On July 12, speaking at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, surrounded by nuclear equipment removed from Libya, President Bush defended his strategy for stopping the proliferation of nuclear and other unconventional weapons. The president’s milestones included the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, the end of Libya’s nuclear ambitions and the disclosure of the nuclear black market run by Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan. These and other efforts, such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, are all worthy accomplishments and deserve recognition. The president, however, offered no new proposals to solve the serious threats remaining, including the continuing nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran, nor did he follow-up the as-yet unimplemented nonproliferation agenda he presented February 11 at the National Defense University.
The president acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, but he did not address how the false claims of Iraqi WMD have damaged American credibility. Both Chinese and South Korean officials, for example, now openly question U.S. claims that North Korea has a secret uranium enrichment capability. The U.S. claims it has evidence of North Korean imports of uranium enrichment equipment but has not shared this information with allies and has not yet found direct evidence of any enrichment facilities in North Korea. This hampers efforts to resolve the Korean nuclear crisis.
In the case of Libya, the Bush administration deserves credit for completing and implementing a deal that eliminates Tripoli’s nuclear, chemical and missile programs. But the president overstates his case when he claims that "this progress was set in motion, however, by policy declared in public to all the world," after September 11. He failed to credit the 15 years of international sanctions and bipartisan work of four presidents that crippled Libya’s economy, or the negotiations begun in the 1990s that made the deal with Libya possible. The war in Iraq certainly help shape the final agreement with Libya, but the Libyan decision to abandon these programs was made before the war and seems to have been based as much on economic considerations as the "lesson from Iraq."
The president also cited the dismantlement of the A.Q. Khan network as a major proliferation victory - yet the United States cannot demonstrate that the network is fully dismantled or claim to know its full history. U.S. officials do not have direct access to A.Q. Khan and the Bush administration acquiesced to Pakistan’s official explanation that no Pakistani government officials were involved in the network. With so many questions unanswered, the network may still be able to help other would-be weapon states, or worse, terrorist groups. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, moreover, could end up in terrorist hands should the government in Pakistan fall.
Despite findings from the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA that it was highly unlikely Saddam Hussein would give weapons to Al Qaeda, in his remarks the president continued to maintain that the war was necessary because Hussein "had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them." There was little basis for asserting this before the war - and absolutely none now.
Perhaps of greatest concern, however, is the message that no new U.S. initiatives or policies are required. The president’s speech notably did not stress the need to proactively prevent nuclear materials from ending up in terrorist hands. Even the administration’s own newly launched Global Threat Reduction Initiative, designed to secure and remove vulnerable stocks of weapon-usable materials world-wide, fails to get a mention. With terrorist attacks on the rise, the president missed an opportunity to stress the urgency of blocking terrorist access to nuclear bombs, to call for greater cooperation on prevention and to launch a more concerted effort for more resources and attention. Given the priority the administration claims it has given proliferation issues, it is difficult to understand this lapse.
In the end, the speech is long on how forceful diplomacy and military action has battled proliferation, but fails to appreciate how all of the diplomatic, economic and political tools can be used to pursue an even more effective set of proliferation policies. The U.S. needs to use all of the tools at its disposal, now more than ever.
Additional Resources:
- Remarks by President Bush, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, July 12
