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William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute, began researching the economics of the arms trade at the Council on Economic Priorities in the 1980s. He wrote his first book "And Weapons for All," a comprehensive study of the impact of arms sales on U.S. foreign policy, just as the first Gulf War, Desert Storm was about to be launched. Hartung was instantly struck by the contradiction between public policy statements favoring restraint, and the eagerness and excitement shown by arms industry executives seeking to capitalize on the war. "The people I was interviewing viewed that Gulf War as a huge sales opportunity,. " he recalls. "They felt that CNN had done a great marketing job." The process of writing the book spanned both the administrations of George Bush and Bill Clinton. Both Republicans and Democrats were lured by the profits in selling weapons abroad. The Global Beat talked with Hartung about what to expect from the current Bush administration, and its strategy in Iraq.

Global Beat: With the U.S. now engaged in a perpetual
war against terrorism, where do you see the future of
trying to control the arms trade?

William Hartung: I don’t think you can treat arms
trade policy on its own at this point. The critique has to be
part of a larger vision and strategy of protecting the United
States.

Global Beat: How do you protect the United States?

William Hartung: Well, I think from the point of view
of the arms control and peace communities, we
have to be tougher. I don’t think you can just say "Give
diplomacy a chance." I think you have to say, "Yes, our
country has been attacked. We suffered terrible losses in
September 11. We do need to be very proactive in going
after these problems. But while force should be one
element of a policy, it cannot be the whole policy. " Bob
Gallucci, who helped create the 1994 nuclear framework
agreement with North Korea under Bill Clinton, says that
one problem with the Bush policy is that it is one thing to have a policy
of diplomacy backed by force, but the thing he does not
understand about this administration is that it seems to
have a policy of force without diplomacy. In Iraq, there
was far more discussion about how to get rid of Saddam
Hussein than there was about what they were going to do
afterwards. Now they seem to be rallying to catch up, and
the vision that seems to have the most purchase is a kind
of privatized, top-down approach where you hire
companies that are cronies of the president’s inner circle,
and the Pentagon makes most of the decisions. Even if it
works efficiently, which I don’t think it will, it is a non-starter
when it comes to communicating to the region and the rest
of the world what it is that we are about here... If we want
to fight terrorism in a way that is not going to increase the
threat, where we are not going to create a backlash or
make it easier for the Osama bin Ladens of the world to
recruit people, then we need a much more balanced
approach that says,."Yes, We have the most powerful
military in the world, and if you mess with us we will use it.
However, we are not going to use it lightly. We will use it
with allies, and where ever possible, if time and
circumstances permit, we will do it with the approval of the
United Nations." The whole urgency of going into Iraq
does not really hold water. They still haven’t found these
elusive weapons of mass destruction. In my mind there is
no question that Saddam had chemical and biological
weapons, but the administration never established that
invasion was the best way to contain them. All they can
tell us now is that they are going to keep looking, which is
what the U.N. was doing before the invasion. Bush has
even said that it could be that the weapons of mass
destruction have been dispersed, but that what we do
know for sure is that Saddam Hussein will not use them
against us. That doesn’t make me feel any safer,
especially if he has given them to some other group that
has a beef with us. I think that the 'High Noon' posture that
our president is riding high in the saddle and is going after
these evil regimes is a compelling image--people certainly
want tough action after 9/11, but it is not a very smart
strategy. A lot of what we need to do should be done
quietly. It should be done through intelligence cooperation,
through cutting off financing. That can be difficult, but I find
it hard to believe that we couldn’t have a better strategy for
pressuring the Saudis to cough up information and
suspects, to crack down on groups. It is quite possible
that the most effective way is not to lecture them, but to do
it more quietly and to say, "We’ve built this relationship,
let’s try to sustain it, but do it differently." In Iraq we
certainly had the opportunity before the war started to use
smart sanctions to build an internal opposition. It would
have taken a lot more time. It would have been more
challenging, but I think in the end it would have been less
damaging to our relationships in that region and to our
relations with European allies that we need if we are going to deal with
terrorism, if we are going to deal with poverty and AIDS,
and if we are going to deal with all the threats to Global
Security. Even the State Department and the FBI have
made a point of saying that the countries that have been
among the most helpful in terms of cooperation and
sharing intelligence have been the French and Germans.
The reason that they stress that point is that with
Rumsfeld’s stomping up and down about "old Europe," the
FBI and our police officials are afraid that he will damage
those relationships which they have with their
counterparts in France and Germany.
In the climate that we are in, a tough love Democrat
could say that we have to fight smarter. Bob Graham was
against the war resolution because he said it would be a
distraction against fighting Al Qaeda.

