The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power - Softcover

Sanger, David E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307407934 ISBN 13: 9780307407931

Verlag: Crown, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Readers of The New York Times know David Sanger as one of the most trusted correspondents in Washington, one to whom presidents, secretaries of state, and foreign leaders talk with unusual candor. Now, with a historian’s sweep and an insider’s eye for telling detail, Sanger delivers an urgent intelligence briefing on the world America faces.

In a riveting narrative, The Inheritance describes the huge costs of distraction and lost opportunities at home and abroad as Iraq soaked up manpower, money, and intelligence capabilities. The 2008 market collapse further undermined American leadership, leaving the new president with a set of challenges unparalleled since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the Oval Office.

Sanger takes readers into the White House Situation Room to reveal how Washington penetrated Tehran’s nuclear secrets, leading President Bush, in his last year, to secretly step up covert actions in a desperate effort to delay an Iranian bomb. Meanwhile, his intelligence chiefs made repeated secret missions to Pakistan as they tried to stem a growing insurgency and cope with an ally who was also aiding the enemy–while receiving billions in American military aid. Now the new president faces critical choices: Is it better to learn to live with a nuclear Iran or risk overt or covert confrontation? Is it worth sending U.S. forces deep into Pakistani territory at the risk of undermining an unstable Pakistani government sitting on a nuclear arsenal? It is a race against time and against a new effort by Islamic extremists–never before disclosed–to quietly infiltrate Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

“Bush wrote a lot of checks,” one senior intelligence official told Sanger, “that the next president is going to have to cash.”

The Inheritance takes readers to Afghanistan, where Bush never delivered on his promises for a Marshall Plan to rebuild the country, paving the way for the Taliban’s return. It examines the chilling calculus of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, who built actual weapons of mass destruction in the same months that the Bush administration pursued phantoms in Iraq, then sold his nuclear technology in the Middle East in an operation the American intelligence apparatus missed. And it explores how China became one of the real winners of the Iraq war, using the past eight years to expand its influence in Asia, and lock up oil supplies in Africa while Washington was bogged down in the Middle East. Yet Sanger, a former foreign correspondent in Asia, sees enormous potential for the next administration to forge a partnership with Beijing on energy and the environment.

At once a secret history of our foreign policy misadventures and a lucid explanation of the opportunities they create, The Inheritance is vital reading for anyone trying to understand the extraordinary challenges that lie ahead.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID E. SANGER is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times. In twenty-six years at the Times, he has been a member of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize and has received numerous awards for investigative, national security, and White House reporting. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two sons.

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Chapter 1

Decoding

Project 111

Fate changes no man, unless he changes fate.

—Epigraph on the opening page of a status report prepared by engineers of Project 111, the Iranian military’s effort to design

A nuclear Warhead

By the time President Bush’s national security team gathered in the Situation Room the Thursday before Thanksgiving 2007, the rumor had already raced through the upper reaches of the administration: America’s much-maligned spy agencies had hit the jackpot.

With a mix of luck and technological genius, they had finally penetrated the inner sanctum of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. For weeks the dialogues, laboratory drawings, and bitter complaints of Iran’s weapons engineers had secretly circulated through the headquarters of the CIA and the National Intelligence Council, the small organization charged with putting together classified, consensus “estimates” about the long-term security challenges facing the nation. Now the highlights were crammed into a draft of a 140-page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was stacked in front of every chair in the Situation Room’s new, high-tech conference center, where Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and others prepared to pick through it. Though it would never be explicitly discussed that morning, the memories of another NIE—the disastrously wrongheaded one on Iraq in the fall of 2002—was the subtext of their deliberations. No future NIE on weapons of mass destruction could escape from under that cloud.

But this report was different in every respect. It detailed the names of each of the Iranian engineers and program managers, along with excerpts from their deliberations about the nuclear program and speculation about the political travails inside Iran’s fractious circle of top leaders. What those exchanges revealed turned out to be so mind-blowing that it threatened to upend Washington’s strategy toward Tehran for months, maybe years, to come. The estimate concluded, in short, that while Iran was racing ahead to produce fuel that would give it the capability to build a bomb, it had suspended all of its work on the actual design of a weapon in late 2003. No one knew whether the weapons programs—what the Iranians referred to as “Project 110” to develop a nuclear trigger around a sphere of uranium, and “Project 111” to manufacture a warhead—had been resumed since then. The discovery cut the legs out from under Bush’s argument that Iran harbored an active nuclear-weapons program that needed to be stopped immediately.

