[12:43 PM] Continuing with the Africa theme of the last few posts, Nicholas Kistof is on the case of Bush negligence in Liberia

The bankruptcy of America's policy toward Africa is evident now in Liberia, a lovely and passionately pro-American country with dazzling white beaches, swaying palms, the greenback for currency — plus 200,000 deaths from unending war, and mass rape that spreads AIDS.

President Bush initially seemed to engage Africa in a way that President Bill Clinton and other predecessors had failed to do. To his great credit, Mr. Bush pushed hard to end Sudan's civil war. He announced a $15 billion initiative to fight AIDS. He visited Africa and has been responsive to the famine raging in Ethiopia.

It is a good thing that Bush intervened in Sudan’s civil war, sending former Senator John Danforth as special envoy to Sudan. But let’s be honest about the reasons. They had nothing to do with Bush’s newfound interest in Africa. Here’s an excerpt from a 2002 Foreign Affairsarticle (only an excerpt is available online)

Despite the attack, in its final years the Clinton administration began loosening up on Sudan, sending low-profile missions to Khartoum and appointing a special envoy to look into the faltering peace talks and review the general situation. More recently, despite its warnings that foreign assistance and meddling in African wars would not be a high priority, the Bush administration has also shown real interest in Sudan, thanks to (sometimes contradictory) pressures from some of the administration's core supporters. The Christian right (in an unlikely coalition with the Congressional Black Caucus) has urged Bush to isolate Muslim Khartoum and support the southern Christian insurgents -- particularly the SPLM. Meanwhile, the U.S. oil industry, among other commercial interests, has applied counterbalancing pressure on Washington to normalize relations with the north, thus opening up access to Sudan's oil fields and growing markets.

Domestic lobbying always helps shape foreign policy. But I think Kristof is giving Bush way to much credit, especially for a man who knows next to nothing about the rest of the world. The remainder of the article is a scathing critique of U.S. policy toward Africa, so I suppose the Sudan line keeps the article “fair and balanced.” Liberia will still suffer.

[9:28 AM] In a rare moment when news from an African nation – Liberia in this case – continues to make headlines, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this coverage will be fleeting (and U.S. television news is barely noticing). Only a month ago, there was some coverage of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Today, nothing. But, the conflict goes on.

[3:46 PM] I thought my last post might have been a little snarky. I’ve written here before that I don’t want this little virtual thing to become a “Bush is an idiot” forum. There are plenty of those already. But as I looked further down the transcript of GWB’s press conference with Mahmoud Abbas this morning (I was initially only looking to see what his latest statements on Liberia were), I see how well he sticks to the paradigm I mentioned in the last post and felt better about it.

Q Prime Minister -- (question asked in Arabic) --

Mr. President, how you perceive the settlements as obstacle to your vision, to implementation of your vision? Thank you.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes --

Q The first question to the Prime Minister –

PRESIDENT BUSH: Okay, good, yes. This is the old two-question trick. It's an international trick, I see. (Laughter.) Very good job, yes. You learned from the guy to your left. Both of them from your left are pros at that, too, I might add. (Laughter.)

Q (Question to the Prime Minister is translated.) Various officials in the administration yesterday indicated that they are having difficulties understanding the Palestinian situation when it comes to the issue of prisoners. In your meeting today with the President, did you discuss that, and did any progress happen on the U.S. understanding?

PRIME MINISTER ABBAS: We always raise this issue, that it is basically an important and sensitive issue for us. This is the issue of prisoners. We look at the prisoners as the true constituency for peace. And we have raised this issue. We believe that they will support the peace process. Today, we did discuss this issue, and we see understanding coming from the administration about this humanitarian and fair issue.

PRESIDENT BUSH: As to the settlements, I've constantly spoken out for the need to end the settlements. I -- and we'll continue to work with both sides on this very sensitive issue. Let me make something -- let me say this -- this is necessary. It is necessary for this good man to continue to fight off the terrorist activity that creates the conditions of insecurity for not only Israel, but for the peaceful Palestinian people. In order for us to be able to make progress on a lot of difficult issues, there has to be a firm and continued commitment to fight terror.

[2:23 PM] Anatomy of a George W. Bush press conference:

1. Tell us how concerned you are about the matter. Even if you don’t do anything, the rest of the world can be assured that you’re concerned and worried. After all telling us you’re concerned is really the same as actually demonstrating concern by mobilizing people into action.
2. Mention that in order for the problem to be solved, we must get past that thing that’s keeping the problem from being solved. “In order for there to be peace in the West Bank, the violence must be stopped.”
3. Tell us how hard you’re “working” with friends and allies.
4. Move on to next question.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. On Liberia, if I may.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Liberia, yes.

