After every major foreign
policy catastrophe in the contemporary history of
the United States, the blame game goes around as
to who "lost it'.
When the Chinese
communists triumphed in the civil war of the late
1940s, the American press and congress zeroed in
on a bunch of career US foreign service officials
involved in intelligence gathering (the infamous
"China hands") for misleading their own government
and people and undermining the Kuomintang. The
converse view was that president Harry Truman was
the culprit for not providing adequate assistance
to China's anti-communist forces.
When
president John F Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion of
communist Cuba backfired in 1961, the fiasco was
attributed to
bungling and serious
miscalculations by the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). The CIA's own exculpating take was that
Kennedy was plainly at fault for not using the US
Air Force in tandem with the marines.
When
Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran was dethroned in 1979,
this pattern was repeated. Hawkish Cold Warriors
dug out embarrassing revelations of how the CIA
was reporting just months before the Islamic
revolution that "Iran is not in a revolutionary or
even a pre-revolutionary situation". However, the
left in the US argued that losing the shah to the
ayatollahs was a natural boomerang effect of the
age-old American policy of coddling brutish
dictators.
In recent years, the US body
politic performed a laborious stocktaking of the
multiple failures that led up to the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, with intelligence
failure being bandied about as a prime
contributing factor.
The 9/11 commission
of inquiry concluded that fragmentation and shoddy
coordination among the panoply of American
intelligence agencies caused a preventable
disaster. But here too, the longer-term view was
that the problem went much deeper than incompetent
turf battle among spy organizations and that it
was actually a come-uppance for misguided American
foreign policies in the Middle East.
Post
mortems of events that generate a crisis for
American overseas interests essentially go along
two opposing lines. The first one is technical,
which involves dissecting the minutiae of why the
nation's assortment of spies did not provide
accurate advance information so that the dreaded
outcome could have been occluded or at least
hedged against.
The second one is
political, which asks why American interests were
poorly defined and executed by the highest office
holders in power when the realities on the ground
were clearly headed towards a shocking denouement
that would set back US influence in a country or
region for decades.
The current
self-introspection in the wake of the overthrows
of pro-American despots in Tunisia and Egypt fit
neatly into this dualistic framework. The US
intelligence community is finding itself under a
heap of brickbats from politicians and
hindsight-equipped pundits for turning a blind eye
to signs of the popular mobilization and protests
that have toppled two solid US allies already and
threaten to scalp some more in a hurry.
The House and senate committees on
intelligence are grilling defensive personnel of
the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence
(DNI) for their alleged failure to catch the pulse
of youth movements and online chat rooms, which
ended up damaging US assets in the Middle East
much more than violent Islamist terrorist cells of
al-Qaeda.
Feisty American politicians have
labeled the double whammy loss of Tunisia's Zine
el-Abidine Ben Ali's and Egyptian Hosni Mubarak's
regimes as a "wake-up" call for US spies
apparently snoring on their jobs and feeding a
false sense of complacency in Washington by rating
these former strongmen as stable in their seats.
According to the widely followed liberal website,
The Huffington Post, President Barack Obama told
the DNI, James Clapper, that he was "disappointed
with the intelligence community and its failure to
predict the unrest".
New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof tallied lessons that
the US can learn from the democratic surge in the
Middle East and opined that "we need better
intelligence" that can "hang out with the
powerless" and which can predict impending
political storms.
As in the past, the
other side of the coin is also in full bloom, with
stinging critiques of US foreign policy priorities
and tactics in the Middle East now gaining
credence even in the mainstream public debating
space. The Obama administration and its
predecessors are coming in for rebuke in the media
for propping up vile authoritarians in the name of
"stability" in the Middle East.
If the
attacks of 9/11 unearthed the "why do they hate
us?" refrain, the largely peaceful deposing of
decades-old pro-American tyrants today has
uncorked the "why do we always back the bad guys?"
soul-searching.
The present crisis of the
unknown in the US foreign policy establishment as
to the degrees of independence or even hostility
of proto-democratic polities in the Middle East
has unleashed a frenzy of scapegoats and alibis
about how and why these developments could not be
anticipated to minimize damage.
Clapper
has excused himself and his rank-and-file in the
intelligence agencies by admitting that "we are
not clairvoyant" and that "specific triggers
cannot always be known or predicted".
To
be fair to the spies, predicting behavior in the
complex social world has never been easy because
history often gets remade in mysterious bouts of
energy spurts and realignments of actors.
The most colossal failure to foretell
occurred in the late 1980s, when it was assumed by
almost everyone that the Soviet Union would
survive and remain a global threat right through
to the new millennium. The entire industry of
"Sovietologists" in the US government, academia
and think-tanks were as surprised as the lay
public when the USSR collapsed like a house of
cards.
Equally unpredictable was the
financial crash of 2008 on Wall Street, with most
experienced economic intelligence analysts taken
aback by the swiftness with which the meltdown
shook the foundations of global capitalism in a
matter of months.
There always were some
sagacious (or plain lucky) forecasters of doom on
the stability of the USSR (Russian dissident
Andrei Amalrik said so as early as 1970) and on
the sustainability of the longest financial boom
in American history (economist Nouriel Roubini saw
the writing on the wall for the US economy in 2006
itself). But such views were always in a minority
and became household topics only in an ex post
facto setting.
One of the dilemmas
intelligence agencies face in hyping threats is
the likelihood of these warnings not panning out
due to the uncontrollable nature of history, which
the Russian savant Leo Tolstoy depicted
masterfully in his magnum opus, War and
Peace.
For an intelligence station
chief or an agent on the ground, the problem is
often that of receiving alarming news from various
sources but exercising discretion on how much of
these titbits should be passed on to higher-ups
who might be skeptical about overly frightening
scenarios. The mark of a quality spy has always
been supreme alertness to danger, but agents are
wary of crying wolf far too often and then losing
the ears of policymakers who get inured to
scaremongering.
The unforeseeable force of
historical developments can be a legitimate
defense for intelligence agencies, but it does not
imply that politicians and definers of national
interest at the helm of the US state structure can
be absolved for misguided policy. Washington's
bipartisan consensus during and after the Cold War
in favor of cultivating strong relationships with
totalitarian regimes that repress their people
remains the ultimate cause of anti-Americanism in
many parts of the world, including the Middle
East.
Tunis and Cairo are symbols of the
yawning gap between the American self-image and
political rhetoric of promoting democracy on one
hand, and the continued preference for "big men"
with whom Washington can easily "do business with"
on the other.
The revolutions in the
Middle East reflect the disconnection between
American ideals and practice. Intelligence failure
is a charade or, at best, a minor glitch compared
to the larger problem of policy failure.
Sreeram Chaulia is Vice Dean of
the Jindal School of International Affairs in
Sonipat, India, and the author of the forthcoming
book, International Organizations and Civilian
Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in
Conflict Zones (I B Tauris) .
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