Global Beat: What do you think about the plan to pull
troops out from Iraq.

William Hartung: I don’t think it is going to be as
quick or as clean as it has been presented. General
Shinseki pointed out before the war that it is going to take
a lot of troops to keep Iraq stable. There have been
predictions that it could take up to 150,000 troops over the
next five to ten years. How much of that they can get
other countries to take up will be interesting to see. The
Rumsfeld approach to diplomacy, where you badger
people and then posture self righteously, is hard for our
allies to take, much less our former allies. Just look at the
British. When the U.S. was going after a second U.N.
resolution and the British hesitated, you had Rumsfeld
speaking off the top of his head and saying that the U.S.
would go it alone. That was after Tony Blair had put
everything on the line, and gone along every step of the
way with President Bush. That caused great
consternation in Britain. Then you get to the rebuilding
process, and no British companies were allowed to bid--not
even to dredge the port of Um Qasr which was liberated
by British troops. The argument that was given is that we
needed companies with security clearances, so they had
to be American companies. What we were saying is that
the British are good enough to die with us in Iraq, but they
are not good enough to bid, although they can be
subcontractors on our terms. I think in constructing a
U.S. presence and relying on other countries, there are
going to be limits in how far these other countries are
willing to go. Also, I think they are underestimating how
long it will take for things to settle down. There is no
question that they have to get U.S. troops out of a policing
role in which they shoot demonstrators. That is not what
they are primarily trained to deal with.

Global Beat: Do you think that the demonstrations
were spontaneous, or planned?

William Hartung: One thing that Richard Perle pointed
out is that many Iraqi troops just abandoned their uniforms
and blended back into Iraqi society. If they did that
because they were tired of Saddam Hussein and want to
build a new Iraq, it is good. If they blended back into
society because they are biding their time and want to get
back at the U.S., that is obviously a bad thing. There are
going to be a lot of possibilities for different groups to
assert themselves. It is another example of asymmetric
warfare. One of the reasons that Osama bin Laden went
after the World Trade Center is that you can’t really beat
the U.S. military straight up. There is no possibility of
matching us plane-to-plane or matching our
communications ability and training. But our civilian
society is much more open and much less defended. The
first attack against the World Trade Center wasn’t really
ready for prime time. The next attack was. If your goal is
to get at the United States and to show that this global
behemoth can’t just have anything that it wants, then those
U.S. troops in Iraq are just too tempting. I think the
Pentagon is right to reduce the numbers, but unless they
do a lot more cooperating with other countries, and with
the U.N., to try to get an effective administration that also
has some legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis, they are going
to face a situation in which whatever troops are left are
going to be targets. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would like to
keep some bases in Iraq to reduce our presence in Saudi
Arabia and to be in a position to intervene and intimidate
Iran and Syria, but it is a two-way street. Is Iraq going to
be Lebanon or the Balkans, or is everything going to go
perfectly the way Rumsfeld claims that it will? There is no
way to know in advance, but there are already some
troubling signs that it is not going to be easy to stabilize the
country. If they were willing to patch up with some of the
countries that we had rough diplomacy with before the
war, the French and Germans are much more capable of
sharing peace keeping duties--the French have been in
Afghanistan and the Balkans. The Bulgarians and the
Poles wont have the same capabilities. But to do that, you
would have to get off your high horse, which Rumsfeld is
not willing to do, but Powell probably is.

Global Beat: What should we be doing?