Q How many U.S. troops will be going in? What is their role? How long might they stay?

PRESIDENT BUSH: As the statement says that we put out, that U.S. troops will be there to help ECOWAS go in and serve as peacekeepers, necessary to create the conditions so that humanitarian aid can go in and help the people in Liberia. We're deeply concerned that the condition of the Liberian people is getting worse and worse and worse. Aid can't get to the people. We're worried about the outbreak of disease. And so our commitment is to enable ECOWAS to go in. And the Pentagon will make it clear over time what that means.

Secondly, it is very important for Charles Taylor to leave the country. Third, we want to -- in order to expedite aid and help, in order to make the conditions such that NGOs can do what they want to do, which is to help people from suffering, that the cease-fire must be in place.

And finally, we're working very closely with the United Nations. They will be responsible for developing a political solution, and they will be responsible for relieving the U.S. troops in short order. And so we're working all these pieces right now. But today I did order for our military in limited numbers to head in the -- to the area, to help prepare ECOWAS's arrival to relieve human suffering.

Try the model on your own GWB press conference. It's fun for the whole family.

[8:10 PM] Excerpts from the NIE that Condoleezza Rice didn’t get around to reading in its entirety are available here. A cursory look shows lots of other curiosities other than the yellowcake matter. More after the Fields Report team looks at the excerpts after the Daily Show.

[9:47 PM] This is from the White House’s Africa Policy page

In Africa, promise and opportunity sit side by side with disease, war, and desperate poverty. This threatens both a core value of the United States— preserving human dignity—and our strategic priority—combating global terror. American interests and American principles, therefore, lead in the same direction: we will work with others for an African continent that lives in liberty, peace, and growing prosperity.

Together with our allies and friends, we must help strengthen Africa’s fragile states, help build indigenous capability to secure porous borders, and help build up the law enforcement and intelligence infrastructure to deny havens for terrorists. An ever more lethal environment exists in Africa as local civil wars spread beyond borders to create regional war zones. Forming coalitions of the willing and cooperative security arrangements are key to confronting these emerging transnational threats.

But how ironic, once again this administration is forced to put its money where its mouth is. One estimate puts the dead yesterday in fighting in Liberia at 600. Meanwhile the Bush administration is wringing its collective hands deciding what to do. This should have been a no-brainer. Africa is never a priority in U.S. foreign policy; here was a chance to intervene with relatively small force and help out a country with traditional ties to the U.S.

But as analysts are now saying, that the window has closed (not to mention the fact that the administration fiddled while hundreds of civilians were dying).

The administration has "squandered the monthlong opportunity it had during which the cease-fire had held," said Susan Rice, a former Clinton administration national security staffer now at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-area think tank. "The U.S. refusal to say what it was going to do led predictably to the situation deteriorating. Neither the rebels nor the government could be expected to pause indefinitely."

[…]

Bush "had a split memo and a split Cabinet and looked at it before and after his Africa trip and was not anxious to make a decision. The split led him to be very cautious and say, 'Let's know what we are doing here,' " said J. Stephen Morrison, the director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former State Department policy planning staffer.

"Was it a stall strategy? No," Morrison said. "It was a missed opportunity, although playing this one through is going to be ugly and complicated any way it's played."

I don’t know if I could be as generous to say that there was no stall strategy involved. But surely (again), a president with more foreign policy acumen would have acted quicker and more assuredly. And in a cynical way, the PR resulting from acting would have gone a long way, despite less than altruistic reasons for getting involved.

[2:30 PM] I wasn’t exactly a news junkie over the past weekend, but I would have thought that something like this Friday NYT article would have (justifiably) fanned the flames over how the Iran from Africa statement got into the SOTU address. Here’s the first paragraph

The Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies blocked a Bush administration plan to deliver sharp new warnings this week about Syria's efforts to develop unconventional weapons, according to United States government officials.

It continues

A second government official said the assertions spelled out in [undersecretary of state for arms control John Bolton’s] prepared testimony went well beyond what the United States had previously said about Syria's weapons programs.

One would have thought they’d have learned a lesson from the Niger brouhaha.

