Posted on 07/13/2004 6:20:31 PM PDT by Axion
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report last week on the Central Intelligence Agency's performance in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The report, the result of efforts by both Democratic and Republican senators, draws three major conclusions:
1. The Bush administration, and in particular the White House, did not force the CIA to reach the conclusion that Iraq harbored or was building weapons of mass destruction.
2. The CIA failed to reach the proper conclusions about Iraq's WMD because of a broken "corporate culture."
3. Implicit in the second conclusion was the recognition that fundamental changes are needed in the way the CIA works.
These appear to us reasonable and even obvious conclusions, but there are levels of complexity here that must be addressed in order to make sense of this.
It is now obvious that Iraq had no nuclear or biological weapons program, and that it retained only limited chemical weapons capabilities -- although how limited those weapons might be is still not fully determined. It is also clear that the CIA failed to understand this situation and drew the opposite conclusion. The primary term used in the Senate committee's report for this conclusion was "group-think," which means, in our mind, believing in the conventional wisdom. That is a devastating charge to make against an intelligence agency, but it is one that could be made against the CIA many times in its history. It is always easier to stand in good company than to stand alone. The internal culture of the CIA discouraged iconoclasm, especially in the products that were delivered to decision-makers.
Nevertheless, in this particular case, the conventional wisdom was held by many far beyond the CIA. In our encounters with intelligence officials outside the United States, prior to the invasion of Iraq, it was a common -- in our experience, universal -- belief that Iraq had, to varying degrees, ongoing programs for the development and deployment of weapons of mass destruction. This was a general belief within the global intelligence community.
Everyone, including Stratfor, believed that Iraq had deployable chemical weapons. The reason was simple: Iraq had possessed and used chemical weapons in the past, and it had never given any proof that they had been destroyed, despite the fact that demonstrating their destruction would have massively helped Saddam Hussein's diplomatic position after 1991. The default assumption, therefore, was that Hussein still had the chemical weapons stockpile.
Views on whether Iraq maintained a nuclear program diverged more substantially. Hussein certainly had a nuclear program in the 1980s: The Israelis destroyed the Osirak reactor in a raid in 1981, and there were indications that the Iraqis were committed to rebuilding it. Some argued that the program was hopelessly stalled, while others argued that it was moving along quickly -- but no one argued that Hussein had completely abandoned the idea. There were intelligence experts who doubted the existence of Hussein's biological program, but here too, the consensus was split. When we add to this Hussein's strange behavior after the U.N. Security Council resolution of November 2002, demanding inspections of Iraqi weapons production -- and after which Hussein did everything possible to make it appear that he had something to hide -- it is understandable why the international consensus was that he possessed WMD.
It has always been our view that the Bush administration believed the Iraqis had chemical weapons and that they were trying to develop nuclear and biological weapons. That was the CIA's view, it was a common-sense view, and it was shared by the administration. But this still does not explain the administration's behavior in two areas.
First, if you believe that a country has WMD that might be used against you, announcing plans to invade a year before you actually do so would appear to be suicidal. If the Bush administration believed what the CIA said, then officials had to assume the worst case -- that the Iraqis could build these weapons. In that case, giving a year's warning that an invasion was coming would allow the Iraqis to speed up development so as to use the weapons against American forces -- either as they invaded Iraq or as they built up strength in Kuwait, where they were confined to a relatively small space. Thus, believing what the Bush administration apparently believed, beginning the drumbeat of war in the spring of 2002 makes no sense.
Second, Iraq was far from the most dangerous country when it came to WMD. Pakistan's nuclear program was undeniable, and the United States had clear intelligence that the military and intelligence elements who controlled that program -- or at least a significant portion of them -- had substantial Islamist leanings. If there was fear of WMD getting into al Qaeda's hands, Iraq would not be the top candidate: It would have been Pakistan by a mile.
Yet the Bush administration chose to invade Iraq. Everything we have seen in the Senate intelligence committee's report convinces us further of what we have argued for almost two years: That the invasion of Iraq was designed to achieve strategic ends, rather than to take out WMD -- but that WMD was a useful public justification for the invasion. The administration was confident that WMD programs would be found after U.S. forces arrived in Iraq, and saw it as more persuasive to use this argument with the public and allies than the far more complex geopolitical one we have discussed in the past. Administration officials believed that there were WMD programs in Iraq, but it is obvious that they did not believe the Iraqis could complete these programs -- save the already completed chemical weapons -- within a year. They also felt that they had successfully solved the Pakistani nuclear problem. If this were not the case, then the administration would not have behaved as it did -- telegraphing its punch and ignoring other, greater dangers.
