1 Boring Old Man

 

But in making this defense, the White House also inadvertently pointed out the real problem: intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not drive its decision to go to war. A view broadly held in the United States and even more so overseas was that deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept "in his box," and that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place. That the administration arrived at so different a policy solution indicates that its decision to topple Saddam was driven by other factors — namely, the desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region.

If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.

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The Bush administration’s use of intelligence on Iraq did not just blur this distinction; it turned the entire model upside down. The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.

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But the greatest discrepancy between the administration’s public statements and the intelligence community’s judgments concerned not WMD (there was indeed a broad consensus that such programs existed), but the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the "alliance" the administration said existed. The reason the connection got so much attention was that the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the "war on terror" and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country’s militant post-9/11 mood.

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Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq
Paul R. Pillar

This Administration’s flawed relationship with the C.I.A. is probably going to turn out to be one of the great tragedies of our new Century. I don’t personally know enough about it to do it justice. All I know is that the rooms of the American Enterprise Institute and later the Project for the New American Century , there was an intense feeling that the C.I.A. was leading the country down the wrong path. The C.I.A. was seen as mistakenly focusing on Al Qaeda and rogue Terrorists, and ignoring the threat of States like Iran, Iraq, Syria, or North Korea. This was a consistent climate in writings, seminars, and policy statements. Fighting against the C.I.A. was viewed as heroic, as in Laurie Mylroie’s later book, Bush vs. the Beltway : How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror.

This article by Paul R. Pillar, recently retired C.I.A. officer who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year, is a clear, well written, insider’s view of the problem, and as scathing an indictment of the Administration as will ever be written. It’s perfectly clear what happened, though Pillar only tells the part of the story he saw. The Bush Administration imports came from their think tanks with a strong bias against the C.I.A. and a hawkish plan later known as the Bush Doctrine – originally introduced by Paul Wolfowitz in 1991.

The September 11th, 2001 attack was clear evidence that the C.I.A. was on the right track, but instead was coopted to jumpstart the neoconservative agenda – war with Iraq. That’s where Pillar picks up the story. What many have thought to be true is true. The Administration used the C.I.A. to justify its preexisting plan rather than as a resource to formulate their policies. It’s that simple. Pillar lays it out so clearly that the only thing left to think about is how to prevent it ever happening again, and he addresses that issue in his article.

I know that the claim that our Administration is fascist seem harsh, particularly with the overwhelmingly negative connotation the Nazi German debacle gave to that term, but Pillar’s article is another piece of evidence for that conclusion. The neoconservatives came into power with a fixed idea – that we need to be aggressively pugalistic in dealing with the Middle Eastern States and other "Rogue States." They were sure that the C.I.A. and the United Nations were obstructions rather than resources. So the ignored and manipulated both. They thought that there were too many blocks in gathering Intelligence, so they ignored oversight. They disagreed with many Supreme Court decisions, so they worked at stacking the court. They thought Congress was in the way, so, in spite of having control of the Congress, they still ignored many of its mandates. That’s what fascism is: rule by the powerful with a focus on the State, rather than the people.

They were so sure they were right, they disregarded our Institutions, and ignored their oversights and insights. As a matter of fact, they ignored, or at least reinterpreted our Constitution. I think they believed what they were doing was the right thing to do the create a powerful State. For one thing, they were very wrong about a lot of things. For another, the United States has a number of priorities, and becoming a powerful State is not primary. It has been and will be part of our Defense Policy, but it’s not our reason for being. So the tragedy is that they are in love with their idiosyncratic ideology; they ignore and over-ride anything that opposes them; and they are incompetent. Rule by the Powerful is bad enough, but Rule by the Incompetent Powerful is Cancer…