[9:25 PM] One of the annoying television news media trends since 9/11 and continuing through the war in Afghanistan and now Iraq is the habit of inviting unqualified guests on news shows to discuss complex foreign policy issues—especially issues that have a distinct military or technical element. “Christopher Hitchens, can Saddam build a nuclear weapon?”

This morning on Wolf Blitzer’s morning show on CNN, the trend continued with a twist. Wolf invited Deborah Perry of the Independent Women’s Forum to discuss Iraq and WMD with Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Institute for International Peace. Cirincione is one of the best analysts in the field of nonproliferation. He’s written extensively about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and his book Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction is on the shelf of every weapons analyst working. It’s unclear what Perry’s expertise and her bio doesn’t shed any light on the subject. After watching the show it was clear that security issues weren’t her forte. Cirincione cleans her clock. It’s worth reproducing the transcript at length not only for the delight of seeing an administration apologist struggle with basic issues over which men and women are dying in Iraq, but also to hear a leading analyst talk intelligently about the matter—something the networks seem to avoid in favor of the likes of fellow journalists who have no extensive experience these issues

WOLF BLITZER: An assertion that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Africa, 16 words in the President Bush's State of the Union address, 16 words that have come back to haunt the Bush administration.

[…] Let's talk a little bit about it.

Joe, some people are beginning to conclude, even some hawks going into the war, supporters of the war, that, well you know what? Maybe Hans Blix was right, maybe Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei were right, maybe there was no smoking gun because there were no weapons of mass destruction.

JOE CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT: Well, the U.N. inspections look a lot better now than they did there just in the few months going up to the war when there were so many critics depicting these as people as bumbling Inspector Clusoes (ph). It turns out they were doing a good job. There are no weapons of mass destruction, at least on the level that the president and the officials in the administration claim. There was no ongoing production. There is certainly -- and this is the most important point -- there was no reconstituted nuclear weapons program. There was not an imminent need to go to war.

BLITZER: Go ahead, Deborah.

DEBORAH PERRY, INDEPENDENT WOMEN'S FORUM: Well, all I can do is respond by saying Iraq is a very complicated place. Obviously there are miles and miles of tunnels underneath buildings and a lot of areas that we haven't even explored yet. We've explored a very small percentage at this point. We've got to remember that we've got to take into account hundreds of thousands of pieces of intelligence that we received since 1989 and prior to that, and we've got to figure out how to follow up best that we make sure as few points fall through the cracks and that we keep our country safe.

BLITZER: Joe, we keep hearing Iraq is the size of California.

CIRINCIONE: Well, it is. Most of that is desert, but you can't build a nuclear bomb in the desert. There are known facilities for this kind of activity. We have had thousands of troops -- American, British, Australian troops -- and experts over there for the last three months. We've been to over 250 top sites. And as the Marine general in charge of this operation said, we have found nothing.

And the problem that presents for the president is that we're going to find something. There will be some mustard gas shells, there will be some parts, there will be some plans, but there isn't this large, ongoing WMD program -- not nuclear, not chemical and not biological. So, why did we have to go to war? Why couldn't we let the inspections work?

PERRY: Well, that was one reason why we went to war, and they don't necessarily have to be assembled in Iraq. Things can be produced there. It can be assembled elsewhere. We still don't know. I mean, this is a very new situation that we're exploring. It's been an issue that has been really getting tumultuous over the years. We're going to be learning a lot as the months come. We could be sitting here now in two weeks and discover weapons of mass destruction.

BLITZER: Let's take a caller. Linda from Connecticut, go ahead with your question.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you for taking my call. I'm wondering how it is that we could have spent so many millions of dollars investigating a blue dress in the last administration and not be curious about how those 16 words came into the State of the Union. Should we not call for an independent council to investigate who it allowed it into his speech? And why if they were not sure of that information did it get into it?

BLITZER: What about that?

CIRINCIONE: Well...

BLITZER: Let's let Deborah answer that.

PERRY: Well, that actually is taking place now, and I'm all for accountability. But again, we've got to remember all of the bits and pieces of human intelligence. We rely on foreign nationals. We rely on foreign governments. We do the best we can. It is not an exact science. We've got to be able to continue to rely on foreign individuals that are going to provide to us information, and we'll have to decide how credible or not it is.

BLITZER: Go ahead, Joe.

