Frank Gaffney mobilizes Bolton support

After reading the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's June 2004 WMD hearing over the weekend, my curiosity has been piqued as to whether the collapsing Cooperative Threat Reduction agreements are tied in any way to neoconservative ideologues' distaste for proliferation control agreements. Proliferation and security, US-Russia relations, and Iran policy are all implicated. So I spent part of the weekend exploring the ideological assumptions and personalities involved, to discern whether the policy paralysis over the plutonium liability issue is actually part of an unstated, de facto government position.

(See yesterday's post on Pete Domenici's criticism of John Bolton; also, for the legal issues surrounding liability, Nonproliferation Review has an exhaustingly thorough 2003 piece [PDF here].)

Thus, it was interesting this morning to see CNN.com reporting that a pro-Bolton coalition just sent a letter to Foreign Relations Committee members. (This is a reponse to a recent letter from over sixty former diplomats opposing John Bolton's nomination as UN Ambassador. See The Washington Note for all things Bolton.) The organizer of this Bolton defense is at the core of the anti-CTR sentiment in Washington.

Below the fold, I will be undertaking a sort of archaeological expedition into the idea that US proliferation expenditures should be linked to Russia-Iran relations.

There are all sorts of reasons to question Bolton's nomination. Of course there is the standard "But he's agin' the UN," which is only helpful if one is already a multilateralist. But even if one is a unilateralist, hawk, superhawk, or whatever, John Bolton is a cause for concern. His obstructionism of Congress, his political hackery, the think-tank money laundering, the domestic pandering-as-diplomacy, etc. For me, it comes down to job performance. When proliferation is the greatest security concern facing the United States, when United States senators have historically been the most active and vital players in pushing and securing proliferation control agreements, Bolton's evident (in)competence ought to be the overriding standard.

So it's instructive that today's defensive coalition is organized by Frank Gaffney, head of the monomaniacally anti-Soviet Center for Security Policy. I say "anti-Soviet" because that seems to be the operating ideology and overriding priority of this organization, even in this here non-Soviet, post-9/11 world. Many of these figures, for instance, are involved in the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, a neocon group promoting "human rights" in Chechnya, and using rhetoric and logic startlingly similar to Ward Churchill's anti-American red herrings. They are all part of the same network withing the AEI, Heritage Foundation and Committee on the Present Danger.

Take, for instance, Gaffney's 18 September 2001 column. This comes one week after the September 11 attacks. It is filled with the obligatory cliches of "no more illusions" and whatnot. However, by sentence 3 Gaffney is talking about National Missile Defense. How is it that one week after an audacious, asymmetrical attack involving civilian airliners by non-state actors, the chief intellectual contribution offered is a Dem-baiting rant about potential state-centric ballistic missile threats?

But my real interest is in this faction's standard criticism of US funding WMD security and disposition projects in Russia and former Soviet republics. What--after all--is so bad about keeping uranium and plutonium secured? Post-Soviet Russia's decrepit infrastructure presents a global security and environmental threat.

The opposition's general line of argument is that US funding for threat-reduction in Russia subsidizes Russia's new weapons design, and rewards Russia for proliferating to countries like Iran. Russia should be contributing more of its own resources and prioritizing WMD security before the "US taxpayer" lends a hand. (Within anti-controls discourse, appeals to the "American taxpayer" are rife, usually while ignoring the physical security and well being of said taxpayer.)

While I find neocon bashing and conspiracy theorizing often redundant and tedious, two documentary sources triggered my question of whether ideologues within the current administration have a de facto policy of subverting Nunn-Lugar and the CTR umbrella agreement. (While these proliferation pacts aren't thwarted outright, when occasions for paralyzing implementation arise, they represent targets of opportunity. Plutonium liability appears to be one such occasion. However, this alone isn't evidence towards answering my question.)

Two documents triggered my interest in this question. The first is John Bolton's 29 March 2001 nomination hearing for Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, before Jesse Helms' Foreign Relations Committee (PDF here via FUGOP). The second is Dick Lugar's Foreign Relations Committee's hearing of 15 June 2004 (S. HRG. 108-675), on the Sea Island G-8 meeting and WMD. (See yesterday's post for more.)

In the 2001 nomination hearing, Bolton made two interesting allusions linking proliferation agreements with Russia and Russia's exports to Iran, within the context of the new administration's general "review" of US-Russia security agreements. Senators immediately squashed this line of thinking, and Bolton retreated with the line that any policy change would of course involve bipartisan efforts with Congress. The first instance (p. 16):

SEN. NELSON: Let me ask you, would you want to increase the funding, if you were a part of the policy making of the administration?

BOLTON: I would want to see these programs perform successfully. And if they could be justified, and if these other considerations that I mentioned -- Russian commitment and foreign support -- could be found, I think they are in America's interest.

NELSON: So if I can interpolate from that . . . does this mean you would condition your support of these programs on Russian behavior?

