May 16, 2006

Said Bruce W. Jentleson ("a foreign-policy adviser to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign and professor at Duke University, who has written the most detailed study of why Col. Gadhafi abandoned WMD"). He's interviewed by Judith Miller in the first part of a two-part article about what changed Moammar al-Gadhafi.

[A] review of confidential government records and interviews with current and former officials in London, Tripoli, Vienna and Washington suggest that ... a heretofore undisclosed intelligence coup--the administration's decision in late 2003 to give Libyan officials a compact disc containing intercepts of a conversation about Libya's nuclear weapons program between Libya's nuclear chief and A.Q. Khan--that reinforced Col. Gadhafi's decision to reverse course on WMD.

While analysts continue to debate his motivation, evidence suggests that a mix of intelligence, diplomacy and the use of force in Iraq helped persuade him that the weapons he had pursued since he came to power, and on which he had secretly spent $300 million ($100 million on nuclear equipment and material alone), made him more, not less, vulnerable. "The administration overstates Iraq, but its critics go too far in saying that force played no role," says Bruce W. Jentleson, a foreign-policy adviser to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign and professor at Duke University, who has written the most detailed study of why Col. Gadhafi abandoned WMD: "It was force and diplomacy, not force or diplomacy that turned Gadhafi around . . . a combination of steel and a willingness to deal."

6 comments:

I don't think there is any doubt that Lybia openned up its borders and changed its course when the US invaded Iraq. No one knows to what extent that influenced the diplomatic front, but rest assured, it did.

I should also point out that the previous statement was not one of the reasons the current administrattion used to go to war in Iraq.

I do find it extremely interesting that Judith Miller is conduction the interview.

As U.S. and British troops began flooding into Kuwait, Col. Gadhafi grew agitated, diplomats said. Italian press accounts quote then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as saying that Col. Gadhafi had called him to say he feared he would be America's next target. "Tell them I will do whatever they want," said one diplomat, recounting the call.

That seems to me to downplay the actual report:

A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

Hey, All's well that ends well. I have no problem with combining force and diplomacy. The problem with some previous administrations is that they were all diplomacy and no credible threat of force. You can think of it as the carrot and the stick, or good cop/bad cop. But the reality is that the combination of the two most often works better than either alone does.

And pavlov's dog proves that you should not respond the same way to any behavior all the time. The best way to instill a preferred behavior is to give the subject a carrot or the stick on a random basis.