CIRINCIONE: Yes, but you're dodging the question. What she's asking is: How did those 16 words get in the speech? You know, the president would like this debate to be over. That's what he said. His press secretary said it's over. We don't have to talk about this anymore. Well, Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, just re-raised the issue on the talk shows with Donald Rumsfeld yesterday. They're now claiming that, in fact, those 16 words are accurate -- that it was accurate. A Clintonesque (ph) definition, you raised the blue dress, we're back to those Clinton definitions. What's the definition of, "is?" What's the definition of "weapon of mass destruction?"

They're trying to have it both ways. They want it over. And the reason Condoleezza Rice is spinning it this way is it turns out, according to "The New York Times" on Saturday, it was her staffed, Robert Joseph, Bob Joseph, who insisted on putting this sentence in the speech. So, Condoleezza Rice is protecting not just the president, but herself and the National Security Council staff by insisting that it be over.

BLITZER: Well, they sort of tried to parse words -- and I'll let Deborah respond -- that the British government, in precise words, say that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. Well, historically they did seek to buy uranium at some point, yellow cake, in Africa.

PERRY: You know, what's interesting...

BLITZER: But technically they're parsing their words.

PERRY: Right. Here, we're having this debate where we want to have collaborative efforts and we shouldn't go at this alone. So, we're in a situation where we were reliant on a foreign government who was providing information.

BLITZER: But it's one thing to rely on a foreign government and to get intelligence when you suspect they're right, but when the intelligence professionals suspect they're wrong and they themselves have come up with an opposite conclusion, do you still go ahead and rely on that foreign government?

PERRY: I think you do the best you can under the circumstances. You know, we've got to remember, we are in a post-9/11 world, where we never thought airplanes would be used as weapons. And so, we've got to be able to filter out the good from the bad, the credible from the non-credible.

BLITZER: She says err on the side of caution.

CIRINCIONE: Well, Deborah, I mean, you're being a little disingenuous here. If this was a Democrat you'd be ripping him up one side and down the other.

PERRY: I'm all for accountability, there's no question about it.

CIRINCIONE: Well...

PERRY: And we can go back and have an investigative council look into this. There is no question about that, but...

CIRINCIONE: Excellent. Then we agree on that. We need a congressional investigation.

BLITZER: All right, let's take another caller. Ray, go ahead. You're in California.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm going to say, I'm a little disappointed, because I think the biggest issue, which I don't hear anybody making reference to, is the fact that there are innocent Iraqi citizens, and more importantly to me, American soldiers that are dead as a direct result of this information. I would think that above and beyond anything regarding who did it, the CIA or whoever, the president and the staffers should be calling for an investigation for their sake, I mean, if for no other reasons. Don't you think the same thing? Thanks.

BLITZER: Well, I think both of our guests, Ray, already said they agree, there should be some sort of investigation. And a lot of people, even some Republicans, want that investigation. Richard Shelby, one of the former chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, yesterday told me he'd like to see such an investigation. There are other Republicans saying go ahead with an investigation as well.

Let's get to an e-mail for Deborah. This is from Rick in Pennsylvania: "The vice president's office, the CIA and the NSA knew months before that the information about Iraq trying to acquire nuclear material was false. They removed it from a speech from October. It was simply a scare tactic to get people to support the war, and it worked."

PERRY: Well, I don't think that's the case. I don't know that to be a fact; I don't know it not to be a fact. Again, we've got to rely on 18 different intelligence agencies that we have here domestically, not to mention trying to work in concert with other foreign governments, foreign nationals on the ground. We do the best we can with the resources we've got. I think if anything 9/11 was a real wakeup that we need to do a better job of having a less bureaucratic intelligence system.

BLITZER: We've got -- Joe, this from Jim in Columbia, California, echoing a point we made earlier, but let's get your reaction to this. "There was no mistake in the State of the Union address. The sentence is technically accurate. Get over it. Move on to a new topic. Stop picking on Bush."

CIRINCIONE: Well, the problem is, the president meets a higher standard, must meet a higher standard. It's not enough to say it was technically accurate, that the British intelligence said this. The question is: Is it true? Is he being honest with the American public? And that's where he's falling down, and the administration officials are continuing to spin now, because it's not just the uranium from Africa. It's also the whole question of: Was there a reconstituted nuclear program?

And this is the first claim they've had to withdraw. Condoleezza Rice was on television yesterday defending the aluminum tubes story, and once again she was disingenuous. She said that most analysts agree that these aluminum tubes could be used for nuclear weapons. She neglected to say that the two most important agencies -- the Department of Energy and the State Department, the people who know the most about it -- disagreed. We need a full vetting of all of the information we had.

