Informed Speculation

When it became clear that the Taliban regime was overthrown, and the remnants of Al Qaeda were either killed in the mountains of Tora Bora, or driven into hiding in Pakistan, the focus turned to Iraq. If Bob Woodward’s account in Bush At War is correct, there were some who wanted to target Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It is worth considering, if you are among the conspiracy-minded, ‘Bush lied’ crowd, that Bush resisted and insisted on concentrating on Afghanistan.

Intelligence is a tricky business, but let’s resist the temptation to use hindsight and go back to that time. We can start with some absolute, 100% givens that no serious person would challenge.

1. 9/11 still provoked a visceral reaction, and the War on Terror was the primary focus of much of the world.

2. At the heart of modern terror is Islamic fundamentalism.

3. The most fertile ground for recruiting terrorists was and is brutal rhetoric against the infidels in Muslim lands, such as the Israelis and Americans.

4. Saddam Hussein, while not a fundamentalist in the Taliban/Iranian mullah sense, was more than happy to feed this aggression, through such gestures as his payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (a de facto declaration of war against Israel).

5. Though, leftist rhetoric to the contrary, Bush never claimed a direct link between Saddam and 9/11 (nor did he ever say Saddam presented an imminent threat – in fact, he argued we could not wait until the threat became imminent), we knew that terrorists, Al Qaeda and otherwise, found a friendly refuge in Saddam’s Iraq.

And we knew two other, very important things: one, that the only long-term solution to terror was to bring hope and democracy to the lands where terror flourishes, and two, that Saddam Hussein was a maniacal tyrant, brutally killing opponents, terrorizing any who dared question him, attacking the Kurds of northern Iraq whenever he was not blocked by U.S. air power, and of course, most notoriously, actually USING weapons of mass destruction against his own people and against the opposition in the Iran/Iraq war.

No amount of revisionism can touch the above facts; they are irrefutable, and they provide the backdrop to the runup to the war. Good men can and do disagree about what should have happened next. I think the case remains rock solid that Saddam Hussein had to be removed, and I have long been of the opinion that the ‘obstacle to peace in the Middle East/brutal tyrant’ route would have been the preferable point of emphasis. Unfortunately, and here at last I allow hindsight to come into play, the WMDs were stressed because the WMDs offered the most politically attractive means of selling the war.

Why WMDs? Because, as we know, Saddam had possessed them and used them. Because we also know that he had nuclear ambitions. Because an attempt could be made to bring the international community on board, since WMD inspectors had been kicked out of Iraq, and the issue was the focus of a dozen unenforced UN resolutions. And because the evidence was overwhelming that Saddam remained in pursuit of and possession of WMDs.

I won’t make the mistake of applying revisionist history on this point myself. I thought, with a high degree of certainty, that we would find the stockpiles of WMDs that were a major selling point of the war. I think it’s pretty plain that most international statesmen and diplomats did, as well, and that even the weapons inspectors were of that opinion. I don’t think anything thus far raises much that would be disputed.

Three questions, then, remain: (1) Did Bush mislead us into war? That is, did he either manufacture or manipulate intelligence findings to make his case?; (2) Why was the intelligence so wrong?; and (3) Was intelligence that argued against the Administration position ignored?

Well, the first shall be last, as that is the heart of the current Iraq debate. As to the second question, the primary reason the intelligence was so wrong is because there was precious little human intelligence to rely on. The Senate Select Committe on Intelligence, in their 2004 assessment of the state of pre-war Iraq intelligence, had this to say:

Conclusion 78. The Intelligence Community depended too heavily on defectors and foreign government services to obtain human intelligence (HUMINT) information on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction activities. Because the Intelligence Community did not have direct access to many of these sources, it was exceedingly difficult to determine source credibility.

(U) Conclusion 79. The Intelligence Community waited too long after inspectors departed Iraq to increase collection against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.

Conclusion 80. Even after the departure of United Nations (UN) inspectors, placement of human intelligence (HUMINT) agents and development of unilateral sources inside Iraq were not top priorities for the Intelligence Community.

Conclusion 81. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) continues to excessively compartment sensitive human intelligence (HUMINT) reporting and fails to share important information about HUMINT reporting and sources with Intelligence Community analysts who have a need to know.

Conclusion 82. …The lack of in-country human intelligence (HUMINT) collection assets contributed to this collection gap.