BOLTON: Well, I think in part, as Sen. Baker said, Russian behavior is very important. He had a specific reference to the question of Russian arms sales and technology transfers to Iran, which make it very difficult politically up here, for example, for people to support what appear to be implicit subsidies to the Russians.

Joe Biden then jumped in and nailed Bolton for blatantly misrepresenting Senator Baker and the conclusions of the Baker-Cutler panel, for implying Baker supported linking proliferation programs with Russia-Iran. (See this and this.) However, Bolton then reiterated the same point on page 22, again citing Baker for authority.

In the June 2004 hearing, a musing Senator Biden makes this seemingly off-hand and interesting remark:

Until you lay it out for the President of the United States in graphic detail a particular facility . . . that had some 1,900,000 some artillery shells in that facility, until the chairman [Senator Richard Lugar]--and I guess I was a bit of an instigator--laid out in detail physically how they sat in a rack, how big they were, what damage they could do, what security rested around that facility--the President at one point looked up at Dr. Rice and said, looked around at the chairman who was sitting on the couch, and said: "Is that true?"

Let me be more precise. Without inflection, he said: "Is that true?" And Dr. Rice said: "Yes." And the Vice President said, well, that may be fungible money; you know, the argument that is made that if we do that and help the Russians build a facility to get rid of those artillery shells they may do other bad things or something.

The President sat and listened. You could see it register in his eyes. In 2 weeks . . . all of a sudden the money was made available. [My emph.]

Naturally, if Vice President Cheney subscribes to a notion, it is worthwhile examining it closely, since this was the standard argument of Nunn-Lugar opponents in the mid-1990s. The theme is taken up in this 2003 FrontPage symposium on US-Russian relations. But back in 1995, Baker Spring of Heritage argued that Nunn-Lugar money should go to B-2 build, making the now stock "subsidize" argument. This archive at the American Foreign Policy Foundation is devoted to attacking Nunn-Lugar, so you can read the standard arguments from the mid-1990s on. (This CTR faq provides refutations to standard attacks on Nunn-Lugar.)

Here are some other examples of the linkage being made. Dr. Ariel Cohen, the Heritage Foundation's Russia wonk, made the linkage in 2003 testimony to Congress (although I agree with many of his conclusions) -- in the context of criticizing Clinton-era policies:

The United States spent $5 billion to secure Russia’s nuclear arsenal, however, Moscow still sold its sensitive nuclear and ballistic technology to China and Iran, as well as some parts and components to Iraq and other rogue states.

In a March 2003 op-ed, House Armed Services chairman Duncan Hunter made the point more clearly, in a piece that otherwise criticized programmatic waste and defends non-proliferation programs:

At the same time, for every dollar the United States commits to helping Russia destroy these weapons, we run the risk that Moscow will use the savings to fund military programs that are contrary to U.S. national security interests. For example, the White House told us in January that Russia maintains a biological weapons program and may keep -- at great expense -- an ability to mobilize its chemical weapons production facilities, in violation of its treaty obligations. We were also told that the Kremlin is procuring new intercontinental ballistic missiles it brags can defeat American missile defenses (even though the forthcoming U.S. system is not designed against Russia).

In an October 2004, pre-election bit of hackery, Gaffney states the argument quite clearly:

Sen. Kerry claims he will do better than President Bush at getting the former Soviet Union’s nuclear and other WMD under control, apparently by throwing more U.S. money at the problem. Unfortunately, the Russian government seems not nearly as worried about the proliferation threat posed by such weapons – even in the face of its own terrorist menace. Otherwise, Russia’s new oil windfall would surely be applied to securing its arsenal. The Bush realists recognize that, as long as this is the case, Sen. Kerry’s posturing about an accelerated solution to this problem is more loose talk than real relief from Russia’s loose nukes.

A strange argument for US inaction, but there you go. Anyway, the "subsidization" argument is pretty straightforward, and not hard to find. It still has currency with influential policy advocates. However, is the subsidization argument the basis for sabotaging the implementation and expansion of efforts which are currently part of US Government policy? I'm still not sure, but it's a question worth asking at Bolton's nomination hearing.

At the same time, Russian intransigence and bureaucratic ineptitude have also operated to delay Nunn-Lugar implementation. However, this administration's tepid commitment to the program has done little to overcome such roadblocks, instead using them to justify paralysis and inaction.

Comments

[praktike]

Bizarre. Aren't terrorists a satisfying enough new enemy for these folks?

[Stygius]

I'd be shocked if Gaffney's letter amounted to a damn with the FR Committee. Gaffney's been spearheading an effort to kill one of Lugar's pet projects, the Law of the Sea Treaty.

[praktike]

Whatever for?

[Stygius]

I started to figure out the answer to that question, then opted for lunch. However, Lugar's own website cheerfully copies a Washington Times piece that disses Gaffney. See http://lugar.senate.gov/sfrc/opeds.html#washtimes2>this.

[praktike]

Ah, that's actually a pretty hilarious diss. Good find. I think the answer is that Gaffney doesn't understand.