BLITZER: Deborah, go ahead.

PERRY: Well, I think while that's great on its face and it absolutely sounds idealistic in a perfect world, it's never going to be the case. We're never going to be able to discern always between credible and non-credible evidence. We do the best we can with the resources we've got, and that's what we've got to continue to do, so that we can ensure not just a safer country for ourselves, a safer world, that we actually start to resolve some conflicts in the Middle East beyond Iraq.

CIRINCIONE: If we can't determine between credible and non- credible evidence, I don't know what we're paying these guys for. Of course, we can determine that. As one of your callers said, guys are dying because we went to war. There's a kid in Iraq dying every day now, and that's why the American public is concerned about it. They're making the link between soldiers dying and possibly administration officials lying.

BLITZER: Joe, you're a respected analyst. You've been around this community a long time. Do you believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to use against the United States or its friends in the region on the eve of the war?

CIRINCIONE: No. Precisely the way you said it. We all thought there were some weapons there. I still think there are some weapons there, but this was never a debate over weapons; it was over war. Did we have to go to war to eliminate that threat? And it's obvious now that there were not programs on the scale the administration said. There were no weapons ready to go. I'm telling you, if there were, there was a large-scale production, if there were dozens of Scuds, we would have seen it by now. We've had hundreds of Iraqis coming out to us with information.

Interesting that Wolf doesn’t ask Deborah her opinion on the existence of WMD prior to the war.

BLITZER: Let's take another caller from Georgia. Betty, go ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm calling from Memphis, Tennessee.

BLITZER: Tennessee. Go ahead, Betty.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think I was (UNINTELLIGIBLE) 9/11, I almost believed anything the president said. I watched his State of the Union address, and I really believed it was weapons of mass destruction, you know, there. And I don't know. I can't believe anything now because, you know, they are not showing the weapons. Nobody can seem to find anything.

BLITZER: Deborah?

PERRY: Well, you know, it's one thing about our society. We want things done on an expedient basis, just like our foreign policy has been carried out for some time. I think there are a number of reasons why we originally went to war. I think weapons of mass destruction has become the Achilles heel, if you will.

BLITZER: But that was the most important reason.

PERRY: Absolutely. But there has been legitimate evidence to believe there was weapons of mass destruction, and there was an imminent threat carrying out throughout the nation as well, not only through Iraq, but through countries...

(CROSSTALK)

Stupid and disingenuous question from the host alert

BLITZER: But, Joe, I was in Kuwait on the eve of the war. I saw a lot of U.S. troops. They all got their full chemical suits on. They had their gas masks. I had a gas mask. We were all told, you know, get ready, it's probable, it's almost certain that there is going to be a chemical or a biological attack. Get ready for it. They went in there fully dressed for these protective purposes. Do you think that the Central Command General Tommy Franks would order a quarter of a million U.S. and British forces to go into Iraq dressed for that contingency if they didn't believe it to be the case?

CIRINCIONE: Well, you had to be ready for the worst case, and so you have to prepare for that kind of thing. There's no question about it. But clearly what happened was we relied much more heavily on defector information, and you can see it as you go back over the documents. A defector says he went to 20 sites where there were chemical and biological weapons. It turns out they were wrong. And this is exactly the kind of intelligence failure that we have to get to the bottom of. It's not enough to have a defector tell you this. It turns out they saw protective gear and they thought, well, there must be weapons there, but there weren't. The defector information was wrong. We never should have been relying on those guys for our plans to go to war.

BLITZER: Briefly, Deborah, the last word. Go ahead.

PERRY: I think we're absolutely on the right track. I think we went to war for the right reasons. We are making progress. We're creating a democracy that is tremendous. It can be a model for the rest of the Middle East, and that can make us live in a much safer world.

Even Wolf joined in on the inanity with the “question” about the chemical suits. It’s clear how much networks enjoy this debate format; and they went with the right person in Cirincione to have a genuine discussion on WMD. The network just couldn’t resist the temptation to add a combative factor and of course they chose someone eager to pick a fight over politics but less than familiar with the issues (to put it kindly). How does this help inform the public?

