units – not for a week but for the duration of the war.

“Embedding for life,” is how deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Bryan Whitman, sees the program – which appears to be viewed a bit differently by the military than by the media.

At a recent orientation meeting with Washington bureau chiefs, Whitman described the ideal “embed” as one who follows a unit (ground, air or sea) from load-out to deployment through combat (subject to field approval) to the “march on whatever capital we happen to march on” to the return trip home and the “victory parade.”

This could take “two weeks, two months, two years.” If reporters leave a unit there is no guarantee they can return or even join another unit. Probably they will be “pooled” in mobile media clusters that form and dissolve as the action dictates. “Itinerants” (reporters working independently) are not encouraged.

Nearly 300 reporters have already been inducted into the program at a half-dozen media boot camps along the East Coast, and more one-week sessions are foreseen. Participants are prepped on U.S. military policy and weapons capabilities, and taught rudimentary survival skills, including how to suit up in the event of chemical or biological weapons exposure.

Lt. Col. Gary Keck, who wrote the training program, stresses that enrollment doesn’t guarantee an “embed opportunity.” Nor must embeds take the course, although commanders are reassured when they have.

The media boot camps are overtures to a larger strategy in which the Pentagon, for the first time, has actively integrated reporters and photographers into its war machine. The significance of this audacious decision, whose sponsors are Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers, becomes clearer when it’s set beside the media policy that governed Gulf War I.

Under then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Army Gen. Colin Powell, the press was confined to the National Media Pool, and ordered to submit all copy, photographs, and film to military censors. Most TV footage, usually bombers streaking across desert skies, was supplied by military crews. High-level briefings were orchestrated by Cheney and Powell themselves because, as Cheney later told an interviewer from Freedom Forum, “the information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence I could leave that to the press.”

As a result, according to Patrick J. Sloyan, who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Desert Storm in Newsday, not a single pool reporter produced an eyewitness account of the clash between allied and Iraqi troops. Nor did a single image of dead bodies find its way into the American media. By the time the press was taken to the scene of a battle, the Iraqi bodies were gone; buried, on one occasion, by giant plows mounted on Abrams battle tanks, followed by Armored Combat Earth movers that leveled the ground.

“The best covered war ever,” Cheney told the Forum interviewer. “The American people saw up close with their own eyes through the magic of television what the U.S. military was capable of doing.” But in the months to come, writes John R. MacArthur in Second Front, “it was difficult to find anyone [in the media] who didn’t … count Desert Storm as a devastating and immoral victory for military censorship and a crushing defeat for the press and the First Amendment.”

In Afghanistan, the reliance on special operations units and air power tipped the balance even further toward military control, until even the pools were abandoned. In one instance, journalists stationed at a Marine base were locked in a warehouse after U.S. forces were hit by “friendly” fire a hundred yards away. Later briefing officers distributed press releases from Central Command in Tampa.

But in Afghanistan the controls sprang leaks. Public Affairs officers (PAOs), who didn’t know a mullah from a Pashtun bandit, didn’t know how to manage the information flow, either. When Special Forces raided Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s compound, cutting reporters out of the action, the official version of the botched operation invited a scathing account in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh. Exposes like this led the Pentagon to think that perhaps it could use the media in a more creative way. Instead of shutting it out of the battle for public opinion, why not enlist its vast resources?

When Bryan Whitman lays out the “very aggressive embed plan” – with reporters transmitting “products” from the Pentagon, foreign capitals, and “in theater,” via embedding, mobile pools, CPICs (combined information press centers) and sub-CPICs – he sounds like a general massing his troops. PAOs scan all the media, he says; print and electronic, domestic and international; calculating markets, circulations; blending 24-hour news channels, nightly news shows, and news-magazine formats with entertainment divisions who also want “to do some embedding.”

Does the planning, one wonders, include the 13-episode “reality” series on ABC that Maureen Dowd wrote about last February, the one that hopes to profile “our troops abroad?” What about the VHI show called the “Military Diaries Project,” in which soldiers are to star in their own war movies? “Moonwalking in the endzone,” CBS News executive Dan Rather called this stuff; and he found it “ridiculous” and “very awkward,” he told Dowd, that while the news side was pounding the Pentagon for “bare-bones access” to the war, the military had rolled out the carpet for ABC Entertainment.

