Middle East Calculations
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Middle East Calculations IN MID-OCTOBER, with President Bill Clinton going to the Middle East, it seemed that the closer the region came to peace, the...
...Of some three dozen indigenous agents compromised, only about 10 are known to have been executed...
...All that upbeat news comes from the 1,011 pages of the 1994 Statistical Ab?stract of the United States, published by the Census Bureau and familiarly known as "Uncle Sam's Almanac...
...And there's more...
...forces pinned down in Kuwait and count on American impatience to bring them home...
...When Ross Perot, who won almost 20 per cent of the vote in 1992, made the same charge, it was something else...
...Creating a Sense of Confusion A CONTRIBUTOR to the danger of mis?calculation by America's opponents is political criticism at home that goes be?yond the bounds of proper debate, creat?ing a sense of confusion and irresoluteness...
...There is no way of knowing, of course, how Saddam reads America...
...President Clinton's visit to the region and the signing of an Israel-Jordan peace treaty will probably help the peace pro?cess to survive terrorism, as it has before...
...He suggested to Glaspie, without receiving any vigorous response, that there was apolitical imper?ative in the United States against risking American lives...
...So the general impression of escalat?ing violence is no figment of the imagi?nation...
...Eager to avoid responsibility, Arafat tele?phoned Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, saying the perpetrators of the October 19 bus bombing in the heart of Tel Aviv that took 22 lives and injured 48 people "probably" did not come from Gaza...
...If you do not read spy novels, let me introduce you to a couple of spyspeak terms: dou?bles and dangles...
...He encountered a cul?ture in the cloak-and-dagger community that resisted supervision and had ways of undermining his efforts to get rid of the bad apples...
...America's antagonists constantly cal?culate, and sometimes miscalculate, the President's standing with the public in an effort to determine his capacity and will to act...
...I am reminded of October 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon, short?ly after the "Saturday night massacre" that brought his Watergate troubles to a head, put American forces on a worldwide alert...
...would Creating not respond with force to an invasion of Kuwait was undoubtedly influenced by soft words from President George Bush and Ambassador April Glaspie as he pre?pared for his invasion...
...In six months of PNA administration there has been little sign of economic improve?ment...
...The real enemy of peace in Gaza is squalor, the incubator for extremism...
...This time, even before Perot's and North's unhelpful remarks, Saddam may well have calculated??given the evacua?tion of American forces from Somalia and Rwanda, and the pressures to quit Haiti??that he could afford to see U.S...
...Arafat, the quintes?sential tightrope-walker, sought to avoid precisely that choice...
...Also, although one keeps hearing that people cannot af?ford to purchase homes anymore, almost two-thirds of America's families (64.3 per cent) owned their own homes in 1993 ??and that is close to a record...
...But when President Clinton says that we are better off than we think we are, he has some statistical support...
...While religious groups may decry a drift away from spiritual values, the number of religious congregations has increased to 257,640...
...This country, you may be as surprised as I was to learn, is the United States...
...A dangle is a version of the double, someone dangled before the CIA to mislead it...
...Nor does it help the economy when Israel, re?acting to acts of terror, bars day laborers from Gaza and the West Bank...
...In 1988, a Cuban defector gave the CIA a list??from Cuban files??of virtually every Cuban the agency consid?ered its spy...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Middle East Calculations IN MID-OCTOBER, with President Bill Clinton going to the Middle East, it seemed that the closer the region came to peace, the greater the terror...
...In 12 years the percentage of murders committed with handguns went from 46 to 55 per cent...
...Uncle Sam's Almanac SOMEWHERE there is a blessed coun?try where life expectancy is up and infant mortality is down, where the rate of deaths on the highway is declining, where school enrollment and the number of col?lege graduates is increasing, where fewer young people are taking to smoking and drinking alcohol, where the divorce rate is declining, and so is the number of young people who own guns...
...But Gaza is a Hamas stronghold, and as the Israelis are quick to remind Arafat, the territory is aresponsibility of his Pales?tinian National Authority (PNA...
...But that is far from a sure thing...
...Yet try as they might to keep their efforts to organize peace from being disrupted, neither Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin nor Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasir Arafat was entirely the master in his own house...
...Anti-Israeli terror was aimed also at him...
...He talked of "cre?ating a common language with Hamas," and said "we are not their enemies...
...Who had penetrated whom...
...Should heads have rolled for letting all this happen...
...The Iraqi dicta?tor must have miscalculated again in thinking that a show of force near the Kuwaiti border wouldprod the United Na?tions into easing sanctions...
...Violent crime rose 41 per cent in the 10 years ending in 1992, although it dropped slightly in the last of those years...
