IQ Tests

Mother Jones' Daily Mojo sent me to an article in the Los Angeles Times running down a list of intelligence failures, some gross, some stupid, that preceded the invasion of Iraq. My favorite was this one:

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.

"We inspected a lot of chicken farms," said a former inspector who asked not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N. team printed "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team" on 20 gray T-shirts to mark the futile hunt.

But there's much more going on here, I think, than (depending on your perspective) a frustrating or sardonically amusing list of screwups and shortcomings.

First is the implication that if only the intelligence was accurate, the Iraq War would never have happened. And that's absurd. The intelligence was not the cause of the war, it was the excuse. Intelligence was both used and abused, revealed and concealed; it was offered straight up or openly shot down; it was cherry-picked or gutted, emphasized or eviscerated; it was treated in whatever way would best advance the argument for attacking Iraq.

To cite just one example, which can be drawn from the LA Times article:

U.S. experts, for example, still have not been able to determine the meaning of three secretly taped conversations that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell played to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 in making the case for war. Investigators have been unable to identify who was speaking on the tapes or precisely what they were talking about.

In playing the tapes, Powell identified them as recent electronic intercepts of officers or commanders of the Republican Guard and claimed they proved Iraq was hiding banned weapons.

Now, you can claim that the inability to gather more information about those calls is an intelligence shortcoming - but the clearly fraudulent use of that information was not: It was a political decision made by the White House. The WHS* had convinced themselves against all logic and evidence that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was the key to imposing their vision of a Pax Americana on the Middle East and by God! they were going to have their war. Intelligence, good or bad, was merely a means to that end.

What we're seeing now is a replay of the old trick of dodging questions about policy by focusing attention on the mechanics. Forests and trees and all that.

Second, I think the article is further evidence of a serious, behind-the-scenes battle going on between the CIA on one hand and the White House and military intelligence on the other. The article says it's based on interviews with "current and former U.S. intelligence officials." Those officials, in turn, apparently have access to the forthcoming Senate Intelligence Committee report on US intelligence, from which a lot of the failures described appear to come.

While the article does briefly mention the "National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies" and says the report will criticize the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, still most of the text is taken up with charges of failures by the CIA. Indeed, it seems that's what most of the debate of late has been about: how the CIA fouled up. The LA Times even says this:

At that point [December 1998], the CIA and other groups increasingly turned to defectors presented by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, another London-based exile group that was working to overthrow the Baghdad regime.

But by that time, the CIA had long soured on Chalabi, regarding him as unreliable. In fact, it was the ears of the White House hawks and their OSP that were being filled with Chalabi's sweet nothings about cheering throngs and rose petals in pathways. So why are Chalabi and the CIA being linked here? Mere sloppy reporting? Or is that the way the story was fed to them by "officials?"

This is part of a PR campaign, folks! A carefully-constructed White House plot to blame the entire mess on the CIA so they can walk! Pay attention!

But the agency is not without the means to fight back. So at home we have the choir directors trying to get everyone to sing the Battle Hymn of the White House, also known as It Was All the CIA's Fault. (I also guarantee that if they get enough people at least humming the same tune they'll introduce the updated version, with the refrain It Was All George Tenet's CIA's Fault with a counterpoint of "You know, Bill Clinton's George Tenet's CIA.") Meanwhile, in Iraq, the White House's boy (Chalabi) is out while the CIA's boy (Allawi) is in.

This could be interesting.

Footnote: The LA Times article also says that

[a]fter the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the CIA and other Western spy services infiltrated U.N. teams sent to disarm Iraq, and used the cover to spy on the regime.

At the time, when Saddam complained the inspections were being used as a cover for spying, there were shocked denials and it was used as further evidence that he was not only an evil dictator, he was a paranoid liar and quite possibly mentally unstable.

Plus ça change....

*WHS = White House Sociopaths