Treachery: How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies
by Bill Gertz 288 pp, Crown Forum, $25.95
Richard Paige
In addition to weapons of mass destruction ("WMD"), Mr. Gertz discusses "dual use" technology—conventional hardware and software that can be adapted to military applications—which, with WMD, present "the most significant threat to U.S. national security for the foreseeable future."
Mr. Gertz documents that this international trade and transfer of weapons materials and intelligence is the very "Axis of Evil" around which Iraq, Iran, and North Korea revolve. Its danger is compounded by the fact that nations with whom the U.S. is allied also maintain alliances with nations that are enemies of the U.S.--and vice-versa. Well-worn aphorisms such as "politics makes strange bedfellows" and "nations don't have friends, they have interests" take on an alarming freshness. The Bush Administration believes that the next major terrorist strike on the U.S. will use WMD, according to Gertz's Pentagon sources. Mr. Gertz points out insider information about the U.S.'s inability to acknowledge its true weaknesses but also casts blame globally when he acknowledges that the United Nations is too inept to help. The U.N.'s "Oil for Food" program that was intended to relieve U.N. trade embargoes to help Saddam Hussein's regime sell some oil to help feed the Iraqi people ended up serving as a pipeline funneling billions of dollars to corrupt officials. This is even more disturbing since threats continue against the U.S., and unless the U.S. acknowledges these truths and fortifies its security, the threats will become even more dangerous, since the international community provides little protection or insulation from outside attacks.
Importantly, Mr. Gertz takes aim at the U.S. Government and faults it for being careless and negligent in allowing weapons-technology proliferation to continue. Between 1992 and 2001, the U.S. supplied arms or military technology to 92 percent of the world conflicts under way.
Mr. Gertz, a defense and national security reporter for the Washington Times and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Breakdown and Betrayal, conducted interviews with top American defense and intelligence officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He also had access to classified documents and reports, supplementing publicly available information. But Mr. Gertz falls prey to his own alliances: his chief sources are the same Pentagon officials who lowered the bar on what constituted evidence of WMD in Iraq, asserting, on the slimmest of evidence, that Iraq was ready to use such weapons.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," said Vice President Dick Cheney. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."
However, as we now know, the 1,500-page final report of the chief U.S. arms inspector and head of the Iraq Survey Group submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee found no evidence of weapons stockpiles. What else was the Pentagon wrong about? These are the concerns that Mr. Gertz alludes to, causing the public to question sources and media coverage which may be incomplete or inaccurate.
Mr. Gertz seems to take the failure to find WMD as grounds for duplicity, emphasizing Iraq's ties to France and President Jacques Chirac dating back to 1975. But French ties to Iraq go back to the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which guaranteed France 25% of Iraqi oil production. And at that time, Americans responded to those provisions by whipping up a storm of public indignation. It's an old story, unless of course you have never heard it.
Mr. Gertz goes on to state that the Russians, like the French, had huge oil contracts with Iraq and that, in a shameless display of chutzpah, expected the new postwar Iraqi government to honor those contracts. Again, by using his insider contacts and information, Mr. Gertz is able to depict how countries such as France, Germany, Russia, and China have armed our enemies and have themselves become threats based on their involvement in the proliferation of weapons technology.
Weapons of mass destruction are the crucial components of Mr. Gertz's argument. He acknowledges the suspect motives of both our allies and enemies. In his last chapter, he cites nuclear and non-nuclear weapons proliferation as the important danger for America. But there is a twist. Mr. Gertz advocates increasing weapons spending to create the ultimate deterrent, a new weapon called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, "what the Chinese call a 'trump card' weapon," he writes. However, it is unclear how the American public would support measures to increase weapons spending in light of the dramatic changes in the international arena, and Mr. Gertz does not sufficiently address this, making for a less-compelling case. However, he does manage to address the issues and questions that America must tackle no matter how intimidating they might be.
If nothing else, after the Senate report on WMD, "Treachery" stirs the pot on the witch's brew of arguments surrounding the war in Iraq.
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