NEW YORK TIMES
DONALD RUMSFELD....IRAQ VISIT!
Mon Apr 14 17:31:10 2003
204.189.23.194

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/14/opinion/14HERB.html

Let's go back some 20 years. Ronald Reagan was president. George Shultz was
secretary of state. Lebanon was in turmoil. And Iraq and Iran were locked
in a vicious war that had sharply curtailed the flow of oil out of Iraq.

In December 1983 Donald Rumsfeld was sent to the Middle East as a special
envoy in an effort to jump-start the peace process in Lebanon and advance a
presidential initiative for peace between Arabs and Israelis.

One of his stops was Baghdad, where he met with Saddam Hussein. That was
unusual. Mr. Rumsfeld was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq
since 1967, when Iraq and other Arab nations severed relations with the
U.S., which they blamed for Israel's victory in the Six-Day War.

The primary goal of Mr. Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad was to improve
relations with Iraq. But another matter was also quietly discussed. The
powerful Bechtel Group in San Francisco, of which Secretary Shultz had been
president before joining the Reagan administration, wanted to build an oil
pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, near the Red Sea. It was
a billion-dollar project and the U.S. government wanted Saddam to sign off
on it.

This remains, two decades later, a touchy subject. When I brought the
matter up last week with James Placke, who in 1983 was a deputy assistant
secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, he said, "My memory on that is
kind of foggy."

But at the mention of Bechtel, he said: "Ahh, now you've said the magic
word. Now I remember. Bechtel was promoting it."

Bechtel was promoting it and the Middle East peace envoy, Donald Rumsfeld,
was pushing it with top Iraqi officials. A previously classified State
Department memo that is contained in a report on the pipeline by the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington described how Mr. Rumsfeld
broached the subject during a private meeting with Iraq's foreign minister,
Tariq Aziz.

The memo, from Mr. Rumsfeld, said: "I raised the question of a pipeline
through Jordan. He said he was familiar with the proposal. It apparently
was a U.S. company's proposal. However, he was concerned about the
proximity to Israel as the pipeline would enter the Gulf of Aqaba."

The Iraqis were afraid the Israelis might destroy the pipeline. "I said I
could understand that there would need to be some sort of arrangement that
would give those involved confidence that it would not be easily
vulnerable," Mr. Rumsfeld wrote in the memo. He added, parenthetically:
"This may be an issue to raise with Israel at the appropriate time."

It was known by the fall of 1983 that Iraq had used chemical weapons
against Iran. That did not prevent the U.S. from pursuing improved
relations with Saddam, or curb the enthusiasm for the Aqaba pipeline — a
project promoted by a company that had given the Reagan administration not
just its secretary of state, but also its secretary of defense, Caspar
Weinberger, who had been Bechtel's general counsel.

No one seemed concerned about weaving these obvious conflicts of interest
into the peace process in the most volatile region of the world.

Mr. Shultz said he recused himself from anything having to do with the
pipeline. But it was his State Department that had joined with Bechtel to
push the project, and everyone knew that Mr. Shultz had run Bechtel.

Saddam ultimately gave a thumbs down to the pipeline proposal. "It didn't
seem to make very good commercial sense," said Mr. Placke, "and ultimately
I think it failed on those grounds."

The efforts to promote peace in the Middle East also failed. Now, 20 years
later, Mr. Shultz (who is currently on the board of Bechtel) and Mr.
Rumsfeld are among the fiercest of the war hawks. They wanted war with Iraq
and they got it.

Their philosophical flights in favor of the war would seem more graceful,
and much less unsavory, if they weren't flying with the baggage of Bechtel
and other large commercial interests that have so much to gain from the war.

This unilateral war and the ouster of Saddam have given the hawks and their
commercial allies carte blanche in Iraq. And the company with perhaps the
sleekest and most effective of all the inside tracks, a company that is
fairly panting with anticipation over oil and reconstruction contracts
worth scores of billions of dollars, is of course the Bechtel Group of San
Francisco.


2]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/14/opinion/14MON1.html

Invading, occupying and rebuilding Iraq will cost American taxpayers more
than $100 billion. But for some lucky companies, Iraq is emerging as a
profit center. The administration has begun farming out contracts, and
politically connected firms like Halliburton are among the early winners.
This looks like naked favoritism and undermines the Bush administration's
portrayal of the war as a campaign for disarmament and democracy, not lucre.

Despite the limited damage of this war, the ravages of earlier conflicts
and sanctions have left much of Iraq in ruins. Roads, ports and schools
must be rebuilt, the oil industry revived and power grids and
communications networks repaired. Some emergency contracts need to be
awarded right away. But that does not mean this should be done without
competition or that such contracts should be long term. Moreover, by
grabbing much of the first year's money, the favored American companies may
have a leg up for signing future deals as well. Reconstruction is expected
to cost some $20 billion a year for the next three years.

With so much money involved it is vital that bidding be competitive,
transparent and open to all. That has not happened so far. Shortly before
the war began, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a no-bid contract to
fight oil fires for the next two years to a subsidiary of Halliburton, the
company Vice President Dick Cheney ran from 1995 to 2000. The deal could be
worth as much as $7 billion.