William Hartung: We need to broaden the approach
and if not hand the whole problem over to the U.N. , at
least let the U.N. take the lead wherever possible. We
shouldn’t make it seem as though it is a policy that has just
been cooked up in Washington. As it is now, the first
major contract goes to Halliburton. It was negotiated
secretly in advance of the war. It’s the vice president’s
company which is still writing him checks for his golden
parachute, there is no way that is going to look acceptable
to anybody anywhere else in the world, much less here.
Then there is the notion of Iraq for the Iraqis. It ends up
that the 150 people that they are dropping into the various
agencies for the interim authority have been on the
Pentagon payroll for the last three months. They have
been working out of the SAIC. corporation and have been
very carefully handpicked by Paul Wolfowitz. They don’t
necessarily represent the full breadth of Iraqi society.
While they talk about democracy, they are not willing to
give it much scope at the moment. In the short term, you
might say that they have to create order first and that it
might be premature to talk about elections, but my
impression is that they are trying to have it both ways.
They have this top-down administration, and they are
trying to shape whatever democracy, however limited,
that emerges there, so that their people are running it. My
sense is that under the Bush approach the best you are
going to see is government similar to the current regime
in Afghanistan, which is a cobbled together coalition with a
certain legitimacy, but which is not able to rule the entire country.
In that case, you are going to need peacekeeping forces. In
Afghanistan, Karzai has the U.S. protecting him and is not
really able to travel around the country. They can’t really
afford to let that happen in Iraq. It is a much more
important country strategically. There was a much more
forceful regime change, and it is a much more important
region in terms of U.S. security and that of our allies.
They are going to have to make this work in some sense.
For that reason, I am hopeful that they are going to be
forced to open up the process. It won’t just be a
government made in the Pentagon and cordoned around
by all these U.S. companies. If you take only U.S.
companies and only U.S. personnel to do all these things
on a medium to long term basis, how much authority is the
new government going to have? They have contracted
out all the basic functions of government. You could do
that if the Iraqi people, through a functioning government
could assert some scrutiny and authority over those
companies. But if you are setting it up first, and locking it
in as they did with Halliburton, it may not be able to fly.
They won’t be able to sell that as a version of democracy
either on the Iraqi side or the U.S. side of the equation.
They can build all the structures they want, but if they
don’t have a political dynamic that works, they are still
going to be in a very messy situation.

Global Beat: Do you think we have overextended
ourselves?

William Hartung: The budget strategy, the tax cuts,
plus the boost in Homeland Security, plus the war without
end policy gives us too little room to maneuver to do some
of the other things that we need to do to have a resilient
economy. Eisenhower basically said that unless we have
a resilient economy and are able to balance our books, we
are never going to be able to provide for our security, and
if we are seeking absolute security, all we are going to do
is to bankrupt the country. I think we are very much back
in that zone, with the difference that it is not that we need
the military to float our economy. It is that this particular group
is so reliant on the military and so wedded to its tax cuts, that it is putting
us in a very difficult position both fiscally and in terms of
our security. It is not really necessitated by the realities of
the world. We have a margin of power, and we have a
margin of economic vitality that should give us a whole
range of options to deal with these problems. Alliances are
huge force multipliers. If we are going to alienate our
closest allies, if we are going to denigrate institutions that
have taken decades to build up, if we are going to
undermine treaties that could do a great deal to get rid of
weapons of mass destruction and eliminating the materials
needed to build them, if we are then going to go on a
rampage country-by country threatening force, we are
going to create a situation of overreach in which we are
this over-muscled behemoth who is only using this one
tool and throwing away all the other tools in the toolbox,
and then wondering why no one wants to work with us,
and wondering why we are not safer. I think that Donald
Rumsfeld has become the central figure here. He has
almost a cult of personality. He is the administration hunk.
He arranged to have a cover story written on him in a
major newsmagazine-- no interviews, just photos of him
running the war. Given his terrible track record of dealing with other
countries, where all he has to do is to open his mouth to
alienate an ally, I think it is a very bad development for this
administration and for our democracy, to have a secretary
of defense who is trying to put so much power in his own
hands. It undercuts the positive elements of the Rumsfeld
approach, which is that he is no nonsense, he wants to
reform the military and cut through the bureaucracy. The
way he wants to use the power vitiates the reform
impulse. The negatives of having so much power
concentrated in one person and one institution, far
outweigh the benefits of trimming a weapon system here,
or getting rid of a hidebound procedure there. The notion
of whether George Bush is more of a Rumsfeld
Republican or a Powell Republican should be an issue for
the upcoming election. Nobody elected Donald Rumsfeld.
Nobody ever would. If people understood his ideology and
that of the neo-conservatives who hold sway in this
administration, they would say that that is not the America
that I signed up for. Globally, these guys are a disaster.
Even our closest allies, the British, the Spanish have
problems with them. It was the Spanish who said "If you
want us to be closer with you on this, we need more
Powell and less Rumsfeld. "

Global Beat: What do you think of Jerry Bremer?

William Hartung: I think the appointment is
interesting. He does come out of the State Department as
a counter terrorism expert. He does have a relationship
with Powell. He is a civilian. In that sense it is a reassertion
of some sort of State Department role. On the other hand,
the contracts are being decided by the Pentagon. A lot of
the people who are being dropped into the interim authority
are being handpicked by Paul Wolfowitz, so I think the
question is going to be: is he a civilian figurehead because
Garner and Rumsfeld are creating an image that the
administration doesn’t want to be associated with, or is he
going to have substantive input? I think whether he is a
cosmetic addition or is going to be able to assert some
authority is probably going to be battled out by the
Pentagon and State, and by the president’s inner circle. I
think it is probably a small tactical victory for Powell, but it
is not going to mean anything unless it goes a lot further.