We do not believe that the CIA failure triggered the invasion of Iraq -- the Bush administration regarded that as a strategic necessity. What the CIA intelligence failure did was persuade the administration to use WMD as an easy public justification for the war, rather than resorting to more complex and abstruse reasoning about the invasion. The CIA failure, therefore, did not create a policy shift. Instead, it created a public relations nightmare for the administration globally and domestically. The fundamental failure of the administration still stands: It still has not provided a strategic explanation for the invasion of Iraq. Quite apart from the WMD fiasco, its explanations for invading Iraq remain wholly unpersuasive. U.S. officials have never explained what the invasion of Iraq had to do with fighting al Qaeda, even though good -- if complex -- explanations are available.
The administration failed in a second instance: The CIA had been underperforming for a generation, primarily in grasping broad developments (such as the fall of the Soviet Union) and in the tactical plans of groups like al Qaeda. The responsibility rested with a long line of CIA directors, but with George Tenet more than anyone. Tenet brought modern management techniques to the CIA. The problem was that the last thing the agency needed was modern management techniques. These techniques are designed to create orderly processes. But the world isn't orderly, and neither should the intelligence process be. It should celebrate the unconventional, the iconoclastic, the brilliant. These are not orderly values. Tenet's slow, grinding system of committees and reviews had failure built into it. People learned that in order to get along, they had to go along -- so everyone did.
The fault lies with two presidents. Bill Clinton -- who, like Bush, believed that Iraq possessed WMD -- failed to recognize that the time of peace over which he presided was, almost by definition, fleeting and transitory. Rather than taking that time to rebuild U.S. intelligence and defense capabilities, Clinton not only allowed them to degrade, but overused them in operations stretching from Haiti to Kosovo. Clinton created the Tenet attitude at the CIA.
But it was Bush who took the inexplicable position of allowing the intelligence team that had failed to detect al Qaeda's plans for Sept. 11 to continue to run the CIA. It was nearly three years later -- after presiding over the failure on WMD and the far more critical failures to forecast the postwar resistance in Iraq and Shiite behavior there -- that Tenet left the CIA. Extraordinarily, his key deputy, John McLaughlin, has been permitted to become acting director. McLaughlin was deputy director of operations, the man who oversaw intelligence-gathering -- and certainly someone who was responsible for these failures. Yet nothing that has happened has disqualified him from running the CIA. He has been described as "professional." By that, no one means that he has been successful, but that he has moved the process along successfully.
The CIA might well have been responsible for the Bush administration's misreading of the WMD issue. But it was the administration that failed to fire the leadership of the CIA the day after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the administration that failed to force an emergency restructuring of the entire intelligence community after its manifest failure to penetrate al Qaeda. Certainly, this was a difficult mission to carry out, and failure was possible. But with failure comes dismissal and reorganization. The U.S. intelligence community was allowed to slip into a "no-fault, no-blame" mindset under Clinton, but Bush's willingness to leave that culture of failure in place after 9-11 makes the CIA's failure his.
There is a corporate culture in America that says that so long as the process is adhered to, people have done their jobs. Orderly, predictable processes that can be clearly mapped and explained are not an end in themselves. The time and effort spent on them can be justified in only one way: success. Over and over, the lovers of ISO 9000, 9001 and endless other standards confuse the means with the end. They embrace order, even when it leads to failure.
That's what happened at the CIA: A culture of process destroyed a culture of excellence. There are many outstanding people at the agency, in both the Directorate of Intelligence and Operations. The agency's obsession with intelligence process crushes these people daily. Those who flourish in this environment are those who can sit through long meetings without falling asleep. The people who can peer through the darkness and see the truth are either sucked into the surreal world of modern management or shunted aside.
The Bush administration is not responsible for the failures of which it stands accused: It did not invent the CIA's estimate of Iraq's WMD capabilities, nor did that estimate change national strategy. Nor was the administration responsible for the state of the CIA on Sept. 11, 2001; that was Clinton's fault, and no one could reasonably expect Bush to have overhauled the CIA in eight months -- particularly during peacetime. But in 2004, the CIA has become Bush's fault. And he still hasn't taken the necessary steps to overhaul the system.