Federal contracting regulations allow normal rules to be bypassed when time
is short and national security concerns are involved. Those exceptions may
apply to oil fields set aflame during the fighting, but it's hard to see
how they justify a multiyear contract. Congress has rightly asked the corps
to provide details on the Halliburton contract and on why no competing
firms were allowed to bid.

Over at State, the Agency for International Development has limited bidding
to a short list composed mainly of government contracting insiders. These
include the Bechtel Group, on whose board sits George Shultz, a former
secretary of state, and the Fluor Corporation, whose recently retired chief
executive is being considered by the Pentagon to run Iraq's oil industry.

Companies unfairly excluded from bidding for these contracts are
justifiably upset, including those based in Britain, America's most
important military ally in Iraq. Under World Trade Organization rules,
procurement contracts are supposed to be open to all bidders, domestic and
foreign.

Even if a legal basis can be found for these closed bidding arrangements,
they are unacceptable. The Iraq war was fought in the name of high
principles. Victory should not turn into an undeserved financial bonanza
for companies that have cultivated close ties with the Bush administration.


3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/14/opinion/14SAFI.html

WASHINGTON "The best defense is a good offense." That favorite saying of
heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey gets a half-million hits on Google,
including George Washington in 1799: "Offensive operations, often times, is
the surest, if not the only means of defence."

That's the essence of our new policy of pre-emption as a last resort. If
threatened by a regime harboring terrorists or likely to provide them with
mass-murder weaponry, the U.S. will not wait to gain world sympathy as the
victim, but will defend itself by striking first.

That power to protect ourselves — and our will to use that power — was
established in Afghanistan and driven home in Iraq. Dangerous dictators
elsewhere as well as fair-weather friends no longer doubt America's
seriousness of purpose.

First dividend of our new credibility can be seen in a sudden shift in
attitude in and around North Korea. For six months we resisted paying
another round of blackmail to Pyongyang for more of its nuclear duplicity.
Instead, we called on its neighbors — Russia, China and South Korea — to
join us in multilateral pressure to stop the North's nuclear buildup. They
pretended it was solely America's problem, not their own.

While defeating Saddam, we let it be known that the U.S. was prepared to
pull our 37,000 tripwire troops out of harm's way along the demilitarized
zone, opening the possibility of an air assault on plutonium production. In
addition, we hinted we would help Japan and Taiwan build their own missile
shields, diminishing the strategic power of China and Russia.

Lo! Reminded by Under Secretary of State John Bolton that rogue states like
North Korea should take Saddam's lesson to heart, our sunshine allies
suddenly decided the U.S. meant business.

In return for our not pressing the feckless U.N. Security Council to
condemn the North for tearing up its nonproliferation treaty (toothless
U.N. resolutions have become mere publicity stunts), the Chinese finally
agreed to put diplomatic and economic heat on their reckless neighbor
across the Yalu River.

Then Vladimir Putin, rattled by Paul Wolfowitz's mild suggestion that
Russia forgive the $8 billion arms bill run up by Saddam's Iraq, ordered
his foreign ministry to state ominously that Pyongyang's nuclear threat
"goes categorically against Russia's national interests."

Kim Jong Il may be crazy but he's not stupid. With one end of the axis
down, his father's many heroic statues look a little shaky. His South
Korean counterpart, Roh Moo Hyun, whose own attitude toward the U.S. has
undergone an after-Saddam epiphany, says that Kim was "petrified" by the
speedy U.S. victory.

Yesterday, a Washington Post headline read "North Korea Drops Its Demand
for One-on-One Talks With U.S." Although derided as bellicose by Democrats,
President Bush's insistence on Kim's dealing with a coalition of those
concerned may be working out peacefully. Different strokes for different
dictators.

Thus may the credible threat of pre-emptive war obviate its carrying-out.
Bush officials say that Syria has chemical weapons, has been warehousing
Iraqi weapons and — in what Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called "a hostile
act" — was the conduit for the illegal shipment of Russian arms. Plain
logic suggests Syria is probably now hosting Iraq's most wanted
killer-scientists.

Do we threaten to invade Syria? No. Do we put the economic squeeze on the
stumbling young Assad, now that he is no longer propped up by a lucrative
smuggling trade with his fellow dictator in Baghdad? Yes. And after
coughing up Saddam's mafia, Syria — in the aftermath of Saddam's downfall —
might also be persuaded to end its occupation of Lebanon and support of
Hezbollah terror.

If we steadily introduce free enterprise and the rule of law into a loose
confederation; if we expect little gratitude from Iraqis exercising the
freedom to complain loudly and a lot of carping from "the little three" in
Paris, Berlin and Moscow — then Americans could possibly achieve what seems
as far-fetched as defeating fascism in the 40's and Communism in the 90's.

We could give liberty a chance to take root in the land of Job. Then our
children may be able to lay down the burden of a great offense because
there will be less need for a best defense.
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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/13/1050172477656.html

Spoils of War - Follow the Money!
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