Embedding, it seems, had not yet been extended to the news media. Now that it has, the question is will journalists be brought any closer to the facts of war?

The Pentagon’s goal is clear: Embedding is designed to focus public attention on the troops. As field commanders told CNN chief executive Walter Isaacson during his recent tour of the Gulf, “the best representatives to convey America’s intentions and capabilities are the soldiers and sailors in the field.” American intentions and capabilities, of course, are in hot dispute, and no doubt will be as long as the U.S. pursues its Middle East interests by military means. So it’s not hard to follow Pentagon thinking.

Embedded reporters will develop the relationships, trust, and understanding of unit customs which are likely to produce savvy human interest stories. Embeds are more likely to play up acts of heroism than embarrass their units with negative stories, and risk losing access. This is not to suggest they won’t try to be objective; or that their minders don’t respect journalistic “objectivity.”

“It’s the reporter’s job to report objectively,” insists Lt. Keck. “If we took some casualties, he’d report it … But an embed is more sensitive to things that can’t be said,” Keck adds, recalling a reporter from “a previous war” who decided to quote an officer “when it was the worse thing he could have done, and hurt his career.”

Whitman’s boss, Victoria Clarke, offers the official answer: “The fundamental principles on which we will say no, you can’t transmit … [are] operational security, success of the mission, and safety of the people involved.” Like Keck, she notes, “Somebody who is embedded with a unit … has a full appreciation for that.”

These are the principles that were invoked to silence the press during the first Gulf war, and are nearly always summoned in times of stress between public and military interests. It’s when and by whom and how they’re applied that makes a difference.

Some reporters were based in forward units during that war, too, but their dispatches and film often took so long to get back to the hotel in Dahran that they were too dated to use. “Censorship by delay,” the problem came to be called. Today’s press will be loaded down with its own tansmission devices, and this alone marks a significant departure from the pool system. But how often will reporters be asked to “turn off their electronic devices,” as they say on commercial aircraft?

When the question was asked by Cissy Baker, bureau chief for Tribune Broadcasting, at the Pentagon meeting, Rear Adm. Steve Pietropaoli described the occasions and circumstances when sat phones or cells going live from the decks of a carrier would be silenced. “You guys would like to be able to go live 24-7,” he said, “and we would like to be able to control your timing.” Clarke, who wants “to raise the comfort level” for reporters, added: “We’re not going to go to all that trouble [with embeds] and not try to make every effort to help you get your product back.” Military spokesman are more plainspoken about such matters than their civilian counterparts.

The cautious optimism toward embedding that is currently expressed by the media may be misplaced. “There’s a kind of strange naivete on the part of journalists, especially in a war situation when it comes to accepting official explanations,” says Richard Rubenstein, professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. “One gets the feeling that the press is being played.”

Isaacson’s claim that embedding is “quite old-fashioned [because it’s] letting reporters actually cover the fighting,” overlooks the military’s propaganda interest. CNN’s military analyst, Gen. Wesley Clark, comes closer when he says: “We made a huge mistake trying to restrict press coverage in the first Gulf War because of our Vietnam mentality. We had a First Armored Division tank battle that was just incredible, perhaps the biggest armored battle ever, but not a single image was reported or documented for history by the press.”

A murkier interest is raised by Dave Moniz of USA Today when he suggests that “what is driving this [plan] is a fear that Iraq will win the propaganda war if reporters are not on the ground with troops.” Iraq win the propaganda war? Isaacson offers some clarification. “The U.S. military feels that there is a possibility, perhaps even a probability, that Saddam Hussein will perpetuate atrocities against Shiite civilians and try to make it look as if they were committed by coalition forces.” Others have suggested that “human assets” will be deliberately positioned near military targets.

This is reminiscent of what the Pentagon said about the widespread destruction of schools, churches, hospitals and market towns by the air war over North Vietnam; namely, that SAM missiles and the like were deliberately hidden in such places, a claim that “itinerants” such as the New York Times’ Harrison Salisbury were able to refute on the ground.

