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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (196874)	2/18/2007 12:40:56 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793729

I think my mind is capable of being changed, and though you may not believe it, I have actually listened to Scheuer and Pillar quite carefully on NPR and Charilie Rose when they have been interviewed. What will not persuade me is arguments that say: see, here are the noble CIA truth-tellers giving the real scoop about how they were bullied by the big bad Bush administration, which is often the subtext of the presentation of their arguments. The political motivation of administration officials are taken for granted while the political motivations of the CIA are presumed to be non-existent. That I won't buy for a minute. Three things have been clear since the start of the Bush administration, so clear that it's hard for anyone of whatever political background to deny them: 1) the CIA are ferociously bureaucratic infighters who know Washington better than any administration, 2) that the CIA, while ostensibly not being policy makers, have in fact some settled policy objectives deeply at odds with the Bush administration, which colored the intelligence product they were producing and 2) the intelligence product that the CIA has been producing has been crappy since before the end of the Cold War. The CIA missed the fall of the USSR. They missed Saddam's quite mature nuclear program in 1991. They had no idea of Libya's nuclear program. They believed that Saddam had WMDs in 2003 (in their defense, so did British, French and German intelligence agencies), but had this cockamamie theory that secular Saddam would never ally himself with Islamist Al Qaeda. This was stupid even before 2003, since Saddam quite openly spent the last years of his reign building grandiose mosques, portraying himself as a pious Muslim, and supporting Islamist terrorists. It was beyond stupid after 2003, when the Baathists and Al Qaeda emerged joined at the hip in the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Is it any wonder that the DoD lost faith in the product, and formed their own intelligence branch? Since 2004, when the CIA allowed Scheuer to publish a book bashing Bush in the middle of a Presidential campaign, the nature of the CIA campaign to discredit the Bush administration and make sure that the CIA winds up smelling of roses when all is said and done, has come out into the open. So I really need some neutral third party to adjudicate between the Bush administration and the CIA to try to figure out what happened. Every time this has happened so far, such as the Senate Intelligence Report, they report that there was no overt 'twisting' or 'cherry-picking'. Nothing in fact, that could not be much more simply explained by the differing ideological stances of the CIA and most of the Bush administration.

To: epicure who wrote (196874)	2/18/2007 1:11:06 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793729

I am just starting to read Pillar's FA article, but I was really struck by the following three paragraphs, right on page one: 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. A MODEL UPENDED The proper relationship between intelligence gathering and policymaking sharply separates the two functions. The intelligence community collects information, evaluates its credibility, and combines it with other information to help make sense of situations abroad that could affect U.S. interests. Intelligence officers decide which topics should get their limited collection and analytic resources according to both their own judgments and the concerns of policymakers. Policymakers thus influence which topics intelligence agencies address but not the conclusions that they reach. The intelligence community, meanwhile, limits its judgments to what is happening or what might happen overseas, avoiding policy judgments about what the United States should do in response. In practice, this distinction is often blurred, especially because analytic projections may have policy implications even if they are not explicitly stated. But the distinction is still important. National security abounds with problems that are clearer than the solutions to them; the case of Iraq is hardly a unique example of how similar perceptions of a threat can lead people to recommend very different policy responses. Accordingly, it is critical that the intelligence community not advocate policy, especially not openly. If it does, it loses the most important basis for its credibility and its claims to objectivity. When intelligence analysts critique one another's work, they use the phrase "policy prescriptive" as a pejorative, and rightly so. In paragraph one, Pillar basically says that the White House must always obey the analysis of the intelligence community. In paragraph two and three, he says that the analysis of the intelligence community should not be "policy prescriptive". Doesn't paragraph one completely contradict paragraphs two and three? If the CIA is not prescribing policy, then presumably the White House is free do its own analysis and choose its own policy. What Pillar is REALLY saying is that the White House is free to choose its policy ONLY if its chosen policy has the imprimatur of the intelligence community, who have already decided on the right answer, even if they don't tell it outright. Otherwise, the CIA will feel perfectly free to undermine the White House policy and try to implement some other policy, as we have seen. I do agree that this is the crux of the problem. The Bush Administration was arrogant enough to believe that it, not the CIA, had been elected to decide the foreign policy of the United States. It was even dumb enough to think that the CIA, like the military, was supposed to obey civilian control! The CIA has set to punish the Bush Administration so harshly for its temerity that all future administrations will learn from the example. Not incidently, it will manage to pass off all the blame for its own errors if it succeeds.