Instead of being praised for his work with the commission’s co-chair, former Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, Republicans are accusing Gore of negotiating secret deals that flouted American laws and allowed Russia to continue selling arms to Iran. They also charge that he undermined Washington policy towards Moscow, turned a blind eye to Russian corruption and missed opportunities to stabilize the country’s collapsing economy.
But are these fair criticisms? Or are they Republican red herrings intended to distract Gore–and the voters–in the final days of the campaign? Mostly, it’s the latter. “The allegations that are being made are driven by election year partisan politics,” says Jon Wolfsthal, an associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I think it’s wrong to take one activity out of context and paint it in a partisan light.”
The GOP claims that Gore mishandled Russian policy on several fronts. Its most-publicized charge: that Gore signed a secret 1995 agreement with Chernormyrdin allowing Russia to continue selling weapons to Iran. The thrust of the agreement was that while Russia would make no new arms deals with Iran, it would be allowed to deliver already-sold items–including 160 T-72 tanks, 600 armored personnel carriers and a diesel-powered Kilo-class submarine–by Dec. 31, 1999. In return, Washington promised not to invoke sanctions against Moscow under a 1992 law imposing such measures against any country that delivered advancedweapons to Iran.
Russia failed to meet last year’s deadline. And in October, Republican lawmakers accused Gore of breaking his own 1992 law–written together with Senator John McCain when Gore himself was still in the Senate–by not imposing economic embargoes on Moscow. “The law requires them to use the sanctions,” said Sam Brownback, the Republican Senator who presided over a foreign relations committee hearing on the subject on Oct. 25. “It may be their opinion that they don’t want to use the sanctions, but the law requires it.”
Not so, argue Administration officials. John P. Barker, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation Controls, testified during last week’s committee hearing that the Gore-McCain sanctions law was not violated because the weapons Russia had sold to Iran did not meet the definition of “advanced conventional weapons” under the Act.
McCain himself is more skeptical, describing the Administration position as “probably false.” “Both Vice President Gore and I cited transfers of Kilo-class sub deliveries as weapons Gore-McCain intended to prevent,” he said in a statement on Oct. 13. “And it is highly debatable that the other conventional weapons transfers to Iran do not amount to destabilizing amounts of advanced weapons.”
However, at least some independent scholars disagree with McCain’s view. “Iran does represent a potential threat to U.S. interests, but it has not had a major conventional arms build-up or received destabilizing transfers of advanced conventional weapons,” wrote Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in an Oct. 15 report. “The violations of U.S. and Russian agreements have been minor, have had little military meaning, and have been more technical than substantive.” Says the Carnegie Endowment’s Wolfsthal: “There’s a very good argument that [the sales] were militarily insignificant. These were not cutting edge weapons. They added only incrementally to Iran’s weapons capability.”
Nor was the agreement exactly a secret. While certain details still remain confidential, the White House held press conferences about it and U.S. newspapers carried reports of it at the time. In addition, Barker told the hearing, Congressional committees and interested House members received both open and classified briefings on it several times between 1995 and 1997. “I don’t think it was meant to be a secret deal,” says Toby Gati, a former assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research who helped the Clinton Administration develop its Russia policy. “It was not meant to be public because that’s how a lot of diplomacy is conducted. If you want public diplomacy, you can go to CNN.”
What of the other GOP charges? The Speaker’s Advisory Group, a Congressional panel led by Republican Christopher Cox, issued a September report blaming a Gore-led “troika” for what it considered the failure of the Clinton Administration’s Russia policy. The report is especially critical of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, established in 1993 to manage a wide range of U.S.-Russia issues. “The meager accomplishments of the Commission could hardly mask its fundamental failures,” says the report. “Russia even today lacks the most basic elements of a free market economy; the costs and delays from U.S.-Russian space cooperation continued to accelerate; the “privatization” of Russia’s energy sector was becoming criminally corrupt; and Russia was accelerating its proliferation of dangerous technology.”
Paula Dobriansky, a pro-Bush Russia expert who testified at the GOP platform hearings on the country last June, says she believes that Gore “frittered away” opportunities to promote Russia’s development. The Administration has not dealt with the country’s corruption and had failed to appreciate how its powerful Kremlin-aligned criminal syndicates could influence Moscow politics, she says.
Dobriansky believes the Administration also erred in condoning massive infusions of foreign aid which was neither monitored nor tracked. Bush has backed away from his debate claim that Chernomyrdin lined his own pockets with loans from the International Monetary Fund and the IMF says it has no evidence of such misappropriation. Nonetheless, argues Dobriansky, that money was “at best wasted and at worst stolen.” “I feel that the [administration’s] handling of Russia’s economic affairs has basically been inept,” she says. “While primary responsibility for Russia’s problems rest with Russia’s leaders, I think that our mistakes–American mistakes–have contributed to Russia’s economic and political problems.”
It is true that the Administration did miss some opportunities to shore up the Russian economy before it collapsed in 1998. “There is some deserved criticism that there was not complete vigilance in terms of tracking every dollar,” says the Carnegie Endowment’s Wolfsthal. Still, he argues, Gore should get some credit for the gains he did achieve. “Look at what the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission accomplished. It eliminated nuclear weapons from three former Soviet republics–Kazakstan, Belarus and Ukraine.
It ended up destroying hundreds of missiles capable of delivering thousands of warheads [to the United States.]”
Administration supporters also argue that the vice president’s Russia policy initiatives–especially the deal over arms to Iran–should be examined in the political context prevailing at the time. Barker, the nonproliferation expert, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that without the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement Iran today “would have received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sensitive nuclear technology and would be well on the way to mastering the nuclear fuel cycle.” “It did not give us everything we wanted, but it did eliminate those aspects of cooperation with Iran that presented a clear and present danger to our national security,” said Barker.
Gati, now a senior advisor to an international law firm, says the Administration took the chance that the five years allotted by the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement on Iranian arms sales would give the Russian economy enough time to stabilize so that would have less need for the foreign currency generated by such sales. At the same time, the White House also hoped Moscow could be won over to Washington’s views about the regional threat posed by Iran. None of that has happened. But to what extent should the vice president be held accountable for Russia’s ongoing internal problems? “Gore was extremely conscientious in learning all he could about Russia,” says Gati. “He understood the risks and tradeoffs he was taking [in signing the agreement]. The problem with the deal is that anybody who studies Russia knows that two, three, five years is an eternity.” To Gore, at least, the debate probably feels almost that long.
