Paul Pillar speaks
Power Line
I just watched my old friend Paul Pillar on Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room program. Paul didn't take serious issue with the key elements of the administration's defense of its decision to go to war in Iraq. He agreed that American and world intelligence strongly supported the view that Iraq had WMD, and that the CIA itself reached the wrong conclusion on this issue. And he agreed with the Robb-Silberman commission (which he praised) and the Senate Intelligence panel that the administration did not push the CIA to reach specific conclusions or change its findings.
Paul noted that the CIA had underestimated Iraq's WMD program before the first Gulf War, and suggested that the Agency's erroneous views the second time around may have been the result of over-compensation. This explanation, which sounds plausible, has nothing to do with improper pressure by the Bush administration.
Paul again argued that the administration's pressure was "subtle," and complained that the administration offered the Agency no incentive to carefully question and challenge the conclusion that Iraq had WMD. I would have thought that in a properly functioning CIA, the desire to provide the best intelligence possible would have been incentive enough.
Paul stated that, as we move towards a possible confrontation with Iran, we need to learn the lessons of Iraq, and recognize the limits of our information regarding the state of Iran's nuclear program. This is true, of course. However, I would make two additional points. First, Iran is a much more open society than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The Israeli intelligence community, for example, which never claimed to have much first-hand knowledge about Iraq, is said to have good sources on the ground in Iran. Second, imperfections in our intelligence cannot be a dispositive argument against military action, particularly if that action involves something less than a major commitment of ground forces. In dealing with Iran, we should take pains not to "over-compensate" again for past intelligence failures.
JOHN adds: Claims that the administration "cherry picked" or "influenced" pre-war intelligence strike me as deeply ironic. The fact that there was no need for cherry picking is obvious to anyone who reads the 2002 Consensus Intelligence Estimate. On the contrary, it seems clear that one reason why the administration emphasized Iraq's WMDs in the run-up to the war is that this was the issue the CIA enthusiastically supported. The administration knew about Iraq's terrorist training camps, but didn't push this issue beyond the most general references to Iraq's indisputable links to, and support of, terrorist groups, because--I think--of the CIA's dogmatic conviction that there could be little relationship between secular Baathists and Sunni extremists. We know now that the CIA was wrong, but at the time, if the administration had played up Iraq's terror connections, it would have been met with a blizzard of leaked CIA reports. (As it was, one or more such reports were leaked.) So it was the CIA that molded the administration's case for war, not the reverse.
And, speaking of "cherry picking," it's the administration's critics who either disregard the CIA's conclusions entirely (like the 2002 Consensus Estimate) or treat them as gospel, depending on whether they can be interpreted as undermining administration policies.
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