There is also this, from the introduction the the report:

Conclusion 6. The Committee found significant short comings in almost every aspect of the Intelligence Community’s human intelligence collection efforts against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction activities, in particular that the Community had no sources collecting against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after 1998. Most, if not all, of these problems stem from a broken corporate culture and poor management, and will not be solved by additional funding and personnel.

In other words, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have become too reliant on technology, and don’t have the benefit of good old-fashioned double agents and moles who are reliable enough to interpret the data collected by the gadgets. Still another way of saying it: when you are drowning in SIGINT, more HUMINT is needed as a filter.

Question 3, then: did we ignore intelligence that didn’t fit our agenda? Here, the Left can claim at least a partial victory. Again, from the Senate Committee 2004 report:

Conclusion 85. The Intelligence Community’s elimination of the caveats from the unclassified White Paper misrepresented their judgments to the public which did not have access to the classified National Intelligence Estimate containing the more carefully worded assessments.

Conclusion 86. The names of agencies which had dissenting opinions in the classified National Intelligence Estimate were not included in the unclassified white paper and in the case of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the dissenting opinion was excluded completely. In both cases in which there were dissenting opinions, the dissenting agencies were widely regarded as the primary subject matter experts on the issues in question. Excluding the names of the agencies provided readers with an incomplete picture of the nature and extent of the debate within the Intelligence Community regarding these issues.

Conclusion 87. The key judgment in the unclassified October 2002 White Paper on Iraq’s potential to deliver biological agents conveyed a level of threat to the United States homeland inconsistent with the classified National Intelligence Estimate.

On the surface, that’s a huge blow to Administration credibility – but hold on just a moment. Who is providing this somewhat sanitized intelligence? The White House? No, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence:

The IC [Intelligence Community] started production of the white paper in May 2002, months before the classified NIE was requested by Members of the SSCI. On May 8, 2002, an assistant to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) sent an electronic mail (e-mail) to the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Near East and South Asia (NESA) asking him to prepare a white paper on Iraq’s WMD programs. The NIO told Committee staff that the DDCI had recently attended a meeting at the White House, and the DDCI wanted the paper as a follow-up to the meeting discussions. The Deputy Director for Central Intelligence testified at a March 4, 2004 Committee hearing that the paper was requested by the National Security Council (NSC) Deputies Committee.

Nevertheless, Congressmen and women who claim to have not seen the same intelligence as the White House do have a leg to stand on.

Finally, what, then of the most crucial allegation, that Bush lied or misled us into war? Clearly he did not lie; the intelligence he used to make his decision was provided…he did not make it up out of whole cloth. Here’s the Senate Committe Report on this subject:

Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President’s visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.

The dissenters say that that doesn’t prove the Administration didn’t manipulate the intelligence once it was delivered. Here’s Jay Rockefeller, Carl Levin, and Dick Durbin’s dissent:

The central issue of how intelligence on Iraq was used or misused by Administration officials in public statements and reports was relegated to the second phase of the Committee’s investigation, along with other issues related to the intelligence activities of Pentagon policy officials, pre-war intelligence assessments about post-war Iraq, and the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, which claims to have passed “raw intelligence” and defector information directly to the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President.

As a result, the Committee’s phase one report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which Intelligence Community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public.

As with everything in the 21st century, it all comes back to those 4 hijacked airplanes.

9/11 is the key to the puzzle, and the entire issue is inevitably intertwined with the desire to protect the homeland. Errors were made, no doubt, and I won’t pretend the credibility of this Administration, and more importantly, the United States itself, has not been harmed; but they were made because we were no longer prepared to wait idly for terrorists to strike America again:

Conclusion 102, The Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq’s links to terrorism. After 9/11, however, analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11. As a result, the Intelligence Community’s assessments were bold and assertive in pointing out potential terrorist links. For instance, the June 2002 Central Intelligence Agency assessment Iraq and al-Qaida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship was, according to its Scope Note, “purposefully aggressive” in drawing connections between Iraq and al-Qaida in an effort to inform policymakers of the potential that such a relationship existed. All of the participants in the August 2002 coordination meeting on the September 2002 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism interviewed by the Committee agreed that while some changes were made to the paper as a result of the participation of two Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy staffers, their presence did not result in changes to their analytical judgments.

The Bush Administration has bungled much in the post-war environment, and it is more than fair that it take the heat for a not-very-well-planned occupation. If we must satisfy our longing for a scapegoat on pre-war intelligence failures, however, the music stops at George Tenet’s chair.