Global Beat: Is there a risk that we could be forced out
of Iraq?

William Hartung: There is a real danger to just pulling
out. If they decide to cut our losses, that could be one of
the most dangerous options. You take a society that was
under iron rule for so many years, you tip the table over
and rearrange the pieces, there has to be some stability
while that is being put back together.
People in the peace movement who want the U.S. out of
Iraq are not making a rational demand at this point. The
issue is how does the U.S. help manage the transition so
that there is stability and order and some reasonable
representation that the people of Iraq have input. A
reasonable approach is to multilateralize it, but I think that
where Bush is coming from, perhaps that would have to
be phased in. But eventually he would have to have a
multinational peace keeping force, elections that are
monitored by the U.N., at a minimum he would have to
open the bidding on reconstruction to companies outside
the U.S. He might say that there is an emergency period
in which he wants certain companies that he trusts to work,
but I think that you don’t want to create the sense that Iraq is just a
big cash machine for the benefit of companies run by
cronies of president Bush. I don’t think the Rumsfeld-
Wolfowitz crowd would countenance a full pull out, given
how much they’ve staked on this strategy of preemption,
but they might underestimate how much is required. The
danger is that the U.S. would not have an effective
presence, even though it had some boots on the ground.
You would have thought that if their position was that they
could win this within a week that they would have had
military police ready, their administration ready, and people
guarding the national museum and not just the oil ministry.
It really seemed that they weren’t prepared for success. I
don’t know if that is because they had a romantic idea that
Iraqis would rise up and thank them. If that kind of thinking
carries forward, you can imagine them again underestimating the task.

Global Beat: Where do things go from here?

William Hartung: It is a very challenging
circumstance for all sides of the spectrum as to what to do
now. Whatever you think about how the war was initiated,
no one is shedding any tears over the elimination of
Saddam. The real question now is: can you have a more
multilateral, open, approach to rebuilding Iraq than you
had to the overthrow. Can you rebuild some of the
relationships to countries to restore the integrity and
legitimacy of some of these institutions that we are going
to need down the road--be it the U.N. or other regional
and international agencies—or is it really going to
be the first in a series of U.S. promoted
interventions against countries that might at some point
pose a threat to us? If you go down that road, where does
it end? Any number of countries fit that profile, and the
worst thing is that if you take that approach, you might
actually get countries that accelerate their efforts to get
nuclear weapons thinking that Saddam didn’t get his in
time, and that a nuclear bomb might be an impediment to
U.S. intervention. When it comes to these rogue states,
the "get tough" policy is not such a viable option. Even
this war in Iraq, which went as well as can possibly be
expected, is not going to be easy to repeat. It has cost a
lot of political capital. The Bush administration has done
very little else. They are going to sink hundreds of billions
of dollars into this. How many countries will they be able to
do that for? You have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time
and the doctrine of preemption doesn’t really lend itself to
that. You can focus like a laser beam on your enemy of
the moment, but the rest of the world can be going to hell
in a handbasket. Your reaction is "If I can get just get this
one fixed, it will have a domino effect on the rest of the
world." But there may not be any dominos left in the rest
of the world if you spend all your time focusing on this
narrow problem. I am hoping that between now and
November 2004, a lot of these issues are going to be
fleshed out in debate, and that it is not just going to be that
we won the war and now we can go back to the home
front, and forget about it. We really need to have a debate
about what this war meant and how we can proceed from
here, both on a security front and a diplomatic front, and
how we want to run our own country. Since September
11, Bush has overthrown two vicious regimes, and there
will hopefully be a greater modicum of freedom in both
those places, but at the same time that freedom has
increased in those places, there has been a significant
decrease in freedom in our own country, the Patriot Act,
the militarization of debate, the smearing of people who
raise legitimate questions--some scholars who followed
the McCarthy period say that this is in some ways worse.
That was a two-bit senator. This is all the levers of
government being controlled by people who want to
demonize their adversaries. There is a lot at stake here. It
is not just about democracy in Iraq. It is about democracy
in America and how much freedom we are willing to
sacrifice in the name of security. And we certainly don’t
want to sacrifice freedom for a security strategy that is
counterproductive or dangerous, and makes us less
secure. For the moment, I think that is what we are doing,
if we accept the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz strand of the Bush
policy without moderating it with diplomacy and a more
realistic assessment of what the most important threats
are.

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