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Graham leaves Washington with little optimism for Bush's second term

By William E. Gibson / South Florida Sun-Sentinel

WASHINGTON · Wrapping up a distinguished yet often frustrating 18 years on Capitol Hill, Florida Sen. Bob Graham says he foresees an ideological Bush administration forcing its will on a polarized Congress while international terrorist groups continue to gather strength abroad.

A centrist Democrat who sought consensus in a sharply divided Congress, Graham leaves office without much optimism for the near future. A stalled intelligence reform bill in the waning days of this session is just the latest of his exasperations.

"In terms of the total intelligence community, unless Congress can resolve this stalemate, I don't feel very optimistic," the retiring senator said in an interview last week in his office, which he will soon vacate.

Graham, former chairman of the Senate's intelligence committee, gained national stature over the past few years as a security watchdog constantly warning about the spread of terrorist groups and the nation's vulnerabilities. Now a kind of elder statesman on intelligence matters, he plans to teach and lead research at Harvard University and to establish two centers in Florida to train intelligence officers.

"I'm concerned that our adversary has strengthened in the last 31/2 years," Graham said. "Al-Qaida, for instance, has reorganized itself. It's less like General Motors and more like Burger King, in the sense that instead of a very hierarchical structure, now it's decentralized into some 60 different countries, with al-Qaida forming a partnership with local and regional terrorist groups."

Graham, though never known as a bomb-thrower, took a bold and quixotic stand in 2002 against the impending war in Iraq.

He told his colleagues in a blistering Senate speech that sending troops to remove Saddam Hussein would distract attention and divert resources from what he now calls "the real war on terror."

Most Democratic Party leaders, including presidential candidate John Kerry, eventually adopted Graham's stance on Iraq, and it remains the chief argument against the war policy.

Now Graham says he fears that terrorists pose an even greater threat than they did in 2001.

"There are a lot more international terrorists today than there were 31/2 years ago," he said. "They've been able to recruit a lot of additional people. We have erected billboards across the Middle East encouraging young fanatics to join terrorist groups by what we've been doing in Iraq. And we've significantly fractured our relations with some of the allies who will be necessary to win the war on terror."

Bush defense

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to argue that Hussein's regime harbored terrorists and that the war in Iraq is an integral part of the war on terror.

"In Iraq, we saw a threat, and we realized that after Sept. 11 we must take threats seriously, before they fully materialize," Bush said during the first presidential debate in Miami last September. "Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell. America and the world are safer for it."

Evidence of direct links between Hussein and al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, however, remains sketchy, lending credence to Graham's theory.

Conservative defense analysts note that Bush, who was told that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, had multiple reasons for invading Iraq apart from reacting to the hijacked-airliner attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Sen. Graham's thesis that Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror was correct, but we have to keep in mind that terrorism was not the only threat that we believed Hussein presented," said Loren Thompson, defense analyst and chief of operations at the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank in Virginia.

"Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons would be much more of a threat than Saddam Hussein with airliners," Thompson added.

Thompson and other security experts say the president had been victimized by faulty intelligence indicating that Hussein was developing dangerous weapons.

Graham now plans to do his part to improve the quality of intelligence by establishing training centers for spies modeled on the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

"During the Cold War, we were so dependent on machines that human intelligence withered," Graham said. "What we have left are products of the Cold War who understand Russia and speak Russian but don't know a lot about Iran or Afghanistan or Iraq and certainly don't speak the languages of those parts of the world."

Graham said these training centers could dovetail with attempts by former Florida congressman Porter Goss, now CIA director, to transform the intelligence service by putting greater emphasis on human spies rather than satellites and technology.

Graham, who endorsed Bush's selection of Goss as director of intelligence, defended his old friend and colleague, who faces an internal rebellion from senior career officers at the CIA.

"The very reason we are talking about major reform, not just of the CIA but the whole intelligence community, is because of the series of mistakes that have been made," Graham said. "It's going to take some significant changing of people, mission and organizational structure to increase the chances that we won't repeat those mistakes. So it's not surprising that Porter is making significant changes. They need to be made."

Consensus or not

While the CIA struggles to reform itself, Congress will become even more polarized than it has been through most of his three Senate terms, Graham predicted.

He advised Democrats to be the loyal opposition, "but that doesn't mean you should be lap dogs. When you disagree with policies suggested by the president or Republicans in Congress, you not only have the right but the obligation to say so."

Republicans will gain four seats in the Senate that convenes on Jan. 4, increasing their prospects for pushing through conservative legislation and the president's judicial appointments.

"It may be at a point where Republicans can do just about whatever they want to do without needing to negotiate with Democrats," Graham said.

"These tax cuts are going to be made permanent. That will add another $500 billion to a trillion dollars to the debt. If the president's proposed Social Security changes are made, that will add another trillion. There are a lot of the president's proposals that have big price tags, all of which are going to add to the annual deficit and long-term debt."

Graham's successor, senator-elect Mel Martinez, a Republican ally of the White House, last week offered a much sunnier assessment of the prospects for reaching consensus and solving problems in the new session. After attending orientation meetings for new senators, Martinez said he found common cause with Florida Sen. Bill Nelson and other Democrats.

"I'm naive enough to believe that we can carry this on," Martinez said. "I'm very hopeful that this spirit [of cooperation] during the orientation process can be carried on beyond that timeframe."

Graham departs the Senate with Democrats in a foul mood after elections that strengthened Bush's hand and left them more firmly in the minority.

Despite his own gloomy predictions, Graham advised his party to stay its course and not get too discouraged.

"I'm not one to say we all need to go jump off a building," he said.

"What Democrats don't need to do is change our basic principles," Graham added. "We are a big-tent party. `Opportunity' has been the principle word in our vocabulary. That should continue."