<<It is clear from the record now that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, wanted a war with Saddam Hussein immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in order to take out all of America's adversaries, regardless of whether they were connected to those attacks or not. After all, there was a plan then for Iraq and none for Afghanistan, as journalist Bob Woodward reported in his book Bush at War. And soon afterward, Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff jumped on to that bandwagon as well.
What is also clear from the story of Saddam's purported search for uranium in Niger is that this charge was repeatedly inserted into intelligence assessments, only to be repeatedly shot down or questioned. Nevertheless, despite the fact that it was regarded from the start as being of questionable validity, it kept floating to the top until it was publicly broadcast. But there is no smoking gun pointing to any one office or individual who kept pushing this story back into the president's assessments. Therefore, it is imperative that an effort be made by the Americans to find out how and why this happened, and to avoid similar failures in the future.>>
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Soldiers pay in blood
By Stephen Blank
The White House suddenly finds itself in an unaccustomed position, that is, on the defensive. The cause is the statement, now conceded to have been false, that President George W Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was searching for uranium in Niger. This admission, and the circumstances surrounding the placement of false intelligence in the president's speech, has produced an uproar that shows no sign of going away because it gives his opponents an opportunity to smell blood. This should not be surprising. After all, the same thing happened to Prime Minister Tony Blair over deficiencies in British intelligence analysis and assessment of Iraqi capabilities.
But it would be a profound mistake to dismiss these charges as merely reflecting partisan wrangling. The issue here is not the failures of either the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or of British intelligence to get Iraq's nuclear program right. Neither should this episode reflect on whether or not the war itself was justified. That is a whole different subject. Rather, the real issue is the use and misuse of intelligence to support a policy, especially where it appears that the policy was decided on and the intelligence twisted to support it.
It should be pointed out that such abuses of intelligence are hardly unique to the United States: they are endemic to the business of policymaking and use of intelligence assessments. Any student of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan will soon find how corrupted that intelligence assessment was because key people in Moscow wanted the answers to their questions to look a certain way, and their subordinates obligingly complied with the pressure from above.
Israeli intelligence failed grievously in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, not least because it bought the government's strategic assessment of Arab intentions and capabilities and failed in its responsibility to question that assessment and analyze evidence impartially without reference to it. Because intelligence agencies have an inherently political responsibility and are invariably large bureaucratic agencies with exquisite antennae concerning the requests of their masters, such manifestations or corruptions of the process are a constant risk and occupational hazard.
It is clear from the record now that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, wanted a war with Saddam Hussein immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in order to take out all of America's adversaries, regardless of whether they were connected to those attacks or not. After all, there was a plan then for Iraq and none for Afghanistan, as journalist Bob Woodward reported in his book Bush at War. And soon afterward, Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff jumped on to that bandwagon as well.
What is also clear from the story of Saddam's purported search for uranium in Niger is that this charge was repeatedly inserted into intelligence assessments, only to be repeatedly shot down or questioned. Nevertheless, despite the fact that it was regarded from the start as being of questionable validity, it kept floating to the top until it was publicly broadcast. But there is no smoking gun pointing to any one office or individual who kept pushing this story back into the president's assessments. Therefore, it is imperative that an effort be made by the Americans to find out how and why this happened, and to avoid similar failures in the future.
The question here is not whether the charge concerning Saddam's search for uranium was justified or whether the war was justified. Those questions divert attention from the real issue: namely why, when, how and by whom was the US intelligence process distorted, and what are the consequences of that action?
It is essential that answers to those questions be found for a number of reasons. First of all, the United States' military doctrine and strategy explicitly assume that US forces and commanders will have as perfectly transparent a view of and understanding of the enemy battlefield as can be had today. Yet if US intelligence is distorted for political reasons and becomes unreliable, transparency will inevitably be greatly compromised. In that case the outcome of the battle or campaign could have serious strategic consequences. The unexpected situation in Iraq today is clearly a result of faulty estimates and irrational exuberance as to what might be expected when and if US forces entered Baghdad. Thus, tampering with intelligence leads ultimately to intelligence failures that generally have serious and negative strategic consequences.
A second reason this issue will not go away is that US intelligence agencies in the wake of September 11 have suffered serious attacks on their leadership and competence. It ultimately does not matter if Bush says he gets "darned good intelligence", because this episode, combined with the widespread critiques of the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation before September 11 and the unjustified optimism concerning Iraq, casts a baleful light over the whole process by which information is first collected, then analyzed, then assessed, and then used in policymaking. In any bureaucratic-political establishment, not just the White House, if intelligence assessments are somehow compromised, even unwittingly, before they reach the top decision-maker, he or she may have no independent way of verifying whether or not the intelligence received is accurate, statements to the contrary notwithstanding.
Thus the dissatisfaction of key policymakers with the intelligence they were getting before the war is a matter of record. Obviously they felt at that time that they were not getting "darned good intelligence". In the wake of September 11 and in the run-up to the war against Iraq it was widely reported that Rumsfeld and his subordinates were dissatisfied with the intelligence they had received and were setting up their own shop to analyze intelligence about Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Likewise, congressional dissatisfaction with the US intelligence system appeared among members of both political parties after September 11. These reports and this episode show that no matter what improvements were made after September 11, the system of intelligence gathering, analysis, distribution and policymaking based on it still stands in need of a scrupulous and thoroughgoing examination.
While undoubtedly the opposition to Bush will exploit this opportunity for partisan purposes, the issues raised here cut to the heart of America's overall defense structures, strategies and policies. That is why it will not go away. However an intelligence system may fail or be corrupted, even unwittingly by political pressures, we can be sure that when it does the repercussions of that failure will be profound. September 11 was one such intelligence failure; the misapprehension of the situation in Iraq after Saddam appears to have been another such occurrence. But can the US tolerate a third event of this magnitude?
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