Faulty Intelligence
Josh Marshall is doing a good job of pulling together the threads that have to be considered on the "faulty intelligence/WMDs/links between Saddam and Al Qaeda" issues. (See here and scroll down).
On the one hand, as we know from Ken Pollack and others, major intelligence agencies including the CIA over-stated the threat posed by Iraq for years. This swayed the judgment of the Clinton administration as well as that of Bush II.
On the other hand, the most extreme risks, which were only in the worst-case scenarios, or at the margins, in the "official" analyses, somehow came to be front and centre in the way the Bush administration presented its message to the world.
Did someone deliberately torque or spin the analysis to make Iraq look as threatening as possible? Was the President presented only with the torqued analysis, or did he insist on adding some spin in order to make the case for going to war?
More later.
Update: Marshall on WMDs:
"... for the moment let's stipulate that the US intelligence community got some major facts wrong and that we need to find out why and make improvements.
"Having said that.... We didn't go to war because Iraq had mustard gas or nerve gas or even anthrax. The threat, as presented by the White House, went far beyond that. All WMD are not created equal. Indeed, the catch-all phrase "weapons of mass destruction" obscures much more than it clarifies. It groups together things like mustard gas, which is really a battlefield weapon, with nuclear weapons, which really are weapons of mass destruction.
"The White House was well aware of this. And for that reason it repeatedly pressed the argument that Iraq was close to creating nuclear warheads --- a point over which there was very real disagreement within the Intelligence Community."
Even if Iraq had WMDs, of course, that in itself would not (to many people) justify invasion. There had to be a link to 9/11, or international terrorism. Marshall again:
"On the question of ties to al Qaida one can't say there was a great deal of disagreement within the Intelligence Community, because the White House had real difficulty finding any intelligence professionals who believed that this was true. This, after all, is why administration officials at the Pentagon set up their own intelligence analysis shop --- because most people in the Intelligence Community didn't buy their argument about the connections between the Iraqi regime and al Qaida."
Marshall's concern is that after months when the politicals in the Bush administration criticized the CIA and other agencies for under-stating the Iraq threat, or presenting an analysis that undermined the case for invasion, or suggesting that more preparation was needed than was actually being made, now the consistent over-statement of the Iraq threat is going to be blamed on: the CIA!
If so, this will surely go down as one of the great examples of spin. Gulf War I gave us the "Iraqi soldiers slaughtering newborn babies in incubators" story--a total fabrication, probably originating with a Kuwaiti princess, but promulgated with great gusto and no research by PR firm Hill & Knowlton. I believe that is still celebrated by H&K, and probably taught in Business school, as a great example of successful PR based not on facts but on wishes. Maybe Gulf War II will be remembered for its superb and artistic political spin.
Of course, the spinners, whoever they were, may have done what they did because they honestly believed Iraq was a terrible threat, and this aspect of the official analysis had to be brought more to the forefront. The profile of Dick Cheney in Newsweek last November emphasized that he came to the White House in 2001 convinced, because of his previous government experience, that the CIA is always wrong. One can see his point. The CIA missed the end of the Cold War, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan (which still haunts the U.S.), the advent of nukes in North Korea in the 90s (so we've been told) and other big events.
At the daily intelligence briefing, they no doubt appear with reams of data, and a sophisticated analysis. How can the politicals have some kind of counter-weight to all this, some basis on which to ask truly tough questions, if they suspect (reasonably) that the "experts" are perpetually victims of group-think and the echo-chamber effect?
Unfortunately, the solution frequently is to put complete trust in a handful of shady individuals who seem to be authentic where the CIA is phony, "natives" or "emigres" where the CIA are 100% American, and determined to see quick action on a bold scale where the CIA seems to counsel patience, or small-scale, low-key operations. Trusting the emigres has a long history with the CIA itself, judging from the Bay of Pigs and other operations. It has become a key note of the neo-conservatives. I don't think Cheney and Rumsfeld are in that category, but they may have been won in that direction by the events of 9/11.
I finally read another article in the January/February Atlantic: James Fallows on "How War Planning Bit the Dust". Fallows emphasizes that a lot of planning for the post-invasion phase of U.S. occupation of Iraq was done, by many conscientious people, but it was mostly ignored by the Bush politicals. The analysis struck them as leaning too much to inaction or diplomacy, rather than invasion (here we go again). So they were (apparently) surprised: by the looting, by the destruction of infrastructure after the "end of hostilities," by the difficulties of governing.
(As a side note: Fallows confirms that the U.S. had very few Arabic-speakers available for the Iraq operation. That must have left them at the mercy of ... someone).
Fallows: "How could the Administration have thought it was safe to proceed in blithe indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with operational experience....?" It can't have been simply politics, since political calculations about the 2004 election should have made them more sensitive, not less, to such issues, which could come back to haunt them.
Fallows points to three factors: the "panache" of Rumsfeld, which just seemed to carry a lot of people along; the tendency of Republicans to feel like an embattled minority, up against a bureaucracy which is somehow working for the "other side" (which makes them disinclined to listen to anyone outside of a small circle); and the President's tendency to stick to the big picture, and leave the details to others.
I think Fallows misses one. There are indications, including the new Frum and Perle book, that some of the Bush politicals have been talking about launching a series of wars, and taking on as many as 6 or 10 countries at once, with tough sanctions if not military measures. If the U.S. had admitted that Afghanistan and Iraq together required a full deployment of available U.S. resources, any further threats would have been fairly empty. The result was this official message: Iraq is a terrible threat, with many WMDs of all kinds and links to international terrorism; but it can be conquered, occupied, and left with a constitutional government, on the cheap.
On intelligence, it is worth noting that Pollack and Fallows agree on one detail. Rumsfeld's style was not to tell people their analysis was all wrong, do it again, or anything like that. It was more subtle: certain people were invited to key meetings; others were not. Report writers received clear hints as to which passages would be welcome, and which would not. It may not be possible to prove that Rumsfeld or Cheney told anyone to change a report to suit the Administration's political message. But even if so, that is not the end of the story.
Update: Atrios has dug up a story by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek pointing out a pattern in "faulty intelligence." During the Cold War, the CIA produced estimates of Soviet strength that were later found to be much too high. Team B was created on the political side out of a suspicion that CIA estimates were too low--and even higher estimates, even further from reality, were produced. Wolfowitz and Cheney were both involved in this project, although Wolfowitz has said he never believed the most extreme estimates of Soviet strength.
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