|
03/09/2006
The War Over Intelligence
A few weeks ago Paul R. Pillar, a former National Intelligence
Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005,
garnered quite a bit of publicity for his piece in the March / April
2006 issue of Foreign Affairs. It’s rather critical of the Bush
Administration and the lead up to war in Iraq. Following are
excerpts.
---
The most serious problem with U.S. intelligence today is that its
relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly
needs repair. In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear
that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making
even the most significant national security decisions, that
intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already
made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers
and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s
own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer
responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed
all of these disturbing developments .
[On Saddam and his WMD program]
In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its
perception of Saddam’s weapons capacities was shared by the
Clinton administration, congressional Democrats, and most other
Western governments and intelligence services. But in making
this defense, the White House also inadvertently pointed out the
real problem: intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not
drive its decision to go to war. A view broadly held in the
United States and even more so overseas was that deterrence of
Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept “in his box,” and
that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through
an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions
already in place. That the administration arrived at so different a
policy solution indicates that its decision to topple Saddam was
driven by other factors – namely, the desire to shake up the
sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the
spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region .
The proper relationship between intelligence gathering and
policymaking sharply separates the two frictions. The
intelligence community collects information, evaluates its
credibility, and combines it with other information to help make
sense of situations abroad that could affect U.S. interests.
Intelligence officers decide which topics should get their limited
collection and analytic resources according to both their own
judgments and the concerns of policymakers. Policymakers thus
influence which topics intelligence agencies address but not the
conclusions that they reach. The intelligence community,
meanwhile, limits its judgments to what is happening or what
might happen overseas, avoiding policy judgments about what
the United States should do in response .
The Bush administration’s use of intelligence on Iraq did not just
blur this distinction; it turned the entire model upside down. The
administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making,
but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without
requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any
strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.
[The military made extensive use of intelligence in its war
planning, although much of it was of a more tactical nature.]
Congress, not the administration, asked for the now-infamous
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s
unconventional weapons programs, although few members of
Congress actually read it. [According to several congressional
aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material, no
more than six senators and only a handful of House members got
beyond the five-page summary.] As the national intelligence
officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of
the intelligence community’s assessments regarding Iraq; the
first request I received from any administration policymaker for
any such assessment was not until a year into the war .
Before the war, on its own initiative, the intelligence community
considered the principal challenges that any post-invasion
authority in Iraq would be likely to face. It presented a picture of
a political culture that would not provide fertile ground for
democracy and foretold a long, difficult, and turbulent transition.
It projected that a Marshall Plan-type effort would be required to
restore the Iraqi economy, despite Iraq’s abundant oil resources.
It forecast that in a deeply divided Iraqi society, with Sunnis
resentful over the loss of their dominant position and Shiites
seeking power commensurate with their majority status, there
was a significant chance that the groups would engage in violent
conflict unless an occupying power prevented it. And it
anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the
target of resentment and attacks – including by guerrilla warfare
– unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to
prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of
Saddam .
The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard
not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in
aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its
decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data –
“cherry-picking” – rather than using the intelligence
community’s own analytic judgments .
In the upside-down relationship between intelligence and policy
that prevailed in the case of Iraq, the administration selected
pieces of raw intelligence to use in its public case for war,
leaving the intelligence community to register varying degrees of
private protest when such use started to go beyond what analysts
deemed credible or reasonable. The best-known example was
the assertion by President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of
the Union address that Iraq was purchasing uranium ore in
Africa. U.S. intelligence analysts had questioned the credibility
of the report making this claim, had kept it out of their own
unclassified products, and had advised the White House not to
use it publicly. But the administration put the claim into the
speech anyway, referring to it as information from British
sources in order to make the point without explicitly vouching
for the intelligence .
But the greatest discrepancy between the administration’s public
statements and the intelligence community’s judgments
concerned not WMD (there was indeed a broad consensus that
such programs existed), but the relationship between Saddam and
al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not
reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or
was likely to be anything like the “alliance” the administration
said existed. The reason the connection got so much attention
was that the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to
the “war on terror” and the threat the American public feared
most, thereby capitalizing on the country’s militant post-9/11
mood.
The issue of possible ties between Saddam and al Qaeda was
especially prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to make a
public case for war. In the shadowy world of international
terrorism, almost anyone can be “linked” to almost anyone else if
enough effort is made to find evidence of casual contacts, the
mentioning of names in the same breadth, or indications of
common travels or experiences. Even the most minimal and
circumstantial data can be adduced as evidence of a
“relationship,” ignoring the important question of whether a
given regime actually supports a given terrorist group and the
fact that relationships can be competitive or distrustful rather
than cooperative.
The intelligence community never offered any analysis that
supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and al
Qaeda. Yet it was drawn into a public effort to support that
notion. To be fair, Secretary Powell’s presentation at the UN
never explicitly asserted that there was a cooperative relationship
between Saddam and al Qaeda. But the presentation was clearly
meant to create the impression that one existed .
The Bush team approached the (intelligence) community again
and again and pushed it to look harder at the supposed Saddam –
al Qaeda relationship – calling on analysts not only to turn over
additional Iraq rocks, but also to turn ones already examined and
to scratch the dirt to see if there might be something there after
all .
One possible consequence of such politicization is policymaker
self-deception. A policymaker can easily forget that he is
hearing so much about a particular angle in briefings because he
and his fellow policymakers have urged the intelligence
community to focus on it. A more certain consequence is the
skewed application of the intelligence community’s resources.
Feeding the administration’s voracious appetite for material on
the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of
time and attention at multiple levels, from rank-and-file
counterrorism analysts to the most senior intelligence officials.
It is fair to ask how much other counterrorism work was left
undone as a result .
The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the
fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in
the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and,
most of all, with the American public. The community needs to
remain in the executive branch but be given greater
independence and a greater ability to communicate with those
other constituencies (fettered only by security considerations,
rather than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is the
Federal Reserve, which is structured as a quasi-autonomous body
overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms.
These measures would reduce both the politicization of the
intelligence community’s own work and the public misuse of
intelligence by policymakers. It would not directly affect how
much attention policymakers give to intelligence, which they
would continue to be entitled to ignore. But the greater
likelihood of being called to public account for discrepancies
between a case for a certain policy and an intelligence judgment
would have the indirect effect of forcing policymakers to pay
more attention to those judgments in the first place.
---
Hott Spotts will return next week.
Brian Trumbore
|
