A Hawk Who Earned His Feathers Under Clinton

FORWARD | September 27, 2005
By MAX GROSS

Kenneth Pollack is the ultimate guy behind the guy... behind the guy.

Pollack, 36, has spent the last 12 years in the upper echelons of government and intelligence work. In his capacity as a CIA analyst, director of Gulf affairs for the National Security Council and director of research for the liberal Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, he has conferred with kings, presidents and prime ministers — nearly always in the capacity of aide-de-camp.

But the behind-the-scenes expert is now making his voice heard on the main stage.

With the publication of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" (Random House), Pollack has become a leading figure among the punditocracy supporting a pre-emptive American strike on Baghdad. So far he's made his case on CNN, NPR, Fox News, CSPAN and Charlie Rose's and Oprah Winfrey's television shows; Senator Joseph Lieberman quoted from the book on the floor of the Senate during the debate on Iraq last month.

Pollack, who was once called by one of his colleagues "the most hawkish man in the Clinton administration," does not consider himself a hawk in the mold of Richard Perle, Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration neoconservatives who have been at the forefront of the call to arms against Iraq.

"I had some real policy disagreements with many of the neocons, in particular with Paul Wolfowitz," said Pollack, peeking out from behind a pair of thin, wire-rimmed glasses. "They had been supporting this idea of arming the Iraqi opposition to overthrow Saddam, and I had been one of the most vocal critics saying that trying to use the Iraqi opposition was dangerous. And as a result I have not won myself a lot of friends in the far right of the Republican Party. I'm a firm believer in getting rid of the guy [Saddam], but my point all along has been don't think you can do it on the cheap. We tried — and failed."

Pollack also parts company with the neocons in that he strongly supports invading Iraq with the help of allies, wants a lull in Israeli-Palestinian fighting before the invasion starts and wants to rebuild Iraq when it's all over rather than allowing the nascent regime to flounder.

The case he builds in "The Threatening Storm" is one available to any diligent student of Iraq, he said. Before Pollack submitted the book to Random House, he gave a copy to the CIA to make sure he wasn't divulging any secrets. Pollack, who has been privy to a great deal of classified information, said that there was much that he left out.

But even within these constraints, Pollack assembled a mountain of evidence to make the case for the failure of containment. He shows the increasing amount of money Saddam makes through smuggling: "Whereas [in] 1999 Saddam's regime netted only about $350 million," Pollack writes, "in 2002 it will rake in $2.5 billion to $3 billion." France and Russia were rewarded by Saddam with oil-for-food contracts for making sure that the United Nations sanctions and inspections remained toothless and ill-enforced. Even Iraq's enemies, including Syria and Iran, kept lucrative smuggling routes open.

Because of all these failures, Pollack argues, Iraq will eventually attain nuclear capability, and given Saddam's propensity toward aggression, lash out with them. The question, then, is not "will we go to war?", but "when will we go to war?"

Pollack, a New Yorker before moving to Washington, talked with the Forward at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel in New York, yearning for a bagel and lox.

Pollack grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attending Horace Mann preparatory school and later Yale University. In 1988 he joined the CIA. As a junior analyst in 1990, he was one of the few people at the agency to argue that Iraq would invade Kuwait, but was drowned out by the higher-ups who never thought that Saddam would do something so rash.

Ever since then, Iraq has been on his mind.

After leaving the CIA he completed his Ph.D. in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was invited into the Clinton administration under National Security Advisor Samuel "Sandy" Berger.

In addition to "The Threatening Storm," Pollack recently published "Arabs at War" (University of Nebraska), another massive text that surveys the history of Arab armies during the last 50 years. "I wrote ['Arabs at War'] four years ago... I knew it was a pretty safe bet that [the Middle East] would be back in the news," Pollack said with a sad grin.

And if that weren't enough, Iraq has crept into his personal life.

"I met my wife because of Iraq," Pollack said. Andrea Koppel — daughter of longtime ABC newsman Ted Koppel — was looking for an expert on Iraq for a story she was working on as the State Department correspondent for CNN. After months of trading phone calls, the two finally met and fell in love.

"There were a couple of times when I was at the NSC [National Security Council] where something would break in the newspaper and Andrea would come storming in with a copy of The New York Times or The Washington Post, throw it at me and say, 'So that's what you've been working on for the last two weeks!'" Pollack said. "She's constantly trying to wheedle things out of me."

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