[11:33 AM] I hadn’t realized there was such an entity as the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute, which studies post-conflict situations and disseminates lessons learned from past peacekeeping operations to the armed forces. Nor did I know that the Bush administration had decided to shut it down and has now reconsidered. When I read this Christian Science Monitor article I assumed that the decision was a post-Iraq reaction. But apparently I missed the original reporting on this and the decision was originally taken in the summer of 2002. Much like most of the administration’s foreign policy, this turnaround, is likely the result of the realities of the real world, that George W. Bush was astonishingly ignorant about (and still is) during the 2000 election cycle.

But flip-flops like this are business as usual for this White House. Fields Report wants to take this opportunity to put out an idea he has had for some time—an idea which admittedly has received very little support among my colleagues and friends alike. What can the U.S. do about this peacekeeping/humanitarian intervention dilemma? It won’t go away. The last three presidents have all struggled with it. Some, like GWB, don’t won’t to go that route for philosophical reasons—“We don’t need to have the Eighty-Second Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten,” as Condi Rice put it during the campaign. Others like Bill Clinton, likely would favor more robust intervention, but are faced with the realities of using a military ill-equipped to perform such tasks.

So let’s address both problems: Establish a permanent Peacekeeping Corps. This would be a division of the U.S. armed forces that would train exclusively to be peacekeepers; sort of an armed Peace Corps. The volunteers would receive the same basic training that soldiers or marines do. But after that, their additional training would be strictly related to post-conflict scenarios: language training, urban combat, cultural sensitivity, policing, etc. Some sort of executive mandate would have to be made to exclude them from active combat service no matter what. This type of service might attract the more gung ho types that might join the Peace Corps but maybe are looking for a little more action, yet can’t see joining the “regular” military. The Peacekeeping Corps could work like Americorps in that service could help defray the cost of college education. A Corps of 10,000 volunteers at the ready would make decisions like the one the president is facing over Liberia easier.

More on this later.

[4:17 PM] As is becoming routine in the public discussion of weapons of mass destruction especially with regards to Iraq, larger, important issues are often missed in favor of smaller, sexier, less complicated and less important ones. The recent brouhaha over the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal is an example. It is certainly important to explore whether the administration manipulated or stretched intelligence to make its case for war in Iraq. So whether Iraq was in reality seeking to purchase yellowcake from Niger is an important topic. But the case for or against war can’t hinge on whether this is true or not. If the allegations were true – and it appears that they are most certainly not – Iraq would still have to take the yellowcake and enrich the uranium for a weapon. This is not an insignificant task. Were this story true, in the absence credible intelligence suggesting Iraq had suddenly reconstituted its ability to enrich uranium (which it never mastered before the first Gulf War), the yellowcake alone would not be evidence of an imminent Iraqi nuclear threat. Let us not forget that the IAEA didn’t find much to a clandestine Iraqi nuclear program either

Neither Iraqi declarations nor IAEA inspections have given rise to any new information of significance regarding the period covering Iraq's past nuclear programme (pre-1991) or the evolution of its nuclear-related capabilities between 1991 and 1998.

[…]

In the first eight weeks of inspections, the IAEA has visited all sites identified by it or by States as significant. No evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities at those locations has been detected to date during these inspections, although not all of the laboratory results of sample analysis are yet available. Nor have the inspections thus far revealed signs of new nuclear facilities or direct support to any nuclear activity. However, further verification activities will be necessary before the IAEA will be able to provide credible assurance that Iraq has no nuclear weapons programme.

On March 7, Mohamed ElBaradei would report that “After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.” This not so insignificant finding should not be lost as the debate turn over uranium from Niger.

[12:19 PM] Much is being made of the George W. Bush’s five nation trip to Africa this week. This Washington Post article examines some of Bush’s motivations in recent interest in U.S. policy in Africa. The article makes much of the pressure Bush received from evangelicals to get involved in Sudan to stop Christians from being terrorized by the Islamic government. Bush appointed former senator John Danforth as special envoy to Sudan. Read his report on the outlook for peace in Sudan here. As it quotes people and facts and figures on both sides of the “is Bush really serious about Africa,” the case really isn’t made that Bush is serious. The most serious charge to this effect is the U.S. apathy toward the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Susan Rice, who was assistant secretary of state for Africa during Clinton's second term, said the "jury is still out" on whether Bush is prepared to invest real resources in Africa. "They have spent a lot of time on the Sudan issue, but haven't been very engaged in the Congo, and places like Burundi, where the Clinton administration was actively engaged."

Salon has a nice essay on what the author sees as Bush’s phony concern for human suffering in Africa.