…and disregarding the rest. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are willing to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt:
In July two Defense Intelligence Agency analysts lodged a complaint with the Pentagon’s Inspector General alleging that Centcom—the military command that oversees the effort against ISIS—was altering its intelligence assessments to bring them into line with the Administration’s positive spin. The allegation has since been corroborated by more than 50 other analysts, according to the Daily Beast.
We won’t join the clucking brigades claiming that President Obama or his inner circle are “manipulating intelligenceâ€â€”the dishonest and discredited claim endlessly made about the Bush Administration’s mistaken intel on Iraq. If you need a refresher on this score, read the conclusions of the July 2004 bipartisan report from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, or the equally definitive Robb-Silberman report from March 2005.
What we know of the Centcom story so far reminds us that intelligence is a complex business involving partial information, unverifiable sources, conflicting analysis and bureaucratic turf wars—all of it aimed at a moving target. Even in an age of cybersleuths and surveillance drones, it’s more often a wonder when intelligence agencies get things right.
The more pertinent question now is what are the correct policies with respect to Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East, generally? There’s an idea called “path dependency”, the notion that today’s decisions are limited by yesterday’s, more succinctly expressed a “you can’t unring a bell” or, maybe, “don’t cry over spilt milk”. We should never have invaded Iraq but we did and that decision limits the future decisions we can make about what we do.
President Obama seems remarkably unable to learn from experience, whether the experience of others or his own. Maybe that’s what it takes to become president these days. Why are we supporting violent radical Sunni Islamists in Syria and opposing them in Iraq? What does he think will happen if Assad is out of the picture? What alternatives does he think Assad has? What alternatives does he think the Alawites have? Is there an objective to be attained in Syria that warrants risking major power confrontation?
I can never find a WSJ editorial which doesn’t throw in something so exceedingly false I can give the rest of the piece a fair hearing. They just had to try and rehabilitate Bush for some reason and fouled everything else in the process.