The controversial National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s
nuclear program has finally precipitated a discussion about the
fallibility of U.S. intelligence. Until now, the intelligence
community might have one view one year and the opposite view a year
or two later, but whatever view it had, that view was supposed to
be the authoritative understanding — as if this country
were a nation of bobble-heads.
Thus, CIA Director George Tenet famously assured President
George W. Bush that Iraq’s proscribed weapons constituted a “slam
dunk” case for war. When those weapons could not be found, we were
all supposed to believe they never existed — and not, as former
U.N. weapons inspectors who long worked in Iraq have suggested:
those involved in that search did not know enough and did not stay
long enough to do the job competently.
Indeed, Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper (Ret.), who headed the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency during Operation Iraqi
Freedom and is now Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence,
explained in the fall of 2003 that “satellite imagery showing a
heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the
American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons
material ‘unquestionably’ had been moved out of Iraq.” Even the White
House did not challenge the CIA’s conclusion that Iraq’s banned
weapons were destroyed in 1991.
Now prompted by the latest NIE, the Washington Post
recounts some of the CIA’s “biggest bloopers,”
while the National Interest relates others. Maybe, the failed hunt for Iraq’s
weapons will eventually be added to those lists?
Meanwhile, if we can now challenge an intelligence conclusion,
America should know that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had extensive
dealings with terrorists — including Islamic terrorists — as
captured Iraqi documents reveal. One analyst recalls walking into a
Pentagon meeting in 2004 with a stack of papers, explaining that
the documents in his hand would justify the war. He was astonished
when a senior aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
dismissed them as “history.” A battle followed about releasing
them, but Rumsfeld ultimately sided with those who argued that
“intelligence” should not be used for “public diplomacy.”
Following that decision, a handful of such documents were leaked to a
small, conservative online outfit, Cybercast News Service.
Anticipating substantial public interest, CNS increased its
website’s capacity before posting the documents, but the server
crashed anyway. CNS also expected a call from the White House, but
none ever came.
On 9/11, relatively few Americans knew much about the greater
Middle East beyond Arab-Israeli issues, the preoccupation of the
Clinton administration. As Fouad Ajami jokes, on September 10, tens
of people could speak knowledgeably about the next day’s events; on
September 12, there were thousands.
We regularly cite Sun Tzu’s famous maxim, “Know the enemy,” but
we regularly use information only for immediate, tactical
advantage. Consequently, we do not have a viable,
strategic understanding of Middle Eastern terrorism. During the
Reagan years, we recognized that major terrorist attacks against us
were basically state-sponsored. That understanding persisted
through Bush 41, but was tossed aside one month into Bill Clinton’s
first term in office, when the World Trade Center was bombed. No
less a figure than then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey wrote of that
administration’s aversion to learning a state, particularly Iraq,
might be involved — “there would be less need to confront Saddam,
and perhaps less need to make hard choices, if it didn’t finger him
as being behind the WTC bombing.”
Much speculation about a possible Iraqi role followed the 9/11
assaults, redoubling with the appearance of the extraordinarily
lethal anthrax sent to Senators Daschle and Leahy less than a month
later (which the FBI has yet to explain.) Most senior
administration officials, save Secretary of State Colin Powell, a
key figure in promoting the early cease-fire to the 1991 Gulf War,
privately expressed suspicions of Iraq’s
involvement. A year later, when it came time to make the case for
finishing the previous war, bureaucratic resistance to linking Iraq
to 9/11 or other attacks was enormous — as Tenet recounts in his
book, he actually stopped the Vice President from making a speech
suggesting Iraq’s complicity in al Qaeda’s operations. The
administration instead focused on what was nearly-universally
believed to be Iraq’s retention of proscribed weapons.
Bush has since disavowed any suggestion that Iraq was involved
in 9/11, but the administration has also failed to produce a
satisfactory explanation for the war — over 60 percent of Americans think it was not
worth fighting. Few things undermine an administration like an
unpopular war. Now, its efforts to promote a tough policy to check
Iran’s nuclear program have been mugged by an NIE.
Most Americans, including perhaps, the president himself, would
be astonished to learn that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and that
could be demonstrated — if the administration were willing to take
on the intelligence community. Such a demonstration would focus on
the extraordinary “family” of terrorist masterminds
(pdf) behind the major attacks, starting with the first assault on
the Trade Center, culminating in 9/11, and even continuing
afterwards.
Might those who want a tough policy toward Iran be ready to help
correct the intelligence failure that emerged in the 1990s, when
shadowy groups supplanted hostile states as the focus of America’s
national security policy? Even to take another look at the
information suggesting Iraq’s role in terrorism, including 9/11?
The decision to remove Saddam was entirely justified, but their
failure to offer it adequate support now undermines their own
cause.
