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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?
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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