What comes to mind when someone mentions
intelligence and the Iraq war? Why, of course, the
US intelligence estimate on Iraqi
unconventional-weapons programs that was
excoriated in a 500-page report that the Senate
Intelligence Committee issued with much fanfare in
July 2004, was further torn apart in another
500-page report by a presidentially appointed
commission, and has been the object of scorn and
vilification ever since.
But the weapons
estimate was one of only three classified,
community-coordinated assessments about Iraq that
the US
intelligence community
produced in the months prior to the war.
Don't feel bad if you missed the other
two, which addressed the principal challenges that
Iraq likely would present during the first several
years after president Saddam Hussein's removal, as
well as likely repercussions in the surrounding
region. After being kept under wraps (except for a
few leaks) for more than four years, the Senate
committee quietly released redacted versions of
those assessments on its website on May 25, as
Americans were beginning their Memorial Day
holiday weekend.
I initiated those latter
two assessments and supervised their drafting and
coordination. My responsibilities at the time as
the United States' national intelligence officer
for the Near East and South Asia concerned
analysis on political, economic and social issues
in the region. A duty of any intelligence officer
is not only to respond to policymakers' requests
but also to anticipate their future needs.
With the administration's determination to
go to war having become painfully clear during
2002, I undertook these assessments to help
policymakers, and those charged with executing
their policies, make sense of what they would be
getting into after Saddam was gone. Following a
common practice of the National Intelligence
Council with many self-initiated projects, we got
a policy office - in this case the State
Department's Policy Planning Staff - to provide
cover of sorts by agreeing to be listed as the
customer of record.
The tremendous
notoriety the estimate on weapons programs
achieved has been all out of proportion to any
role it played, or should have played, in the
decision to launch the war. The administration
never requested it (Democrats on the Senate
Intelligence Committee did), its public line about
Iraqi weapons programs was well established before
it was written, and, as the White House later
admitted, President George W Bush (and the then
national security adviser) did not even read it -
nor did most members of Congress.
Opposition to the war among many at home
and abroad who shared the misperceptions about
Iraqi weapons programs demonstrated that those
perceptions did not, contrary to the Bush
administration's enormous selling effort, imply
that a war was necessary.
In contrast, the
other two assessments spoke directly to the
instability, conflict, and black hole for blood
and treasure that over the past four years we have
come to know as Iraq. The assessments described
the main contours of the mess that was to be,
including Iraq's unpromising and undemocratic
political culture, the sharp conflicts and
prospect for violence among Iraq's ethnic and
sectarian groups, the Marshall Plan scale of
effort needed for economic reconstruction, the
major refugee problem, the hostility that would be
directed at any occupying force that did not
provide adequate security and public services, and
the exploitation of the conflict by al-Qaeda and
other terrorists.
The Senate committee
report released two weeks ago revealed sharp
partisan divisions, so sharp that the only
evaluative comments are in separate statements by
majority and minority members. The focus of the
political clash was on what heed the Bush
administration should have taken of the
intelligence community's judgments. The two sides
even disagreed over including in the report a list
of who received the assessments.
The story
of these prewar assessments has other implications
that are at least as important, however, including
ones for the current debate over Iraq policy. The
assessments support the proposition that the
expedition in Iraq always was a fool's errand
rather than a good idea spoiled by poor execution,
implying that the continued search for a winning
strategy is likely to be fruitless.
Some
support for the poor-execution hypothesis can be
found in the assessments, such as the observation
that Iraq's regular army could make an important
contribution in providing security (thus
implicitly questioning in advance the wisdom of
ever disbanding the army). But the analysts had no
reason to assume poor execution, and their
prognosis was dark nonetheless.
Moreover,
amid the stultifying policy environment that
prevailed when the assessments were prepared - in
which it was evident that the administration was
going to war and that analysis supporting that
decision was welcome and contrary analysis was not
- it is all the more remarkable that the analysts
would produce such a gloomy view.
A second
observation - bearing in mind how long it took for
these assessments to be made public - is that
evaluation of the intelligence community's
performance tends to be heavily politicized, with
much criticism having more to do with agendas and
interests of the critics than with anything the
intelligence community does.
The two
assessments, which contained very little sensitive
reporting, should have been far easier to
declassify than the Top Secret estimate on
weapons. Yet it has taken almost three years, and
a change in party control in Congress, to release
them or any report based on them. (But give the
Senate committee credit for even belatedly doing
something that neither its House of
Representatives counterpart nor the executive
branch did.)
Republican interest in
protecting the Bush administration and, in so
doing, shifting blame for the Iraq disaster to the
intelligence community clearly is a large part of
this. But the scapegoating has a bipartisan
element as well. For all members of Congress who
supported the war, the assessments about postwar
consequences are an inconvenient reminder of how
they bought into the administration's false
equation of a presumed weapons program with the
need to invade, and how, in trying to protect
themselves against charges of being soft on
national security, they failed to consider all of
the factors that should have influenced their
votes.
Spinning the intelligence
community's performance through selective
attention has consequences that go far beyond
institutional pride or the historical record. For
example, the enactment in late 2004 of an
intelligence reorganization of doubtful
effectiveness depended in large part on the public
perception - incomplete and incorrect - that
intelligence on Iraq had been all wrong.
A
final observation concerns how the intelligence
community really did perform on Iraq. It offered
judgments on the issues that turned out to be most
important in the war (as distinct from ones the
administration had used to sell the war), even
though those judgments conspicuously contradicted
the administration's rosy vision for Iraq. And for
the most part, those judgments were correct.
Paul R Pillar is on the faculty
of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown
University.
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