But the analysis preceded the intelligence. My understanding is that the CIA conspired against Bush and Cheney by not giving them the evidence they needed for their ideal war marketing campaign, not that it kept them from floating their prefered analysis anyway, without the evidence. Couple references:
But just at the point where the discussion might have become interesting, Hayes suffers a sort of cognitive arrest, closing the book with some abrupt observations about how those worries were intolerable in a post-9/11 world, and how eliminating Hussein was therefore necessary and worthwhile. What Hayes ducks is the $130 billion question that should have been at the core of his book: whether a Hussein-bin Laden alliance was not merely conceivable, but so worrisome as to require a preventive war to stop it.
The failure to engage that question demonstrates a sort of prescientific thought process -- one that uses the tools of reason, but only to construct an unfalsifiable case for a foregone conclusion. At the heart of the scientific method is the testing of theories. Answers are always provisional, ready to be discarded if better ones comes along. The reasoning that policy makers use to deal with practical problems should work the same way. But in Hayes's case it doesn't.
A large majority of informed professionals who have examined the question of Iraq's possible connections to Al Qaeda have come to the same conclusion: the two had some contact with each other and shared a hatred for the United States but do not appear to have worked closely together or to have been on the verge of doing so. Yet Hayes cannot bear to let his pet theory fall by the wayside, whether it is borne out by the facts or not.
Take the question of the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta's supposed meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001, often cited as proof of an Iraqi hand in the attacks. After an exhaustive investigation, the 9/11 commission concluded that 'no evidence has been found that Atta was in the Czech Republic' during the period in question, and that there were no grounds to think such a meeting ever happened. Rather than simply accepting such findings, however, Hayes has continued in magazine articles to spin out highly implausible scenarios of how this and other meetings might have occurred and why the Atta-Iraq linkage should still be taken seriously. In other words, he tries to make the facts fit his theory, rather than his theory fit the facts.
For true believers, moreover, the threats emanating from Iraq loom so large that they blot out everything else. Laurie Mylroie of the American Enterprise Institute goes so far as to argue that figures like Yousef and the 9/11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed are actually covert Iraqi agents. (It was Mylroie's theories that Wolfowitz was apparently trying to prove by having Yousef yanked out of his cell and broken.) To his credit, Hayes gives Mylroie's wilder hypotheses a wide berth. Yet he is still unable to keep his subject in proper perspective. nytimes.com
The author of that review will of course be familiar to old timers, but we'll leave it at that. I think the $130 billion is maybe an order of magnitude low at this point, somewhat dating the review, but that's another other story. Trillion here, trillion there and all that. On to the esteemed Ms. Mylroie, who seems to have always been a prime mover here:
And a score-settling one at that. She uses the book to lash out at the ideological losers of the prewar period, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, saving her greatest wrath for the nation's spy service. Most observers will recall that the White House and Pentagon easily steamrolled over the few pockets of institutional resistance in Washington on the drive to Baghdad. Yet Mylroie seems to believe that the national security bureaucrats very nearly derailed the war, and only the certitude of the president himself carried the day.
If that were true and if the tale were well told, you'd have the basis for a dramatic narrative. But Mylroie offers few inside details or juicy new revelations. Instead, she rehashes old information and stretches its significance. As a result, these pages come across as an exercise in dead-horse kicking. To be sure, it is hard to go wrong criticizing the C.I.A. these days. When it comes to the agency, a Russian saying seems apt: 'If you see a Bulgarian on the street, beat him. He will know why.' After Sept. 11, now widely regarded as the greatest American intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, any dart thrown in the general direction of Langley, Va., is bound to hit a C.I.A. officer who has somehow messed up.
Even so, Mylroie comes at the agency from a skewed angle of attack. Its greatest sin, she proposes, is that it mulishly refused to agree that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
If it had, she suggests, then President Bush would have been saved the trouble of worrying about Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Not that she doubts that the weapons were there. But if Sept. 11 had been recognized as a plot hatched in Baghdad, then there would have been a clear-cut case for war, one not fought pre-emptively but in self-defense. Mylroie complains that the C.I.A. seems to have been duped into believing that Al Qaeda is a loose-knit group of Islamic extremists, and that the agency's analysts have turned a collective blind eye to the evidence suggesting that Al Qaeda could well be a front organization for Iraqi intelligence. She believes that Iraq was behind almost every major terrorist attack of the past decade, dating back to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. query.nytimes.com
Ok, I'll leave it at that for now, and see how the CIA conspiracy develops. Needless to say, Mylroie's "analysis" is taken apart elsewhere. |