To those who delved into the report, starting with Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA who was now defense secretary, the intelligence estimate was one of the most imprecisely worded, poorly assembled intelligence documents in memory. Later, Gates would declare that in his whole career in intelligence he had never seen “an NIE that had such an impact on U.S. diplomacy.” He did not mean it as a compliment.

“The irony is it made our effort to strengthen the political and the financial sanctions more difficult because people figured, well, the military option is now off the table,” Gates told me a few months after the estimate was released.

To many of Gates’s colleagues on the national security team, it seemed clear that Bush and Cheney were paying the price for twisting the intelligence on Iraq. Either out of a new sense of caution or out of fear that Bush was laying the predicate for war, the authors of the intelligence report had hemmed the president in, leaving Bush little justification for military action unless, as Gates put it, “the Iranians do something stupid.”

The summary opened with a set of “key judgments,” the first section of every National Intelligence Estimate, and sometimes the only pages that top officials read. To this day, those judgments are the only part of the intelligence estimate that has been made public—a decision prompted largely by the realization that once the classified version went to Capitol Hill, the main conclusion would leak instantly. The key judgments were written in a shorthand that emphasized the remarkable new discovery that some powerful Iranian had ordered a halt to the weapons design work. But it failed to say what sophisticated readers instantly understood: Designing the weapon is the easiest step in putting together a nuclear bomb. It could be done relatively quickly later on in the development process, presuming the Iranians had not already purchased a workable design from the Russian nuclear scientists who kept jetting into Tehran after the fall of the Soviet Union, or from the Pakistanis. The hard part of bomb-building is obtaining the fuel—the part of the project that was still speeding along in public view. The omission of that distinction in the NIE summary had to do with its intended audience. “We never wrote this to be read by the general public,” one of the authors of the report told me. “So it is missing a lot of the context.”

But once the key judgments became public, the reaction astounded everyone from President Bush to Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Hayden, the CIA director. No one was more astounded than the authors of the report inside the National Intelligence Council, who had written the document with the assurance that it would never be made public. Around the world, critics of America’s many intelligence failures in Iraq trumpeted the Iran report’s conclusion to make the case that even the Americans now had their doubts that Iran was pursuing a bomb. As a consequence, the Germans delayed plans to announce new sanctions; the Russians and the Chinese said they would not vote for stiffer action against Iran.

Readers of the full classified version of the NIE, however, walked away with a very different impression. In their copies, the report contained the first allegations of a complex, covert program by the Iranians to enrich uranium at sites other than the giant facility outside the ancient city of Natanz, where inspectors were counting every gram of nuclear material. The covert enrichment program, too, had been halted, the classified sections of the report concluded.

“I’m not saying we saw centrifuges spinning on the edge of the Caspian Sea,” said one senior intelligence official who was deeply involved in reviewing the intelligence with Bush. “But there was a secret enrichment program too.” That was important, he said, because “none of us believe that they will create weapons-grade fuel at Natanz. What they are producing at Natanz is a body of knowledge there that they can transfer elsewhere.”

Whatever the truth—that Iran wants a bomb, that it wanted a bomb until it realized the cost, or that it simply wants the capability to build a bomb someday should the mullahs decide to take the last step—it is now clear that the effect of the intelligence report was far more detrimental than anyone realized at the time. The NIE’s findings, or at least the awkwardly worded declassified version, sent a go-back-to- sleep message around the globe. In the intelligence community’s overcaution about not repeating its mistakes in Iraq, analysts may have actually erred the other way, veering toward the kind of mistakes they made when they underestimated the Soviet effort to build a bomb sixty years ago or the pace of the Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani efforts that followed. It may turn out that one of the great post-Iraq paradoxes was that in crying wolf about Iraq, the American intelligence community found itself unable to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307407934
• ISBN 13: 9780307407931
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 552
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland