If you’ve been pining for another rehash of how the U. S. came to invade Iraq, you probably should read this book review by Joseph Stieb at War on the Rocks:
In order to write this book, Draper conducted 300 interviews with policymakers, politicians, intellectuals, and high and mid-level personnel throughout the relevant departments and agencies of government. The most prominent interviewees included Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Douglas Feith. The fruits of these interviews allow Draper to shed new light on certain individuals and events, although not the causes of the war itself.
Even experienced national security hands will find Draper’s account of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction illuminating. He interviewed 70 CIA personnel, who recall that top policymakers consistently welcomed intelligence that bolstered the case for war and dismissed contradictory evidence. His interviewees also recall staffers of then-Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld using unvetted intelligence that supported their unshakeable belief in a connection between the Iraqi state and al-Qaeda no matter how many times the intelligence agencies refuted these claims. One CIA official described the spurious intelligence presentations of Feith’s staff as “It was moons away. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon’s mom.â€
I don’t have much to say about it that I haven’t already said 1,000 times other than
- We have been poorly served by our intelligence apparatus over the period of the last 70 years. The routinely bad information, first about the Soviet Union, then Al Qaeda, now who knows? was bad enough. But the routine way in which our intelligence officers are suborned, first by the Soviet Union and now by China. Maybe we should start offshoring our intelligence. We could hardly do worse than we already are.
- In 2000 every sitting senator with presidential aspirations voted in favor of the invasion. That includes Joe Biden. Neither Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, nor Kamala Harris had been elected to the Senate in 2000. If they had been I believe with all my heart they would have voted for it, too.
- It was an error. I said so in 2003 and I still say it.
At the time, I thought Colin Powell was an honorable man, and I believed him.
And this is why they hate Trump. He ain’t buyin’ what they are sellin’ and what their careers depend upon.
There is no deep state my ass.
PS –
I should note that I was a supporter of the war based upon the “evidence” at the time. I was flat, damned wrong. It would be illuminating and encouraging if other commenters on this site could similarly shed political bias, and see the truth from time to time. I won’t hold my breath.
The politicians, I am sure, supported it for other, commercial and political, reasons.
Would be interested in Andy’s take, but from reading this and other readings my take is that the intelligence people presented lots of evidence that there were no WMD. The problem was, as is showed above, that Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al had already decided what to believe and discarded all of the (better) evidence that opposed their beliefs. The problem has been more at the leadership level.
Where I think we had failure in the intelligence apparatus is that it sounds as though they often tailored reports so that they reflected what POTUS wanted to believe. If you have read McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty he documented that this has been a problem in the past with military intelligence and leadership so this certainly isn’t unique to the CIA and alphabet agencies.
We still have the same problem. Leadership doesnt want to believe what they are told so they make up their own beliefs and act on them.
“At the time, I thought Colin Powell was an honorable man, and I believed him.”
Me too. Didnt believe the other stuff before him, we had a good inspections routine, almost as good as we had in Iran. However I just didnt believe that Powell would lie.
Steve
There’s also evidence that Tenet actively prevented that information from making it to the people higher up. That’s mentioned in the linked article (and documented in the book he’s reviewing).
I recall reading Lincoln Chaffee saying he went to talk to intel people and he got the impression they did not believe the evidence. Bush and Cheney wanted war and would only listen to those who gave them evidence supporting the case for war.
‘“At the time, I thought Colin Powell was an honorable man, and I believed him.‒
He was involved in My Lae, and not in a good way.
I’m conflicted about the WMM (I don’t use WMD, because they are weapons of Mass Murder). Too many troops got sick over there from contact with what were apparently nerve agents. And then there the mystery trains sent to Syria just before Desert Storm. A lot of s**t just doesn’t add up.
Be that as it may, I think it was a case of once the Taliban were ousted in Afghanistan GWB deciding it was time to clean up all the sore points in the ME, and there certainly would never nave been peace in the ME as long as Saddam acted as if he was the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar. I think there was also a revenge motive, Saddam having been stupid and vengeful enough to try assassinating Bush Sr. after he was out of office. Saddam certainly had violated almost every promise he’d made in the cease fire agreement, so there was already a standing casus belli in place. It just wasn’t enough of one to get enough public support to get rid of the monster.
There are a lot of people to blame from well down the ladder all the way to the top. And I won’t even talk about the fiasco of the occupation. If we had to go in, it should have been a punitive expedition. Go in, get him, get out. Pretty much what originally happened in Afghanistan (except we didn’t get Bin Laden and Sheik Omar). That would have been a lesson to whoever succeeded Saddam; don’t p**s off the Americans.
Don’t even get me started on Afghanistan—I opposed that too because it was pretty obvious to me that what actually ended up happening would happen.
Afghanistan? We still have SOCOM troops in Somalia fighting al-Shabaab. (Aidid is long dead.) That’s 28 years of failure
Well, I could write a series of posts just on this topic. But here are a few key points:
– There is no human organization where leaders like to hear bad news or information that conflicts with their goals. This is true in the intelligence world as well, it’s just that it can sometimes have a much larger impact. In the case of the Bush administration there was tremendous pressure to bias information and analysis that would provide the necessary political support to get Congress and the UN to authorize a war.
– I don’t necessarily agree with Dave’s criticisms of the intelligence community. I think he’s picked a few perceived cases of failure out of a large body of work that included many successes – big and small.
– There are some things that simply can’t be accurately forcasted, yet the intelligence function is still expected to try and is criticised when it can’t predict emergent events. For example, the intelligence community knew and reported for a long time that the ME and North Africa was a powder keg that combined failed governance, poor economic conditions, ethnic tension, and a youth bubble. But the IC could not predict that a vendor in Tunisia would ignite this keg by literally setting himself on fire. That was something no one could have predicted.
– Most intelligence failures are failures of analysis. But the problem is that facts actually don’t “speak for themselves.” Human’s evolved to make cognitive shortcuts and filter information to existing frameworks. Even though I’ve studied cognition and practice introspection as much as I can, and fully understand how and why the human brain uses these shortcuts, I still find it very difficult to avoid them. Our patterns of thinking are hard-wired in where we have a very strong cognitive bias to interpret information that agrees with our established worldview. Even knowing this and working to avoid it, it is still extremely difficult to avoid.
The extreme example is Doug Feith. What Dougy did is he got an account on the US TS/SCI intelligence networks and he did the equivalent of a google search looking for information that confirmed his existing view that Iraq was working on WMD. He collected every bit of information he could find that supported this view, discarded every piece of information that didn’t, and then assembled his collected information into a narrative that he pitched as “alternative” analysis to what the IC was providing.
Now, I personally don’t think he was being dishonest – in other words, I think he actually believed what he was doing was correct. And we see the same thing every single day when partisans “analyze” politics. But the problem of this kind of “analysis” should be pretty obvious, yet most people don’t realize that the cart is leading the horse inside their brain.
– So the root failure with respect to Iraq is that we didn’t fully understand what Saddam was doing. Saddam had a very specific strategy that we were ignorant of until very late in the game – namely Saddam was trying to convince one audience (Iran, Israel) that he still had WMD while trying to convince everyone else that he didn’t. He pursued this strategy by trying to deny the US and UN all hard evidence of a WMD program while leaving sufficient doubt that he might still have stockpiles.
One example of this is when Iraq, contrary to the cease-fire agreement, unilaterally and secretly destroyed its stocks of chemical weapons. Those weapons were supposed to be destroyed under UN supervision. This move by Saddam was intentional (and he actually did destroy his known stocks) and designed to both technically comply with WMD disarmament while sowing doubt whether he actually disarmed. This was not an isolated incident, there was a pattern of Saddam intentionally making it impossible to prove he had disarmed.
Like all the regional players the US and western governments assumed that Saddam did this in order to hide weapons or at least preserve a WMD capability. And so during the 1990’s, a huge amount of effort was spent trying to locate possibly hidden stockpiles and clandestine efforts to keep Iraq’s programs afloat (And to be sure, Iraq WAS doing some of that – they hid key pieces of equipment and supplies with the intention of restarting their programs once they were able to.). Iraq sought to stymie these efforts, further reinforcing the perception that they were hiding actual weapons.
It wasn’t until a decade later on the eve of the 2003 war that analysts – including myself – started to come around and realize the game that Saddam had actually been playing. And after the war investigations and interviews with key leaders in his regime showed that his dangerous game was actually true – he thought that denying the US and UN any hard evidence of actual stockpiles would prevent a war or attack by the US, but lingering doubts about whether stockpiles existed would be enough to deter Iran and Israel. Obviously, his gamble was a bad one.
Anyway, this is getting too long, and I could go on for a long time, but I hope that’s a helpful context.
Over a period of nearly 40 years our intelligence apparatus systematically overstated the capabilities of the Soviet Union. That is a failure so major as to defy description.
And it doesn’t take a lot of security breaches for the entire system to be obviously flawed and we had far too many. The Soviets were convinced that all it took was money.
“Over a period of nearly 40 years our intelligence apparatus systematically overstated the capabilities of the Soviet Union. That is a failure so major as to defy description.”
And most of that was in the 50’s and 60’s prior to key technologies like satellite imagery. Capability estimates got much better over time and, at least during my career, which started after the Cold War, were very good.
It wasn’t accident, for example, that we so decisively beat the experienced and battle-hardened Iraq military in 1993 – the intelligence community work in everything from weapons systems, to tactics to doctrine and other means and measures culminated there.
“And it doesn’t take a lot of security breaches for the entire system to be obviously flawed and we had far too many. The Soviets were convinced that all it took was money.”
Well, that’s a problem for any intelligence function. Perfect security is never possible and there is always a tradeoff between more stringent security measures and an effective intelligence organization, especially in an open society.