Op-Eds (2004 edition)

Thought we needed a new Editorial thread for the new year...CA


Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page B06

• Truth and Consequences
  
  THE CHINESE government recently suggested that it does not necessarily believe U.S. intelligence reports on North Korea's secret effort to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. "We have no knowledge of [North Korea's] nuclear program or its capabilities. We do not know if [North Korea] has a HEU [highly enriched uranium] program," a Chinese embassy spokesman told The Post last week. In Britain and France hostile commentators have questioned whether there is any legitimate basis for U.S. requests that certain commercial flights to the United States be canceled because of intelligence about possible terrorist attacks. Maybe these objections were politically motivated and would have been raised regardless of the circumstances. But the painful fact is that they carry more weight because of the mounting evidence that U.S. intelligence about Iraq was mistaken -- and because of the Bush administration's refusal to acknowledge it.
  
  An extensive article in The Post last week by reporter Barton Gellman added substantially to the emerging picture of an Iraqi regime that retained the motive and some of the means to acquire or develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons -- but, for the most part, had not done so. An Iraqi rocket scientist described for Mr. Gellman a project to build banned missiles capable of striking targets across the Middle East, work that he successfully concealed from United Nations weapons inspectors. But the missiles were never built and might have taken years to complete. A top nuclear scientist was engaged in a puzzling project to construct a "linear engine," which may have been a futuristic anti-aircraft gun or an experiment in nuclear warhead design. In either case the work apparently was far from yielding any practical results.
  
  The new evidence bolsters the case that Saddam Hussein blatantly violated the U.N. resolution offering him a "final opportunity" to come clean. Like the interim report of the Bush administration's Iraq Survey Group, it indicates that had the United States not insisted on action against Iraq beginning in 2002, Iraq would have developed illegal weapons it could have used against the United States and its allies -- and that the programs would have resumed after last year's inspections ran their course. We still do not know the full story, and the Iraq Survey team is continuing its work. But the latest Post report strongly supports a conclusion that much of the case against Iraq made by President Bush and his top aides before the war was wrong.
  
  There is no reason to believe that the president fabricated the case against Iraq. The conclusion that Iraq was hiding chemical and biological weapons and aspired to rebuild its nuclear program was also reached by the Clinton administration and a number of other Western governments, including several that opposed the war. There's little question that the president and other senior officials -- notably Vice President Cheney -- exaggerated the case in public. Administration statements on Iraq frequently contained phrases such as "we know" and "no doubt" to describe official suspicions, or, in the case of Iraq's nuclear program, stated conclusions apparently not backed by any strong evidence.
  
  But those exaggerations are not the most serious problem with the prewar debate. The deeper concern is that U.S. intelligence agencies could have been as wrong as they apparently were about a target as important as Iraq. Congress has done some preliminary investigation of why this happened; hearings in the coming months could shed some more light. But above all it is in the interest of the Bush administration and the leadership of the intelligence community to discover why its estimates about Iraq were wrong, make any necessary corrections to staff or procedure and offer a public accounting. This is more than a matter of politics, whether or not the politics are embarrassing for Mr. Bush. Accountability here is crucial to preserving the ability of the United States to discover the most serious threats to its security -- and to be believed when it does.

January 11, 2004

• The Faulty Weapons Estimates
  
  There seems little doubt that the Bush administration's prime justification for invading Iraq — the fear that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction — was way off base. Nine months of fruitless searching have made that increasingly clear.
  
  But last week three new reports cast further doubt on the administration's reckless rush to invade Iraq. Taken together, they paint a picture far different from the one presented to Americans early last year. They depict a world in which Saddam Hussein, though undeniably eager to make Iraq a threatening world power, was far from any serious steps to do that. The reports strengthen our conviction that whatever threat Iraq posed did not require an immediate invasion without international support. And they underline the importance of finding out how far the Bush administration's obsession with the Iraqi dictator warped the American intelligence reports that did so much to convince Congress and the public that the attack was justified.
  
  The likelihood that significant weapons of mass destruction will be found seemed to grow even more remote last week with publication of an investigative report by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post. Mr. Gellman, who perused Iraqi documents and interviewed key Iraqis and members of the American search team, found that Iraq's effort to produce terror weapons had been so thoroughly beaten down by conflict, sanctions and arms embargoes that its forbidden weapons program amounted mainly to wishful thinking.
  
  A program to produce missiles with enough range to reach neighboring capitals, for example, turned out to exist only in designs and computations on two compact discs. Experts estimated it would have taken at least six years to build the missile, if it had worked at all. A planned genetic engineering lab to design germ weapons was never completed. Most dramatically of all, an internal letter, written by Iraq's top unconventional-weapons official in 1995 to one of Saddam Hussein's sons, asserted unequivocally that Iraq had destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons agents in 1991, proving the falsity of intelligence estimates that Iraq still possessed large quantities of germ materials.
  
  The failure to find anything significant has particularly disturbed Kenneth Pollack, a former Clinton administration national security official whose book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" led many moderates and Democrats to believe that an invasion was justified — at least in time to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, a prospect that seemed only a few years away. Now, in an article in The Atlantic magazine, Mr. Pollack anguishes over how estimates of Iraq's capabilities could have been so far off.
  