Tenet's mindset was inappropriate at any time, and it had no place in intelligence during wartime. There is not the slightest evidence that John Kerry understands the state of emergency that has existed in intelligence for years. It is possible that Bush now understands it. However, as the nation braces for possible attack this summer, it is clear that it cannot afford the complacency of process to continue.
Bill Casey broke all the rules at CIA. It's time to find another Bill Casey.
Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
The problems with the CIA is directly related to the inadequacies of the US Congress. We should start hanging those members of Congress who were/are responsible for dereliction of their sworn duty.
This was more than a one-man screw-up. Until the heads roll, it will look like cooked to order intel.
The problem lies in the fact that we are unable to act on the information we have. To this day we have hysterical folks on the left and the right, sadly, who are screaming our loss of privacy rather than loss of life due to terror attacks.
The Democrats were shameless about the content of the memo. Well, now the Democrats are going ahead with the plan in the memo (even though it's widely known) to distort the truth and to lie and discredit the administration from the Intelligence Committee report just as the memo instructed them to do.
The media goes right along with them. Bottom line: The Democrats sent out a memo detailing their false and lying power grab (that is: "by any and every means necessary") and though it is known all over the Internet and was lightly reported, they are bold-facely going through with it. "We are going to lie cheat and steal to regain power and don't give a "RAT'S" ass if or that you know about it."
That, lady's & gentlemen is guts and gonads. I only wish that the Conservative Republicans had them as well. Example: Senator Pat Roberts (R) and Senator J. Rockefeller (D)! Rockefeller beat Roberts in every single TV interview with both trying to go along to get along. Rockefeller creamed him, no contest! Enough said....
"who are screaming our loss of privacy rather than loss of life due to terror attacks."
Agreed - however privacy is alive and well - it just takes structuring it - legally, economically and effectivly .. that's what I facilitate for others.
Ahhh ... Information overload and how to sort the wheat from the chaff.
That is the problem! And when politics gets involved with intel = do do.
Not to slight other tellers of the tall tale, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have been willing to bend the truth to suit their purposes. The China influence and the sex scandals of the Clinton administration kept his adminstration preoccupied with keeping the removal from office under control. The Bush adminstration in their zeal to embellish their reasons for going to war in Iraq, have kept them busy trying to justify their position in light of the revelations that have come to light. These are examples of how a little fib here, a little exaggeration there, will come back to haunt you, once you try to deceive or exaggerate. The truth will set you free, the lie will be your chains forever.
Bush Lied!!! Bush Lied!! Has any one considered that it may have been the CIA(or elements within) that lied to the President . If they did why?
I think this article get it about right except that it leaves out Congress's role in the intelligence failure. Bush went to war with Iraq primarily for strategic reasons. The President used WMD as the primary means of convincing the public that the war was necessary. The failure to find these has damaged the administration's and the country's credibility and has given our adversaries at home and abroad a baton to hammer us again and again. The administration has done a poor job arguing its case in the post war period. While a Kerry administration would be cheered by much of the rest of the world and all of our enemies, he would likely be even worse at fixing the enormous problems in our intelligence services that have been with us for decades.
In other words, I don't believe the Senate Intel committee, or Butler, or Stratfor got it right. The Administration wanted to attack Iraq for strategic reasons (excellent ones I believe), felt they had to use WMDs and connections to Al Queda to sell their programs, and didn't want to have good intel gumming up the works. They may even have been cynical enough to realize that if the intel they wanted turned out to be bad they could turn right around and blame it on the agencies.
Wouldn't surprise me. Machiavelli rules...always.
The interview on today’s program (7/19/04) with Peter Brookes, dealing with the reported (leaked) recommendation from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the so called “intelligence failures” prior to the Iraq war was fundamentally flawed.
First, the premise of the interview and the Senate investigation are that there were intelligence failures in the assessment of the likelihood of Iraq having WMD. This is now an article of faith, particularly with the extreme left, and God help you if you question this premise. “Bush lied!” they scream. Today Max Cleland repeated this canard in an official Kerry press event, even in light of 3 investigations that eviscerate all of the so called evidence about this “truth” from the Michael Moore wing of the Democrat party. Yet Fox news complacently accepts the premise of the kangaroo court that the evidence must have been flawed. “Everyone knows that Saddam had no WMD since we haven’t found huge stockpiles sitting around with labels saying illegal WMD.”