...That President Clinton, ignoring France, Russia and domestic critics, ulti?mately was able to convince the Iraqi rul?er that he meant business is a credit to an uncharacteristically surefooted policy...
...One should therefore not have been surprised when the CIA mountain, hav?ing promised a no-holds-barred investi?gation of the Aldrich H. Ames disaster, gave birth to a disciplinary mouse...
...Doubles and Dangles WHEN Admiral Stansfield Turner, President Jimmy Carter's CIA director, attempted to overhaul the agency after its scandals of the mid-1970s, he found, as he later wrote, that he was trying to ''manage an octopus...
...Says Woolsey, "That's not the American way, and it's not the CIA way...
...Once a Russian is ex?posed to the KGB as an American spy, he may be doubled??that is, turned into a double agent, in effect an agent against the CIA, who can be used to feed mis?leading information into American intel?ligence reports...
...To Hamas his Nobel Peace Prize is a badge of shame...
...There was a moment of unwitting humor when Director Woolsey told re?porters that the unmasking of three dozen agents by the Russians testified to the CIA's success in penetrating Soviet intel?ligence...
...Most of the Cuban agents enlisted by the CIA to eliminate Fidel Castro in the 1960s, it developed, were working for him...
...Saddam may also have counted on splitting off Russia and France from the U. S., as in fact he did...
...When French Defense Minister Francois Leotard suggested that Clinton was stirring up a confrontation with Iraq for domestic political reasons, it was one thing...
...When the files of the Stasi, the East German security agency, were explored after unification, it was discovered that for years almost all osten?sible American agents were actually dou?ble agents who provided a stream of mis?leading information...
...Prior to his Middle East trip Clinton...
...Serious consequences result from a spy network being turned into a disinfor?mation network...
...This was in response to moves suggesting the possibility of Soviet military inter?vention in the Middle East...
...forces to a point where they may no longer be capa?ble of dealing with Saddam Hussein, he was virtually inviting miscalculation...
...And when Senate candidate Oliver L. North said the President ("not my commander-in-chief") has reduced U.S...
...The impression was un?doubtedly fueled by President Ronald Reagan's abrupt pullout from Lebanon following the October 1983 car-bomb at?tack there that killed 241 American Ma?rines, and the extraordinary lengths to which the Reagan Administration went in 1986 to try to ransom a handful of American hostages in Lebanon with the sale of arms to Iran for use in its war against Iraq...
...It is apparent that much of the instiga?tion and support for terrorism comes from elsewhere??from the West Bank, from Iran, with considerable financial backing from groups in the United States...
...Two other officers were fired for what was considered the greatest offense: thumbing their nose at the Director by giving a plaque for mer?itorious service to one of those repri?manded...
...But it was becoming abundantly clear that they are his enemy...
...What happened to the others...
...It contains a lot of bad news, too...
...Juvenile arrests for violent crimes were up 53 per cent between 1980 and 1992...
...It takes cover, and eventually dusts itself off and goes on...
...Underpressure from outraged Israelis, Rabin sealed off the West Bank and Gaza and demanded that Arafat choose between "making peace with Israel and making peace with Hamas...
...This had, in fact, been foreseen by Israel and its nego?tiating partners...
...For letting Ames operate as a KGB mole over a period of nine years, despite the many signals he sent, 11 current and former of?ficials were merely reprimanded by Direc?tor R. James Woolsey...
...This enabled him to expose the assassination plots and to is?sue warnings to the John F. Kennedy Administration about a double-edged sword...
...Periodically the agency is rocked by some great scandal and hung out to dry in Congressional investiga?tions that damage its reputation...
...continuing an unusual series of foreign policy successes that included the effec?tive deployment of American troops in Haiti and the conclusion of an agreement with North Korea to limit its nuclear po?tential??had faced down the latest threat from Saddam Hussein...
...Nixon was so widely assumed to be engineering a dis?traction, though, that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had to call a news con?ference and appeal for a "minimum of confidence" that the Administration was not playing with American lives...
...Financial aid from outside has been slow in arriving, partly because the con?ditions for aid have not been met...
...As details of the CIA Inspector Gen?eral's classified report become known, it is apparent that the harm Ames did went far beyond the betrayal and execution of Russians working for American intelli?gence...
...His disas?trous 1990 conclusion that the U.S...
...The latter is certainly true...
...But it availed him nothing because Clin?ton, displaying rare resolve, faced down those governments as well by making it clear that he would not be deterred from using force to rid southern Iraq of Saddam's tanks...
Vol. 77 • October 1994 • No. 10
