USA Today August 13, 2002
Some question motives behind leaks about Iraq
By John Diamond
WASHINGTON -- A newspaper article reports on a war plan, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fumes that the source of the story should go to jail. A Web site posts commercial satellite photos of U.S. military planes massing at a Mideast base, and irate e-mails come in demanding, "How much is Saddam paying you?"
As talk of a U.S. invasion aimed at toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein intensifies, some are saying news media reporting is compromising classified military plans and putting lives in danger. Past deployments have received advance coverage, but some administration officials complain that an unprecedented level of detail about the possible assault is giving valuable intelligence to the enemy. "Anyone who has a position where they touch a war plan has an obligation to not leak it to the press or anybody else because it kills people," Rumsfeld railed after one recent leak. "If people start treating war plans like they're paper airplanes and they can fly them around this building and throw them to anybody who wants them, I think it's outrageous. . . . They ought to be in jail."
So far, no one at the Pentagon has been locked up for leaking to reporters, sparking a different kind of speculation: the possibility that the Bush administration is letting slip tantalizing but ultimately harmless bits of military information to confuse the enemy or win over skeptics.
During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, U.S. commanders used news leaks and other means to lead Iraq to believe that Marines would land on the Kuwaiti coast. In 1944, Allied forces used inflatable dummy tanks and false radio traffic to lure Germany into worrying about a non-existent army.
There are many reasons for the volume of information about a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. As a rule, the United States doesn't do Pearl Harbor-style sneak attacks. Especially since the collapse of public support for the Vietnam War, lawmakers have argued that the United States cannot embark on a major military commitment without the backing of the public. That requires a public debate and some detail about the military commitment to come.
Virtually everyone who leaks to the press has an agenda. Sometimes an official wants a plan scrutinized in the hopes the exposure will kill it. Sometimes trial balloons are floated to test reaction.
Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver says leaks have actually helped President Bush advance his Iraq agenda by getting Congress, allies and the public used to a controversial idea.
"Bush administration officials understandably complain about the leaks, but on balance, the leaks have helped rather than hurt," says Feaver, who worked on President Clinton's National Security Council staff. "The leaks have shifted the debate from 'should we go?' to 'how should we go?' "
After more than a month of intensive coverage, several Iraq scenarios have been aired. They range from small, swift attacks involving elite commandos swooping in on Saddam's Baghdad redoubts to a full-scale invasion involving nearly 300,000 troops.
"The cacophony is its own form of deception," says Kenneth Allard, who teaches national security courses at Georgetown University. He says some of the leaks may be deliberate disinformation drawing on Winston Churchill's assertion that in wartime, the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by "a bodyguard of lies."
The Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon disagrees. He says a report last month in The New York Times contained information that would help Saddam prepare for a U.S. attack. "This was actually a very serious leak," he says. "It was a big mistake."
Senior administration officials make no secret of their hope that Iraqi military officers may hear the war drums beating in Washington and be encouraged to topple Saddam on their own.
Even the prodigious volume of debate on a possible Iraq attack does not give away the exact time, place and method of the actual operation. Germany knew the Allies were coming in the spring of 1944, but they didn't know it would be Normandy on June 6.
John Pike, whose GlobalSecurity.org Web site published the satellite pictures that drew angry e-mail, says superior force and execution, not surprise, are the keys to success. The options for attacking Iraq, he says, are well known.
"Anyone who watches the History Channel can game this one," Pike says. "There's only a short list of military options available to the United States, and anyone who knows which end the bullet comes out of is going to figure out those options pretty quickly."
Copyright 2002 Gannett Company, Inc.