Well, I’m sorry, but that’s crap. There were over a dozen so called “dual use” chemical weapons factories discovered during the war that were undeclared (as required by the 1991 peace treaty and 14 UN resolutions), hidden under camouflage and guarded by Iraqi Republican Guard troops. How many MINUTES would it have taken Saddam and Osama to make TONS of VX, Sarin and other WMD if they’d cut a deal? There have been lots of illegal chemical weapons found, including some used in IEDs in the so called “uprising” (conveniently funded by UN “oil for food” money) that are of a type never admitted to by Iraq or discovered by the UN inspectors in all of the time since the ’91 Gulf War. There are large quantities of chemical weapons, of the type the CIA and all of the other intelligence services said Saddam had (and Syria never had), that have turned up in a foiled Al Qaeda attack on Jordan. And there is an official UNSCOM report to the UN within the last month that Saddam smuggled large quantities of chemical and biological weapons, as well as banned rocket parts, out of Iraq before, during and after the Iraq war. Where is the reporting on those facts? Where is it in the Senate report? Also given the number of TONS of explosives that the “insurgents” have been using in the IEDs what makes anyone believe that there aren’t TONS of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons hidden in this very large country?
But the press, including that noted “right wing mouthpiece” Fox News, ignores these inconvenient facts which would challenge the “conventional wisdom.” Or should we call it by it’s new pejorative, “group think?”. The press accepts the inside the beltway conventional wisdom that there were/are no WMD. That goes hand in glove with the “Bush lied” mantra. And the press that docilely tows this party line gets invited to the right parties. All of the so called “objective” or even “right wing” sources get tired of fighting the same battles, over and over. You allow the fanatics to mindlessly spin their talking points because you know it’s pointless to argue with them since they’ll just shout louder. They take advantage of you being a rational person who is loathe to rely on repeating the same (seemingly dialectic) argument, the way they do. And given your honesty, they win. Goebbels was right. All it takes is mindless repetition and a stubborn refusal to accept, deal with, or even acknowledge contrary facts. A few good men will usually do nothing.
And then we get to the argument about a new layer of bureaucracy to “fix” the problems with the intelligence community. Ignoring that the very premise is flawed, or that the real problem is with the politicization of national security fostered by the ideologues in the far left of the Democrat party (Church, et al), we’re still faced with the absurdity that another layer of bureaucracy will help anything. Those charged with oversight of intelligence matters couldn't possibly do anything wrong? The report never suggests they could, so it must be true!
What is happening today is that the bureaucracy, the true evil empire within this country, is striking back. And their handmaidens are the extreme left wing of the Democrat party and the institutionalized leftist establishment media. Notice that all of the critics coming out with “insider” stories and “exposes” are consummate bureaucratic insiders. These people, Wilson, Plame, Clarke, et al, all live and die within the beltway. And GWB doesn’t kowtow to them, he doesn’t accept their supremacy in the pecking order. He must therefore be destroyed. And Kerry/Edwards and the Democrats offer a return to the way it’s always been, with their comfortable sinecures, their meaningless white papers and their jet set perks, like meaningless preordained trips to Niger to sip mint tea.
And the problem with your interview with Peter Brookes? Well, he is part of the CIA bureaucracy. His institutional bias is that having 7 of the current intelligence organizations fall under the Secretary of Defense instead of the CIA director is the “real problem.” Who says? Isn’t intelligence a defense function? Isn’t the entire bureaucratic problem that, since Allen Dulles, the “intelligence community” has been separated from the defense community based on rational from the “whiz kids” like Rusk and McNamara? Isn’t that the same brain trust that gave us Vietnam and the assassination of friendly governments that didn’t do our bidding? Why does the intelligence community exist except to provide accurate and reliable information for the President to make DEFENSE decisions? We already have a very effective Secretary of Defense and effective checks and balances on that position. Maybe it’s time to move all of the intelligence apparatus under the department of Defense. After all, why else do they exist?
And so, I’ve written a much too long piece to ever be read on the air. Well, I don’t want this read on the air, unless it’s part of a substantive debate over the entirety of the issues I raise. I want to remind you people at Fox why you got into the business. I hope it wasn’t to get face time. I hope it wasn’t to make “the big bucks.” I hope it was because you felt a sincere desire to communicate and educate. Well, if that is the case, I hope that this diatribe inspires you to do your jobs.
Thank you
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.