  He puts most of the blame on the intelligence community, which overestimated the scope and progress of Iraq's weapons programs starting in the late 1990's, partly because a lack of hard evidence led analysts to assume the worst. But he also condemns the Bush administration for distorting the intelligence estimates in making the case for going to war, particularly by implying that Iraq could have had a nuclear weapon within a year when estimates suggested five to seven years was more likely. Even that number now looks far-fetched given that Iraq's nuclear program was virtually eliminated.
  
  Analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also found that three intelligence services that are arguably the best in the world — those of the United States, Britain and Israel — were tragically unable to provide accurate information on Iraq. But the Carnegie experts are even harsher in condemning the administration for deliberate exaggerations. They argue that the intelligence community gave reasonably cautious assessments up until mid-2002, when official statements and estimates suddenly became increasingly alarmist. The Carnegie analysts accuse the Bush administration of putting intense pressure on intelligence experts to conform, of minimizing the existence of dissenting views, and of routinely dropping caveats and uncertainties in painting a worst-case picture.
  
  What emerges most forcefully from these reports is the need for two thorough inquiries. Even though members of the American search team in Iraq told Mr. Gellman they hold little prospect for major discoveries of forbidden weapons, the search must continue vigorously to a conclusion, preferably with the assistance of United Nations inspectors who have a huge database on Iraq and are more credible to much of the world. Back home, a nonpartisan investigation independent of political pressures from the administration and Congress is needed to get a better sense of how judgments about Iraq were so disastrously mistaken. Nothing can be fixed until we know for sure how it happened.

January 11, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

• Call It the Family Risk Factor
  By JACOB S. HACKER
  
  NEW HAVEN, Conn.--On the heels of Friday's glum Labor Department report, Americans have a right to be confused. Soaring growth, stocks and consumer confidence have heartened investors. And yet, the country remains mired in a jobless recovery. The reality is that the economy has become more uncertain and anxiety-producing for most of us — not just over the past three years, but over the past 30. But by fixating on the day-to-day ups and downs, analysts have largely missed the more telling trend: an increasing shift of economic risk from government and corporations onto workers and their families.
  
  Signs of this transformation are everywhere: in the laid-off programmer whose stock options are suddenly worthless, in the former welfare mom who can get a job but not health care or day care, in the family forced into bankruptcy by the sickness of a child. But these episodes, while viewed with sympathy, are usually seen in isolation, rather than as parts of a larger problem. This blinkered view stands in the way of both diagnoses of the causes of the new economic insecurity and prescriptions for its cure.
  
  Consider the accompanying chart. The line traces the year-to-year instability of family income from 1972 to 1998, based on the University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics. It measures the extent to which a family's income from both government and the private sector fluctuates from year to year, controlling for the size of the family and the general rise of income among all Americans (so as not to confuse upward mobility with instability).
  
  The formula captures both changes in the income of families and changes in families themselves, like divorce and separation, that alter their standard of living. What it shows is that family finances have grown much more insecure. Although insecurity dropped in the booms of the late 1980's and late 1990's, the long-term trend is sharply upward. In fact, the instability of family incomes was roughly five times greater at its peak in the 1990's than in 1972.
  
  Optimists point out that Americans are much richer than they were in the 1970's. But while they are as a whole, incomes have grown little for the middle class and working poor — even as wages have become more unstable, the financial effects of losing a job have worsened, and the cost of things families need, from housing to education, has ballooned. Yet government and the private sector aren't just ignoring these problems, they are making them worse. Many programs for the poor, for example, have been substantially cut. And middle-class programs like Social Security have steadily eroded.
  
  The truly staggering changes, however, are taking place in the private sector. The number of Americans without employment-based health benefits has been rising for decades. Employers are also restructuring workplace benefits to impose more risk on workers. Once, for instance, workers lucky enough to have a pension enjoyed a guaranteed benefit. Now, with so-called defined-contribution plans like 401(k)'s, workers have to put away their own wages and the returns of the plan depend entirely on their own investments.
  
  What might be done to help families cope with the new economic insecurity? The essential first step is to shore up existing policies to ensure broad-based and secure unemployment, pension and health benefits.
  
  
  
  Yet simply upgrading present efforts is not enough. I believe we need a new, flexible universal insurance program to protect families against catastrophic expenses and drops in income, before families fall into poverty. Universal insurance would, in turn, be coupled with tax-subsidized savings accounts that would help middle and lower-income families manage these expenses before they reached catastrophic levels.
  
  Our economy is in the throes of a great transformation — from an all-in-the-same-boat world of shared risk toward a go-it-alone world of personal responsibility. Protecting families from the greatest "hazards and vicissitudes of life" — in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's still relevant words — is necessary and possible, and it offers perhaps the best hope for reviving a constructive role for government, on bold new terms, in this new century.

Jacob S. Hacker, assistant professor of political science at Yale and a fellow at the New America Foundation, is working on a book about economic insecurity.