It’s the better part of wisdom to recognize that the last thing the government wants is to let a free press cover war. In Vietnam, many journalists understood that; and disdained the “5 o’clock follies” (the official briefings) and the military escorts, and found their own units to ride with. Or like David Halberstam, no enemy of the army, they attached themselves to their own officers, as Halberstam famously did with John Paul Vann.

Nothing like this is very likely to happen again, but just to make sure, the Pentagon has insisted that the media centralize the process of selection so that a single point of contact (POC) for each news organization, preferably a bureau chief, works with a POC at the Pentagon. This is to avoid “people cutting deals,” which reporters have already attempted, Clarke complains, and adds: “The only deals that will be made on the embeds … will be the deals that are made here.”

Carol Brightman is working on her upcoming book titled, “Total Insecurity: The Myth of American Omnipotence.”

Sorry, I can’t applaud the French foreign minister, because I don’t believe that France, which sold Saddam his first nuclear reactor, the one Israel blew up, comes to this story with the lofty principles it claims.

The French foreign minister, after basking in the applause at the U.N., might ask himself who was clapping for his speech back in Baghdad and who was crying. Saddam was clapping, and all his political prisoners — i.e., most Iraqis — were crying.

But I don’t have much applause in me for China, Russia — or the Bush team either. I feel lately as if there are no adults in this room (except Tony Blair).

No, this is not a plague-on-all-your-houses column. I side with those who believe we need to confront Saddam — but we have to do it right, with allies and staying power, and the Bush team has bungled that.

The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy and terrible at diplomacy. I covered the first gulf war, in 1990-91. What I remember most are the seven trips I took with Secretary of State James A. Baker III around the world to watch him build — face-to-face — the coalition and public support for that war, before a shot was fired. Going to someone else’s country is a sign you respect his opinion. This Bush team has done no such hands-on spade work. Its members think diplomacy is a phone call.

They don’t like to travel. Seeing senior Bush officials abroad for any length of time has become like rare-bird sightings. It’s probably because they spend so much time infighting in Washington over policy, they’re each afraid that if they leave town their opponents will change the locks on their office doors.

Also, you would think that if Iraq were the focus of your whole foreign policy, maybe you would have handled North Korea with a little less attitude, so as not to trigger two wars at once. Maybe you would have come up with that alternative — which President Bush promised — to the Kyoto treaty, a treaty he trashed to the great anger of Europe.

You’re not going to get much support in Europe telling people, “You are either with us or against us in a war on terrorism, but in the war you care about — for a greener planet — America will do whatever it wants.”

I am also very troubled by the way Bush officials have tried to justify this war on the grounds that Saddam is allied with Osama bin Laden or will be soon. There is simply no proof of that, and every time I hear them repeat it I think of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. You don’t take the country to war on the wings of a lie.

Tell people the truth. Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice — but it’s a legitimate choice. It’s because he is undermining the U.N., it’s because if left alone he will seek weapons that will threaten all his neighbors, it’s because you believe the people of Iraq deserve to be liberated from his tyranny, and it’s because you intend to help Iraqis create a progressive state that could stimulate reform in the Arab/Muslim world, so that this region won’t keep churning out angry young people who are attracted to radical Islam and are the real weapons of mass destruction.

That’s the case for war — and it will require years of occupying Iraq and a simultaneous effort to defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to create a regional context for success. If done right, such a war could shrink Al Qaeda’s influence — but Al Qaeda is a separate enemy that will have to be fought separately, and will remain a threat even if Saddam is ousted.

It is legitimate for Europeans to oppose such a war, but not simply by sticking a thumb in our eye and their heads in the sand. It’s also legitimate for the Bush folks to focus the world on Saddam, but two years of their gratuitous bullying has made many people deaf to America’s arguments. Too many people today no longer accept America’s strength as a good thing. That is a bad thing.

Some of this we can’t control. But some we can, which is why it’s time for the Bush team to shape up — dial down the attitude, start selling this war on the truth, give us a budget that prepares the nation for a war abroad, not a party at home, and start doing everything possible to create a global context where we can confront Saddam without the world applauding for him.